It’s that time of year again! The annual Summer Exhibition 2025 returns to the Royal Academy for its 257th year, with its vast array of an immense 1,700 contemporary artworks by amateur and professional artists alike. This year’s selection was led by architect Farshid Moussavi, RA, and a committee of RA artists: Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald, Vanessa Jackson, Christopher Le Brun, Sikelela Owen, Helen Sear, Caragh Thuring and Richard Wilson. Each artist is responsible for curating a room. All the works are selected from an open submission.

Part of the fun of course is that this is a selling show – and proceeds from sales go to support the future of the RA (who receive no government funding), as well as to the exhibiting artists. Prices start at less than £250, meaning there’s something to suit almost every budget from budding collector to connoisseur.

Highlights this year include a fun-filled large-scale installation by Ryan Gander welcoming visitors as they arrive in the courtyard, with its 3-metre inflatable balls, and new paintings by Tracey Emin. You’ll spot prints, photographs, paintings, sculptures and much more – all united, loosely, under a theme of ‘dialogues’.

Art Basel is upon us – the godfather of art fairs in the pristine Swiss city opens this week and runs to Sunday. 280 world class galleries gather at the Messeplatz to present booths, with special events and a programme of talks, tours and other activities across the city.

The Wick recommends a public guided tour spotlighting 14 women working on an ambitious scale and presented at Unlimited, Art Basel’s special sector for monumental scale projects. This year includes Petra Cortright’s 50 webcams with over 200 compositions, Nicola Turner’s new ten-meter-high sculpture made of horsehair and wool, and a huge new painting by Katherine Bernhardt.

What is considered a commercial work is shifting and plenty of projects at Basel this year push the criticality and role of art in today’s political climate to new places. A case in point: Nir Altman’s presentation of French artist Ndayé Kouagou, a performance and video artist that blurs the language of TV, TikTok, advertising and art in a masterful and ingenious way. A new work, A not that dirty mirror (2025) will be shown, featuring a TV-style vox pop presenter stopping passersby to ask: ‘What do you think of what’s happening here and elsewhere?’

The summer blockbuster you’ve been waiting for is at last here: Jenny Saville’s epic solo show The Anatomy of Painting is unveiled to the public at the National Portrait Gallery from tomorrow. It is the British painter’s largest ever museum exhibition in the UK (including 45 works) and cements her status as one of the world’s most significant painters working today.

Saville’s career goes back to the 1990s, when she already won acclaim for her 1992 degree show at Glasgow School of Art – a series of monumental-scale, visceral and charged female nudes that ruptured the genre and catapulted Saville into the limelight. Since then, Saville has continued to revolutionize the genre and how we look at bodies in her paintings and charcoal works.

This display unfolds chronology charting the evolution of her work but the continued and consistent passion for her process and subject matter, unwavering and increasingly masterful. Saville has a unique ability to completely floor the viewer with the familiar, questioning ideas of beauty – especially for women – and in a push-pull dialogue with the history of art. The curation was organised in close coordination with Saville herself and gives an unprecedented insight into her way of thinking, working, and seeing. An unmissable show.