The best exhibitions in London for January 2025

A new year brings new excitement, and new exhibitions. The London Art Fair – an annual highlight for collectors of 20^th and 21^st century British art – bestows the month with a modernist emphasis, and alongside is a glut of shows focusing on different aspects of that same period. At the Royal Academy of Arts we’re offered opportunity to explore Brazilian modernism, which has what Hubert Zandberg describes as a “bossa nova feel.” Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert are showing the works that Patrick Heron and Victor Pasmore exhibited in Brazil in 1965, when they were selected to represent Britain at the São Paulo Biennial as leading figures of British modernism and pioneers of abstraction. And Dulwich Picture Gallery is hosting the first ever retrospective devoted to Tirzah Garwood, who was married to Eric Ravilious, and whose prints, paintings, marbled papers and collaged houses are utterly captivating.

Alongside are exhibitions that reach back further in time. Also at the Royal Academy is a focus on Florence in 1504 – when Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael were all living and working in the city, to exceptional result. At the Victoria & Albert Museum are exquisite treasures from the Golden Age of the Mughal Court (c. 1560 – 1660) – objets and textiles as well as painting.

And, it’s the last chance to see the major autumn exhibitions before they close – or, if you have seen them, to visit them one final time, for they’re each five-star extravaganzas. I’m specifically talking about Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery, Monet and London: Views of the Thames at the Courtauld Gallery, and Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery.

The best exhibitions in London for January 2025