BEST LONDON ART EXHIBITIONS OF THE YEAR

The Capital's Top Art Shows, Nominated by YOU for the Time Well Spent Awards

Over the past 12 months, the art world has expanded and blown minds with inflatable museums, kawaii juggernauts, cartoonish hospitals, wonder dolls and light alchemy.

But which was your best London art exhibition of the year? You have spoken, and the nominations for the Time Well Spent Awards are below. The ultimate winner will be crowned in August.

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Cute Exhibition

The Hello Kitty-filled, Cute exhibition was catnip for the Instagram generation; an adorable, fluffy playground for children and a fascinating journey through the rise of cuteness in contemporary culture for anybody keen to look deeper than the hearts and doe eyes.

The Somerset House show was a slick, huge and sickly sweet juggernaut, crammed with 'adorable' art and immersive installations by more than 50 artists, including a dreamscape sleepover room; Hello Kitty disco; a shrine to plushies and games arcades. But beneath the sugar was a compelling story about the history of cute, its powerful links to capitalism and its unsettling, emotional manipulation.

Somerset House, Embankment Galleries, South Wing

Yoko Ono: Music for the Mind

Spanning more than seven decades and featuring over 200 artworks, this was the UK’s largest exhibition celebrating Ono’s groundbreaking, multidisciplinary career, from the mid-1950s to now – including her years in London where she met her future husband and longtime collaborator John Lennon.

It included her Instruction Pieces, which you could interact with - shaking hands with a stranger through a hole; making a peace wish and tying it to a tree; drawing on a boat installation; completing tasks inside a black bag and playing chess with all-white pieces as well as her most famous pieces, like the banned Bottoms film and Cut Piece, where people were invited to cut off her clothing.

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

When Form Comes Alive

Hayward Gallery’s glorious, When Forms Come Alive exhibition spanned 60 years of contemporary sculpture and featured a warren of spaces to explore, with 21 artists’ takes on movement and the poetics of gravity.

It included giant, crystallised bubbles, explosions, neon rollercoasters, pink fleshy tubes to investigate to techno music, and dancing lights you lay beneath, with frills which opened and closed like otherworldly jelly fish.

Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, London SE1 8XX

The World of Tim Burton

We whispered Beetlejuice three times, and the UK premiere of The World of Tim Burton appeared at London's Design Museum.

The alchemist of whimsical goth horror’s exhibition explored the darkly unique aesthetic behind some of the most celebrated films of the last four decades, mastering the comically grotesque and the endearingly misfit.

Drawing from Burton’s personal archive and representing his creative output from childhood to the present day, this collection of drawings, paintings, photographs, sketchbooks, moving-image works, sculptural installations, set and costume design focussed on the recurrent visual themes and motifs found in Burton’s art and film worlds.

Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London W8 6AG

Leigh Bowery!

In his short, but brilliant life, Leigh Bowery left an indelible mark on the art world, as artist, performer, model, TV personality, club promoter, fashion designer and musician.

This eclectic and immersive exhibition is a rare chance to experience many of Bowery’s looks alongside his collaborations with artists including Michael Clark, Charles Atlas, Nick Knight, and Lucian Freud.

It provides a fresh insight into the creative scenes in London, New York and beyond featuring Lady Bunny, MINTY and Boy George and allow us to step into Bowery’s dynamic world that blurred the lines between art and life.

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

Jason and the Adventure of 254

Artist Jason Wilsher-Mills presented his major (and FREE) solo exhibition, which transformed the gallery into a cartoonish hospital ward, full of surreal humour and kaleidoscopic colour, exploring his experience of becoming disabled as a child. The joyful show invited visitors to touch everything. Highlights included a giant installation of a figure in a hospital bed, Seb Coe with a TV for a head, huge calliper boots and penny arcade inspired dioramas.

Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd, London NW1 2BE

Balloon Museum: EmotionAir

The world’s first inflatable art museum opened in East London, after attracting more than three million visitors on its stops in Paris, Rome, Milan and Madrid.

The Balloon Museum launched with huge fanfare and giant queues for the EmotionAir exhibition, featuring works by 20 artists, in which air was a distinctive element.

Visitors enjoyed sound trapped in floating bubbles, giant pink rabbits, huge, otherworldly ball pits, psychedelic balls you can swing and monstrous weebles in a show you were invited to immerse yourselves in through play and touch.

1 Old Billingsgate Walk, London EC3R 6DX

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art

Textiles are literally part of the fabric of our lives and each thread reveals stories about gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.

This exhibition shone a light on this rarely explored subject, featuring 50 international artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles.

It featured more than 100 artworks, from intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations.

Highlights included handstitched tapestries used to carry the memories of the deceased it touched; giant, deity-like macrame sculptures; a spatial installation exploring textiles’ use as an ancient form of communication and embroidered blankets, reflecting on an artist’s HIV diagnosis.

Barbican Centre, Silk St, Barbican, London EC2Y 8DS

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur

To mark his 65th birthday, Sir Grayson Perry presents over 40 new works, in the largest contemporary exhibition ever held at the museum.

Visitors encounter ceramics, tapestries and works on paper, displayed alongside masterpieces from the collection that helped shape Perry’s vision for this landmark show.

The show questions the nature of craft-making and our drive for perfectionism. Intricate handcrafted objects are shown alongside works made with digital technology – comparing an object that may have taken thousands of hours to create against one that was possible with the click of a button. Through these approaches, Perry asks the viewer to contemplate questions concerning authenticity and the artist’s role in the future.

The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN

Anthony McCall - Solid Light at Tate Modern

The Godfather of immersive exhibitions, Anthony McCall brought his extraordinary, Solid Light show to Tate Modern, inviting visitors to bring artworks to life through movements and interactions.

Beams of light projected through a thin mist created large, three-dimensional forms in space, which slowly shifted and changed. As you moved through these translucent light sculptures, you’ll create new, airy sculptures.

Occupying a space between sculpture, cinema, drawing, and performance, McCall is known for his innovative installations of light. In 1973, his seminal work Line Describing a Cone redefined the possibilities of sculpture and this show was one of Tate’s big blockbusters.

Anthony McCall: Solid Light. Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

Barbie: The Exhibition

The wonder doll (and society’s) evolution is charted in this luminous exhibition, which opened this month, to coincide with Barbie’s 65th birthday.

Exploring her story through a design lens including fashion, architecture, furniture and vehicle design, her plastic-fantastic universe has engulfed the Design Museum, showing changing attitudes to women’s careers - Barbie has had more than 250 jobs - race, sexuality, fashion and body image.

Highlights include a rare first edition of the very first doll released by Mattel in 1959, the first Black, Hispanic and Asian dolls to bear the Barbie name, as well as dolls that reflect today’s diverse, multicultural society, including the first Barbie with Down Syndrome, the first to use a wheelchair, and the first to be designed with a curvy body shape.

Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London W8 6AG

Rong Bao is Me

Deliciously surreal artist, Rong Bao transforms everyday objects into playful, otherworldly and interactive artworks to laugh at the absurdity of life. In his show, wonderfully bizarre sculptures resembled giant, robotic trifles or dancing, rainbow coloured burgers in feather headdresses and demanded a smile. Other highlights included a Fragile box, perpetually being dropped from a conveyor belt.

Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York's HQ, King's Rd, London SW3 4RY