Oasis, Charli XCX, Tom Cruise and a giant spider: 2025’s cultural highlights

If you fancy a visual feast, having just consumed plenty of the edible variety, the works of artist JMW Turner may be just what you’re after.

Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery says its In Light and Shade exhibition (7 February to 21 November) will offer a “rare opportunity” to see the Liber Studiorum prints, created from his etchings, and it will also display some of its other Turner masterpieces.

For something completely different, London’s Caurtauld Gallery’s Abstract Erotic (20 June to 14 September) will explore the sculptural works of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams, highlighting their “commitment to using humour and abstract form to ask important questions about sexuality and bodies”.

Bourgeois will also feature at London’s Tate Modern, when her giant stainless steel spider, called Maman, returns there in May to celebrate the gallery’s 25th birthday. The 10m (33ft) sculpture will be reinstalled in the Turbine Hall, having been the first work seen when the gallery opened.

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch – famous for The Scream – will feature at London’s National Portrait Gallery (13 March to 15 June). Calling him “one of the great portraitists of the 19th and 20th Centuries”, it says the show will illustrate how many of his pictures “double up as icons or examples of the human condition”.