The Ashmolean Museum has announcd its 2025 exhibitions programme featuring shows dedicated to figures who have made groundbreaking contributions to art, music and our contemporary cultural landscape.
Opening in February 2025, Anselm Kiefer: Early Works will survey the German artist’s output between 1969 and 1982 with works from a private collection rarely shown publicly.
Later in the year, This is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke (from 08 August 2025) will be the first exhibition in a public gallery looking at the relationship between the visual and musical in the work of one of the most important bands of the last few decades, Radiohead.
The programme also includes a free exhibition showcasing new work by contemporary sculptor Daphne Wright in the Ashmolean NOW series and a temporary display looking at different portrait traditions from Europe to Iran.
Ticketed exhibitions
Anselm Kiefer: Early Works
14 February to 15 June 2025
John Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries
The Ashmolean’s Spring 2025 exhibition will be a landmark survey of the early output of the towering figure of postwar art, Anselm Kiefer.
The group of 45 early works made during the period 1969–82 will feature paintings, watercolours, artist books, photos and woodcuts rarely displayed in the UK before.
The exhibition will also include three new paintings from Kiefer’s own collection, chosen by the artist, especially for the Ashmolean show, which is organised in partnership with the Hall Art Foundation.
Read more: Ashmolean Museum to present early works by Anselm Kiefer in landmark exhibition
This Is What You Get:
Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke
08 August 2025 to 11 January 2026
John Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries
This is What You Get will be the first large-scale institutional show exploring the visual art of Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke and the iconic images of Radiohead.
The exhibition will look at the artists’ thirty-year collaboration, which found expression in album covers, digital compositions and etchings, to unpublished drawings and lyrics in their sketchbooks.
Free exhibitions and displays
Images of Authority: Portraits between Iran and Europe
01 March 2025 to 15 March 2026
Gallery 29
How do images of power work? And how is the sitter’s presence and authority communicated in media as diverse as paintings, prints and objects?
This display explores these questions by comparing the modern portraiture traditions of Iran, Britain and France. Presented for the first time in nearly a century are also two recently restored 18th-century Persian paintings and intriguing facts discovered during their treatment.
Ashmolean NOW:
Daphne Wright – Deep-Rooted Things
13 June to 07 December 2025
Gallery 8
The fourth instalment of the Ashmolean NOW series will be an exhibition of sculptures by Irish artist Daphne Wright (b. 1963). The exhibition will feature several new works in plaster which consider the tradition of still-lifes inspired by a dialogue with the Ashmolean Cast Gallery.
Wright works in unfired clay and jesmonite and has long experimented with casting. Central to the exhibition will be the forthcoming piece, Sons on Couch, a life-size cast of the artist’s sons featured in their mother’s moving and personal work from an early age. Alongside Fridge (2021) and older work will be pieces from the Ashmolean’s important collection of casts.
Founded in 1683, the Ashmolean is the University of Oxford’s museum of Art and Archaeology. Its world-famous collections range from Egyptian mummies to contemporary art, telling human stories across cultures and across time.
For this Ashmolean NOW series of exhibitions in Gallery 8, each artist explores different areas of the Museum’s broad collections from the artists’ individual perspectives.
The first summer Ashmolean NOW 2023–24 exhibition showed work by Flora Yukhnovich and Daniel Crews-Chubb, followed by Pio Abad in February 2024. Currently on show is Bettina von Zwehl until spring 2025, followed by Daphne Wright opening in June 2025.
