Two new exhibitions are opening at York Art Gallery tomorrow (Friday).
It’s a double-bill launch at York Art Gallery this week as the Aesthetica Art Prize 2025 and Future Tense: Art in the Age of Transformation open to the public from Friday 19 September.
Both exhibitions will run until Sunday 25 January 2026. Take a look at these stunning new exhibitions in our gallery below.
Aesthetica Art Prize 2025
The Aesthetica Art Prize returns to York Art Gallery, celebrating its 19th anniversary. The exhibition features 25 shortlisted contemporary artists from more than 3,000 entries, with mediums ranging from paintings and sculpture to photography and digital art forms.
“You’re really seeing a selection of the very best, cutting edge contemporary art of today,” said Livia Turnbull, curator of contemporary art at York Art Gallery.
“What’s wonderful about contemporary artists is that they’re referring to the themes of everyday life, the things that we come in contact with, or see on the news. We have artists dealing with mental health, climate change, migration, belonging and identity.”
These include artist Àsìkò’s focus on migration and cultural memory in his series New World Giants, Hussina Raja’s STATION, an exploration of South Asian and Caribbean cultures in the London landscape. The Object, Pen with Tattoo, The Portrait and The Vinyl, an audiovisual installation by Joanne Coates (UK House of Commons Election Artist for 2024) depicts working-class landscapes in the rural Northeast of England.
“I am very grateful to have worked on a show that gets to foreground living artists who get to benefit from their work being in our gallery,” said Livia.
Future Tense
The artists exhibiting in Future Tense are Aesthetica Art Prize alumni themselves – Squidsoup with Submergence and Liz West with Our Spectral Vision.
Submergence is an immersive work that features over 8,000 individually suspended LEDs, providing a sensory experience unfolding over a 12-minute rotation. Visitors can walk through and touch the suspended LEDs and interact with the art piece.
“It’s a chance to have fun,” said Livia. “It makes you want to stay in there for a long time, and engage with it in quite a playful way.”
Liz West, like Squidsoup, also uses light and colour to create rich, immersive, and interactive displays. Her installation draws primarily on mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton’s experiments with light refraction through prisms.
Titled Our Spectral Vision, and commissioned by the Natural History Museum, the work creates a vivid immersive environment that mixes luminous colour and radiant light using a mixture of LED lamps and dichroic glass in the form of seven prisms.
Both exhibitions are included in general admission which can be booked in advance on the Gallery’s website.
