This year, art has taken itself out of the gallery and seeped into our video games, our embroidered quilts, our films and our thoughts. Here are our favourite moments from 2025.
Maggi Hambling at 80: what next?
‘I do agree with Matisse, who said artists should have their tongues cut out for the amount of rot they talk,’ says Maggi Hambling. Self-effacing, yes, shrewd, sharp and unfailingly honest – but there’s no worry of any rot from the revered, respected, and often feared, Hambling.
When we visit her in October 2025, in the south London home she has lived and worked in for 40 years, the artist is about to turn 80. She will mark this milestone with both a joint exhibition with good friend Sarah Lucas at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects in London, and the release of an illustrated monograph of works from a five-decade career, from her 1960s studies at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing to her recent politically and emotionally charged war paintings.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s multiplayer experience at London’s Serpentine invites visitors to connect in the real world
Traditionally, art galleries can be solitary experiences, with visitors avoiding eye contact on a stroll around an exhibition. It is a custom Berlin-based British artist and game designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is keen to challenge, with the artist’s immersive new exhibition at The Serpentine encouraging visitors to interact – with each other.
The video game commission, The Delusion, is a multiplayer experience, inviting viewers to virtually enter digital portals. Inside each one there are conversation starters, reflecting on both the digital world and its often vitriolic and dangerous real-life consequences. Players follow prompts, and are encouraged to engage in honest conversations with themselves and each other.
Chantal Joffe paints the truth of memory and motherhood in a new London show
Chantal Joffe deals in memory. In the thick, tangible brushstrokes of her paintings and in the generous sizes of her canvases, we are invited to discover Joffe’s women - because it is often women she paints, those she admires, or those she is close to.
Joffe has a wholly unique figurative style of painting, eschewing a neat formality for gorgeously expressive brushwork, with the palpability of the paint allowing for a greater freedom in the depictions of the women she is painting. Her complex, multifaceted subjects can only come alive in Joffe’s thickly-drawn sweeps of paint, their nuances and quirks and features recognisably theirs, without being perfectly or realistically rendered.
María Berrío creates fantastical worlds from Japanese-paper collages in New York
In the work of New York-based Colombian artist María Berrío, nothing is quite as it seems. Otherworldly tales are part myth, part memory, delicately rendered in watercolour on Japanese paper. Her paintings are unexpectedly rife with familiar and contemporary detailing, in a meeting of worlds real and imagined. It is a style that is reflective of Berrío herself.
Artist Qualeasha Wood explores the digital glitch to weave stories of the Black female experience
What is a glitch? The consequence of an unstable system, glitches expose a vulnerability to threats, but they also open up the possibility of change. It’s a duality that fascinates the Philadelphia-based artist Qualeasha Wood, who jumps into the black hole of internet malfunctions in a new exhibition, ‘Malware’, at London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
In a series of tapestries, tuftings and videos, Wood marries contemporary digital culture with traditional crafts. In her hands, a digital pixel becomes a single stitch. In video works, she creates glitches by compressing text file data. ‘In this quest for something real, we produce a lot of fake images,’ says Wood. ‘For me, something that feels most natural is something that is decomposing, that’s not perfect or hiding anything. It’s about bringing all those things to the forefront.’
Home again: the artists reframing the domestic world
‘There is a quieter tradition going on, different artists deciding there's something really interesting in this room to paint, rather than outside of [it],’ says Scottish painter, Andrew Cranston. ‘Philosophically, you can only be in one place at a time, and we spend a lot of our lives in rooms, or in limited spaces. I think there’s a disease, a paranoia, that you’re missing out on something over the hill, or a party in the next room. It's a simplistic thing but there's some truth in it – it is almost like all the world's problems stem from a person's inability to be happy in their own room.’
Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska uncover the missing narratives in everyday life stories
Creating worlds and telling stories around marginal communities has long been a passion for Lubaina Himid, who intertwines history, narrative and a centralisation of the Black figure throughout her boldly coloured works. A long career has been punctuated with significant milestones, from Himid’s curation of 1985 exhibition ‘The Thin Black Line’ at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, which shone a spotlight on underrepresented Black and Asian women artists, to the taking home of the Turner Prize in 2017. In 2026, Himid is to represent Great Britain at the 61st Venice Biennale, with a solo exhibition at the British Pavilion.
Artist Shaqúelle Whyte is a master of storytelling
Shaqúelle Whyte may be early in his career, but his richly atmospheric paintings have quickly pegged him as a rising star in the art world. Born in Wolverhampton, Whyte graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2022, going on to receive an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2023. Group exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, and Grimm Amsterdam followed, as well as solo exhibitions at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (his current show ending 8 November 2025).
Diane Arbus at David Zwirner is an intimate and poignant tribute to her portraiture
American photographer Diane Arbus was drawn to the other, celebrating the fringes of society in a prolific body of work created throughout the Fifties and Sixties. Her unflinching portraits, including of nudists, socialists, circus performers and transvestites, awarded her subject a respect which at the time was otherwise entirely absent.
A comprehensive exhibition earlier this year of over 400 works, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, has returned Arbus firmly back into the public consciousness. Now, in London, the emphasis shifts to intimacy over scale, with the opening of 'Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum,' an exhibition of 45 photographs made in private places between 1961 and 1971. The exhibition will go on to travel to Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco in spring 2026.
Tilda Swinton: 'If Derek Jarman were with us now, he'd be making films on an iPhone'
It is difficult to define Tilda Swinton. Actor, performer or artist, Swinton’s chameleonic quality sees her flit, effortlessly, between worlds, her work a firm rejection of the stereotypically passive nature of the artist. Swinton is all about the collaboration. An actor has agency, and an opinion.
It’s more than a tokenism for Swinton, who has formed close and fruitful relationships with filmmakers and photographers throughout her life and career. Continuing to push at the traditional parameters of acting, she is acknowledging this component of the creative process with a new role, as curator. The new exhibition, ‘Tilda Swinton – Ongoing’ at Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, marks these meaningful partnerships with the presentation of new work from Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Saillard, Tim Walker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Almodóvar and the late Derek Jarman.
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In Norway, remoteness becomes the new luxuryAcross islands and fjords, a new wave of design-led hideaways is elevating remoteness into a refined, elemental form of luxury
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The rising style stars of 2026: Oscar Ouyang is taking knitwear into new realmsAs part of the January 2026 Next Generation issue of Wallpaper*, we meet fashion’s next generation. Born in Beijing, Central Saint Martins graduate Oscar Ouyang is inspired by anime, medieval folklore and his friends’ wardrobes
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Zbeul Studio's 'future relics' merge traditional craft with unexpected materialsWallpaper* Future Icons: Paris-based studio Zbeul merges archaeology, craft, and design, taking the design process to innovative places
