Leigh Bowery, Emily Kam Kngwarray and Lee Miller—Tate reveals its 2025 exhibition programme

Tate Trendy is to host the primary full-scale UK museum exhibition devoted to the trailblazing Australian efficiency artist Leigh Bowery, a celebrated muse of the artist Lucian Freud, early subsequent 12 months. The exhibition (27 February-2 September 2025), a centrepiece of Tate’s 2025 programme, “will span his emergence in London’s Eighties membership scene by to his outrageous performances in galleries, theatres and the road, utilizing the physique as a shape-shifting device in ways in which would go on to encourage Alexander McQueen, Woman Gaga and lots of extra,” says a Tate assertion.

The present, organised in collaboration with Nicola Rainbird (the director and proprietor of the Property of Leigh Bowery), will concentrate on his collaborations with artists corresponding to Michael Clark, Charles Atlas, Nick Knight, Stephen Willats, and Freud, whose 1991 portrait of Bowery is at current on show at Tate Britain.

Different Tate Trendy highlights subsequent 12 months embrace an exhibition of works by the Twentieth-century Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray (10 July 2025-13 January 2026) which is billed as the primary large-scale presentation of her work ever held in Europe. Kngwarray (1910-96) was from Utopia, an Aboriginal group 250km north-east of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory. From 1988 till her loss of life eight years later, Kngwarray produced round 3,000 work—roughly one per day. The present because of open at Tate lately closed on the Nationwide Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

A survey of Nigerian Modernism (8 October 2025-Spring 2026), which focuses on Nigerian artists working earlier than and after the last decade of nationwide independence from British colonial rule in 1960, additionally opens at Tate Trendy subsequent 12 months. Artists featured embrace Ladi Kwali and Ben Enwonwu.

The crowdpleasing Pablo Picasso, whose legacy has come underneath scrutiny previously decade, additionally takes centre stage at Tate with the exhibition Picasso: The Three Dancers (25 September-Spring 2026). “Tate Trendy’s exhibition tells the story of this landmark portray [made in 1925] by a number of key works from throughout Picasso’s profession, exploring themes of intercourse, loss of life, and the politics of dance,” provides the Tate assertion.

Tate Britain begins 2025 with a present devoted to the UK artist Ed Atkins (2 April-25 August 2025). The exhibition will embrace work, writing, embroideries and drawings alongside Atkins’s moving-image works. Within the autumn, the highlight falls on the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller (2 October-15 February 2026). “With round 250 classic and fashionable prints, together with these by no means beforehand displayed, the exhibition reveals Miller’s poetic imaginative and prescient and fearless spirit,” says the Tate assertion. Two of Britain’s most revered artists, JMW Turner and John Constable, are in contrast and contrasted in an formidable present exploring the “heady rivalry” between the pair within the 250th 12 months of their beginning (27 November 2025-12 April 2026).

Tate St Ives will current exhibits devoted to the Polish-Romani artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (till 5 January 2025); the Nineteen Thirties UK Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun (1 February-5 Could 2025); the US artist Liliane Lijn who made essential kinetic works (Could-October) and the Lithuanian-born artist Emilija Škarnulytė (October 2025-January 2026).

Tate Liverpool, which is closed till 2026 for renovations, has taken up residency at RIBA North the place it is going to current a programme of assortment shows, household actions and public occasions together with a part of the Liverpool Biennial in the summertime of 2025.