Women artists dominate the 2026 exhibition programme at Tate Modern, with shows dedicated to Tracey Emin, Frida Kahlo and Ana Mendieta lined up at the London institution.
The Emin show (26 February 2026-31 August 2026), will include painting, video, textiles, neons, writing, sculpture, and installation. It caps a successful period for Emin, following exhibitions in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi (Tracey Emin. Sex and Solitude, until 20 July) and at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut which is due to open later this month (Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until the Morning).
According to a statement, the upcoming Tate show will display how Emin challenges boundaries, “using the female body as a powerful tool to explore passion, pain, and healing” and demonstrate her “lifelong commitment to painting, showing her recent work as the culmination of the ways she has channelled her life into her art”.
Frida Kahlo: The Making of an Icon (25 June 2026-4 January 2027) will feature more than 130 works depicting the artist’s “many selves—the dedicated wife, the intellectual, the modern artist, and the political activist”, says Tate. Work by more than 80 of her contemporaries and other artists she inspired will also feature along with documents, photographs and memorabilia from Kahlo's archives.
Another important woman, the late Cuban-US artist Ana Mendieta, is also the subject of a Tate Modern show next year (9 July 2026-10 January 2027). The exhibition will include newly remastered films, early paintings, and late sculptural pieces, many of which have never been seen in the UK before. “[It] will continue outside the gallery walls, embracing Mendieta’s deep relationship with the natural world,” says a Tate statement.
Mendieta fell to her death from the window of the 34th-floor apartment she shared with her husband, the late Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1985. Andre denied accusations that he killed his wife, insisting that Mendieta’s death was either an accident or a suicide. In 1988, Andre was tried and acquitted on a charge of second-degree murder.
At Tate Britain, the UK artist Hurvin Anderson gets his first major museum show, comprising more than 60 paintings (26 March 2026-23 August). Anderson is known for his swimming pool paintings made soon after leaving London’s Royal College of Art in the late 1990s and his nostalgic interiors of Birmingham’s Black barbershops.
Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant (12 November 2026-11 April 2027), also at Tate Britain, explores the legacy of the core members of the Bloomsbury Group through 250 works including portraits, still lives, landscapes, decorative works on furniture, ceramics, textiles, and much more. The show will incorporate “a once-in-a-lifetime restaging of Duncan Grant’s studio”, which will be relocated from Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse that has become a Bloomsbury shrine.
The Studio at Charleston
© The Charleston Trust, photography Lee Robbins
Charleston's director, Nathaniel Hepburn, says: “Caring for a historic collection in a 16th-century house on a farm comes with unique challenges, and our most recent conservation survey has highlighted essential work needed to protect the studio’s structure and environment. This partnership with Tate Britain is a rare opportunity, not only to share the studio with new audiences, but to carry out crucial preservation work while its contents remain visible on a major international stage.
“Thanks to support from Arts Council England, we can begin urgent repairs this summer while we secure grants and donations for further works during the winter of 2026/27 when the studio is on display at Tate Britain. During this period we will undertake work on the interior of the studio protecting this special room to inspire generations to come.”
Following a wave of shows about art of the 1980s, The 90s (Tate Britain, 1 October 2026-14 February 2027), curated by the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, focuses on photographers including Juergen Teller and Nick Knight, along with Young British Artists of the era such as Damien Hirst. Meanwhile, Zineb Sedira, the Franco-Algerian artist who represented France at the 2022 Venice Biennale, will also unveil a new commission in the Duveen Galleries.
Tate St Ives will present exhibitions dedicated to the Lithuanian American artist Aleksandra Kasuba (2 May 2026-4 October) and the British 20th-century artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (24 October 2026-11 April 2027). While Tate Liverpool remains closed for renovations, its programme of collection displays and public events will continue at RIBA North.
