Five Exhibitions To See In London In August 2025 — from Derek Jarman’s evocative Black Paintings to Aboriginal dreamscapes and Rachel Jones’s vibrant explorations of identity, discover our picks for August’s must-see exhibitions across the capital.
London in August buzzes with more than sunshine and riverside strolls. While the parks brim with picnickers and the pavements hum with conversation, behind gallery doors a different energy unfolds — intimate, evocative and global. This month’s cultural calendar is especially rich, and our Five Exhibitions To See In London In August 2025 offers a cross-section of the most captivating shows in the city right now, from deeply personal narratives to global artistic traditions.
At Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, Derek Jarman: The Black Paintings: A Chronology, Part II (1988–1991) offers a rare window into the artist’s late creative surge. Between 1988 and 1991, Jarman cultivated his now-famous garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, wrote the lyrical diary Modern Nature, and completed his celebrated film The Garden (1990). The works here pulse with the tension between beauty and loss, interweaving diary fragments about wildflowers and sea winds with memories of Soho nights and childhood gardens — a poetic meditation shaped by the AIDS crisis and the solace of creation.
Meanwhile, Dulwich Picture Gallery presents its first-ever solo contemporary exhibition in the main galleries, featuring new work by Rachel Jones. Born in Whitechapel in 1991 to Jamaican and Barbadian parents, Jones uses bold colour, layered textures and recurring motifs of mouths and teeth to explore identity, emotion and the lived experience of Black bodies. These new works respond directly to Dulwich’s historic collection, transforming traditional surroundings into a space of vibrant dialogue.
Over at Unit, Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming gathers nine leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, tracing the influence of Emily Kam Kngwarray, whose work has secured her a place among the 20th century’s most celebrated artists. With contributions from figures such as Rover Thomas Joolama, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford and Makinti Napanangka, the exhibition offers a rare chance to experience one of the world’s oldest living artistic traditions, where landscape, cosmology and ancestral narratives merge into striking visual forms.
Next up on five exhibitions to see In London in August 2025, In her debut solo exhibition SCORE!, Eva Dixon turns sport and spectacle into a camp, playful examination of gender and desire. Football trading cards, WWF wrestlers and portraits of sex workers are altered with glitter, mesh, folds and cuts, transforming hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine archetypes into something both subversive and celebratory. Dixon’s approach reframes sports fandom through a queer lens, challenging and delighting in equal measure.
Finally, at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Francesco Clemente’s Self-Portraits in the Bardo draws on Tibetan Buddhist imagery of the transitional state between death and rebirth. In eight luminous canvases, Clemente merges his own likeness with peaceful and wrathful deities, producing a cycle of paintings that feel both personal and cosmic — an intimate meditation on impermanence rendered in glowing, spiritual colour.
From the windswept gardens of Dungeness to the sacred cosmologies of Australia and the meditative landscapes of the Tibetan bardo, our Five Exhibitions To See In London In August is your essential guide to the month’s most thought-provoking shows — proof that the capital’s art scene remains as vital and diverse as ever.
So here’s our Five Exhibitions To See In London In August 2025
Oil and mixed media on canvas
16 x 16 inches
Amanda Wilkinson Gallery
Derek Jarman The Black Paintings: A Chronology Part II 1988 – 1991
Part II of Derek Jarman The Black Paintings : A Chronology presents works made between 1988 – 1991. During this time Jarman created his garden at Prospect Cottage, wrote his famous diary Modern Nature and made what is thought to be one of his most significant films The Garden, 1990, shot on location in Dungeness.
The diary entries in Modern Nature speak of the joy that Jarman found observing the landscape of Dungeness as well as the creative challenge of making a garden around Prospect Cottage. He found both pursuits healing, following his HIV diagnosis, and as markers of the time during which he lost many friends to the virus. Poetic passages about particular plants and the gradual development of the garden are interlaced with notations about his parallel life in London’s Soho with HB and reminiscences about other gardens he had access to a s a child.
Derek Jarman The Black Paintings: A Chronology Part II 1988 – 1991
17th July, 2025 – 20th September, 2025
Amanda Wilkinson Gallery
1st Floor, 47 Farringdon Road
London, EC1M 3JB
Courtesy of the artist and Dulwich Picture Gallery
Rachel Jones at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
Dulwich Picture Gallery will present its first solo contemporary exhibition in the main galleries this autumn, featuring new work by the British artist Rachel Jones.
Jones, born in 1991 in Whitechapel, east London, to a Jamaican mother and Barbadian father, grew up in Brentwood, Essex. She studied fine art at the Glasgow School of Art, earning a degree in painting and printmaking in 2013, and completed her master’s at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 2019.
Her practice moves between painting, installation, sound and performance, often marked by bold colour, layered textures and recurring motifs of mouths and teeth. These forms, both physical and symbolic, frame her exploration of identity, interior life and the lived experience of Black bodies. She has described her approach as an “exegesis of colour”, using palette and form as a language for emotions that resist articulation.
The works commissioned for Dulwich grow from her recent exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and respond to the Gallery’s collection.
Rachel Jones at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
10th June, 2025 – 19th October, 2025
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Gallery Rd
London
United Kingdom
Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming
A new exhibition opened on 9 July at London’s Unit, bringing some of the most significant names in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art to a British audience, and tracing the profound influence of Emily Kam Kngwarray, the Anmatyerr painter whose work has earned her a place among the 20th century’s most celebrated artists.
Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming gathers work from nine artists whose paintings emerge from one of the world’s oldest continuous traditions. The show arrives ahead of Tate Modern’s forthcoming Kngwarray retrospective, offering what organisers call a rare opportunity to view her paintings in conversation with those of her peers, predecessors and artists shaped by her legacy.
Alongside Kngwarray, the exhibition features figures central to the East Kimberley Art Movement and the Western Desert Movement, including Rover Thomas Joolama, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrla, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Makinti Napanangka, Tommy Watson and Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi.
Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming
9th July, 2025 –17th August, 2025
Unit
3 Hanover Square
London
United Kingdom
Eva Dixon: SCORE!
Eva Dixon’s inaugural solo exhibition, SCORE! features a dynamic cast. The Ipswich football team, WWF wrestlers, sex workers, a lone diver. Appearing on collectible cards sourced by the artist, these characters appear in control.
Though the cards name real individuals, they often read as archetypal, exaggerated ideals of hyper masculinity or hyper femininity. Dixon has a deft way of framing paradoxes, literally and metaphorically. Always playful, she highlights that the more something epitomises heterosexuality, the more it becomes camp. Jock-themed porn, fetishwear and parties are examples of how gay culture appropriates sport. In the artist’s own football work, the Ipswich team recede and emerge from a surface of glitter-covered construction mesh. The treasured cards have been folded or clipped, sometimes rendering the men anonymous bodies: it’s material that’s Dixon’s star player.
Eva Dixon: SCORE!
14th August 2025 – 14th September, 2025
Split Riviera
(at the back of Grow Hackney)
Hackney Wick
E15 2SJ
Francesco Clemente: Self-Portraits in the Bardo
LONDON — Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Francesco Clemente: Self-Portraits in the Bardo — a significant series from the artist’s recent practice, on view for the first time. In eight vivid and visionary canvases, Clemente fuses self-portraiture with imagery inspired by traditional Tibetan Buddhist representations of the bardo.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is a liminal state of consciousness between death and rebirth. The awe-inspiring figures in Clemente’s paintings draw on the sacred peaceful and wrathful deities said to inhabit this non-corporeal realm—brought to life through his vibrant compositions.
Francesco Clemente: Self-Portraits in the Bardo
25th June, 2025 – 27th September, 2025
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
35 Dover Street
London W1S 4NQ
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