The free London exhibitions to see this October

London has one of the largest collections of free museums and galleries in the world, and a lot of its most interesting shows cost nothing to see. Alongside the permanent collections, the national museums run changing exhibitions and displays that are open to everyone without a ticket, and they are easy to miss among the paid blockbusters. Each month we pick two free exhibitions worth making time for. Here are our highlights for October.

Issy Wood: Self-Portraits

Installation view, Self-Portraits, Issy Wood. National Portrait Gallery. 2026. Image credit MTotoe. Courtesy of FLO London.

#FLODown: Issy Wood: Self-Portraits is the first presentation in Artist Focus, a new strand at the National Portrait Gallery that features three presentations each year and invites contemporary artists to explore the evolving role of portraiture in art, society and culture. The display brings together intimate self-portraits by British American artist Issy Wood, born in 1993, an artist, musician and writer whose work examines intimacy, desire, consumer culture and the complexities of contemporary identity. Wood began the series in 2020 and it forms a particularly intimate side of her practice. The paintings are marked by her humour and her distinctive approach to cropping and framing, and they negotiate the appearance or concealment of the self through layers of distortion and masking. For Wood, self-portraits often function as substitutes for photographs of herself, with the painted image standing in place of the real. Artist Focus is supported by the Gallery's new Contemporary Council.

Date: 9 October 2026 - 28 February 2027. Location: Room 32, Floor 1, National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, London WC2H 0HE (main entrance on Ross Place). Price: Free. npg.org.uk.

Yinka Shonibare and Thomas Gainsborough: A Conversation

Installation view Yinka Shonibare and Thomas Gainsborough: A Conversation, National Gallery. 2026. Image credit MTotoe. Courtesy of FLO London.

#FLODown: Yinka Shonibare and Thomas Gainsborough: A Conversation brings together a work by British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare and the painting that inspired it, in the H J Hyams Room at the National Gallery. Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews, painted about 1750, shows a richly dressed husband and wife on their land in the English countryside, and is one of the best known British paintings of the 18th century. Shonibare's 1998 sculpture Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads reimagines it, removing the heads of the two figures and clothing them in West African textiles, with the couple taken out of the landscape altogether. The work questions ideas about power, identity and wealth, and makes connections between the Gainsborough portrait and the networks of colonial exploitation that Britain was part of in the 1700s. Headless figures are a recurring theme in Shonibare's work, a provocative nod to the executions of the French Revolution. This is the first time the two works have been displayed together, and the first time the sculpture, on loan from the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, has been seen in the UK. The exhibition marks the 300th anniversary of Gainsborough's birth.

Date: 15 October 2026 - 7 February 2027. Location: The H J Hyams Room (Room 1), National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN. Price: Free. nationalgallery.org.uk.