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Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting – 5 stars from The Guardian
When: June 20-September 7, 2025
Where: National Portrait Gallery
Tickets at the link.
Jenny Saville is one of the world’s best known contemporary artists. She became the talk of the town in the 1990s after a successful exhibition of her graduate work at Glasgow School of Art. Since then she has played a leading role in the revival of figurative painting, a genre that Saville continues to explore with particular insight and passion. The exhibition, which opened June 20 at London’s National Portrait Gallery, features 45 works by Saville – charcoal drawings and large-scale oil paintings of human figures, monumental nudes and more. These large-scale paintings challenge historical notions of female beauty and are striking in their anatomicality.
“Scale in art can do more than just look impressive, important, or strange. It can change the relationship between art and viewer, even magically invert subject and object. When Saville paints large nudes, they are alive. And when she paints pain, the effect is horrifying, because she makes you look through the eyes of the victim. I am now more ready than ever to go back and look at her paintings of violence.”
– writes art historian and The Guardian’s architecture critic Jonathan Jones.
Design and Disability – 5 stars from The Guardian
When: June 7, 2025 – February 15, 2026
Where: V&A South Kensington
Tickets at .
The exhibition, which launched at the V&A South Kensington Museum on June 7, demonstrates that disability-friendly culture and design is about much more than ramps. Visitors will be able to see many unusual works created by and for neurodiverse creators, from self-tightening shoes to a universal vibrator that doesn’t require the use of hands.
“Every section of this stunning exhibition contains something that ordinary society very often overlooks: the joy of people with disabilities. It is present in the straps that allow deaf and hard-of-hearing concertgoers to feel the music as vibrations on their chests. It is present in colorful clothing. It is present – certainly – in the versatile, hands-free vibrator…. But it’s not just individual objects that radiate this joy. It’s also the themes of community action and caring that come up again and again, as well as the redefinition of disability itself – from the ‘medical problem’ that society sees it as, to the proud identity it really is.”
– says critic and columnist Lucy Webster of the British newspaper The Guardian.
Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict – 5 stars from The Telegraph
When: May 23 – November 2, 2025
Where: The Imperial War Museum London
To schedule your visit, visit .
Shocking and hugely important, the UK’s first major exhibition on sexual violence in conflict. Through collected materials, posters, photographs, paintings, letters and more, the exhibition tells the unknown stories of refugee children, victims of human trafficking, prisoners of war and survivors, and highlights the ongoing efforts of those fighting for justice and working to prevent the most ignored war crime – sexual violence. Unsilenced is not a light viewing experience, so children under the age of 16 are not recommended to attend. However, even though the subject matter is revealed in its entirety and scope, it is presented with great care and the utmost sensitivity.
“The fact that the first major exhibition in the UK dedicated solely to conflict-related sexual violence did not take place until 2025 demonstrates how, even in peacetime in democracies, the subject has long been overshadowed… Unsilenced is particularly inspiring in the way it overturns our typical view of military history and reimagines it from the perspective of survivors of sexual violence.”
– Victoria Taylor, critic, columnist and journalist at The Telegraph, shares her impressions.
Hiroshige: artist of the open road – 5 stars from The Telegraph
When: May 1 – September 7, 2025
Where: British Museum
To schedule a visit, please click here.
A major new exhibition, which opened at the British Museum on May 1, is dedicated to the work of the famous Japanese graphic artist, master of color woodblock prints Utagawa Hiroshige. Visitors will be able to plunge into the poetic nature of Japan, admire fashionable characters or images of ordinary villagers in 120 works of the artist – prints, drawings and illustrations.
“Fascinated by the mesmerizing images of Japan’s majestic landscapes (including the eye-catching snow cone of Mount Fuji), I forgot about all the turmoil raging in the world for a couple of wonderful hours. I left there with the firm intention of never again flipping through a newsfeed and appreciating the simple phenomena of nature, such as a soft ray of moonlight or a flower carried away by the breeze…Although there are examples of tumultuous events in his work (a memorable example is the view of Naruto’s whirlpools), in general Hiroshige’s landscapes are characterized by a sense of calm and cosmic order, sometimes balanced by humorous touches that good-naturedly mock human folly.”
– tells The Telegraph’s chief art critic Alastair Sooke.
V&A East Storehouse – 5 stars from The Guardian
When: open from May 31
Where: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford
To schedule your visit, please click here.
Located on four levels of the former Olympic Games Media Center, the V&A Museum’s new branch, the East Storehouse, is a new public space that has not only become home to over 250,000 art objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 V&A archival collections, but has also given visitors a whole new kind of museum experience. The huge space, the size of about 30 basketball courts, is essentially a large-scale museum that has brought together many individual exhibitions under its roof – from David Bowie’s archives and a collection of iconic items from Glastonbury to Renaissance masterpieces, authentic samurai swords and much more.
“The amazing thing about Storehouse is the way it makes you feel close to the art as if it belongs to you – as a national collection should. Everywhere you look, there is abundance – Andalusian column capitals, a Buddha statue, a giant Georgian dollhouse – mixed as casually but lovingly as the objects in someone’s home. Their beauty is revealed, they are free of signatures and ask only one thing – to enjoy them… This is what the museum of the future looks like – an old idea now turned inside out, turned upside down and spewing its secrets, good and bad, in an avalanche of beautiful issues created with curiosity, generous imagination and love”,
–writes The Guardian’s art and architecture critic Jonathan Jones in his review.
