2025 EXHIBITION PROGRAMME - Press Release
21 November 2024
The Ashmolean is pleased to announce its 2025 exhibition 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 1969–82 with works from a private collection which have rarely been shown in public before. Later in the year, This is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke (from 8 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–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 the Press Release online at www.ashmolean.org/press
Exhibition landing page
This Is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke
8 August 2025–11 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at the artists’ 30-year collaboration which found expression in album covers, digital compositions and etchings, to unpublished drawings and lyrics in their sketchbooks.
Exhibition landing page
FREE EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS
Images of Authority: Portraits between Iran and Europe
1 March 2025–15 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–7 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 who have featured in their mother’s moving and personal work since an early age. Alongside Fridge Still LIfe (2021) and older work will be pieces from the Ashmolean’s important collection of casts.
Exhibition landing page
ENDS
Contact details
Claire Parris, Press and Publicity Manager, University of Oxford Museums and Gardens
claire.parris@glam.ox.ac.uk / 07833 384 512
Press images
Images for editorial use are available to download at: https://go.glam.ox.ac.uk/Ashmolean2025
Notes to Editors
The Ashmolean is the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology, founded in 1683. Our world-famous collections range from Egyptian mummies to contemporary art, telling human stories across cultures and across time.
Admission: free
Open: daily, 10:00-17:00; closed: 24, 25 and 26 December 2024
Exhibitions: www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions
Above images
Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945)
Die Etsch (The Adige), early-1970s
Watercolour, gouache and ink on paper, 56 x 41 cm
Hall Collection. Courtesy of the Hall Art Foundation. © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Mark-Woods.com
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke
OK Computer, 1997
Album cover
© 1997 XL Recordings Ltd.
Detail of Rustam's battle against the king of Hamavaran
Illustration to ‘The Book of Kings’ by Abu’l-Qasim Firdawsi (AD 935-1020)
Late 18th-early 19th century
Ink, colour, and gold on paper
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Daphne Wright (b. 1963)
Fridge Still Life, 2021
Unfired clay and mixed media
© Daphne Wright, courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo: Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
