Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Co-exhibitors:

David Hockney RA, Wolfgang Tillmans, Tracey Emin, Bruce Nauman, Wim Wenders, Ed Ruscha and more

The Royal Academy presented the 257th Summer Exhibition, sponsored by Insight Investment, a unique celebration of contemporary art and architecture. Internationally acclaimed architect and Royal Academician Farshid Moussavi has co-ordinated this year’s Summer Exhibition and, with the Summer Exhibition Committee, will explore the theme of ‘Dialogues’.

Farshid Moussavi RA said, “The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2025 will be dedicated to art’s capacity to forge dialogues and to afford us sensitivity towards societal concerns, such as ecology, survival and living together. These dialogues can be between people of different races, genders, or cultures; between humans, all species, and the planet; or across different disciplines - art, science, politics, for example.”

One of the founding principles of the Royal Academy of Arts was to “mount an annual exhibition open to all artists of distinguished merit” to finance the training of young artists in the Royal Academy Schools. The Summer Exhibition has been held every year without interruption since 1769 and continues to play a significant part in raising funds to finance the students of the RA Schools. The RA Schools is the longest-established art school in the UK and offers the only free three-year postgraduate programme in Europe. As the world’s largest open submission contemporary art show, the Summer Exhibition provides a unique platform for emerging and established artists to showcase their works to an international audience, comprising a range of media from painting and printmaking to photography, sculpture, architecture and film. Royal Academicians are automatically entitled to submit up to six works to the Summer Exhibition, and the rest of the exhibition features work by those invited by the committee and external entrants.

The work Oneric by David Cotterrell was included and viewed in Gallery VII in this years exhebition.