The London art exhibitions to see in May

Group shows, major career retrospectives, intimate viewings and avant-garde performances – London is abuzz with art exhibitions. Plan your next visit with our handy, frequently updated guide to the city's best goings on. Heading across the pond? Here are the best New York art exhibitions to see this month.

London art exhibitions: what to see in May 2024

'Fragile Beauty'

V&A

18 May 2024 - 5 January 2025

Avid photography fans Elton John and David Furnish have amassed a vast array of images over the years. Now, more than 300 rare prints from their collection are set to go on show at a new V&A retrospective divided into eight themes, from reportage and the male body to American photography and celebrity. Works from artists such as Cindy Sherman, Gillian Wearing and Diane Arbus are exhibited alongside fashion photography by the likes of Irving Penn, Horst P Horst and Herb Ritts. Highlights include intimate portraits of Marilyn Monroe, and Nan Goldin’s Thanksgiving series.

Writer: Hannah Silver

'Portraits to Dream In'

National Portrait Gallery

Until 16 June 2024

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron may not be a natural duo, yet a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery has brought these two photographers together. Woodman's art emerged during the rise of second-wave feminism and Post-Minimalism, her images haunted by the influence of contemporaries like Ana Mendieta and Deborah Turbeville. Cameron’s work, meanwhile, is distinctly Victorian. The soft focus of her photographs evokes a heavily Christian, English sensibility of feminine beauty; her female sitters often idealised as wives and mothers. Spanning a century and continents apart, there is no direct lineage between Cameron and Woodman’s photo-making – at least, not one Woodman ever directly references.

Writer: Katie Tobin

Incubator 24

Incubator gallery, Chiltern Street

Until 23 June 2024

In April, May and June, Incubator is exhibiting its latest solo show programme, Incubator 24, with a roster of artists from around the world who are currently London-based. Next up is Lucrezia Abatzoglu (1-12 May), an Italian-Greek artist whose paintings bring monumentality to the female body. Corbin Shaw (15-26 May) creates textiles that explore the notions of masculinity he was taught growing up in a mining town in Yorkshire. Roman artist Elena Angelini’s hazy, vulnerable portraits will be on display for the fifth instalment of the show (29 May-9 June); and Paul Barlow’s abstract paintings (12-23 June), which draw inspiration from light waves, fractals, and halos will close out Incubator’s spring season. 

Writer: Mary Cleary

'The Manual of Action'

In collaboration with CIRCA

Until 30 June 2024

Kembra Pfahler, the transgressive performance artist and frontwoman of punk outfit The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, was still in the earliest phase of an idiosyncratic career when she debuted The Manual of Action, at ABC No Rio on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s. In its latest guise, The Manual of Action is a big screen-cum-workshop-led project organised in collaboration with the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts (CIRCA). Over three months, through 30 June 2024, Pfahler will lead a series of classes in person and online; each week a new class is introduced with a short film streamed from Piccadilly Circus in London, as well as in Berlin, Milan and Seoul, daily at 20:24 local time.

Writer: Zoe Whitfield

'Purple Hibiscus'

The Barbican Lakeside Terrace

Until 18 August 2024

Ibrahim Mahama’s monumental work ripples across the Barbican’s Lakeside Terrace. For Mahama, it is possibly his greatest collaborative work - and certainly his largest scale public commission - in the UK yet. Purple Hibiscus, named after Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 novel, encompasses around 2000 square metres of billowing panels of pink and purple fabric, woven and sewn in collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Tamale in Ghana. On the panels, around 100 batakaris have been embroidered - robes traditionally worn by both ordinary people as well as northern Ghanaian royals - which Mahama has been collecting over the years, without at first knowing for what purpose. 

Writer: Hannah Silver

'The Conspiracy of Blindness'

Ben Brown Fine Arts

Until 10 May 2024

Gavin Turk's paintings in 'The Conspirancy of Blindness' affirm the artist’s enduring interest in consumer waste, the subject of his famous Bag (2000), a bronze sculpture resembling a black bin liner, bulging with rubbish, as well as recent watercolours of single-use plastic bottles. The exhibition also engages with the work of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, best known for his own paintings of sleekly formed domestic objects. In Turk’s hands, these accumulated objects acquire a sense of abstraction.

Writer: Rowland Bagnall

'Constellations'

Gallery 1957

Until May 25th 2024

‘Constellations Part 1: Figures On Earth & Beyond’ opened in March 2024, the first iteration of the two-city group show, at Gallery 1957’s space in London. Co-curated by Thompson, Adisenu-Doe, and Finerty, the multimedia show explores the rejection of human-centeredness or domination within a particular time and looks at alternative forms of life, ecologies, and existence. The exhibition features Soto’s installation Relational Realities [coined from a phrase by Swedish-American physicist Max Tegmark]. The piece comprises wire, hardware, seashells, and black-eyed peas, and is, she says, a ‘rhizomatic, abstracted notion of two islands merged into one’, a reflection on the islands of her Puerto Rico and Jamaica heritage. 

Writer: Gameli Hamelo

'Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’ 

The Barbican

Until 26 May 2024

Textiles have often been saddled with restrictive definitions around craft and gender stereotypes, when in fact, they have formed some of the most radical and progressive works of the last century. Many artists have played with these definitions, creating subversive feminist works and expansive sculptural forms. ‘Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’, a show of 50 intergenerational artists at the Barbican Centre in London, explores quite how far the medium has evolved in the last sixty years. 

Writer: Emily Steer

‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure’

National Portrait Gallery

Until 19 May 2024

The National Portrait Gallery is tracing the Black figure throughout portraiture with its spring exhibition, ‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure’, with curator Ekow Eshun uniting works from 22 African diasporic artists working in the UK and US.  In the first part of the exhibition, they consider identity and representation through the lens of African American sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’ 1903 theory, Double Consciousness, exploring the juxtaposition between how artists see themselves and how they are seen. Elsewhere, artists respond to the absence of the Black figure in historical archives, and address representations of Black gatherings. 

Writer: Hannah Silver

‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ 

Tate Modern

Until 1 September 2024

‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ at Tate Modern is an exhibition that wants you to get involved, fittingly for an artist and activist who has long considered participation to be integral to her art. It’s the thread that runs throughout the show, her largest UK retrospective, tracing her multidisciplinary work from the 1950s to date in an immersive experience that’s faithful to the instructive core at the heart of Ono’s work.

Writer: Hannah Silver