London Gallery Weekend 2025: A City in Multiples

07/06/2025

By NOCTURA Magazine

London is not one art scene—it’s many. And nowhere is that more visible than during London Gallery Weekend, when over 130 spaces open their doors in simultaneous generosity, turning the city into a living map of contemporary vision. Across Mayfair’s quiet precision, Peckham’s artist-run grit, and Shoreditch’s conceptual charge, the weekend is not simply an itinerary—it’s a pulse.

In its fifth edition, London Gallery Weekend 2025 feels more decentralised and vital than ever. With free access and expanded late-night programming, the event continues to push against the exclusivity often associated with art-world openings. Instead, it leans into movement: walking between boroughs, drifting between media, letting the body and eye recalibrate. This year’s programming embraces that mobility—site-specific performances, micro-exhibitions, and ephemeral installations scattered across the city’s arteries.

Some standout moments: at Carlos/Ishikawa, a group show dissolves boundaries between sculpture and scent; over in Fitzrovia, Pilar Corrias presents new works by Rachel Jones that feel like internal landscapes. Meanwhile, in a quiet Dalston warehouse, an emerging artist presents AI-generated tapestries in dialogue with diasporic craft. The art doesn’t just sit—it hums, provokes, responds.

Importantly, London Gallery Weekend is not a fair—it is anti-fair in spirit. There are no booths, no VIP lounges. Just the raw architecture of galleries, repurposed and reactivated. Conversations spill into alleyways. Coffee becomes critique. The gallery becomes social again.

In a city grappling with ongoing cultural funding cuts and post-Brexit fatigue, the endurance of this weekend is itself a statement. London still matters. Its galleries—small and large—continue to serve as laboratories of risk, experimentation, and community. This is not a market spectacle. It is something quieter and deeper: a reaffirmation of art’s place in the everyday.

London Gallery Weekend doesn’t pretend to offer a complete view—it embraces fragmentation. And in doing so, it reminds us that multiplicity is not a problem to be solved, but a rhythm to be danced with. One step in Soho, another in Vauxhall, and you’re in entirely different conversations—each urgent, each local, each part of the whole.