Exhibitions backend | Ben Uri Gallery and Museum

Explore some 700 exhibitions across 3 different platforms

Whether you just want to meander or are looking to research, we have developed 3 different ways you can engage with over 700 exhibitions covering a century of Ben Uri in London.

To explore our century of exhibitions in whichever format you prefer, please click on the titles below.

Classic exhibitions

Scroll down and choose from over 45 exhibitions. Please keep checking as we continue to curate and add new exhibitions.

New 3D exhibitions

Ben Uri is excited to launch new 3D exhibition presentations in a range of elegant gallery settings. They are designed to give you greater accessibility and insight to the art and stories behind them.

Ben Uri Archive from 1925 to date

Since 2015, we have researched and chronicled our century of archives and listed every recorded Ben Uri exhibition since our first in 1925 which celebrated the opening of our first gallery in Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury, just by the British Museum. We have created links from each exhibition to any related archival material identified to date. We have over 700 exhibitions to survey of which over 600 were Ben Uri curated. This extraordinary research resource is an ongoing project and is being continually updated, so please keep checking.

Current

Mark Gertler and the Whitechapel Boys
Paintings from the Luke Gertler Bequest & Selected Important UK Collections BURU (the Ben Uri Research Unit) is delighted to present the exhibition, Mark Gertler: Paintings from the Luke Gertler Bequest & Selected Important UK Collections, curated by Sarah MacDougall, the artist's biographer and cataloguer. This exhibition marks the 80th anniversary of the artist’s death and showcases five important paintings from... Read more

Refiguring the 50s
Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry Refiguring the 50s featured works by Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L.S. Lowry: five figurative artists working in Britain in the 1950s, whom each had a strong identification with the place in which they chose to live and work; and which formed, for a significant part... Read more

Interned Artists
Ben Uri and the 80th Anniversary of Internment In memory of Eva Aldbrook 1925-2020 On the 80 th anniversary of internment in Britain, Ben Uri is celebrating the many artist internees who are represented within its permanent collection through this online exhibition. At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, some 74,000 former German and... Read more

Friends and Influences
Auerbach, Kossoff, Kitaj, Freud BURU (the Ben Uri Research Unit) presents Friends and Influences, the third in our series of snapshot survey exhibitions exploring a particular aspect of the Jewish and immigrant contribution to the visual arts in Britain since 1900. This display brings together paintings, drawings, etchings and lithographs by a selected group... Read more

Reinvesting in New Acquisitions and Long-term Loans
The exhibition showcases key recent new acquisitions and long-term loans to the Ben Uri Collection, arranged to reflect both Ben Uri's own history and three principal waves of migration to the UK. The first wave of Jewish migration to the East End, c. 1870-1914 is represented by objects including two... Read more

Golden Drawings and the Coviad
David Breuer-Weil Drawing is like breathing, the most natural form of making a work of art and the beginning of any painting or sculpture. A sketchbook is an extra limb, always there, and a way of automatic thinking. Sitting in front of a sheet of paper with a pencil is a meditation.... Read more

Becoming Gustav Metzger
Uncovering The Early Years, 1945-59 Becoming Gustav Metzger: Uncovering the Early Years, 1945–59 The Ben Uri Research Unit (BURU), in partnership with The Gustav Metzger Foundation, is delighted to present the first museum exhibition to exclusively examine the little-known formative years of refugee artist, activist, and environmentalist Gustav Metzger (Nuremberg, Germany 1926 – London, England... Read more

Czech Routes
Selected Czechoslovak Artists in Britain from the Ben Uri and private collections Czech Routes is the fourth in Ben Uri’s series of exhibitions designed to highlight the contribution of émigré artists to Britain since 1900. Featuring the work of 21 painters, printmakers and sculptors, many of whom fled to Britain as racial and political refugees from National Socialism, Czech Routes marks the... Read more

Jankel Adler
A 'Degenerate' Artist in Britain, 1940-49 Marking the 70th anniversary of the artist's death, Jankel Adler: A 'Degenerate' Artist in Britain, 1940-49 is the first museum exhibition of Adler's works in Britain since the Arts Council memorial show in 1951. Born in 1895 in Tuszyn, near Lódz, into a large orthodox Jewish family, Adler studied... Read more

Jacob Kramer (1892 - 1962)
Works from the Ben Uri Collection A Russian-Jewish immigrant, Kramer arrived in Britain in 1900. He studied at Leeds School of Art and briefly at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, supported by modernist collector and Vice Chancellor of Leeds University Michael Sadler and the Jewish Education Aid Society. His Slade associates included ‘Whitechapel... Read more

Liberators
Twelve Extraordinary Women Artists from the Ben Uri Collection This exhibition celebrates the lives, courage and strength of character, across so many human endeavours, of extraordinary women artists from the Ben Uri Collection. Liberators explores the lives and works of twelve of these extraordinary women, spanning two waves of Jewish migration and the social, political, religious and artistic upheavals... Read more

From Adler to Żuławski
A Century of Polish Artists in Britain This exhibition is the first in Ben Uri’s series on refugee and migrant artists, highlighting the Polish contribution in Britain over the last century. This focus is particularly apt as the community approaches its millionth citizen, the largest migrant group in Britain, and as Poland celebrates a century since it... Read more

Biblical Stories
Photographs by Adi Nes Ben Uri Gallery and Museum is honoured to launch an exhibition of Israeli born artist Adi Nes’ seminal Biblical Stories series from 2006. Born of Iranian parents and raised in Kiryat Gat, Israel, Nes has become internationally recognised for the bold and emotive way in which his photography confronts controversial... Read more

Out of Austria
Austrian Artists in Exile in Great Britain, 1933-45 Marking the 80 th anniversary of the Anschluss (annexation of Austria), the exhibition Out of Austria brings together around 40 works by more than 20 Austrian artists who fled to Great Britain during the era of National Socialism, examining their experiences, careers, impact and legacy as émigré artists in the... Read more

Selected Works by Eva Frankfurther (1930-1959)
Two contexts inform the life and work of Eva Frankfurther: the decade through which she lived and worked in 1950s Britain and its concern with the realist tradition; and the German heritage from which as an exile she was forcibly separated at a young age but to which she was... Read more

Thirty-six Pounds and Ninety-five Pence
Artworks by Contemporary Migrant Artists In honour of Refugee Week, Ben Uri Gallery and New Art Studio celebrate “our shared future” through a partnership of refugee and asylum seekers' artwork. Contrary to common belief, asylum seekers are not allowed to work and receive just £36.95 a week in food vouchers. The paired works in this... Read more

Rothenstein's Relevance
Artist, writer, teacher and consummate networker, Sir William Rothenstein was a leading British artist in the years before the First World War and a highly influential and well-connected figure throughout his career. The exhibition examines a number of his major themes including Jewish subjects, portraiture and figures studies (in Paris,... Read more

German Refugee Artists to Britain since 1900
This exhibition brings together art works and archival material by an array of both celebrated and lesser-known German-born refugee artists, principally from the Ben Uri Collection, supplemented by important external loans from both public and private lenders. Paintings, posters, prints, drawings, cartoons, book illustrations and sculptures explore issues of identity... Read more

Art and the Holocaust
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Teacher and Pupil
David Bomberg and Frank Auerbach Read more

A Farewell to Art
Chagall, Shakespeare and Prospero A Farewell to Art: Chagall, Shakespeare and Prospero is the first UK exhibition of a rare limited edition portfolio by Marc Chagall, which features 50 illustrations created to reflect his interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The exhibition draws on a number of themes, including the relationship between Shakespeare’s Renaissance characters... Read more

Yiddish: the language, people, and heritage
From the Art and Archives of the Ben Uri Collection This online exhibition, Yiddish: the language, people and heritage, explores Ben Uri's extensive collections of artworks and archives, both more than a century old, with unique pieces reflecting the prevailing cultural heritage of the organisation's founders: émigré Lazar Berson and his Yiddish speaking co-religionists, Eastern-European artisans and businessmen, fleeing pogroms... Read more

Rediscovering Wolmark
A Pioneer of British Modernism Alfred Aaron Wolmark was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland in 1877, and moved to England in 1883, first to Devon and then to the East End of London. He trained at the Royal Academy from 1895-1899 (where he added the English 'Alfred' to his name), exhibiting there... Read more

Art-exit 1939: A Very Different Europe
Adler, Chagall, Bloch, Auerbach, Daghani, Feibusch and other This exhibition shines a spotlight on a very different Europe in 1939 and the forced journeys made by many of Central Europe’s most distinguished, talented and pioneering artists, who escaped tyranny in search of artistic and personal freedoms. Elsa Fraenkel, Jacob Bornfriend, Hugo Dachinger, Ernst Eisenmayer, Lucian Freud, Henryk Gotlib,... Read more

Bernard Meninsky
Bernard Meninsky (née Menushkin) was born in 1891 in Karotopin, Ukraine and came to England when he was six weeks old, settling with his family in Liverpool. In 1906, he entered the Liverpool School of Art, where he won a number of awards, including a travel scholarship enabling him to... Read more

100 for 100
Ben Uri: Past, Present and Future From 21 May until 9 June 2016, at the generous invitation of Christie's, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum presents a unique exhibition celebrating its past, present and future sharing the vision driving the museum into its second millennium. Bringing together 100 works for 100 years, the majority from the celebrated... Read more

David Bomberg - A Pioneer of Modernism
David Bomberg was born to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents in Birmingham, England, in 1890. The family moved to Whitechapel in 1895, where he became prominent among the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ — a group of young, Jewish, mainly immigrant artists who were either born, raised or worked in the East End in the... Read more

Finchleystrasse
German artists in exile in Great Britain and Beyond, 1933–45 Between 1933 and 1945, whether for religious, political or artistic reasons, over 300 painters, sculptors and graphic artists fled into exile or immigrated to Great Britain from Nazi Germany. This f ollowed the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor in January 1933, the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation and the... Read more

Emmanuel Levy
Emmanuel Levy was born in Hightown, Manchester, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, in 1900. Like his contemporary Jacob Kramer, he was one of a small group of Jewish artists, whose families, fleeing persecution, restrictive legislation and economic hardship, settled in the north of England as part of the wider Jewish... Read more

Josef Herman
Painter and draughtsman Josef Herman was born into a working-class Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland in 1911. He studied at Warsaw School of Art and Decoration (1930-31), and first exhibited in his native city in 1932. After experiencing rising anti-Semitism, he left Poland for Brussels in 1938, never to see... Read more

Yalta 1945 by Komar & Melamid
Ben Uri is honoured to launch the world tour of this seminal monumental installation of Yalta 1945 from 1986-87, previously exhibited at D ocumenta 8 in 1987 and at Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 1990 , and not presented in public since, until now. Vitaly Komar and... Read more

Migrations
Masterworks from the Ben Uri Collection Ben Uri is delighted to be working in partnership with GARAS and Gloucester Museum and Gloucester City Council to present the exhibition Migrations: Masterworks from the Ben Uri Collection (3rd October 2019 — 28th January 2020). This important exhibition marks two significant anniversaries: the twentieth year of refugee organisation GARAS... Read more

Shanti Panchal
A Personal Language of Painting 2007-2018 Shanti Panchal: A Personal Language of Painting is Ben Uri Research Unit’s first digital show devoted to a contemporary émigré. Born in the mid-1950s (exact date unknown) in rural Gujarat, western India, Panchal arrived in London on a British Council scholarship from 1978-80; he has now lived and worked here... Read more

Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries
From Russia to Paris To celebrate the museum’s acquisition of Soutine’s La Soubrette, c. 1933, the exhibition, Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries: from Russia to Paris, unveils this important portrait, together with a small selection of work from the Ben Uri collection by a number of Soutine’s peers: all either born (like Chagall) within Russia, or (like Soutine... Read more

Self Portraits from the Ben Uri Collection
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Frank Auerbach
Works from the Ben Uri Collection Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin to Jewish parents in 1931 and immigrated to England in 1939 (naturalised in 1947); his parents, who remained behind, subsequently perished in concentration camps. Auerbach spent his childhood at Bunce Court, a progressive boarding school in Kent for Jewish refugee children. He attended St... Read more

Out of Chaos
Ben Uri: 100 Years in London Read more

Midnight's Family
70 years of Indian Artists in Britain This timely exhibition, which coincides with the date of Indian Independence (declared at midnight on 15 August 1947), addresses the representation of Indian immigrant artists (both first and second generation) working in Britain for more than 70 years. Part of the ongoing series of exhibitions produced by the ‘Ben Uri... Read more

Interstices
Discovering the Ben Uri Collection, Curated by René Gimpel Interstices Curated by René Gimpel 'The Ben Uri collection is a treasure trove. It’s an honour and a privilege to be invited to delve into it, with carte blanche as to my selection for this exhibition. After several days sifting through the image library, I settled on two criteria. One... Read more

Uproar!
The first 50 years of the London Group 1913-1963 Ben Uri is honoured to present 'Uproar!': The first 50 Years of The London Group 1913‒63, showcasing 50 works by 50 artists during this half century. The exhibition marks the Group's centenary and its first minuted meeting on 25 October 1913. Founded as an alternative to the existing art establishment,... Read more

Frank Auerbach's Portrait Etchings
from the Ben Uri Collection An online exhibition showcasing Frank Auerbach's series of Seven Portrait etchings from Ben Uri Collection. Read more

Alfred Cohen
An American Artist in Europe - Between Figuration and Abstraction This is an online version of the recent Alfred Cohen exhibition at Bush House, London, co-curated by Max Saunders and Sarah MacDougall. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Alfred Cohen Art Foundation, the Ben Uri Research Unit (part of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum), the Sainsbury Centre, the Centre... Read more

Portraits - Expressionist and Surreal
Becoming Gustav Metzger: Uncovering The Early Years, 1945-59 Portraits — Expressionist and Surreal features 23 paintings and drawings, including an experimental series of portrait heads, surreal figures and large-scale thematic works, the majority probably completed as a result of Metzger’s attendance at composition classes taught by David Bomberg between 1945 and 1953. By the early 1950s, Metzger had... Read more

Antwerp Models
Becoming Gustav Metzger: Uncovering The Early Years, 1945-59 The second in the Becoming Gustav Metzger online exhibition series, Antwerp Models features 33 drawings in pencil, crayon and ink, the majority of which are thought to have been executed in Antwerp, Belgium between 1948 and 1949. Metzger spent summer 1948 in continental Europe, travelling by choice on a stateless... Read more

Towards Abstraction and Beyond
Becoming Gustav Metzger: Uncovering The Early Years, 1945-59 Towards Abstraction and Beyond is the fourth and final instalment in a series of exhibitions designed to showcase the breadth of Gustav Metzger’s early work, as he moved towards the development of the radical Auto-Destructive practice for which he is better known. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Metzger... Read more

British Museum and Architectural Studies
Becoming Gustav Metzger: Uncovering The Early Years, 1945-59 The third instalment of the Becoming Gustav Metzger online exhibition series features 19 British Museum and architectural studies, as well as Belgian landscapes dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s. While living in London, in addition to taking classes at the Sir John Cass Institute, the Borough Polytechnic and... Read more

13 Ukrainian artists
Who migrated or were displaced not so many years ago Please think of Ukraine as you review 20 artworks by past generations of émigré artists from this country. Read more

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