2025 Roundup Roundup
Let’s wrap up the year with some stats:
604 shows seen
345 venues visited
35 full length reviews
2 venue reviews
2 interviews
46 Newsletters (Tuesdays)
40 Gallery Entry Game Newsletters (Fridays)
I set myself a goal in 2025: spend more time seeing less art. And I did! I visited approximately 30% less shows than I did in 2024 but you wouldn’t know it from my Newsletters because I reviewed every single one. That’s right. Every show.
Exhibitions that really captured my imagination or sent my head spinning, whether good or bad, were the ones I wrote about at length. Links to all of those are below. How many of these shows did you see?
🔥 The fire icon indicates the dozen most read reviews, based on site stats.
Art Show Reviews
Andy Holden & The Grubby Mitts (Palmer Gallery)
Art that could kill you (Saatchi Gallery)
Britta Jaschinski - Still Life (Mall Galleries)
CONDO London 2025 (various locations)
🔥 Do Ho Suh - Walk the House (Tate Modern)
E8 Art & Craft Trail (various E8 venues)
The Engine Room (Morley Gallery)
🔥 Feel the Sound (Barbican)
Frieze: 20 I’d Buy (Regent’s Park)
Ian’s Rooms (Gallery Rosenfeld)
🔥 Leigh Bowery! (Tate Modern)
Linder & Mickalene Thomas (Hayward Gallery)
🔥 Lives Less Ordinary (Two Temple Place)
Máret Ánne Sara (Tate Modern Turbine Hall)
Matthew Collings (Handel Street Gallery)
Minor Attractions 2025 (Mandrake Hotel)
Mitchell Anderson - Sonnet (Bernheim)
Nazanin Noori - THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST (Auto Italia)
🔥 New Contemporaries (ICA)
New (or new to me) Gallery Reviews (various locations)
🔥 Noah Davis (Barbican Art Gallery)
🔥 Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs (Lightroom)
R.I.P. Germain - Anti-Blackness Is Bad, Even The Parts That We Like (Cabinet Gallery)
Royal Drawing School 25th Anniversary Exhibition (Royal Drawing School)
Seaside Surrealism (Bobinska Brownlee New River)
Slipping the Veil (Great St Barts)
(Un)Layering The Future Past of South Asia | Young Artists’ Voices (SOAS Gallery)
Victor Hugo - Astonishing Things (Royal Academy of Arts)
Venue Reviews
Boros Collection (Berlin)
Click here to scroll through all my venue reviews and get in touch if there are any missing venues you’d like me to review.
Weekly Roundups Newsletter
I see a lot of art. A LOT. That’s why I started writing the Roundup back in 2022. People would ask me what shows they should go see, and I would just point them to my weekly Roundup which had mini reviews of the best things I had recently seen.
Taste, however, is highly subjective. Which is why earlier this year I decided to review every show I’ve seen. That’s right. EVERY. SINGLE. SHOW.
Short “one-line” reviews (disclaimer: sometimes I use multiple sentences) are now published every Tuesday at noon in my newsletter. Helpfully categorised as follows:
👍🏻👍🏻 ROUNDUP-WORTHY — see it if you can!
👍🏻 IF YOU’RE IN THE AREA — but don’t go out of your way…
👎🏻 NOPE — you can give these shows a skip:
🛑 NOW ENDED — it’s too late to see these…
I’ve been told by many people that they specifically make an effort to visit ‘Nope’ shows just to see if they’re as bad as my reviews make them out to be. However you use my reviews, I hope you find them an enjoyable read and a helpful way to navigate London’s vast and varied art scene.
Sign up at https://londonartroundup.substack.com <— It’s FREE!
Why I Like It
I launched this series in August 2022 as an opportunity to be completely biased and shamelessly unfiltered in my love for specific works of art. The first column was about Piet Mondrian’s Composition C (No.III) with Red, Yellow and Blue (1935). Would you believe that it still gets read at least twice a day, every day, by someone somewhere in the world? In fact, many of the columns in this series get new reads each week, since a lot of the works I’ve written about are currently on display in public museums and galleries. How many have you seen?
Jan — * Unearthed (2019), Adam Halls
Feb — 🔥 I Want My Time With You (2017), Tracey Emin
Mar — Rhino Costume (1989), Gerald Scarfe
Apr — * Grapnel (2023), William Cobbing
May — 🔥 Maman (1991), Louise Bourgeois
Jun — David (2004), Sam Taylor-Johnson
Jul — Winged Figure (1961-62), Barbara Hepworth
Aug — OMNIBUS - a recap of the series, with links to the first three dozen articles
Sep — Prayer for Steven Kupfer (2021), Celia Paul
Oct — Untitled (Underpainting) (2018), Kerry James Marshall
Nov — * Don’t (2024), Diana Zrnic
Dec — 20:50 (1987), Richard Wilson
* Works with an asterisk are part of my personal collection.
Why I Like It will continue in 2026.
Thank you
… to all the artists for being brave and bold enough to share your ideas with the world. (And a special thank you to the artists whose works I’ve acquired. You’ve brought joy and happiness into my heart and home!)
… to everyone that works in a gallery, museum or arts venue. Without you, so many wonderful things would go unseen.
… to anyone who’s read even one article or review that I’ve written. I hope you enjoyed reading my words as much as I enjoyed writing them.
PS — Here are links to the 2024 Roundup Roundup, 2023 Roundup Roundup and 2022 Roundup Roundup, just in case you really wanna plough through the archives!
FOOTNOTES:
🔥 5 of the top 10 most read reviews this year were written prior to 2025. Last year the figure was 80%. A few of this year’s reviews went viral, and some of the shows I wrote about were more widely promoted and/or popular, but I don’t really have enough data to explain the drop in that long tail stat. Regardless, it makes me happy, and just a wee bit proud, that some of my older writings are still read by someone, somewhere in the world, at least once every day.
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