11 best London exhibitions you need to see in 2026
- maxwell museums
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
London’s exhibitions in 2026 are truly blockbuster. The British capital always delivers stellar shows at its museums and galleries, but this year feels even more exciting than usual.
Some of the best exhibitions planned in 2026 are landmark surveys of some of the biggest artists in the world, such as Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor and Frida Kahlo. But there’s also huge fashion shows planned and fascinating global history exhibitions too.
💌 Get weekly exhibition news sent to your inbox with my free newsletter
So mark your calendars for these 11 major upcoming museum exhibitions in London to make sure you don’t miss out. They are all expected to be hugely popular!
Quick links for best London exhibitions in 2026:
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
In what is expected to be one of the year’s most popular museum shows in London, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art will be the first exhibition ever staged in the UK devoted to the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Hosted at the V&A South Kensington from 28 March until 08 November 2026, the exhibition will explore the first, groundbreaking designs by Schiaparelli, through to the major fashion house’s present-day incarnation in the hands of its creative director, Daniel Roseberry. In total visitors will see over 200 objects from a diverse range of mediums, including garments, accessories, jewellery, paintings, photographs, sculpture, furniture, perfumes and archive material. There's been many recent fashion blockbusters at the V&A, meaning you'll likely need to pre-book tickets to the Schiaparelli exhibition to not miss out.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life
One of Britain’s most famous living artists finally gets the retrospective she deserves at the world’s leading contemporary art gallery. Tate Modern will stage the largest ever survey exhibition celebrating the groundbreaking work of Dame Tracey Emin from 27 February until 31 August 2026. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, it will bring together over 90 works encompassing painting, video, textile, neon, sculpture and installation. Curators are saying it will be the most significant exhibition of Emin’s career. For many, the highlight of Tracey Emin: A Second Life will be the redisplay of her most famous work — My Bed — complete with its crumpled tissues, stained clothes, cigarettes, empty vodka bottles, lube and condoms. It caused a sensation when displayed for the Turner Prize in 1999.
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting
This a major new exhibition is a return to the National Portrait Gallery for a British artist that was the subject of the gallery’s most visited exhibition in its history. This follow up — titled Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting and running from 12 February until 04 May 2026 — will dive into how Freud used drawing to shape his work. Curators are claiming that the highly-anticipated show will be the UK’s most comprehensive museum exhibition exploring Lucian Freud’s drawings. They promise that very rarely-seen drawings and preparatory studies will be shown alongside iconic paintings, offering an unprecedented insight into Freud’s creative process.
📚 If you love these exhibition tips, you'll love my new art book recommendations for 2026 too
Van Eyck: The Portraits
Few exhibitions get to be genuinely landmark affairs, but this autumn the National Gallery have really pulled it out of the bag with a show that should be on every art lover’s to-visit list. A world-first Jan van Eyck exhibition will open on 21 November 2026 and run until 11 April 2027, and will focus on the great Netherlandish master’s surviving portraits. Van Eyck: The Portraits will — for the first time ever — bring together all nine of the artist’s surviving painted portraits, in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to discover how the 15th-century pioneer propelled art into a new era, and how he transformed portraiture forever. Only around twenty of Van Eyck’s paintings survive to today. HALF of these will be on display here.
Agatha Christie
Sleuth fans rejoice. The British Library will stage a blockbuster exhibition dedicated to crime writer Agatha Christie, marking the 50th anniversary of her death. The show will be the largest UK exhibition on Christie — who is the world’s best-selling novelist of all time — in over twenty years. It’ll trace how Agatha Christie created iconic characters including Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, while exploring her life, travels and wide-ranging interests in archaeology and pharmacology. Opening on 30 October 2026 until 20 June 2027, the exhibition will display Christie’s notebooks, personal letters and early manuscript drafts, and visitors will also have the chance to listen to Christie’s own voice through her dictaphone recordings.
Henry Moore: Monumental Nature
Over 30 of Henry Moore’s sculptures will go on display in this exciting open-air display amongst the greenery of the wonderful Kew Gardens. It will actually be the largest outdoor exhibition dedicated to the British artist ever staged. Henry Moore: Monumental Nature will run from 09 May 2026 until 27 September 2026 and will feature major loans of famous Moore works displayed across the whole of Kew’s 320-acre site, as well as inside its Temperate House, the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world. The exhibition will even take over Kew’s Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, where an additional 90 works will be shown (indoors), including bronzes, stone and wood carvings, prints and drawings.
Frida: The Making of an Icon
Another crowd-pleasing exhibition at Tate Modern will be Frida: The Making of an Icon, a retrospective of the woman who is arguably the most-famous female artist of the 20th century.
Visitors to the exhibition — which runs from 25 June 2026 to 03 Jan 2027 — will discover the extraordinary story of how Frida Kahlo became a cultural phenomenon, and an internationally recognised commercial icon. Featuring over 130 works, including some of her most well-known paintings, the Tate Modern exhibition will also feature documents, photographs and memorabilia taken from Kahlo's archives, as well as the work of more than 80 of her contemporaries and artists she inspired from later generations. You’ll want to pre-book tickets to this one to make sure you don’t miss out.
Samurai
Prepare to have some myths busted in this major British Museum exhibition exploring the reality of Japan’s armour-clad warriors over the past 1,000 years. Samurai — which runs from 03 February until 04 May 2026 — will bring around 280 items together, many of which will be on display for the very first time. Highlights include an exquisite suit of samurai armour that's newly acquired for the British Museum collection, and a rare portrait of a 13-year-old samurai who led an embassy to the Vatican in 1582. As the first ever show to explore how the Samurai image and myth was created, there’ll also be contemporary pieces that range from a Louis Vuitton outfit inspired by Japanese armour, to the popular video game Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.
Paula Rego: Story Line
The most comprehensive exhibition ever staged on the drawings of the sensational artist Paula Rego will open at London’s Victoria Miro gallery on 17 April until 23 May 2026. Paula Rego: Story Line will feature works from the 1950s until the artist’s death in 2022, and will shine a new light on her evolving use of line drawing and how it was driven by her unique approach to storytelling throughout her life. Visitors to this exhibition — which has a very short run of just a month — will see intimate drawings which have never been exhibited before, to studies for some of Rego’s most recognisable paintings. These are accompanied by notes, letters, sketchbooks, photographs and other archival material from throughout Rego’s life.
Anish Kapoor
Celebrated British sculptor Anish Kapoor makes a sensational return to the venue that helped elevate his name to what it is now. The Hayward Gallery was the first public gallery in the UK to host a major survey of his work in 1998, and it will now host another retrospective nearly 30 years later. This show will span new and seminal works, offering a series of spectacular encounters with Kapoor’s sculptures and paintings across the entire gallery and its terraces. Running from 16 June to 18 October 2026 as part of the Southbank's 75th anniversary celebrations, highlights will be the three monumental works that defy the boundaries of conventional sculpture and which will sit at the heart of the show.
The Bayeux Tapestry
The "extraordinary" loan of the Bayeux Tapestry back to Britain for the first time since it was created nearly 1,000 years ago has already become a huge sensation ever since the news was announced. It is expected to not only be the most popular British Museum exhibition ever, but could well become the most-visited shows ever staged in the UK. The 70-metre Bayeux Tapestry depicts the 1066 Norman invasion and Battle of Hastings and will be displayed in full in the museum’s huge Sainsbury Exhibition Gallery. What else will be shown is still a mystery. Dates of this show are still to be confirmed, but it's expected to open in September 2026.
💌 Join 6,000 museum insiders by subscribing to my free newsletter