The Barbican has unveiled its 2027 programme – and it’s an artsy tour de force
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London is not short of culture – just in the last year the city has been peppered with dozens of big hitting names from exhibitions on Frida Kahlo to a Seurat special, and not forgetting the big wig Bayeux Tapestry which has set foot thread on British soil for the first time in decades. After the Tate’s announcement of a huge new Monet exhibition in 2027, and the National Theatre pulling out all the stops (i.e. huge names) for their respective 2027 slates, there was a fair bit of pressure on London’s Barbican for its own upcoming programme – and it didn’t disappoint.
The Barbican has announced its 2027 art programme, which includes the hip happenings of exhibitions inside the Barbican Art Gallery, The Curve gallery, The Barbican Lakeside Gallery and the Sculpture Court. Which as you can imagine requires a fair bit of art to fill up. Just because some of the Barbican will be closing for renovations (even giving away free plant cuttings from its conservatory), they’re not holding back on pulling out the artsy bells and whistles for its other areas. Currently, the 2026 programme is set to wrap up its run in February 2027 with the exhibition Robert Ryman: The Real Thing.
In short, it’s a lot of fashion, specifically high and flamboyant fashion that will be giving the Barb a glow up.
Barbican 2027 Visual Arts Programme at a glace:
- EXHIBITION Dayanita Singh – March – May 2027
- EXHIBITION Characters of Fashion – April–August 2027
- PUBLIC COMMISSION Ximena Garrido-Lecca, May – August 2027
- EXHIBITION Magdalene Odundo, September 2027 – January 2028
- PUBLIC COMMISSION Rosa Barba, September 2027 – January 2028
- EXHIBITION: Alice Adams, October 2027 – February 2028
Characters of Fashion will be taking over the Art Gallery, charting fascinating relationships with literature, this major exhibition explores fashion from an interdisciplinary perspective, showcasing a wide array of authors and designers. This will be kicking off on April 15th and running until late August 2027. It follows on from last year’s landmark exhibition Dirty Looks, and will use the lens of clothing, previously unexplored facets about the intimate lives of authors and their characters come to life, spotlighting literary voices from Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Jean Rhys. The exhibition will explore how acclaimed authors have used clothing as a way of exploring interior worlds and developing characters, and as a tool for self-fashioning their own image.
Before that lands, a new exhibition from New Delhi artist Dayanita Singh who will be taking over The Curve, transforming it into a shifting landscape of images, reflecting the impact of Indian classical music on her five-decade long practice. The exhibition will feature several of the artist’s portable museums—modular display structures made of teak—including Ustad Museum (2025), Museum of Tanpura (2021) and Musicians’ Bus (2021), shown alongside new work. Through these structures, described by Singh as ‘mobile, organic and changing’, a selection of photographs from her archive will fill the Barbican’s 90-metre-long gallery.
Straight on its heels will be an exhibition from Ximena Garrido-Lecca which will be taking place at the Sculpture Court from 6th May until 1st August. It’s a huge new public commission marking the Peruvian artist’s first solo presentation in the UK. The installation will combine the plant as botanical organism and industrial processing system in a sculptural infrastructure exploring the colonial legacies and contemporary impact of extraction. Which is set to be pretty striking thanks to the Brutalist backdrop of the Barb.
Another first in terms of solo presentations will be heading to the Lakeside Gallery in September 2027, with Kenyan artist Magdalene Odundo exhibiting. It will be heading to the Barbican’s new Lakeside Gallery, home last year to the critically acclaimed Encounters: Giacometti series. The exhibition will present Odundo’s poetic exploration of the ceramic vessel as an elemental form that resonates across time, geographies, and cultures. Taking gestures from everyday life as dynamic cues, Odundo’s vessels have a bodily presence, their forms evoking swelling bellies, swaying torsos and gaping mouths. Considering the human body as a vessel itself, Odundo sees her own body as a channel for transforming her thoughts into clay.
Rosa Barba at the Barbican Foyer is next up on the docket and it's set to be an expansive installation, bringing together cinematic and kinetic sculptural works – using a newly commissioned 35 mm film will be projected onto the Barbican’s iconic architecture. Concluding the 2027 visual arts programme is an exhibition by Alice Adams, a retrospective which will introduce audiences to her experimental tapestries of the 1950s and architectural sculpture of the 1970s to the work she continues to make today, at the age of 95.
You can find more information about each of the exhibitions at the Barbican's website.
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