Top 5 of 2025
Somehow, this is the eighth annual round-up of my top art shows of the year. (See previous from 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.) Aside from a couple of pandemic-induced pauses, I’ve blogged every week since I started this project in January 2018.
Back then, I was an enthusiastic gallery-goer and note taker with a poor memory, and wanted somewhere to reflect and think deeper on what I’d seen. Establishing a weekly ritual of writing about a new exhibition I’d seen has served that purpose.
Since then, my memory has only worsened and my gallery-going has increased. I’m almost ashamed to say that this has been my busiest ever year in that regard. I saw 309 shows in 2025, the most on (my) record. The total was a bit inflated by working in the west end, with Mayfair’s gallery district an easy lunch-hour or after-work walk away. But still…
Anyway, within that mind-bending total, here are my five favourites from the year.
Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life | The Courtauld Gallery
There are no sinister overtones or dark corners in Wayne Thiebaud’s work. The American artist, who died in 2021 but is best known for his 1960s oil paintings of cakes and pies, aimed for abundance, even joy.
As an artistic stance, this is quite radical, especially when compared with his peers: the butch murkiness of Rauschenberg and Rothko; Warhol’s alienated cool; the Minimalists’… minimalism.
At different commercial galleries over the years, I’d seen and loved a broader range of Thiebaud’s work, including some unsurprisingly sunny landscapes from the artist’s native California, and some surprisingly inscrutable portraits. But the Courtauld show goes hard on what makes him famous: cakes, pies, the occasional hot dog or cup of coffee, all picked out in luscious, abundant… I almost said edible oil paints.
The star of the show is Cakes, from 1963, pictured above and perhaps the artist’s signature work. (Considering the artist’s focus on americana, it’s quite suitable that its usual home is in Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art.) It’s the show I loved and returned to the most this year.
Weixin Quek Chong: moulting pangs | ai
This exhibition showcases what look like empty egg sacs and shedded skins. They’re created, by Singaporean artist Weixin Quek Chong, through clever use of silicone and mesh. Taken together, they left me feeling pleasantly horrified.
The location really helped. The exhibition was staged in the gallery’s basement, inside an empty, disused swimming pool, tiled in turquoise and white. A changing room and sauna on the same level are used as side galleries. There’s a rickety temporary staircase down to the bottom of the pool, and a message warning us that only one person can climb down or up at a time.
The shedded skins and sacs are strung up and spotlit like religious relics - or maybe hunting trophies. Ed Gein meets Alien. Her sculptures made me wonder: what beasts have cast off these skins or emerged from these eggs? I found myself regretting I hadn’t visited on Halloween, but immediately remember the feeling of descending those fragile stairs, months later.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature | Metropolitan Museum of Art
I watched the recent remake of Nosferatu on the plane to New York City, where I saw this show. Even on a tiny back-of-seat screen, I was bowled over by the film’s vibe: craggy mountains, gothic ruins, the skeletal shadows of ship masts in the fog. The vibe is pinched wholesale by the film’s director from Caspar David Friedrich. Maybe I was mentally primed to notice that, given there was an outstanding exhibition of Friedrich’s work, on at the Met. A show I was particularly excited to see, once I reached my destination.
I’m sure Friedrich, as a deeply religious man, wouldn’t have been pleased to be associated with vampires and the occult. But it’s a testament to the strength of the vibe. What he originated in the Romantic early 1800s has proved powerful enough to curdle into horror movie cliché, centuries later. But for the viewer of an exhibition, which brought together pretty much all of the artist’s best-known works, it was a massive vibrational thrill to see the original source material.
Joanna van Son: Intermission | General Assembly
Joanna van Son’s paintings, eight of which were collected in this show, draw from a wide range of inspirations, but are distinctively her own. Multiple canvases make up many of the works, and given their partially raw state, the stitched joins between them are clearly visible. Frankenstein’s monster style. An intermission means a break between parts. I took the exhibition’s title to be a reference to these adjoining canvases, and to the abrupt contrasts between the paint and the linen.
She uses thick impasto, building up craggy mountains of oil paint, sometimes creamy-pink, sometimes with a livid orangey-red undertone that’s pure Frank Auerbach. The figures in this paint are reclining, voluptuous naked women. Odalisques. I hope to see more of them, and soon.
The Bourdon Street Chippy | Lyndsey Ingram
Sometimes popular things are good! Speaking of which, I really enjoyed my visit to the Bourdon Street Chippy, a deeply people-pleasing summer show put on by Lyndsey Ingram in their Mayfair space. Despite it being up a quiet backstreet and having very limited opening hours - standard fare for a commercial gallery - it was still rammed with tourists and families.
Understandably. The gallery rooms were been transformed into an amazingly convincing old school fish and chip shop: the kind with a glass-fronted counter, formica-topped tables and a noticeboard. With a twist, though: in there - fish, chips, condiments, signage - was hand stitched in felt. The overall effect was like an interactive Martin Parr photo (RIP). Except everywhere you looked there were cuddly toys. It was adorable. The felt was stitched by the artist Lucy Sparrow, who I hope made bank, given every single felt object in the show was for sale.
Other highlights
Here are five other shows I saw and stood out this year, to round out a top 10.
- Ugo Rondinone: the rainbow body (Sadie Coles HQ, London)
- Antoine Catala: I Love You, I Love You (47 Canal, New York City)
- Richard Wright (Camden Art Centre, London)
- Vlassis Caniaris: Works from 1962 to 1980 (Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Paris)
- Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark (Raven Row, London)
Next year
The itch I have each Sunday morning to write, to lay another couple of bricks in these walls of prose, hasn’t gone away. My need to talk about it has dissipated though. I started out by promoting the website on social media, getting excited when galleries noticed, even if it was to complain about inaccuracies in my hurriedly-written, unedited copy. That’s all been scrubbed. Then, I posted links to the site on my (private) Instagram, for friends to see. Then I stopped, mostly.
From its foundations, the Artangled project is becoming a ghost city, and I wander its streets pretty much alone, if site analytics are to be believed.
I’ve been building so long that, these days, when I do go to a gallery and see something new, I often find myself quickly browsing the tags page to see if I’ve written about the artist before. Somehow, it’s become useful for another reason. I’ll stay here a while longer.