Exhibitions to see in May

This month our recommendations include Tracey Emin at Tate, Michaelina Wautier at the Royal Academy and British landscapes at Pallant House
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Tracey Emin The End of Love, 2024 Tate purchased with funds from A4 Arts Foundation 2025 © Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin: A Second Life

Tate Modern

This landmark exhibitions presents 40 years of work by Tracey Emin, an era-defining artist whose confessional, self autobiographical work has pushed at the boundaries of what has been categorised as art. Her passion for painting and figurative work is particularly present in this show.

Open until 31 August 2026.

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Euan Uglow Head of Pat (1978-83). Oil on canvas laid on panel © The estate of Euan Uglow. All rights reserved 2025/Bridgeman Images

Euan Uglow: An Arc from the Eye

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

This exhibition offers a rare and quietly revelatory encounter with Euan Uglow’s work, placing drawing at the very centre of his practice. Bringing together paintings and works on paper, the exhibition traces Uglow’s unique way of looking, in which the measured line becomes both a tool of perception and a record of time spent seeing.

 

Open until 31 May

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Soma Surovi Jannat Detail from Between the Sea and the Sky, Who Holds the Ground? © Soma Surovi Jannat

Ashmolean NOW: Soma Surovi Jannat 

Ashmolean Museum

This exhibition showcases the work of Bangladeshi artist Soma Surovi Jannat, who draws inspiration from the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world, and the Ashmolean collections to address the climate crisis. 

Open until 1 November 2026

Free, find out more

Michaelina Wautier The Triumph of Bacchus. Oil on canvas. 271.5 x 355.5 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Picture Gallery, inv. 3548 Photo: © KHM-Museumsverband

Michaelina Wautier

Royal Academy of Art

Long unrecognised in the history of art, Michaelina Wautier is celebrated and reinstated in this new exhibition that shows her as an artist who challenged the themes that female artists were able to approach. In her most famous painting, The Triumph of Bacchus, she painted herself as a pagan bacchante in monumental scale, looking squarely at the viewer and confidently asserting her position as the maker. 

Open until 21 June 2026

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John Sell Cotman Capel Curig, 1807, Watercolour and pencil on paper, Hussey Bequest, Chichester District Council (1985), © Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK

British Landscapes: A Sense of Place

Pallant House Gallery

This exhibition opens at the end of May, just as the landscapes that surround us reach a peak in abundance and colour. Spanning Romanticism, Modernism and postwar abstraction, the exhibition traces a rich lineage from Thomas Gainsborough and the golden age of British watercolour to the postwar works of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Nash, and Eric Ravilious. 

Opens 30 May 2026

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