Top 10 art exhibitions in London

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.

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.

Guts are spilled on the floor, blood is splattered across the walls, and skin is stretched and flayed. This is sensual, sexual art, but not like Botticelli or Schiele: this is ‘Hardcore’.  

You get to watch life slowly collapse in Martin Wong’s art. Across his career (he died in 1999 aged 53), the Chinese-American artist documented the free love utopianism of 1970s California and then saw everything descend into derelict decrepitude as the reality of urban New York tightened its grip on him. Crime, drugs, prison and the perseverance of immigrant and queer communities, that’s what happens here.

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.

Frank Auerbach is falling apart. He’s melting, sagging, drooping and collapsing right in front of you. He’s getting – has gotten – very old. Everyone gets old, so it wouldn’t be so unusual if it weren’t for this show of new work being filled with some of the great artist’s only self-portraits. He’s one of the most important British painters of the modern era, part of the same set as Bacon and Freud, but he’s just never really looked inwards before. 

British artist and filmmaker Julien’s work is undeniably serious – his career started in the 1980s with an examination of the Black Atlantic – but he cannot resist making it beautiful. His indulgence of that urge leavens the message; it’s an unusual dynamic that has a devastating point.

Saint Francis of Assisi, by all accounts, was a pretty good guy. He gave up wealth and luxury for pious poverty in order to better serve God. He cared for his fellow man, nature and animals, and in his tattered robes he founded the Franciscan brotherhood. Combine all that with trying to convert the Sultan of Egypt to Christinanity, performing various miracles and then being whacked with a stigmata and you’ve got the makings of a top-notch saint. 

Some old people tell the same stories over and over again. They probably don’t mean to, they’re just a bit forgetful. And the National Gallery seems to have forgotten that the story of the Eurocentric birth of modernism has been told countless times. It’s the most written-about period of art history ever. The narrative of how Monet led to Cezanne who led to Van Gogh who led to Picasso is as overexposed, over-explored and over-baked as it’s possible for art to be. 

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.