The 2024 London arts calendar was defined by a collective desire to correct the historical record. Throughout the capital’s major galleries, curatorial strategies moved away from standard biographical narratives—the tortured genius, the famous muse, the peripheral wife—and instead anchored artists firmly within their own conceptual rigour, technical innovations, and sociopolitical contexts.
We saw legacies redefined, blockbusters that lived up to the immense hype, and long-overdue institutional recognition for visionary figures who had previously been sidelined by art history. The National Gallery broke attendance records with an unprecedented loan collection, while the National Portrait Gallery hosted its first major Francis Bacon portraiture focus in nearly two decades. Whether examining the evolution of the Black figure in Western art or dissecting the industrial design of a global toy icon, the year’s programming proved that audiences are hungry for substance over pure visual spectacle. Here are the 11 exhibitions that dictated the cultural conversation and transformed London’s cultural landscape this year.
The Heavyweight Retrospectives
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind (Tate Modern)
Running from February to September, the UK’s largest retrospective of Yoko Ono’s seven-decade career finally dismantled the tabloid framing that has long obscured her artistic output. Tate Modern gathered over 200 works, establishing Ono as a trailblazing force in conceptual, participatory, and performance art. By engaging with interactive installations like Wish Trees for London and the visceral, action-oriented Painting to Hammer a Nail, visitors were implicated directly in the art-making process. The critical consensus was unanimous: the exhibition effectively stripped away her peripheral association with John Lennon, re-centring Ono as a principled, radical thinker whose interactive “instruction pieces” remain as urgent and intellectually rigorous today as they were in the 1960s.
Michael Craig-Martin (Royal Academy of Arts)
From September to December, the Royal Academy offered a comprehensive look at Michael Craig-Martin, often cited as the godfather of the Young British Artists (YBAs). Known for his vibrantly coloured, crisply outlined depictions of everyday objects, the retrospective tracked his trajectory from early, austere conceptual exercises (most famously, his 1973 work An Oak Tree) to the large-scale, intensely hued canvases that define his mature style. The exhibition successfully demonstrated how Craig-Martin’s visual vocabulary—elevating the mundane items of mass consumption into the monumental—has quietly but persistently shaped the aesthetic parameters of contemporary British art over the last half-century.
Francis Bacon: Human Presence (National Portrait Gallery)
In its first major examination of Francis Bacon’s portraits in 20 years, the National Portrait Gallery curated a staggering collection of over 50 works spanning from the 1940s onwards. Rather than relying solely on the shock value of his familiar, distorted “shrieking” figures, the autumn exhibition provided a granular, emotionally resonant look at his immediate circle. Intimate, visceral depictions of fellow artists and lovers, including Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne, and George Dyer, were hung with careful thematic precision. Reviewers praised the gallery for mapping Bacon’s existential angst onto a coherent narrative, illustrating his lifelong ambition to capture the raw, pulsating nervous system of his subjects rather than their mere physical likeness.
Radical Reframing and Identity
The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure (National Portrait Gallery)
Opening early in the year, this landmark exhibition gathered the work of 22 contemporary artists to interrogate and reconstruct the representation of the Black figure in Western art. The curation boldly bypassed passive historical depictions, opting instead for works that assert physical presence, political agency, and complex interiority. By spotlighting artists who are actively dismantling Eurocentric art historical canons, the exhibition became a critical pivot point for the gallery, offering a robust, necessary challenge to the traditional parameters of portraiture and representation. For more insights into how visual culture and institutional curating are shifting, explore our ongoing Art coverage.
Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles (Whitechapel Gallery)
Zineb Sedira transformed the Whitechapel Gallery into a labyrinth of immersive film sets between February and May. Blending autobiography, fiction, and activist cinema, the exhibition was a masterful exploration of post-colonial memory and cultural transmission. Sedira drew heavily on the militant cinema of the 1960s and 1970s—particularly anti-colonial collaborations between Algeria, France, and Italy—to craft an environment where the viewer became both a passive witness and an active participant. The show was a sophisticated, intellectually demanding experience that required audiences to actively decode the layered, transnational histories of migration and resistance.
Pop Culture Meets Archival Rigour
Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection (V&A)
The V&A’s massive photography showcase, running until January 2025, proved that celebrity collections can possess profound curatorial weight when assembled with genuine expertise. Drawing from the formidable private collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish, Fragile Beauty charted the evolution of modern and contemporary photography. The sheer scale of the exhibition was anchoring, seamlessly navigating between highly stylised fashion photography, raw photojournalism, and intimate fine art portraits. It offered a forensic look at how the photographic medium has chronicled vulnerability, strength, and the human condition across the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Barbie®: The Exhibition (Design Museum)
Curated by Danielle Thom, the Design Museum’s deep dive into the 65-year history of Barbie easily bypassed the trap of pure pink-washed nostalgia. Running through early 2025, the exhibition gathered over 180 rare objects, including the coveted original 1959 “Number 1 Barbie,” to examine the doll through a rigorous, design-led perspective. It tracked the brand’s response to shifting cultural expectations regarding careers, body image, and mid-century architecture. By detailing the complex manufacturing processes, stylistic pivots, and material evolution of the dolls, the exhibition successfully positioned Barbie as a mass-produced, three-dimensional mirror of contemporary Culture.
The Masters, Reassessed
Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers (National Gallery)
This autumn exhibition became a historic event for the National Gallery, drawing a record-breaking 334,589 visitors and requiring unprecedented overnight openings during its final weekend to meet public demand. Focusing strictly on Vincent van Gogh’s highly productive and transformative years in Arles and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (1888–1890), the curation deliberately avoided the exhausted narrative of his mental decline and isolation. Instead, it highlighted his calculated brilliance, poetic intentionality, and compositional mastery. The logistical triumph of the show was the rare reunion of various versions of Sunflowers and La Berceuse, displayed together exactly as the artist had originally envisioned them in his studio.
Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider (Tate Modern)
The first major UK survey of the Der Blaue Reiter group in over 60 years arrived at Tate Modern with kinetic energy and a vibrant palette. Featuring over 130 works heavily loaned from Munich’s Lenbachhaus, the exhibition mapped the collective’s radical experiments with colour, sound, and spirituality prior to the outbreak of the First World War. Crucially, the curation corrected a long-standing historical imbalance by giving equal critical weight to the women of the movement—Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin, and Erma Bossi. Immersive, experiential rooms highlighted the group’s cross-disciplinary engagement with music, proving that their pre-war output was not a disjointed aesthetic scramble, but a deliberate, collaborative dismantling of academic constraints.
British Visionaries
Turner Prize 2024 (Tate Britain)
Marking its 40th anniversary, the Turner Prize returned to Tate Britain with a shortlist that effectively captured the anxious, hybrid nature of contemporary British art. Featuring nominees Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, and Delaine Le Bas, the 2024 iteration felt less concerned with media provocation for its own sake and more invested in deep material investigation and poignant sociopolitical commentary. As always, the exhibition served as a vital diagnostic tool for the state of the UK’s cultural output, forcing audiences to confront complex, often uncomfortable questions about colonial legacies, national identity, and the utility of art in a fractured political landscape.
Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious (Dulwich Picture Gallery)
Closing out the year’s highlights was the first major retrospective dedicated to Tirzah Garwood. Long overshadowed by the towering career of her husband, Eric Ravilious, Garwood was repositioned by the Dulwich Picture Gallery as a singular, visionary force in British printmaking and design. Her masterful wood engravings, patterned papers, and later oil paintings revealed a distinct, often mildly subversive wit and a brilliant eye for the oddities of domestic and provincial life. The exhibition was a necessary, meticulously researched curatorial intervention that secured Garwood’s place firmly outside her husband’s shadow, confirming her as one of the most compelling voices of interwar British art.
The exhibitions of 2024 demonstrated a clear, unified institutional mandate across London: to look backwards with a sharper, more critical lens, to elevate voices historically pushed to the margins, and to ensure that the icons we revere are understood for their artistic complexity rather than their easily marketable mythology.