We Contain Multitudes, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Feb 7 – April 26
Scotland-born Nnena Kalu made headlines when she became the first artist with a disability to win the Turner Prize in 2025. Her first exhibition after the landmark win is in Dundee, alongside three other artists: Andrew Gannon, Daisy Lafarge and Jo Longhurst. All four make work from the perspective of disability or chronic illness, and challenge – implicitly or explicitly – ideas of ableism in art. The work ranges across painting, sculpture, photography and moving image, exploring enclosure, support, surrounding and restriction.
The 145th Open Annual Exhibition of the RSW, RSA Building, Feb 15 – March 11
Some of Scotland’s finest painters will present their work in watercolour and water-based media in the popular annual exhibition of the RSW. The show promises the best painting in traditional watercolour, alongside the work of those who are pushing at the boundaries of the medium. The RSW continues to celebrate both skill and innovation, welcoming contemporary painters to its membership who use water-based media in a broad range of ways. Always a treat.
Joan Eardley: The Nature of Painting, April 2 – June 28, National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two
Eardley is a much admired figure in Scottish art, and this exhibition explores how she engaged with the work of other artists, both her contemporaries and those who had gone before. The show promises an impressive selection of Eardley’s paintings, alongside the work of others including Monet, Constable, William McTaggart and Bet Low. Curators draw on archives, interviews and some of the contents of Eardley’s studio to present what she most admired in the work of others.
Bugarin + Castle, Scotland + Venice, The 61st Venice Biennale, May 9 – Nov 22
There was widespread celebration when Creative Scotland announced that Scotland would once again be represented at the Venice Biennale in 2026. While the venue is still under wraps, the artists selected are duo Davide Bugarin and Angel Cohn Castle, in a show curated by the team at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute. Bugarin and Castle met when both were performing in queer cabaret in Edinburgh, and promise their colourful work will “trouble easy narratives on the contested ground of identity today”.
Sandra George, City Art Centre, May 30 – Sep 27
The photography of Sandra George was almost forgotten after her death in 2013, and its vividness and power came as a surprise to many when it was presented during Glasgow International in 2024. This summer, Edinburgh’s City Art Centre will host the first major exhibition in the city where she lived for most of her adult life. Having worked in activism and community education in Wester Hailes and Craigmillar, she foregrounds the disadvantaged in society, as well as exploring her own identity as a black woman photographer and a mother.
Glasgow International, various venues, June 5-21
Glasgow’s Festival of Contemporary Art returns this year under a new director, Helen Nisbet, the woman behind memorable Art Nights in London and Dundee. Artists of international standing will show alongside projects from the city’s grassroots art scene in what might be the most egalitarian art festival in the UK. While Glasgow’s established galleries prepare to roll out their most exciting work, other projects are set to spring up in more unusual spaces around the city, and there will be a packed programme of performances and events.
Kate Downie: Grasslands, The Scottish Gallery, July 30 – Aug 29
Downie is one of Scotland’s foremost painters and a passionate explorer of landscape, both natural and man-made. A major exhibition at the Scottish Gallery during Edinburgh Art Festival records her journeys through Scotland’s grasslands, from the reed beds of the Tay estuary to the cliffs of Shetland. The work is immersed in nature, inspired by long hours spent in the outdoors drawing, which then become the basis of experiments in painting and printmaking.
Gwen John: Strange Beauties, National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two, Aug 1 – Jan 4 January 2027. Tickets £4-£14
In her lifetime, Gwen John’s work was overshadowed by that of her brother Augustus and her mentor and lover Auguste Rodin, but it has become highly regarded in recent decades. Marking the 150th anniversary of her birth, this is her first major retrospective in 40 years and comes to Edinburgh straight from National Museum Cardiff. John’s best known work, her intimate portraits, will be shown alongside drawings and watercolours which have never been exhibited before, as well as her more experimental later work.
Ade Adesina, City Art Centre, Nov 7 – April 11 2027
The outstanding printmaking of Aberdeen-based Ade Adesina is long due a major exhibition in one of Scotland’s bigger art spaces. Adesina, who was born in Nigeria and studied at Gray’s School of Art, is known for making monumental – and monumentally detailed – linocuts and woodcuts which weave together issues of climate change with objects and places from Africa and Scotland in intricate visual storytelling. The exhibition will include new work made for Edinburgh as well as a series of works Adesina has made in collaboration with other artists.
John Akomfrah: Listening All Night to the Rain, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dec 5 – March 21 2027
London-based John Akomfrah made this immersive film installation for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Hugely ambitious in scale and theme, it explores memory, migration, racial injustice, climate change and the transitory nature of life, using the recurring image of water to connect ideas and histories. Taking its title from an 11th-century Chinese poem, the show filled every corner of the Pavilion from the basement up with sound, moving image and colour, and looks set to do the same in DCA’s two large galleries.
