18+ art exhibitions opening in London this October 2026
October is when London's art calendar hits full volume, and this year the city is spoilt for choice. Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette lands in Britain for the very first time, Edward Enninful takes over Tate Britain to relive the decade when art and fashion became one, and Es Devlin opens up 30 years of her world at the Design Museum. Cecilia Vicuña makes a long-awaited return to the city that sheltered her in exile with her first major UK show at Whitechapel, and Wakaliga Uganda, the Kampala collective better known as Wakaliwood, brings its cult action cinema to Chisenhale for its first UK solo show. From the grand institutions to the smaller spaces worth crossing town for, here are the exhibitions opening in London this month.
Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads
Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Menstrual 1 (unknotted), 2006 / 2024. Site-specific installation with unspun wool and video. Dimensions variable; video duration: 4 minutes, 13 seconds. Installation view, Cecilia Vicuña: Soñar el Agua. Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil. May 17 – September 15, 2024. Photo Isabella Matheus
#FLODown: Chilean artist, poet and activist Cecilia Vicuña receives her first major UK exhibition this autumn at Whitechapel Gallery, a homecoming of sorts for an artist who studied at the Slade and went into exile in London after the 1973 coup in Chile. Across six decades, the show brings together her suspended wool installation Quipu Menstrual, the sole survivor of her fragile precarios series, 1970s paintings and never-before-seen material from Artists for Democracy, the solidarity group she co-founded in London in 1974. The result is a portrait of an artist who has long used thread, poetry and ritual to honour Indigenous knowledge and resist political violence.
Dates: 7 October 2026 – 14 February 2027 (Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm, Thursdays until 9pm; closed Mondays) Location: Whitechapel Gallery, Galleries 1, 2 & 3, 77–82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX · Price: £16.50 standard / £9.50 concessions. Book now.
Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing
Justin Caguiat, Untitled 7 (Alphabet of Dots), 2025, Aquatint and soft-ground etching, gampi paper chine collé over monotype on paper, 35.2 x 26.5 cm. Courtesy the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; Modern Art, London; and Serpentine, London
#FLODown: Tokyo-born painter Justin Caguiat makes his UK institutional debut at Serpentine South this autumn with paintings that are constantly changing. Made with heat-sensitive pigment, they shift colour and reveal hidden forms as the gallery's temperature and light change. Around them, bronze bells cast in the shapes of flowers and seeds ring out in shifting sequences, inspired by the English tradition of change ringing. The show builds on his Madrid project Zodiac Machine and on the story of Spanish builder Justo Gallego Martínez, who spent decades constructing a cathedral almost single-handedly from recycled and found materials.
Dates: 8 October 2026 – 10 January 2027 (Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm). Location: Serpentine South, Serpentine Galleries, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA Price: Free. serpentinegalleries.org
Wakaliga Uganda: Kibuuka Omumbaale
Wakaliga Uganda, production image, 2026. Co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London and The Santozeum, Santorini. Produced by Chisenhale Gallery.
#FLODown: Chisenhale Gallery hosts the first UK solo exhibition of Wakaliga Uganda, the Kampala film collective better known as Wakaliwood. Founded by Isaac and Harriet Nabwana, the group has built a cult following with action films made on tiny budgets that borrow the language of Hollywood blockbusters to poke fun at global power. The show premieres a new film about Kibuuka Omumbaale, a warrior of the Kingdom of Buganda and a god of the Baganda people of central Uganda.
Dates: 2 October – 6 December 2026 Location: Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ Price: Free. chisenhale.org.uk
Es Devlin: Other Worlds
Es Devlin photographed amongst her archive. Photo credit Daniel Devlin @susakpress.
#FLODown: The Design Museum will present the first European retrospective of British artist and designer Es Devlin, bringing together 30 years of work across sculpture, stage design, music, language and light. Visitors will be able to walk through a replica of her London studio and trace her career around the "30-Year Desk," a circular display featuring The Lehman Trilogy, the London 2012 Olympics Closing Ceremony, the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show and sets from major concert tours. Her Infinite Library installation will also be on show, with its books donated to local schools once the exhibition closes.
Dates: 2 October 2026 – 4 April 2027 (Monday–Thursday 10am–5pm, Friday–Sunday 10am–6pm). Location: Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High Street, London W8 6AG Price: Adults from £17.09, students/concessions from £12.82, children from £8.55. Book now.
Pope.L: Five Decades
Pope.L, Negro Idea #38, 2004, vinyl on colored PVC, 27.9 x 30.5 cm, 11 x 12 in, (MA-POPEL-00163). Courtesy the Estate of Pope.L and Modern Art © the Estate of Pope.L
#FLODown: Modern Art surveys the late American artist Pope.L, who was born in Newark in 1955 and died in Chicago in 2023. The show brings together performance-based works, photographs, paintings, sculpture, video and works on paper from across his career, in which he tackled race, class, language, power and the body. It follows his first UK institutional solo show at the South London Gallery in 2023, completed just weeks before his death.
Dates: 13 October – 14 November 2026 (Tuesday–Saturday 10am–6pm) Location: Modern Art, 8 Bennet Street, London SW1A 1RP Price: Free. modernart.net
Salman Toor: Someone Like You
Salman Toor (b. 1983), The Bar on East 13th, 2019, Oil on panel, 36 x 48 inches, 91.4 x 121.9 cm. © Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery.
#FLODown: The Courtauld presents the first European solo exhibition of Lahore-born, New York-based painter Salman Toor, known for his scenes of bars, apartments and city streets. The show brings together 19 paintings made since 2019 about friendship, love, loneliness and the struggle to belong, both culturally and emotionally. Loans come from the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and a separate display of his drawings will be on show on the first floor.
Dates: 2 October 2026 – 10 January 2027 (10am–6pm, last entry 5.15pm; late opening until 8pm on 2 October, 6 November, 4 December and 8 January) Location: Courtauld Gallery, Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Floor 3, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN Price: From £16, including the permanent collection; members and under-18s go free, with other concessions available. Book now.
Lorna Simpson: Previous & Ongoing
Lorna Simpson, Nightfall, 2026. Acrylic and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass, 3 panels, each: 243.8 x 215.9 x 3.8 cm / 96 x 85 x 1 1/2 in Overall: 243.8 x 647.7 x 3.8 cm / 96 x 255 x 1 1/2 in. © Lorna Simpson. Photo: James Wang
#FLODown: American artist Lorna Simpson returns to Hauser & Wirth London with a new show titled Previous & Ongoing. Born in Brooklyn, Simpson rose to fame with conceptual photography that paired text with staged images to question how we see identity, gender, race and history. She has since moved into painting, collage and sculpture, often using photographs from her collection of vintage Ebony and Jet magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s. The show follows a major survey of her work at Punta della Dogana in Venice this year.
Dates: 13 October – 23 December 2026 Location: Hauser & Wirth London, 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET Price: Free. hauserwirth.com
The 90s: Art and Fashion
Juergen Teller, Young Pink Kate, London 1998 © Juergen Teller, All rights Reserved
#FLODown: Former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful curates Tate Britain's autumn show on the decade when art, fashion and photography merged into one cultural force. It brings together more than 100 photographs, paintings, sculptures and garments by nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers, from the Young British Artists to Alexander McQueen. Highlights include Mark Leckey's 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Chris Ofili's Turner Prize-winning tribute to Doreen and Stephen Lawrence, and Damien Hirst's formaldehyde sculptures. The show also looks at the AIDS crisis, racism, free parties and the birth of acid house.
Dates: 8 October 2026 – 14 February 2027 Location: Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG Price: £22 standard; £20 concessions; £5 for Tate Collective (16–25); free for Tate Members. Book now.
Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends
Ian McKellen, Love, London, 2023 © Tim Walker. Tim Walker’s Fairyland. Love and Legends to open at National Portrait Gallery in 2026.
#FLODown: : One of Britain's best-known fashion photographers has spent the past five years photographing queer people and their allies, and the results will fill the National Portrait Gallery this autumn. Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends will feature some 250 new portraits, including Isaac Julien, Ian McKellen, Miriam Margolyes and Chappell Roan, alongside activists, social workers, nightlife performers and musicians. The show will open with founders of the Gay Liberation Front and Stonewall who campaigned in the 1970s and 80s. It will be Walker's largest museum exhibition to date.
Dates: 9 October 2026 – 7 February 2027 (daily 10am–6pm, Thursday and Friday until 9pm). Location: National Portrait Gallery, Ground Floor, St Martin's Place, London WC2H 0HE. Price: Adults £23 off-peak (Monday–Thursday) / £25 peak (Friday–Sunday), or £25.50 / £27.50 with donation; £5 for under-25s through CLUB NPG; Pay What You Can on Mondays 10.30am–2pm; members free. Book now.
Renoir and Love
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Gustave Caillebotte Bequest, 1896. © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
#FLODown: The National Gallery stages the biggest Renoir exhibition in the UK for 20 years, with his famous Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) on show in Britain for the first time. Focusing on the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, the show follows Renoir's paintings of flirtation, courtship, friendship, café life and dancing couples. It ends with The Great Bathers (1884–7), which marks the close of his Impressionist years.
Dates: 3 October 2026 – 31 January 2027 (closed 24–26 December and 1 January). Location: The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN. Price: Standard tickets £20; reduced and free concessions available; members free. Book now.
Katherine Hubbard: The Great Room
Katherine Hubbard, one fifty one (hand-to-face), 2022. Silver gelatin photograph. Image courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery, New York.
#FLODown: Katherine Hubbard's The Great Room at Studio Voltaire will be the American artist's first institutional solo show outside the US, and it grew out of photographs she made with her mother, Antonette Berger, who began to experience the effects of LATE, a progressive brain disease, at the height of the pandemic. Over several months, using two 4×5 large-format film cameras, the pair photographed Berger's Philadelphia home as it was packed up for her move into residential care. Berger had put up a partition to turn the house's "great room" into a make-shift bedroom, and Hubbard will echo that wall in the gallery with a run of freestanding partitions and doorways that frame the photographs. She will also show experimental contact prints, made when she took her mother into a black-and-white darkroom.
Dates: 7 October 2026–10 January 2027. Location: Studio Voltaire, 1A Nelsons Row, London SW4 7JR Price: Free. Book now.
Charan Singh: Your Tongue in My Mouth
Charan Singh, Umrao, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist and Autograph
#FLODown: Autograph presents a new solo show by Charan Singh, whose work draws on more than 20 years of HIV/AIDS activism in India. Singh focuses on Hijra and Kothi communities, who were hit hard by AIDS from the 1980s while life-saving information circulated mainly in English rather than their own languages. Through studio portraits, archive material and storytelling, the show looks at how colonial history in Britain and India, and the English language in particular, has shaped and erased queer lives in both countries. All the work is newly commissioned and on show for the first time.
Dates: 8 October 2026 – 13 February 2027 (Wednesday and Friday 11am–6pm, Thursday 11am–9pm, Saturday 12.30–6pm). Location: Autograph, Gallery 2, Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA Price: Free. Book now.
Painting the French Riviera
André Derain, Matisse and Terrus, 1905. Oil on canvas, 40.3 x 54.3 cm. Private Collection
#FLODown: Painting the French Riviera at the Royal Academy will tell how the Côte d'Azur drew the great names of modern art south, from Cézanne, Renoir and Morisot to Monet in Antibes, Matisse in Nice, Bonnard in Le Cannet and Picasso's work with ceramics. More than 160 paintings, sculptures, travel posters and film clips will cover the 1870s to the 1960s. One room will be given over to posters, books and films about Riviera life, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief. The show will end with the abstract seascapes of Nicolas de Staël and Yves Klein.
Dates: 2 October 2026 – 31 January 2027 (Tuesday–Thursday and Sunday 10am–6pm, Friday–Saturday 10am–9pm) Location: Royal Academy of Arts, Main Galleries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD Price: £24–£26 (£26.50–£28.60 with donation). Book now.
Robert Ryman: The Real Thing
Robert Ryman installing Pair Navigation (1984) at Galerie Maeght Lelong, Paris. Photo: Michel Nguyen, © Galerie Maeght, Paris.
#FLODown: Robert Ryman gets his first in-depth UK exhibition in more than 30 years at the Barbican, with over 60 works by the late American painter made between the mid-1950s and the early 2010s. Ryman worked mostly with white paint and a square format, yet the show reveals how much variety he found using canvas, linen, fibreglass, steel, aluminium, Plexiglas and even coffee filter paper. A former jazz hopeful, he took a job as a security guard at MoMA in New York, where he worked for seven years and which helped push him towards painting.
Dates: Thu 8 Oct 2026 – Sun 28 Feb 2027 (Monday closed; Tuesday–Wednesday 10am–6pm; Thursday–Friday 10am–8pm; Saturday–Sunday 10am–6pm) Location: Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS Price: £20.50 standard; £15.50 students; under-16s free; £6 for Young Barbican members aged 16–29. Pay What You Can every Thursday 5–8pm and Friday 10am–12pm. Book now.
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #710, 2026, Chromogenic color print, Ed. 1/6, 1 AP. 101.6 x 152.4 cm / 40 x 60 in 108.6 x 159.4 x 6.7 cm / 42 3/4 x 62 3/4 x 2 5/8 in (framed) © 2026 Cindy Sherman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYPhoto: Cindy Sherman.
#FLODown: Cindy Sherman unveils photographs from her new Fabric Matrons series at Hauser & Wirth London, in which women appear to melt into elaborately draped fabrics as she examines how women handle being seen at different stages of life. Many of the works use fabrics and other elements from Chanel's archives, continuing a relationship with the fashion house that began with her Ominous Landscapesseries (2010–2012). Born in New Jersey in 1954, Sherman rose to fame with the Pictures Generation in the late 1970s.
Dates: 13 October – 23 December 2026 (Tuesday–Saturday 10am–6pm). Location: Hauser & Wirth London, 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET. Price: Free. hauserwirth.com
Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography
Wu Peng Seng, Construction, 1958. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board, Singapore. © Wu Peng Seng family.
#FLODown: Tate Modern tells the global story of pictorialism, the first international art photography movement. Billed as the first major exhibition to treat it as a worldwide movement, it brings together more than 200 rare prints by over 80 artists, from Seoul and Sydney to New York, Cape Town, Brazil and Singapore. A working darkroom in the gallery shows visitors the process, and the final section features Lionel Wendt's solarised 1930s portraits alongside Shigeru Onishi's experimental 1950s work.
Dates: 14 October 2026 – 21 February 2027 (open until 9pm every Friday and Saturday) Location:Tate Modern, Eyal Ofer Galleries, Bankside, London SE1 9TG Price: £20; £19 concessions; £5 for Tate Collective (16–25); free for Members. Book now.
Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji from the Iuchi Collection
Katsushika Hokusai, Clear Day with a Southern Breeze ('Red Fuji'), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830 - 33, 25.6 x 37.6 cm, colour woodblock. The Iuchi Collection, on deposit at the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. Photo by Norihiro Ueno
#FLODown: Dulwich Picture Gallery will show the complete set of Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c.1830 to 33) for the first time in the UK, all 46 prints, including the ten designs added after the original run. The series made bold use of the newly imported Prussian blue pigment, and proved so popular that the publisher commissioned the extra ten. Highlights will include an exceptionally rare blue impression of the normally full-colour Clear Day with a Southern Breeze, known as Blue Fuji, one of only around ten comparable impressions known to survive, and three well-preserved impressions of Under the Wave off Kanagawa, better known as The Great Wave.
Dates: 20 October 2026 – 17 January 2027 (Tuesday–Sunday 10am–5pm; closed Mondays) Location: Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, London SE21 7AD Price: Adults from £21.50 (with donation); members go free. Book now.
Georg Baselitz: The Heroes 1965–66
Schwarzgrundig (Black Grounded), 1966. Oil on canvas. 162 x 130 cm (63.78 x 51.18 in). Photo: Mick Vincenz, Essen. MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art, Duisburg, Ströher Collection
#FLODown: In 1965, a 27-year-old Georg Baselitz began painting a series of battered, barefoot men in torn uniforms, stranded in burnt-out landscapes. Sixty years on, Thaddaeus Ropac gathers these Hero paintings together in London for the first time, with loans from Tate, Berlinische Galerie, Museum Frieder Burda and Museum Küppersmühle Duisburg. Cast as partisans, rebels, painters and shepherds, his figures are defeated rather than heroic. It was a deliberate challenge to West Germany's post-war boom and its eagerness to forget the past.
Dates: 13 October – 18 December 2026 (Tuesday–Saturday 10am–6pm). Location: Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London W1S 4NJ. Price: Free. ropac.net.
Sabine Moritz: Lie Down in Green Pastures
Children's Home, 1993, Sabine Moritz © Sabine Moritz. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London
#FLODown: Lie Down in Green Pastures at the Garden Museum will be the first UK museum show by German artist Sabine Moritz, with sketches and canvases drawn from her East German childhood, most of them never exhibited before. Many go back to Neulobeda, a satellite town of prefabricated concrete blocks where her family moved after her father's death, and where she looked for solace beyond the city in the surrounding hills and countryside. The show will bring together imagined landscapes of plants encroaching on those tower blocks, floral still lifes and a vast new abstract work painted especially for the exhibition.
Dates: 8 October – 20 December 2026 Location: Garden Museum, 5 Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7LB Price: from £13 - £16 ( from £14.30 - £17.60). Book now.
Yuko Mohri: In Concert
Yuu Takagi. Courtesy of the artist, Project Fulfill Art Space, mother's tankstation, Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, WHITE SPACE. Image credit: Yuko Mohri, Decomposition, 2022. Fruits, wooden bowl, speakers, amplifier, computer, electrodes, cables. Installation view of Kanazawa Citizens Free Art Day "Open Museum 2022", 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
#FLODown: Japanese artist Yuko Mohri will take over the Barbican's Curve gallery with In Concert, a new commission developed during a residency at the Centre. After attending a London Symphony Orchestra rehearsal, Mohri was struck by how close the gallery sits to the Concert Hall, curving around it and letting its sound through. Her sculptures pair everyday objects, from umbrellas and feather dusters to kettles and xylophones, with what she calls unstable elements, among them magnetism, humidity, air, water and gravity, to produce light, sound, motion and scent. The installation will transform continuously in response to the gallery's atmospheric conditions, exploring ideas of entropy, transience and renewal that resonate with the Barbican's current period of renovation.
Dates: 1 October 2026 – 24 January 2027. Location: The Curve, Barbican Centre, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS Price: Free. barbican.org.uk
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