Don’t miss in February – your monthly guide to the brightest and best arts in London

It's a month of unmissable visual arts exhibitions in London, plus an enticement to head to the Midlands to sample the Bard...

The Photographers’ Gallery

There’s always something to see at The Photographers’ Gallery with multiple exhibitions and events. This month sees the opening of a new show featuring works by Daidō Moriyama. Acclaimed as one of the world’s most innovative and influential artists and street photographers, Moriyama’s unique style is edgy and avant-garde. There’s a range of other exhibitions on at the moment including Letizia Battaglia: Life, Love and Death in Sicily; Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage; and Min Kim: Ecological Strangers. Min Kim is a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of nature and technology, often speculating on how we can co-exist in harmony. This is a free interactive artwork that highlights our growing disconnection from nature in urban spaces and asks us to rethink the environments in which we live. The Photographers’ Gallery is also home to an excellent specialist bookshop. And it’s easy to get to, located just a few steps off Oxford Street.

Daido Moriyama: Encounters opens on 7 February at The Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1.

Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave

The Barbican continues its celebration of rarely-seen global cinema with a season of ground-breaking Iranian New Wave films in February. Curated by the London-based Iranian filmmaker Ehsan Khoshbakht, the season will showcase nine pivotal films made between 1962 and 1977. Cinema-ye Motafavet (Iranian New Wave) was an important grass-roots movement for Iranian filmmaking. Produced by a small group of young, collaborative and mostly self-taught arthouse filmmakers, these films were set against the reign of the last Shah of Iran and reflect the era’s complex and often contradictory emotions toward modernisation. Many of these films are now recognised internationally as gems of the modernist movement, but are rarely screened in cinemas. And while they are grounded in a very specific social and historical context, their messages resonate universally, especially in times of social change or unrest.  

The Barbican Centre, 4-25 February.  

‘Dar Ghorbat’ (Far From Home), 1975, Iran, directed by Sohrab Shahid Saless. Image: Supplied.

The World of Tim Burton

Discover the intriguing world of iconic US film director, producer, screenwriter and animator Tim Burton at the Design Museum. Famous for a whole raft of magical and memorable films including Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton has a unique style that blends high fantasy with a glamorous gothic aesthetic. This major exhibition takes you inside his creative psyche as you see these fantastical worlds unfold. The display includes sketchbooks, sculptural installations, storyboards, paintings and photos, in an exhibition that captures his singular imagination and explores his remarkable creations. And if you visit before 23 February, you can also see the fascinating (and very pink!) Barbie exhibition dedicated to the world’s most famous doll who is now 65 years young!

The Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High Street, London, to 21 April 2025.

Drawing the Italian Renaissance

Take a trip around to the back of Buckingham Palace to visit the wonderful Italian Renaissance exhibition in The King’s Gallery. Taking over the entire Gallery space, this is a breathtakingly beautiful display of Old Masters and their contemporaries. Billed as the most comprehensive exhibition of Renaissance drawings ever shown in the UK, this is one to be savoured. It explores the diversity and accomplishment of drawing across Italy between 1450 and 1600, and features around 160 works by over 80 artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian. The Royal Collection is known to hold one of the greatest collections of Italian Renaissance drawings in the world, so really take your time to study these delicate and detailed works. Do look out for my personal favourite, Annibale Carracci’s whimsical Landscape with a Lobster. And see the Royal Collection Trust website for a special offer that allows you to convert your exhibition ticket into a one-year pass.

The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, to 9 March 2025.

‘Drawing the Italian Renaissance’, installation view, courtesy of Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025, Royal Collection Trust. Image: Supplied.

Brasil! Brasil!

This big, bright and colourful exhibition explores the impact of modernism when it arrived with a bang in Brazil. Modernism brought with it an electrifying vision of how art, architecture and design could change. Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism shows how Brazilian artists took the essence of the new artistic styles and gave them a twist of their own. Showcasing more than 130 works by 10 important artists of the 20th century, this exhibition really does capture the range and diversity of Brazilian art at the time. Adapting the styles of modernism to their local culture, these artists worked with the everyday scenes around them, including Indigenous identity and the Afro-Brazilian experience. Most of these works are on loan from Brazilian collections and have never been exhibited in the UK, so this really is a unique opportunity.

The Royal Academy, Piccadilly, to 21 April.

Anita Malfatti, ‘Portrait of Oswald’, 1925 Collection of Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel. Photo: Jaime Acioli, copyright Anita Malfatti.

New Contemporaries

Celebrating 75 years of New Contemporaries, this annual exhibition returns to its old home at the landmark Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) gallery on The Mall. This exhibition is important for offering emerging and early career artists a wider audience for their work. The 35 featured artists were selected through an open call by established artists Liz Johnson Artur, Permindar Kaur and Amalia Pica. Taken together, the works stand as illustration of the lived concerns, interests and social realities of this generation of artists, with recurring themes of sustainability and decay; boundaries, borders and fragmented memories; pop culture and consumerism; and issues around alienation in a digitally accelerated world. Be sure to stop in at the popular ICA Bar for some of the best and cheapest margaritas you’ll find anywhere in London.

ICA on The Mall, London SW1 to 23 March.

Jake Garfield: Man Holding a Snake

There is something quite magical about Garfield’s works that gives them a timeless appeal. Garfield explores the relationship between image and reality through the time-honoured printmaking techniques of woodcut, lithography, monotype and etching. His prints are rooted in the visual storytelling of movies, classical and contemporary narrative painting, and graphic novels. This exhibition features new works in his ongoing series, The Boxer, ranging in scale from postcard-sized to near-cinematic, often with the same composition portrayed in both intimate and monumental formats. These works are about a dialogue with Pierre Bonnard’s 1931 self-portrait Le Boxeur: portrait de l’artiste, in which the painter depicts his reflection holding a boxing stance. In response, Garfield offers a picture of a fragile, absurd and sometimes shadowy masculinity. There’s a lot to ponder in these works.

Eight Holland Street Gallery, St James’s Park SW1 to 12 April.

Famous faces on stage

There’s always an opportunity to see a famous face from film and television live on stage in London. This month, catch Bill Bailey in person in Thoughtifier at Theatre Royal Haymarket to 15 February; Rami Malek starring in Oedipus at The Old Vic to 29 March; Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan in Unicorn at the Garrick Theatre; Brie Larson in Elektra, a modern overhaul of the Greek classic, at the Duke of York’s Theatre; and Paul Mescal in the revival of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Noël Coward Theatre for three weeks only before transferring to New York. And out of town in the Bard’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, you can see one of my favourite actors, Anton Lesser, bringing the Ghost to life in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of Hamlet from 8 February at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

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Dr Diana Carroll is a writer, speaker, and reviewer currently based in London. Her work has been published in newspapers and magazines including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Woman's Day and B&T. Writing about the arts is one of her great passions.