Eddy Frankel

Looking at great art in London usually won't cost you penny. Pretty much every major museum is free, as is literally every single commercial gallery. That's a helluva lot of art. So wandering through sculptures, being blinded by neon or admiring some of the best photography in London is absolutely free. 'What about the really good stuff, I bet you have to pay to see that,' you're probably thinking. Nope, even some of them are free. So here's our pick of the best free art happening in London right now. RECOMMENDED: explore our full guide to free London

Tear the kids away from the TV and take them down to one of London’s best museums this weekend. If you're worried they’ll turn their noses up at the thought historical relics and heirlooms, introduce them to Egyptian mummies, dinosaur fossils, an earthquake simulator and ten foot-tall fighter planes instead.   RECOMMENDED: Discover 101 things to do in London with the kids and here are the 17 best day trips from London.

This city is absolutely rammed full of amazing art galleries and museums. Want to see a priceless Monet? A Rothko masterpiece? An installation of little crumpled bits of paper? A video piece about the evils of capitalism? You can find it all right here in this city. London’s museums are all open as normal again, and the city’s independents are back in business. So here, we’ve got your next art outing sorted with the ten best shows you absolutely can’t miss. 

London’s art museums and galleries have had a great winter, with a brilliant series of exhibitions, including big hitters like Cezanne at Tate Modern and Mike Nelson at the Hawyard Gallery. But the summer is looking just as good. Whether you’re after ecological explorations, African photography, or just some naked performance art, summer 2023 has got some art for everyone.

Art plays an essential role in London’s unparalleled and inimitable culture scene. It’s one of the city’s greatest and most vibrant creative scenes, and you can see it almost everywhere. There are an estimated 1,500 permanent exhibition spaces in the capital, most of them free. Whether you’re looking for contemporary or classical, modernism or old masters, there’s a gallery catering to your next art outing. But after you’ve exhausted the latest art exhibitions in London, choosing a gallery can be tricky business. So we’ve created a shortlist of all the London galleries you need to visit. Organised by size and including institutions like the National Gallery and independent stalwarts like the White Cube, we present the 50 best galleries in London.  RECOMMENDED: All the best art, reviews and listings in London.

For a genre obsessed with corpses and morgues, death metal is showing some pretty encouraging signs of life. It’s nothing compared to the genre’s 1990s heyday of Cannibal Corpse having a cameo in ‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’ or Napalm Death performing on ‘TFI Friday’, but in 2023 the scene is reaching a peak of critical engagement and popular respect it hasn’t seen for a long, long time. It’s impressive, considering its mix of guttural vocals, blastbeat drums, noise, atonality, morbidity and vast walls of distortion.  American bands like psychedelic alien-obsessives Blood Incantation and death metal labels like 20 Buck Spin are lauded and loved way beyond metal circles; the likes of Undeath and Gatecreeper are crossing genre boundaries; gigs and festivals are selling out; Cannibal Corpse T-shirts are being worn by Kardashians: it’s all kicking off.  Photograph: Okay Mike And in among this rising international tide of death metal popularity, British bands are carving out their own identity, reducing the genre to its barest, bleakest elements. Some are even calling it the New Wave of British Death Metal, in a nod to both the 1970s denim-and-leather pomp of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Saxon (known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal), and to the UK’s place in the history of death metal itself, thanks to 1980s originators like Bolt Thrower, Carcass and Napalm Death.  Rising from the grave As you’d guess from the name, the New Wave of British Death Metal is a uniquely Briti

London’s gallery scene just can’t be killed. Pandemics, economic downturns, Brexit, shifts in fashion, insane rent hikes: none of it has stopped the number of galleries in this city from growing and growing. And that, obviously, is a very good thing for art lovers, because it’s in the smaller, newer spaces that the younger, weirder artists get to flourish. If you want to take the pulse of art in this city, these are the galleries to jab your fingers into, and you’ll find that the blood is very much still pumping.

Could the British Museum finally be on the verge of sending back the Parthenon Marbles? For decades, the museum’s controversial position has been that the Parthenon Marbles (brought to Britain by Lord Elgin in hugely dodgy circumstances in the nineteenth century) are legally theirs, and that they had no intention of even contemplating sending them back. And anyway, to do so would require an act of parliament, and nobody’s got time for that. So things weren’t looking too rosy for the repatriation situation. But in November 2022, rumours bubbled up that secret talks had been held between George Osborne – the Chairman of the BM’s board of trustees – and Greek officials. Those rumours were confirmed as true, and then in early January 2023, The Telegraph reported that a deal had actually been drawn up that would see at least some of the Parthenon Marbles returned to Greece on long-term loan. An exciting development, for sure, but how likely is it? Is it all talk, or is the BM really about to lose its marbles?   It’s not as clear or optimistic as the headlines would imply. The BM says the marbles were acquired legally, and therefore belong to them. Greek authorities dispute that, claiming that Lord Elgin’s expatriation of the sculptures was nothing more than theft. Either way, the British Museum’s collection is protected by the British Museum Act 1963 which legally prohibits the splitting up of national collections.  And it’s worth bearing in mind that this all comes in the wake of

London can be a pretty expensive place to go out in, and there's the small matter of the deepening cost of living crisis to boot. But there's no need to lock yourself away, because almost all the art here is free to see. Most of London's major museums – as well as many of its smaller institutions and literally every commercial gallery – are free to enter, so you can see world-class art and artefacts without getting out your wallet. From the Tate to Gagosian, the National Gallery to Camden Art Centre, you've got your choice of literally hundreds of amazing art spaces, all free. Want to see masterpieces by Raphael and Turner, or contemporary abstraction by future art stars? You can, and you don't have to pay.  Our list of brilliant, and totally free, art galleries and museums in London covers the four corners and centre of the city, so wherever you live, there’s a gratis cultural experience near you. Go forth and enjoy, and save your pennies for something else. RECOMMENDED: The best free things to do in London.

Every year is a good year for art in this city, thanks to our huge number of world class museums, galleries and art institutions, and 2023 is shaping up to be a doozy. From classical painting to modern installation, feminist trailblazers to political upstarts, it's got a bit of everything.  RECOMMENDED: The best art in London right now  

Every year, New Contemporaries brings together the UK’s best young artists and recent graduates and whacks them all under one roof (or two roofs, in the case of South London Gallery and its adjacent Fire Station space). It acts as a sort of state-of-play for young art in this country, a way to take the pulse of creativity in the UK. And this year's showing is as good as ever. There's a bunch of painting, loads of installation, plenty of cleverness and oodles of ideas. Here's our pick of the best of the bunch.  Rudy Loewe Rudy Loewe Ultra bright, ultra simple painting that’s full of joy, like Alex Katz at Carnival.  Zearo Zearo Zearo’s super simple portraits, some on homemade paper, are oddly intimate. They feel private, like you’re being let in on a secret just by looking at them. Danying Chen Danying Chen A puddle of green goo seeps out of a woman’s eye as a gaggle of gods leer over her. It’s brilliantly painted, intricate and filled with a tense, threatening aura. Charlotte Edey Charlotte Edey Edey’s striated, pixelated hand embroidery could represent eyes or pearls or breasts. Whatever they are, this feels like seriously spiritual, ceremonial, sacred geometry. Tom Bull Tom Bull A house is covered in thick black liquid, creating a  gloopy, sticky, tacky, gothic structure. Bull’s sculpture is vile, suffocating, diseased, but also somehow deeply attractive. Would cost at least £1800pcm to rent in Camberwell. Rosalie Wammes STUDIO STAGG Two big, clay structures – l

Picking the best London art exhibitions of 2022 is a little like picking your favourite child, if you had hundreds of kids and nearly all of them were awful. Sadly, 2022 will not go down as a great year for art: the pickings were slim. Galleries emerging from the pandemic had big bills hanging over their heads, and nothing pays off bills like boring painting, so we were treated to a whole year of incredibly dull canvases filled with images of absolutely nothing. It was peak banker art. There was also Damien Hirst. And Kaws. Honestly, it was more traumatic than the actual pandemic. I have never been to so many bad, cynical, tedious exhibitions in such a short space of time.  So these good ones are the exception, the few ugly ducklings who blossomed into art swans, or something.  Mike Nelson at Matt’s Gallery Mike Nelson, The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction), 2022, detail. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London. Master of sombre discomfort Mike Nelson returned to London (after his incredible Tate Britain installation in 2019) for a tiny show at Matt’s Gallery. The installation was just a small, suffocatingly claustrophobic bedroom filled with travel books. You got locked in and left to rot with your dreams of escape and freedom. Dreams that would never be fulfilled. The perfect post-pandemic punch in the face. Read the review here. Francis Bacon: ‘Man and Beast’ at the RA and ‘The First Pope’ at Gagosian Installation view, Francis Bacon, © The Estate of Fra

The body positivity movement will tell you that to find happiness you just have to accept your earthly vessel, foibles and folds and all. It’s as simple as that: think differently and everything will be better. It’s a bit like telling a sick person to cheer up. And the artists in GCCA’s new show expose the lie at the heart of that sentiment, because they know what we all know: bodies are gross. For the 13 female and non-binary artists here, our bodies are tricky things to contend with, they’re objects to be wrestled with and reshaped, fleshy blobs that affect how we see ourselves, and how the world sees us. Giulia Cenci suspends faces and bones in filthy reclaimed shower cubicles. Skin is left hanging on a rail, spines have atrophied next to limescaled screens. It’s oppressive, tense, like a mausoleum of people who died while crying in the shower. It’s the body as a crumbling, failing entity. Shadi Al-Atallah paints figures writhing in brutal torment and agony, or maybe ecstasy, all caught mid-surgery or mid-orgasm. There is pain here so profound it’s tearing the figures apart. More crumbling, more failing. But rebuilding happens as well, with Paloma Proudfoot’s ceramic mannequins sewing their broken bodies together in ritualised acts of dominance.  And bodies can produce too. Motherhood appears in the works by Miriam Cahn and Camille Henrot, but there’s no cooing maternal sweetness here. Cahn brilliantly paints spectral nude women with faceless children, they’re symbols of w

Life, what’s it all about? Well, in Jane Hayes Greenwood’s latest series, it’s reduced down to its most fundamental and primal elements: birth and death.  It starts with ancient-looking ceramics, four clay pots in a vitrine. Some are pierced and broken, some are shaped like women with multiple breasts, as if Hayes Greenwood has just dug up some prehistoric fertility charms. Those ceramics appear all over the soft, airy, dreamy paintings. Women’s bodies curve in on themselves to form vessels, they become pots, vases to carry floral loads on their backs. The female figures are lifting, holding, maintaining these flowers that are on the verge of withering.  Where Hayes Greenwood’s previous work was full of love hearts and bright pink, now it’s full of the weight of motherhood, the pain of mourning. Despite their soft focus haze and pastel colours, these are heavy works, weighed down with responsibility and love, and pain and grief too; elemental, primal feelings that we all have to reckon with after the blush of youth fades.  They’re lovely paintings about the most basic of things, that’s why they’re so affecting. Life, it’s just birth and death with a bit of shagging in the middle. 

At a time when photography was going gonzo – when people were hunting out action, shooting from the hip – Evelyn Hofer turned the other way. The German-American photographer had a quieter, more formal, composed approach.  She took her large format camera and her long exposures onto the streets of Paris, London and New York. There are cheeky scamps in 1960s Battersea, an aloof waiter at The Garrick, warehousemen and lorry drivers, Barcelona street sellers and kids playing in a Parisian square. Her sitters look right out at you, concentrated, placid, intense. She didn't sneak secret photos like so many ethically dubious photographers who came after her, she collaborated with the people she found interesting, worked with them to create intimate visual dialogs. They’re lovely, neat, thoughtful images for the most part. But it’s when the humans are absent, or at least faceless, that her work feels the most special. Her cityscapes and interiors are so perfectly composed, so dramatic, so quietly grand. They’re like a long, slow single chord, a huge sweeping sound, a deep intake of breath. Trinity College’s library sucks you into its vanishing perspective, a street in New York is immense and empty, Park Avenue is stark and striated, motorways are shockingly twisted. You can see in these vast landscapes and tiny interiors the birth of modern giants like Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, it’s all the vast drama of the constructed world.  This is slow, considered and careful photography

It might actually be impossible to tell you what the Whitechapel’s new exhibition is about. The gallery handout mentions the cost of living crisis, the pandemic, ‘the intersection of art and everyday life’ and, most terrifyingly, ‘the role of the contemporary art institution’. Some of the art is about east London as a place of migration, but also as a place of social change and rampant corporate greed. But then some of it is based in Germany, and some of it is based in Bucharest. Some of it is about sickness, death and love. Some of it is about gentrification. You could argue that it’s a weaving together of narratives of migration and personal history. But you could also – more convincingly – argue that it’s an unbelievable mess that makes no sense as an exhibition.  It starts with Susan Hiller’s packaged relics from an abandoned synagogue and Janette Paris’s illustrated essay about the lost parts of the London of her youth. Mitra Tabrizian’s film stills capture decrepit, crumbling railway arches, boarded up buildings and abandoned garages; William Cobbing tells stories of the city in manhole covers; Osman Yousefzada packages up all of an immigrant’s worldly belongings, wrapped in black plastic. It all just about holds together. The ideas don’t coalesce into anything comprehensible If this was just a show about east London and its history of migration and relentless change, we’d be fine. But what does Susan Hiller’s map of streets in Germany that start with the word ‘Juden’

Sinning isn’t what it used to be. The concept of going against divine law is meant to be a warning, a code to obey. But no one likes being told what to do, so sins have become dangerously, deliciously appealing.That’s literally the opposite of the point, and it’s a conflict that tickles British artist Chris Ofili, whose huge recent paintings here relish in the complex, forbidden appeal of transgression.  This is Ofili at his most ethereal, glowing and playful. Each of the seven canvases is filled with bioluminescent dots  and shimmering soft pastel colours. There are curving, undulating phallic and vulvic flowers, gushes of water, streams of golden sunlight. The figure of the satyr – huge and hulking – dominates lots of the works, a mythical figure beyond sin, seeming to both tempt and restaurant the other figures. A woman made of countless pointilist dots swings above a n ink black satyr in one work, millions of nude figures spill out of a fountain in another. Bodies mingle and twist and combine, they morph into flowers and grass and sunlight. Ofili paints sin not as a transgression, but as nature following its course, as bodies becoming one with the earth, with myth, with the earth. It’s all sensual, human, biological, sexual. Not all of it is great. The composition of the waterfall work is a bit unwieldy, and some fo the flower painting is a little teenage. But when it works, it’s a glowing, orgiastic, summery celebration of sin. It’s so full of art historical references i

Sometimes, an exhibition can be good despite itself. And Saatchi Yates’s show about the subject of bathers in art history manages to be annoyingly worth visiting despite absolutely bodging its own theme.  Artists have painted bathers for centuries. It was an excuse to flash reclining skin, to tantalise viewers with skin, to explore myth and history. It’s there in Titian and Guercino, in Gainsborough and Cezanne. Mounds of flesh, all freshly dipped.  This exhibition doesn't really have anything to tell you about the significance of the subject, what it means, represents, or how it has evolved. But what it does have is a handful of loans that are genuinely unmissable. There’s a tiny, explosive, bizarre Picasso of a nude star-shaped body rendered as nothing but bits and holes. There are two beautiful, calm, ultra-sensual Hockneys that ripple with heat and lust. There’s the big green solitary calm of Neil Stokoe’s swimmer. There’s a messy, minor Cezanne (one of art history’s great bather-lovers) and a twisting, awkward, beautiful Rodin sculpture. Mounds of flesh, all freshly dipped Lots of the more recent works are good too: the menacing, vile threat of Eric Fischl’s suburban pool scene, the glowing haziness of the little Peter Doig painting, the brilliant, surreal technicality of the Benjamin Spiers Baywatch image, the full frontal gooeyness of Angela Santana. But there’s a lot that doesn’t work too. The Damien Hirst sharks are silly and throwaway, the Alex Katz features no dis

A weight hangs over Bermondsey. A crushing load, heavy with history and war, placed there by German artist Anselm Kiefer.  His latest show at White Cube – the third in a trilogy of similarly huge, ambitious, immersive, oppressive exhibitions, the first of which was brilliant, the second less so – takes as its starting point James Joyce’s famously unreadable experimental final novel ‘Finnegans Wake’. It’s an impenetrable work of puns and metaphors, synecdoches and illusions, solipsistic language and endless word plays. Heavy stuff. Lines from the book are scratched across the walls of Kiefer’s show, almost making sense but never quite coalescing into cogent meaning. Instead, what you’re left to decode are the vast, towering, claustrophobic assemblages of rusted metal, broken vitrines, huge dead sunflowers and endless rubble he has strewn across the gallery. You enter past hanging sheets of lead. The corridor before you is lined with shelves, all piled high with bones, tools and bicycles. There are boxes filled with ash and shattered bricks, cabinets of mouldy, stiffened clothes, stacks of broken machines.  This is Europe, its corpse left to fester In the first room, shopping trolleys and a wheelchair have been left abandoned on a sand dune. Mounds of lead fill the next room, the one after is packed impossibly high with dead trees and machinery. The last room has been reduced to rubble, giant sheets of concrete have collapsed, crashing onto the gallery floor. This exhibition i

It takes a special eye to make exciting things look incredibly boring. But that’s German photographer Thomas Struth’s whole thing, he finds the everyday in the fantastical. For this latest series he was allowed into CERN, the Swiss nuclear research institution where the most cutting edge experiments in science are happening, where particles are being smashed together, black holes being created, Nobel prizes being won. But you don’t see any of that world-changing excitement in his photo. Instead, he captures empty labs and boxes of tools and discarded equipment, the detritus of brilliance. He focuses on the endless curving pipes, the stacks of protective concrete blocks, the brightly coloured metal walkways. There are almost no people here, no scientists working, no discoveries being made. There’s just quiet mundanity; a locker waiting to be emptied, equipment waiting to be put away, cables in a tangled mess, a stool left in the way, waiting to be tripped on. On the one hand, this is about how humanity’s intellectual ambition manifests itself physically. But on the other, this place of huge significance, of scientific importance, has been stripped of its essence, made mundane and banal, made normal, everyday. And somehow, it has become even more in the process.

Who cares if androids dream of electric sheep, the real question is do they ever get lonely?  Black Cloud, the AI in Lawrence Lek’s film of the same name, does. It watches over an abandoned city, SimBeijing, which was built to test self-driving cars, and Black Cloud is its sentinel. But every crash it reports leads to the departure of other AIs. The more it follows its programming, its purpose, the more isolated it becomes. Now, Black Cloud is utterly alone, and the solitude is suffocating. The film traces its efforts to seek therapy from the company that built the ghost city that Black Cloud now watches over for no reason. It searches desperately for answers. It feels trapped, miserable, its artificial intelligence is a burden. A fox wanders down deserted, crumbling highways, in a sort of emotional, virtual reimagining of Samuel Delaney’s ‘Dhalgren’. All around the screen, broken car parts hang from the ceiling on chains, the knackered corpses of former AIs.  Upstairs, a game lets you play as a self-driving car, speeding down the highways of SimBeijing. Do you listen to the warnings of Black Cloud, or do you drive yourself into oblivion? It doesn’t matter, because choice is an illusion, you’re programmed to obey.  Lek’s atmospheric, absorbing, clever work wants to be about technological autonomy, the independence of future intelligences. But it’s Lek’s best work to date because it accidentally ends up just being about us, about loneliness and freedom, and how we all end up p

Abstraction was, at one point, radical. A seismic, violent rupture with the past; a visceral destruction of representational art, a new beginning. That was in the 1920s though. Is there anything interesting left to say with abstraction in 2023? Gagosian seems to think so, and this show promises to ‘examine the significance of abstract painting today’.  There are big new works by big old names: a sploodgy mess of an ‘Abstraktes Bild’ by Gerhard Richter, a towering, fractured Frank Bowling, a little delicate Vija Celmins night sky (very distinctly not abstract). There are art market darlings like Wade Guyton, Mark Grotjahn and Christopher Wool. There are smears and splashes, calm considered marks, big violent gestures. Abstraction can be so many beautiful, affecting things, and there’s tons of all of that on display.  But it’s a pretty damning indictment of the state of contemporary abstraction that this show would have looked almost identical in the 1980s. Some artists have pushed things a little, incorporated digital elements, or twisted the medium in weird new directions, but for the most part, this is an old-fashioned, hugely decorative exhibition. Abstraction has moved on since the 1980s, but you wouldn’t know it from most of what’s on show here. The thing is, abstraction has endured as a radical approach because contemporary artists have married it to conceptual approaches, using it to explore ideas of race, identity, sexuality, ecology, physicality, etc. etc. etc. The yo

Twisted metal, screeching tyres and shattered glass: there’s been a catastrophic accident. A bus has crashed into the gallery, and its splayed remains have been scattered across the space by the impact. The results are brutal, uncomfortable, unsettling, but like any accident, you can’t look away. The bus was found abandoned and derelict in Romania by Polish artist Marcin Dudek. It had once belonged to a Dinamo Bucarest fan group, used for years to ferry ultras to away games. The shattered windscreen that greets you as you walk in tells the tale of the vehicle’s final act: troop transport taking enemy fire until it could move no more.Dudek found it whole but broken down and then took it to pieces. It’s reconstituted here but it won’t drive again. Instead, it acts as a container of history. Written into the rows of torn seats, stinking, fetid carpet and shards of glass are a million stories of togetherness and conflict. People convened here, came together to travel and show faith in something they truly believed in. Once they arrived at their destinations, they fought against those who opposed them – rival fans – like modern crusaders decked out in Adidas. You walk down the central aisle of the bus past rags and shredded seats. Videos show stomachs bubbling with beer, anonymous buildings, and faces passed out either from exhaustion or from violence, it’s impossible to tell. The bus canopy is ripped open to the sky like it’s been frozen mid-crash. A final video shows groups of f

After a day of set design, creative collaboration and artistic expression, Moki Cherry still had to cook dinner for the kids. Sure, she did it in an improvised kitchen in a museum, but she still had obligations. Obligations that her husband and collaborator, the legendary jazz musician Don Cherry, was comparatively free of. That’s one of the main narratives of this show, the first of the Swedish designer and artist’s work in the UK. Her’s is the story of so many artist mothers, of domestic and creative work being intimately linked, but always done under constraints: ‘I was my husband’s muse, companion, and collaborator. At the same time, I did all the practical maintenance. I was never trained to be a female, so I survived by taking a creative attitude to daily life and chores.’ Cherry, who died in 2009, had an amazing psychedelic approach to colour: her tapestry portrait of Don reimagines him as a shimmering Hindu deity, her paintings swirl and curl and spin with eyes and lips exploding in neon yellows and greens and pinks. Lots of the work is fabric-based, inspired by her training as a fashion designer, and was used as set dressing for ambitious, weird, collaborative, hippy happenings. There’s heaps of esoteric philosophy, loads of Eastern spiritualism and endless, mind-bending colour. The fabric works are great, but the handful of paintings here are the best. Just surreal, semi-abstract bursts of line and form and clashing hues.  None of it is that deep, it doesn't have an

Art takes a whole month off every August. Literally every artist, curator, gallerist and invigilator just heads to St Tropez and quaffs champers on yachts. But before the desolate embrace of an exhibition-less August, we've got a whole bunch of corkers to enjoy this July.  Best exhibitions to see in July Adeyemi Michael, Entitled, 2018. at South London Gallery 'Lagos, Peckham, Repeat'Nigeria is as much a part of Peckham’s cultural make-up as Del Boy, William Blake and art schools. The area is home to one of the UK’s biggest Nigerian diaspora communities, so South London Gallery has pulled together a show of 13 Nigerian and Nigerian-British artists working in sculpture, photography, sound and film for a heady celebration of cultural exchange, shared history and community building.'Lagos, Peckham, Repeat' is at South London Gallery, Jul 5-Oct 29. Free. More details here. Aida Muluneh Water Life Series, Star Shine, Moon Glow 2018 commissioned by WaterAid and supported by the H&M Foundation © Aida Muluneh 'A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography' 36 artists from across Africa are being brought together for this exploration of the continent’s fascinating, diverse photographic output. Can you easily sum up what photography is to a whole continent? No, it’s wild, diverse, conflicting and un-sum-up-able, that’s why it’s interesting.'A World in Common' is at Tate Modern, Jul 6-Jan 14 2024. £17. More details here.  Gabriel Chaile, Mama Luchona, Installation view at 202

If you took three years off and spent millions on cosmetic surgery you’d probably look pretty damn sharp too. That’s what the National Portrait Gallery has done: they’ve opened up their once musty darkened spaces and made everything bright and clear, rehung their collection, added a new wing and generally just made it all a bit nicer and shinier.  Among the first things you’ll see - if you turn left instead of right as you enter past the new Tracey Emin-designed doors, and for heaven’s sake don’t turn right, that’s where things get dodgy – is that the new NPG is big on female artists. Right there on the first-floor landing is a whole display of work by Sarah Lucas, Issy Wood, Ithell Colqhoun, Khadija Saye, Helen Chadwick and more. The NPG is saying ‘hey, sorry about having so many paintings by men all these years, hope this goes some way toward making up for it’. Photo by David Parry There are also a lot of celebs. Photos and paintings of Kate Moss, Judi Dench, Self Esteem, Jarvis Cocker, Karen Nelson, and on and on, it’s like walking through Hello magazine. But then you get spat out into a room of death masks and you can almost forgive them.   In the main contemporary collection they’ve gone for a ‘salon hang’, which means instead of giving every painting or photo a whole wall, they’ve smashed it all together like in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It could have been a mess, but it’s made it all more approachable, fun, non-hierarchical, the Queen mixing with Mick Jagg

Before the National Portrait Gallery decided to close its doors three years ago and undergo a £35million refurb, it was an awkward, stuffy place; a warren of winding old staircases that spat you out into dark, musty rooms that were too small and too packed with art. It was all too squeezed in, too dark, too unwieldy. There was also, for absolutely no good reason, a very big portrait of Ed Sheeran.  Something had to change, so they pulled down the blinds, got the builders in and gave the place a new lick of paint. It’s what 20-year-olds would call a ‘glow up’, and it’s opening to the public next week. Admittedly, it’s more than just a lick of paint, they’ve built a whole new wing. The Blavatnik Wing is funded by the same guy (Sir Leonard Blavatnik) who funded Tate Modern’s new building and is also paying for new galleries at the Imperial War Museum. The guy’s addicted to museum funding. It’s due to house more than a hundred years of British portraits, from 1840-1945, with depictions of major figures like Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde and the Brontë sisters by artists including John Singer Sargent, Laura Knight, Gwen John and Lucian Freud. And it’s not just boring old art they’re focusing on in the brand new National Portrait Gallery. Alongside their classic Portrait Restaurant, there’ll also be a new cafe and a late night cocktail bar with a hidden entrance on Charing Cross Road.  Portraiture is a funny thing to have a specific museum dedicated to. We don’t have a National Lands

Coco Chanel, noted Nazi and one of history’s greatest designers, is the subject of the V&A’s next major fashion exhibition. ‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’ will explore the French couturiere’s enormous influence, from her Parisian roots to the establishing of the House of Chanel, and tickets have just gone on sale.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Victoria and Albert Museum (@vamuseum) You can expect oodles of sequins, tons of power suits and the overpowering odour of Chanel N5 wafting over you as you wander about. This is an in-depth look at the looks that defined the look of a century. It’s good they’re concentrating on her fashion manifesto though, because her political one hasn’t aged particularly well.  ‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’ is at the V&A, Sep 16-Feb 25 2024. More details here. The best art right now in London There’s a Wes Anderson pop-up happening in Central London. You should go!

Summer's finally here, and with it comes a whole season of incredible exhibitions. Most galleries and museums take August off, so this lot has to see you through to the autumn Art exhibitions to see this month Details of Web.Life 202.3. Courtesy the spider/webs. Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno, Copyright Tomás Saraceno Tomas Saraceno: ‘Web(s) of Life’ You’ve heard of nightmare fuel, well for some people, Tomas Saraceno’s art is nightmare napalm, because the Argentine artist has some very particular collaborators: spiders. He collaborates with them to create huge web-based installations, exploring their knack for architecture and aesthetics, and their ability to signal shifts in weather, climate, pollution levels, and ecological well being. Tomas Saraceno: ‘Web(s) of Life’ is at The Serpentine, Jun 1-Sep 10. More details here. Pablo Picasso, 'Baigneuse', 1928 ‘Bathers’  Bathing is a big theme in art history, with countless artists exploring the relationship between bodies of water and bodies of people. This show is uniting giants of the genre (your Picassos, your Hockneys, your Turners) with contemporary artists including Hurvin Anderson, Peter Doig and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, all shown alongside younger names like Sujin Lee and Danny Fox. Those are some seriously big names, so this show is sure to make a splash. Get it? Bathers, innit. Splash. ‘Bathers’ is at Saatchi Yates, Jun 1 to Aug 10. More details here.   © Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Atelier Anselm Kiefer   Ans

As sure as the sun will rise and winter will turn into spring, Hyde Park will play host to a new Serpentine Pavilion every year, and 2023’s has just hatched into the world. This one was designed by French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh and is inspired by the Mediterranean urge to sit around a dining table and put the world to rights.  The name of the pavilion is ‘À table’, French for ‘sit the f**k down at the dinner table or you’re going to get a whack around the ear’. The idea is that it’s meant to make visitors think about the table as a place of discussion, engagement, dialogue and exchange, all while sharing a meal.  It’s a big, broad, light, open structure that’s intended to look at ‘food as an expression of care’ and be a ‘space for grounding and reflection on our relationship to land, nature and environment’. It also has a Benugos.  It hasn’t been all that popular with architecture critics. The Times called it ‘pretty but flimsy’, The Guardian said it was a ‘giant cocktail umbrella’ with a clumsy ‘flatpack feel’ and ArtReview called it ‘relentless inoffensive’.  Sounds like everyone needs to get around a table and really hash this out. The Serpentine Pavilion 2023 is open now. More details here.  Want more? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London. Want more, but free? Here you go.   

It’s not officially summer until the Royal Academy opens its annual extravaganza of floor-to-ceiling art, so get your lollies out and get ready to slap on the sunscreen, because next week, the Summer Exhibition flings open its doors to the public once again. This is a place where amateurs rub shoulders with megastars, where watercolourists from South Shields get to show their art next to Tracey Emin, and we’ve had a sneak peek. This year’s is the best we’ve seen in a while, (although Grayson Perry's eye-meltingly tedious 2022 curation is a low bar to meet). There is, as ever, a genuinely incomprehensible amount of reprehensible works by Michael Craig-Martin, but there’s also a lot of great stuff to see. And there’s something else going on, a kind of miserable, sombre vibe that we’ve never encountered at the Summer Exhibition, which makes for a nice change from the hectic, colourful maelstrom it normally is. Here are ten things we loved at this year’s Summer Exhibition A lot of darknessThe last three rooms are full of images of empty streets, barren fields, dead trees, skull and lonely figures in dark rooms. There’s a sad, suffocating atmosphere, a despair and loneliness that you just never see in the Summer Exhibition. If the show is meant to be a sort of state of the nation, reflecting the mood of the country, then things are looking pretty dour.  Thomas Wright Various bogs A couple of toilets (by A. Lincoln Taber), a urinal (by Thomas Wright) and some loo roll (by James L

The Horniman Museum, the cultural jewel in South London’s crown and home to the world’s most handsome walrus, has just submitted plans for a £10m refurbishment. Much of the work will concentrate on the 2022 Art Fund Museum of the Year’s grounds, creating a nature explorers’ action zone next to the Natural History Gallery, an adventure zone and a sustainable gardening zone. That will all include a children's café next to the former boating pond, a nature-themed play area designed by J&L Gibbons, a pavilion for toilets, and a sustainable gardening zone will create a horticultural hub with a new glasshouse. Work will also aim to do up the 1901 Natural History Gallery building to improve its accessibility and ‘thermal performance’. The whole project is being undertaken by architects Feilden Fowles alongside conservationist Fiona Raley Architecture and landscape architect J&L Gibbons. Keep up to date with the Horniman here. Want more? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London right now. Want more, but for free? Here are London’s best free exhibitions.

The Hunterian is one of London’s most unique museums. It’s based on the collection of eighteenth century surgeon John Hunter, who amassed a whole bunch of 14,000 specimens for surgical training. And by specimens, we mean dead stuff. Tons of it. The museum has been closed for renovations for six years but is now reopening so we can finally go ogle the good stuff again. The vast majority of Hunter’s collection was lost when the  Royal College of Surgeons' building was bombed in May 1941, but 2,000 specimens will be on display, and here’s our pick of six essential things to see.  A crocodile Hunterian Museum The Hunterian is full of specimens in glass jars There are human faces, digits and organs, but there are other species too, including this itty bitty crocodile caught just as it emerged from its egg. A beautiful moment in nature, frozen forever in death. Grim and macabre, sure, but it’s done now so might as well have a good look at it.  Tables made of skin and veins Hunterian Museum There are only two types of people who make tables out of human tissue: unhinged, bloodthirsty, deranged serial killers, and medical professionals. Fortunately, these sheets of nerves, blood vessels and limbs were done by the latter, a guy called Giovanni Leoni d’Este who was the Dissector to the Professor of Anatomy at Padua University in 17th century Italy. Old surgical instruments Hunterian Museum Surgery was pretty barbaric back in Hunter’s day, especially compared to modern advances. T

‘The Art of Banksy’ is a big deal for Banksy fans: a huge, sweeping exhibition all about the naughtiest of naughty art boys with his spray can and silly little stencils. In 2021, after touring around the world and popping up in cities like Melbourne and Toronto, the biggest Banksy exhibition in the world took up residency in Covent Garden, before going off on more travels. But now it’s coming back, and apparently it’s going to be bigger and better than ever.  This time it will be on Regent Street in a massive 2000 square metre space. There will be 110 works including ‘Girl With Balloon’ in no fewer than three different colour variations, ‘Flower Thrower’ and ‘Rude Copper’ as well as loads of sketches and previously unseen works.  It feels important to note that although the show contains the largest collection of official works by the artist, made from 1997 to 2008, it is entirely unauthorised by the artist. As organisers put it, this exhibition is ‘completely non-consensual’. Ethical? You wouldn't Bank-sy on it.  Tickets for ‘The Art of Banksy’ are on sale now, and the show opens on July 5. More details here Want more art? Here are London’s top ten exhibitions. Want more art, but free? Here are London’s best free art shows.

Since 2007, Bold Tendencies has been bringing art to a disused multi-storey car park in downtown Peckham, and this year it’s back and bigger than ever. From May 18 through to September, you’ll be able to catch all new sculptural commissions by big artists and rising stars, all themed around the concept of ‘crisis’, and all in the welcoming environment of a massive car park.  There will be new works by word-twister Jenny Holzer and graphic artist and former Black Panther Emory Douglas alongside Abbas Zahedi, Sandra Poulson and Kahlil Robert Irving, tackling subjects including transphobia, the climate emergency and global anti-racist struggles.  There’s an exciting live programme to accompany the art too, with highlights like a performance of Philip Glass organ music and pieces by Mahler, Holst and Shostakovich alongside loads of other experimental, avant garde works of dance, spoken word and contemporary music. There’s also a learning programme, workshops and the chance to watch rehearsals. Bold Tendencies is continuing to cement its place in the London cultural calendar, and the better their programming gets, the more essential they become. Rooftops, art, music and cocktails, it must be summer. Bold Tendencies opens on May 19. More details here.  Want more art? Here are London’s top ten exhibitions. Want art, but free? Here are London’s best free art shows.

You know summer’s about to kick off when Photo London shows up: every May, the massive photography fair takes up residence in Somerset House, bringing with it the best photography galleries in the world. It’s an incredible chance to see what’s keeping snappers happy these days, and to catch sight of some rare old masterpieces too. Fashion, documentary, street scene, portraiture, abstraction, collage - everything you can do with a camera, you’ll find it at Photo London, so here’s our pick of four things to look out for at the fair.  Iranian photography Photo by Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)Photo by Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images) This year, there’s a special focus on galleries and photographers from Iran, including Tehran’s O Gallery, showing work from the Iranian revolution by Kaveh Kazemi and contemporary street scenes by Mohammedreza Mirzaei. Iran has been in the news constantly since the 1970s, and photography has been integral in telling the story of a nation often caught in turmoil. AI Sam Burford, copyright the artist, courtesy Fiumano Case Recently, a photographer won the Sony World Photography Prize, and then revealed that he hadn’t taken the photo at all but had actually (gasp!) duped the judging panel into awarding the prize to a photograph created by an AI. Much controversy ensued, obviously, and the furore around AI photography just won’t die down, so you can expect a whole bunch of computer generated imagery at the fair, including a show of AI portraits by artist Sam