For the London art world, it’s been a turbulent few years. From the impact of Brexit, to the economic uncertainty of tariffs in the last few months, there have been myriad challenges. Nonetheless, smaller spaces are increasingly emerging as engines of innovation and experimentation (as shown in Artsy’s 2025 Art Market Trends report).
Nowhere is this more evident than at London Gallery Weekend 2025, where the city’s creative dynamism is on full display. From June 6–8, over 126 galleries will participate in its fifth edition, including 15 new U.K. and international additions. Out of these, 11 spaces, including Perrotin, William Hine, and Upsilon Gallery, have opened London outposts in the past two years.
Visitor numbers are climbing and galleries are responding with ambitious programming that extends far beyond four walls. Sadie Coles HQ, for instance, will present a live reading by Precious Okoyomon. Meanwhile in Bloomsbury, shows at Canopy Collections, Cob, and Mamoth present some of the finest tastemaking painting shows in the city. Notably, this year also marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of Victoria Miro. The gallery will celebrate with an expansive exhibition of works by its roster of represented artists.
Below, we’ve selected 11 shows not to be missed during London Gallery Weekend 2025.
Dotty Attie
“40 Years” at Public Gallery
Through June 28
Within the rigid structure of the grid, Dotty Attie has found a means to subtly dismantle the fixed narratives of art history. A pioneering figure in New York’s 1970s downtown art scene Attie was the co-founder of the first all-female cooperative art gallery in America, A.I.R. Since then, she has spent over five decades quietly subverting the patriarchal foundations of Western art. Her use of line and repetition imparts a sense of order, which she then unravels by adding fragmentary imagery and disquieting text that challenges what initially appear stable.
“40 Years,” on view at Public Gallery, offers a rare opportunity to trace the evolution of her practice, from her early graphite renderings to later more textually charged compositions that borrow imagery from pop culture and Hollywood. In one of her final graphic works, In Old Age He Painted (1986), Attie reconfigures Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ canonical images into a visual sliding puzzle. Here, she exposes the arbitrary, constructed nature of the female archetypes that the French neoclassical painter drew on. By the 1990s, she had started drawing on the work of Old Masters. In the painting Mixed Metaphors (1993), for example, astonished faces surround Courbet’s famous painting of female genitalia, L’origine du monde (1866), implicating the viewer’s gaze, too. Attie’s mischievous, sometimes unsettling, reconstructions are all about looking again, encouraging us to pick the piece that best fits our own interpretations.