Each month, we bring you a selection of UK exhibitions that complement each other or draw on similar themes. You can discover more about these exhibitions on Bloomberg Connects, a free app which allows access to museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world. For unique content and behind-the-scenes commentary, download the app today.

The Bloomberg Connects guide allows access to hundreds of museums worldwide

This month, we look at how museums and galleries are highlighting the work of women painters.

It's not news that the history of art is a story of gender imbalance. Many women artists have been forgotten or excluded from the art history books, although there has been a rise of interest in the contribution of women artists over the past few years. Recent exhibitions such as 'Now You See Us' at Tate Britain drew attention to Britain's first women artists, such as Mary Beale and Joan Carlile, highlighting their ability to establish a professional career.

Such artists deserve to be better known, argued this story on Art UK.

Modern and contemporary painting by women artists is a rich terrain. The six exhibitions below celebrate well-known women painters and rising stars, providing a more rounded sense of the female contribution to art. If Artemisia Gentileschi challenged the depiction of women as passive subjects, these exhibitions reveal how women painters reclaim the female nude – moving beyond the male gaze – or interrogate the ambivalences around domestic space.

'Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting', National Portrait Gallery, London (until 7th September 2025)

Human flesh is the subject of Jenny Saville's extraordinary paintings – or, more specifically, how paint can become flesh. This display at London's National Portrait Gallery, which brings together 45 works – from the early nudes that brought her fame to more recent examinations of motherhood – reveals her ability to balance the figurative and abstract.

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Always in conversation with the Old Masters – Rubens remains an abiding influence – Saville's art also confronts historical ideas around female beauty.

The Bloomberg Connects guide to the exhibition includes a brilliant audio tour, including interviews with Saville herself and an introduction from curator Sarah Howgate. It begins with the artist's self-portrait Propped (1992), painted as part of her degree show, and takes in the more recent Compass (2013), whose composition was inspired, as Saville makes clear, by the Old Masters. 'Creating groups of intertwined figures is one of my favourite ways to work,' she says.

'Caroline Walker: Mothering', Hepworth Wakefield (until 26th October 2025)

Motherhood is also the subject of many of Caroline Walker's paintings. In fact, her exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield is titled 'Mothering': this, as she explains on the Bloomberg Connects guide to the exhibition, emerged from talking to one of her daughter's nursery workers, and points to the more expansive idea of mothering beyond a biological understanding.

2023, oil on linen by Caroline Walker (b.1982)

Alongside her more recent examinations of motherhood – including those detailing her sister-in-law's pregnancy – the exhibition unites works made across the last five years, all of which point to her interest in women's work more broadly. In the Bloomberg Connects audio guide for example, Walker speaks about the paintings of her mum and the invisible labour of her daily domestic work. You can read an interview with Caroline Walker on Art UK here.

'Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour', Charleston, Lewes (until 21st September 2025)

The domestic sphere formed a central part of the art of Vanessa Bell – an artist who has been overshadowed by her Bloomsbury Group associates and whose interest in documenting everyday life was often disparaged. With more than 100 works on show, this display (the largest of her work to date) reveals the breadth of her output and, more importantly, situates Bell at the heart of artistic modernism. Find out more about Vanessa Bell's art in this story on Art UK.

There's loads of unique additional content to explore on the Bloomberg Connects guide to the exhibition. Watch Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men, tour Charleston, the house where Bell lived with fellow artist Duncan Grant, or listen to actress Gemma Arterton read a letter Bell wrote to her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf.

'Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons', Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (until 19th October 2025)

Following on from her solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in 2022, rising star Rachel Jones presents her colourful canvases at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Made using oil sticks and pastels, Jones's works push at the limits of painting, simultaneously blurring the line between abstraction and figuration.

Expect to see the artist's signature mouth motif running through this suite of work, which includes a new series responding to the historic works in Dulwich's collection. Alongside an introduction to the exhibition by curator Jane Findlay, the Bloomberg Connects guide to the exhibition includes information about a painting Jones was inspired by – Head of a Hound by Pieter Boel.

Also included is an audio about the title of the show which explores how Jones's paintings engage with the idea of a canyon and how the word 'gets to the heart of the central themes of the exhibition: things being simultaneously expansive and contained'.

'Laura Lancaster & Rachel Lancaster: Remember, Somewhere', Baltic, Newcastle (until 12th October 2025)

This is the first major pairing of the Lancaster sisters' paintings and the show encourages us to see the overlaps in approaches. Laura's evocative paintings, made up of loose brushstrokes, are inspired by found materials scavenged from flea markets, while Rachel's more realistic, cinematic images are taken from film stills.

The dance between abstraction and figuration is clear in the styles of both artists, as is an examination of the tactile quality of paint itself. You can read an interview with Laura Lancaster on Art UK here, in which she talks about the open-ended nature of her works.

'Barbara Freeman: A Retrospective', F. E. McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge (until 27th September 2025)

Barbara Freeman is known for her expressive paintings and prints – abstractions that nevertheless conjure some sense of place. This exhibition gathers early works alongside her more recent experiments with digital imagery and filmmaking to reveal the broad scope of her output. Find out more about the exhibition on the gallery's Bloomberg Connects guide.