The Top Exhibitions in London This May
Hey, art lover, If you’re on the hunt for the capital’s best but spoilt for choice and overwhelmed by the social media and press release overload, check out these May recommendations. Striking art pieces by exciting established and emerging artists. Also, Art2LookOut4 is always looking beyond the white cube space for street art and little-known outsider art.
NATIONAL GALLERY REHANG
The Big Rehang is part of the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary celebrations. Well, it is and it isn’t. That is, the anniversary was last year, however, the year-long celebration culminated on May 10 2025 with the redisplay of the entire collection and the redmodelling of the Sainsbury Wing. And it’s also the 250th anniversary of the birth of British artist JMW Turner so why not combine the two celebrations and check out the redisplayed Turner works. And don’t get so awestruck by his majestic seascapes that you overlook the National’s earliest works dating back to 1260. That’s Leonardo da Vinci”s Virgin of the Rocks, in the photo above [check out the gobsmacked gallery visitors!]. Masterpieces like these on show.
Where & When: National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN. From 10 May 2025
TOYOSI SALIU: SANKOFA CHRONICLES
The gold and purple colours of wealth and royalty, Ghananian Adinkra symbols, Byzantine-like divine haloes – all resonant motifs in Toyosi Saliu’s work. And she paints with 24-carat gold pigment so each canvas is rich in more ways than one. This striking collection reaches back into the West African ancestral past, bridging the classical and the contemporary. The Sankofa in the exhibition title refers to the spirit of Sankofa—honouring the past to shape the future. The artist forges dialogue between a celebration of history and heritage and the world we build today, placing these figures in the intersection of ancestral legacy and the hope of future generations.
Where & When: Elitha’s Gallery, 1b Holborn Circus, London EC1N 2HB, 19 – 31 May
MICHAELA YEARWOOD-DAN: No Time For Despair
At the May 13 private view, rockstar-like queues snaked all the way down Saville Row. Pop along to Hauser & Firth’s Mayfair gallery to find out why. Large-scale abstract works sit with near-minatures in an equivocal juxtapostion of bright colour, glitter and ceramic petal motif. In disparate corners of these canvases, notes to oneself penned as poems to the soul. Her visceral signatures can be found in all her works, suffusing her vase-like clay pieces and peppering kitschy decorative forms. A monumental five-panel piece in the far room takes up the full 11 metres of the back wall. A powerful tadah! statement.
Where & When: Hauser & Wirth, 23 Saville Row, London. 13 May – 2 August.
ELI PING: HARD GOODS
The Bernheim gallery reminds one of a millionaire’s plaything. A steep-staircased, high-necked pad tucked away somewhere on a Mayfair side street. The only gallery space giveaways are the eerie, spindly, ebony-coloured tree-like sculptures haunched in the display spaces like alien visitors – the work of US-based artist Eli Ping. You’ll notice a series of coil-like structrues columned on brick bases. The workmanlike plinths base down on the tense, tactile aesthetic. His cotton and resin sheet-white Monocarp sculptures are similarly spartan and skeletal; plucked like the extracted fibia of some great and beautiful prehistoric beast. I can think of worse ways of decorating a millionaire’s Mayfair pad.
Where & When: Bernheim, 1 New Burlington St, London, W1S 2JA. 07 May – 20 June
Writer – Eddie Saint-Jean
For more on London’s art scene, read London Art in Review, authored by Eddie Saint-Jean
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