Showing up
February's Finest Exhibitions and Gallery Shows
The winter rain has felt endless, so we’ve curated a selection of this month’s most interesting exhibitions to bring a little light to your weekend.
Blue Road, Samuel Laurence Cunnane, 2023. Hand-Printed C-Type Print On Archival Photo Paper © Samuel Laurence Cunnane. Courtesy Of The Artist
Blue Road, Samuel Laurence Cunnane - Hayward Gallery
If you’re thinking of throwing in the towel and going full #vanlife, Samuel Laurence Cunnane’s photographic exhibition Blue Road (opening 17th February) at the Hayward Gallery might just tip you over the edge. Taken while the artist was travelling across Europe in a van, the works capture an almost dreamlike sense of stillness, uncovering moments of quiet beauty in the landscapes and lives encountered along the way. The (free!) exhibition takes place in the Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project space. Until 3 May.
Lucian Freud, Portrait of a Young Man, 1944, black crayon and chalk on paper. Photograph: © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images
Lucian Freud: Drawing Into Painting - National Portrait Gallery
Everyone’s favourite Soho fixture is renowned for his layered, impasto paintings of friends, lovers and even Queen Elizabeth II. Lesser known are his wonderful, idiosyncratic etchings and drawings, largely completed in the earlier stages of his career. Presenting over 100 works, many of which have never been exhibited before, the show teems with wonderful details: beautifully rendered fabric textures; charcoal sketches that double as love letters; a whole lot of cute animals too. Bella Freud, one of Lucian’s daughters, has released a limited edition capsule collection you can check out in the gift shop. Until 4 May.
Manon Wertenbroek - Rose Easton
Opening 27 February at Rose Easton in Bethnal Green, Manon Wertenbroek’s eerie, erotic exhibition debuts a new body of work that deepens the Swiss-Dutch artist’s long-standing preoccupation with corporeality and decay. Comprising sculptures fashioned from glycerine-injected leather, the works are, in a sense, alive: they must be continually “fed” with glycerine; if they are overfed, they begin to “cry”, weeping liquid onto the floor. Beneath their taut, skin-like surfaces, bone-like structures protrude, lending the works an unsettling sense of vitality, as though they possess a life and sexuality uncannily close to our own. Until 25 April.
Screen Of Receptive Surface, Manon Wertenbroek, 2026
Installation view, R. Crumb: There's No End to the Nonsense, David Zwirner, London, 2026
There’s No End to the Nonsense, R. Crumb - David Zwirner
Underground comix pioneer R. Crumb is no stranger to controversy: his sexually charged drawings of neurotic, repulsive men and the Amazonian women who tower above them. Yet there is no doubting the technical mastery of his work, all elastic, exaggerated forms and precisely cross-hatched shadows. As debates around gender politics grow ever more toxic, Crumb’s anxious, pathetic men feel newly revealing: warped mirrors held up to the insecurities that so often curdle into misogyny and violence. Until 14 March.
The Ground Beneath Me, Laisul Hoque - Nunnery Gallery
From Tracey Emin to Frida Kahlo, the bed has carried a potent charge in art history, a zone of intimacy, illness and sexuality. For his exhibition The Ground Beneath Me, 2025 East London Art Prize winner Laisul Hoque has put his bedroom at the heart of the gallery space: viewers are encouraged to leaf through his dresser and perch on his bed, suspended by the persistent question of the artist’s absence. A reflection on a year spent between London and Dhaka, Bangladesh – where Hoque was visiting his ailing father – the exhibition meditates on a state of emotional suspension and dislocation, one that unfolds alongside Bangladesh’s own political turbulence. Until 12 April.
Installation view of Laisul Hoque, The Ground Beneath Me, Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, 2026. Photo: Rob Harris.
Sam Keogh, The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle Cartoon, 2024, mixed media installation with performance. Guts, Berlin. Photo credit: Charlotte Bonjour.
Conspiracies - Warburg Institute
Given that conspiracy theories increasingly govern people’s thinking, there’s never been a better time for an artistic deep dive into the phenomenon. In this group show at the Warburg Institute, featuring work Hannah Black, Caspar Heinemann, Sam Keogh, and Shenece Oretha, conspiracies are neither celebrated or outwardly dismissed. Rather, they form a framework for how we may question dominant systems of power and find clarity in an uncertain world. With works across collage, sound art and sculpture, the exhibition traces the porous boundary between paranoia and critique, and asks how suspicion might function as a lens for reading the present. Until 1 May
My time here is brief, Freya Douglas-Morris - Lehmann Maupin at No.9 Cork Street
Glimmering waterfronts, verdant hanging vines, sloping ice-capped mountains: Freya Douglas-Morris’ dreamlike landscape paintings are a balm for overstimulated minds. Her idealised rural scenes, painted with a remarkable understanding of depth of field, are devoid of human presence and untroubled by the noise of contemporary life, unfolding as quiet sanctuaries. Yet the exhibition title, My time here is brief, opening 26th February, gestures towards a world emptied, whether by choice imagination, or by some quiet, post-human catastrophe left tantalisingly unnamed. Until 28 March.
Freya Douglas-Morris, We went on a walk to celebrate, the land stretched on unending, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London. Photographed by Lucy Dawkins.
