Jonathan Jones’s best art shows of the year
1. Caravaggio’s Cupid
Wallace Collection, London, until 12 April
Just one painting but it is one of the world’s very greatest, and most dangerous. The shock of the old hits you in front of a naked Cupid who has clearly been portrayed from life, his raw, laughing features apparently coming straight from the mean streets into the gallery. This young love god is an anarchist, and Caravaggio paints like the antichrist, mocking civilisation, symbolised by the musical instruments at Cupid’s feet. Love doesn’t so much conquer all as destroy everything. See it, then try to forget it.
National Portrait Gallery, London
Giant wounded faces have haunted me since I saw this formidable, almost surgical examination of Saville’s paintings. She emerges as the bloodstained, meaty successor to Freud and Bacon, a painter of modern flesh whose eye-popping variations of scale and searching human compassion make for a mighty artist. Yet Saville can be gentle as well as scary. Her intimate studies of motherhood and Degas-like pastels of lovers draw you in deeply. An artist in full, who can awe you or melt your heart as she looks openly at life.
Tate Modern, London, until 12 April
The surreal staging of this exhibition in a mockup of a proscenium arch theatre – playing with the very tradition of perspective that Picasso abolished, with a vista of his paintings dramatically lit on stage flats – is like something the surrealists might have come up with. Picture it as Marcel Duchamp curating Picasso. It beautifully returns his masterpieces to their avant garde origins. Free from reverence, the savage dream of The Three Dancers – and The Acrobat’s impossible yet human, all-too-human body – explode with all their original revolutionary power. A liberation, a joy and the kind of show that puts Tate Modern back up where it belongs.
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
From the rug of shorn fleeces on the gallery steps, past a barbed-wire screen and into an eerie room laid with stones from a cemetery that made it feel as cold as death, this exhibition was uncannily gripping. Goldsworthy has been making his environmental art for five decades and yet this show stressed his brilliant new works. It proved the power of art to bring the country into the city, to take you into lonely places of the imagination with installations of Romantic solitude. He should be invited to work in the Tate Turbine Hall next.
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
The infra-thin barrier between life and death – as fragile as a glass bulb full of poison gas – haunted this exhibition that resurrected a lost genius. Butt was part of the Goldsmiths-educated generation of Young British Artists in the early 1990s, but his premature death led to him being forgotten. The marvellously morbid installations here included live flies in a work he created before Damien Hirst used them, and a piece that endangered your eyesight. In his most sublime masterpiece, beautiful but deadly alchemical bottles are suspended in a giant executive toy.
National Gallery, London
This exhibition glowed with gold and pulsed with feeling. It made you understand why the medieval poet Petrarch asked Simone Martini of Siena to portray his beloved Laura, for this great artist stood out here as a true poet in paint. It was in 14th-century Siena that the Renaissance truly began as Martini, Duccio and the Lorenzetti brothers brought subtle, sensitive expression to the human face and body. This acute, even profound show made you see their genius for infusing sharply observed reality with mysticism.
British Museum, London
Picasso would have loved this exhibition that showed how limited and closed the western sense of form has often been. Why limit statues to four limbs and reserve sculptural empathy for human faces? Elephant-headed figures and snake goddesses abounded in this ecstatic journey to the beginnings of Indian art and its relationship with Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Stunning masterpieces like the Great Shrine of Amaravati made for a thrilling and illuminating magical mystery tour.
Serpentine, London, until 8 February
A painter whose art has often echoed music – from titles evoking country rock and scenes that look like eerie 1970s album covers to the depictions of fantastical sound systems and solitary guitarists in this show – finally does what you suspect he always dreamed of doing and turns an exhibition into a gig, or club, or festival. Giant sound systems cannibalised from old cinemas pump out his record collection as you mistily dream into his paintings. Even if you bring earplugs, the paintings alone will make you want to dance.
David Zwirner, London
What were they thinking? Why did nudists in 1960s New Jersey let the unforgiving eye of Arbus into their world? Come to think of it why did anyone pose for her? She’s Diane Arbus! She’s going to make you look like a freak! But this exhibition revealed how many people did trust her and let her into their private bedrooms and camping huts. It proved her a great modern artist in the league of Warhol and Bacon. She is one of the few photographers ever to produce such a personal, expressive, tragicomic vision.
Seed 130, London
In Collishaw’s film, Move 37, human civilisation has finally destroyed itself. In the flooded ruins of our world, something is stirring: translucent filaments of artificial life wriggle in the green waters and evolve before your eyes into creatures at once fishlike and instectoid but also inorganic. This vision of post-human, even post-animal life has itself been “evolved” using artificial intelligence tools. Collishaw is one of the few artists engaging deeply (rather than glibly) with AI as he tries to puzzle out if it will save or destroy us.
Adrian Searle’s best art shows of the year
Raven Row, London
One of the great photographers of the late 20th century, and now the subject of Ira Sachs’s 2025 movie Peter Hujar’s Day starring Ben Whishaw, Peter Hujar’s relentless, beautifully shot black-and-white photographs filled Raven Row early this year. This revelatory show brought out Hujar’s curiosity and his unerring eye, his darkroom skills and his utter seriousness. Rolleiflex camera always in hand, Hujar captured human vulnerabilities and vanities, including his own, a prickly artist, shunning fame. New York wreathed in fog, light on the river, life and death: his subjects had no end. My show of the year.
Tate Britain, London
Life, hilarious and hapless and interrupted, was all there in this wildly inventive exhibition that took us from scenes starring the artist’s avatar to the grim daily rounds of medieval life. At every turn there was something new: one minute Atkins at the piano, then in intimate conversation with his mother, then his entire life collapsing down a sinkhole. Jokes and intimacies abounded, with drawings of feet, Post-it cartoon notes sent to his daughter, and a long film in which actor Toby Jones reads the diaries of Atkins’s dying father. Throughout, real life came crashing in.
Royal Academy, London, until 18 January
A revelation. In this fascinating retrospective we chart Marshall’s development from quasi-conceptualist to the pre-eminent painter of Black American life and aspiration. He leads us back to imagined images of enslavement in Africa, to elegaic scenes in the housing projects and to gaggles of black schoolkids in the museum. Shuttling between uneasy nights in stuffy rooms, Afrofuturist fantasies of space travel, parlours filled with mementos of JFK and Martin Luther King and visions of imperious, imaginary female black painters at their easels.
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, until 2 March
Now 93, Richter can appear conservative and radical at the same time. His works could be at one moment laden with pictorial and cultural references, the next revelling in abstractions. His is an art filled with calculation and unreason, making this an exhilarating and sometimes moving show. Culminating in a room dedicated to his attempts, in 2014, to capture the horrors of Birkenau, this is more than another run-through of Richter’s long career. With his deep ambivalence about images and an equally enduring belief in art’s capacity to endure, this profound exhibition is unmissable.
Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 4 May
The vertical and horizontal stripes, the dance of coloured circles on the walls, the shimmering and the undulating, the ordering and reordering, the sneaky angles and the tones too close to call: you think you know Bridget Riley’s art and then, when you give yourself to it, all the certainties fall away. This show is just the right size to keep you grounded and alert to its proliferating complexities. You just might want to stay all day.
Mimosa House, London
Heartfelt pleas, smuggled messages from a Yemeni prison and painted, neon obscenities ricochet in Claire Fontaine’s Show Less. In this complex exhibition, filled with tumbling references and bringing together the surging news cycle, Marcel Duchamp’s casual sexism and multiple, adulterated copies of Courbet’s salacious 1866 painting L’Origine du Monde, Claire Fontaine (Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill) fill the gallery with anger, erudition, humour and hope.
Charlotte Jansen’s best UK photography shows of the year
Tate Britain, London, until 15 Febuary
Miller is most famous for her war photographs and her fashion pictures, but the sheer, staggering scope of this retrospective at Tate Britain – the most extensive Miller show to date – proved there is to see and understand about her surrealist art, and how important her inventions and contributions to history were. Being a good photographer to Miller meant “getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.” The images are always audacious and never anodyne – you won’t walk away unscathed.
National Portrait Gallery, London
Filled with room after room of colour, frivolity and neoliberal fun this tribute to the photographic legacy of the Face was an irresistible, riotous romp through two decades of the groundbreaking, experimental magazine’s halcyon days with lacquered lips, bright-white youthful smiles, and cerulean skies – with a bit of medieval fantasy and the odd Tesco bag thrown in.
Raven Row, London
Putrid, petrifying, and vertiginously beautiful, this museum-quality exhibition threw you into the decaying, dank urban streets of downtown New York, but also lifted you to moments of dizzying euphoria and perfect grace. A sharp, feeling, and sublime account of one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. Unforgettable.
Ikon, Birmingham
Few artists have addressed what it meant for a generation of young Muslim men to grow up in Britain in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/11 with the caustic, confidence-eroding impact of society’s suspicion and surveillance. Hussain’s thoughtful, inventive and inquiring exhibition reclaims the camera to bring power to a community.
Saatchi Gallery, London
Carrie Mae Weems’ skin through a hole torn in her shirt, Afonso Pimenta’s finely dressed families in the favela, Jamel Shabazz’s best friends on the subway, dressed in identical outfits and mirroring each other’s pose. There were so many electric moments in this scintillating show, forging connections through shared geographies and histories, but ultimately evoking something that can’t be contained or imitated, of style, pride and panache.
Jolly Farmers, Oxford
Polglaze didn’t take pictures of public lavatories for 20 years as art – they were used by criminal defence barristers in Section 28 court cases to aid the release of men accused of cottaging. He unwittingly created an important archive that, with the alchemy of time, reveals much about our society’s changing values, attitudes and laws on sex, liberty and truth. You can almost smell the urinals.
7. Merry Alpern: Dirty Windows
Tramps, London
Artist Peter Doig and his partner Parinaz Mogadassi bought a derelict boozer near Kings Cross, London, where they put on this scorcher of a show with the Parisian journal Magma: works from Merry Alpern’s controversial 1990s series, shot in secret from her friend Norman’s apartment, looking into the bathroom window of an illegal den of drugs and prostitution frequented by Wall Street workers. The pictures take no prisoners and leave you wondering which is worse: the dirty deeds in the bathroom, or our compulsive voyeuristic tendencies?
8. Jennie Baptiste: Rhythm and Roots
Somerset House, London, until 4 January
Another show capturing 1990s nostalgia, Baptiste’s feverishly cool portraits of the stars of dancehall, hip-hop and R&B posture, pose, and jostle for attention in this banger of a show. Baptiste grew up in the era of MTV and HMV, and began taking these pictures in the early 90s. Her pictures have that unique power – her subjects look iconic and untouchable yet they feel easy and familiar, like a glossy poster you had Blu-Tacked to the wall in your teenage bedroom.
Whitechapel Gallery, London until 1 March
Gregory’s love of the darkroom began as a schoolgirl, and it instilled a lifelong passion for photography. Everything at her gorgeous retrospective at the Whitechapel attests to her fascination with beauty and precarity. It’s rich in experimentation, with her striking adaptation of Victorian techniques such as cyanotype and salt printing, self-portraiture and film, illustrating her resourcefulness and rigour. Gregory’s work is a national treasure.
10. Harley Weir: The Garden
Hannah Barry Gallery, London
Life is messy and often cruel. Weir gets this and evoked it so perfectly in this head-spinning, deeply touching show which grappled with ageing, loss, and grief, with new and old pictures, including some smirched with the egg-freezing treatment letrozole, and intimate pictures of the artist’s dad, who was diagnosed with Benson’s disease, a degenerative disorder affecting visual recognition. Weir is a brilliant, provocative photographer of the sensual, the sexual and the bodily but is always asking profound questions about life and what we give our attention to. I walked out in a daze.
Eddy Frankel’s best art shows of 2025
Serpentine Gallery, London, until 8 February
Putting some massive speakers in an exhibition so visitors can listen to jazz while looking at your paintings should be a recipe for a gallery covered in spew. The idea is gross. But this isn’t just any painter, and these aren’t just any speakers. The brilliant Doig refurbished a giant old cinema soundsystem for this show at the Serpentine, invited guest DJs to play a bunch of crackly old records, and created a hugely atmospheric love letter to music in the process, filled with some of the darkest and most amazing paintings he’s done in years.
Courtauld Gallery, London
Thiebaud knew how to get viewers salivating. The pioneering American pop painter created a world full of delectable cakes, sweets and gumball machines, a universe of treats and candies laid out in American diners and on deli counters. He died in 2021 at 101 years old, and had a huge influence on the development of American art, but this was his first UK institutional exhibition – it’s staggering it took this long. Not only is his work a smart, conceptual takedown of consumerism, capitalism and the American dream, it’s pretty damn beautiful too.
3. Arthur Jafa: Glas Negus Supreme
Sadie Coles HQ, London
In 75 years, when future critics start compiling a list of the best artworks of the 21st century, Jafa will be all over it. He’s part-archivist, part-historian, part-DJ, he’s a sampler of visual culture and his show at Sadie Coles HQ was incredible. Combining found imagery of Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and crime scene photos with looped videos of Prince funking out, the whole thing was an ultra-affecting, groovily hypnotic, confrontational paean to black culture’s beauty and endurance.
4. Merry Alpern’s Dirty Windows
McGlynn’s Staff Accommodation, London
Up in the damp, squalid former staff quarters of this once iconic King’s Cross pub, American artist Alpern delivered a squalid lesson in voyeuristic, shocking photography. The show was based on a series of photos from the 1990s, when Alpern pointed her camera at the back window of a New York gentleman’s club and captured cropped, uncomfortable views of all the sordid activity that takes place in those sorts of private places. Excellently tense photographs, presented in an awesome, unusual gallery space.
Tate Britain, London
Life, what’s it all about? Well, birth, death and a lot of post-it notes, according to British artist Atkins. His big solo exhibition at Tate Britain was as devastating as it was disarming, disconsolate as it was disquieting. He played with CGI, explored painful themes and doodled on thousands of sticky notes. The result was a very contemporary look at mortality, boredom and technology that felt miles away from the staid, conservative painting shows that have dominated UK institutions post-pandemic.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
This brilliant show of the German art megastar Kiefer’s first steps, from early photographs to heartwrenching landscape paintings, was proof that he’s dedicated his whole career, right from the start, to confronting the horrors of his nation’s past. Whether referencing German mythology, the music of Wagner or just painting the countryside, everything in this show was tainted by the war and the enduring legacy of Nazism. Not as big or overwhelming as his later, more famous work, but just as powerful.
Royal Academy, London
The American painter’s enormous retrospective at the Royal Academy got wall-to-wall five-star reviews. And for good reason. For over 50 years he’s been placing black figures at the centre of his huge canvases, elevating scenes of everyday black life to the level of grand, epic historical painting. Marshall treats his subjects with such heft, such importance, that it’s like seeing the art history canon being rewritten right in front of you. This show was full of contentious ideas, loads of violence, tons of glitter, and a whole bunch of brilliant painting.
Cabinet, London
As a mild claustrophobe I didn’t love being locked in the police van-shaped coffin at the heart of this powerful, acerbic, polemical exhibition. But young Luton-based artist RIP Germain’s exploration of how pretty much everyone in the UK drill scene has been locked up – via 101 hours of banned rap videos – was so clever, powerful and intense that it was almost worth it. The work wasn’t just about rap and prison, it was about the complicity of western audiences with their thirst for violence, gore, and true crime.
The Whitworth, Manchester
Yahuarcani – of the Uitoto-Aimeni people of Peru – paints a world of mythical dolphin-human hybrids, rocks with eyes and shamanistic rituals. His show at the Whitworth was an ayahuasca-fuelled exercise in communing with the ancients, a diary of colonial injustices and a warning about imminent ecological collapse, all captured in swirls of psychedelic paint. Indigenous art was one of the big trends of 2025 – there were shows by indigenous artists from all over the world at almost every major UK institution, and Yahuarcani’s was probably the best of the lot.
Nottingham Contemporary
These days, you can only get away with horny art if it’s about exploring ideas of gender, sexuality or wider identity. But Balinese artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih – or Murni to her friends – dealt in pure, balls to the wall, tits out, no holds barred erotic painting. Sure, it was all combined with traditional Balinese aesthetics and spirituality, and a good bit of morbidity to boot (she died in 2006 aged just 39), but at its heart, the show was just about how life is short, so you might as well spend it shagging.