10 Unmissable Museum Shows to Catch in London
Frieze Week approaches in London, and with it, a veritable buffet of incredible museum shows to see around the city. A bumper crop of summer exhibitions remains on view in the U.K.’s capital city that are worth seeing before they close, including Tate Modern’s historic survey of Australian First Nations artist Emily Kam Kngwarray and a sweeping Do Ho Suh show. There is also a major mounting of works by pioneering 19th-century Realist Jean-François Millet at the National Gallery, and Grayson Perry’s irreverent “Delusions of Grandeur” at the Wallace Collection.
But plenty more exhibitions are fresh to the scene. From the long-awaited Kerry James Marshall survey at the Royal Academy to a rare outing of Wayne Thiebaud’s dessert-themed paintings at the Courtauld, here are 10 must-see shows to hit during the busy fair week.
Gilbert and George: 21st Century Pictures
Hayward Gallery, October 7–January 11, 2026
Installation view of “Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures” at the Hayward Gallery in London. Photo: Mark Blower, courtesy of the Gilbert and George and the Hayward Gallery.
Are there many artists more London than Gilbert and George, the duo of “living sculptures” who have been stalwarts of Spitalfields for decades? Though in their smart, suited presentations they may seem like relics of a bygone age, it turns out the artists’ practice has long been evolving alongside new technologies.
This exhibition traces these changes over 25 years, but at their core, these some 60 floor-to-ceiling installations evince Gilbert and George’s enduring preoccupation with societal taboos and anxieties around sexuality, class, and nationalism. Their work excavates the everyday artifacts of modern life, from road signs to newspaper headlines, to reflect our world back at us but, always, with their characteristic wit.
Dedicated fans of the duo will be excited to see the debut of two new works from this year’s “Screw Pictures” series. With Gilbert and George behind the scenes, you just know the word “screw” is going to have all manner of meanings.
—Jo Lawson-Tancred
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
Royal Academy of Arts, through January 18, 2026
Kerry James Marshall, School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012). Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Museum purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth (Bibby) Smith, the Collectors Circle for Contemporary Art, Jane Comer, the Sankofa Society, and general acquisition funds, 2012.57. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Sean Pathasema.
Marshall’s largest exhibition in Europe to date stages an audacious conversation with art history’s giants. Again and again, the artist takes up a different mode of painting and retools it to express a worldview that reflects Black experience, everyday life, and history from the inside out.
Past Times (1997), Marshall’s riff on Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (famously bought by Diddy in 2018) recasts the protagonists of a leisurely Sunday afternoon in a Chicago park. The nearly monochrome Black Painting (2003/2006), among the show’s most powerful works, nods to a long lineage of “black paintings”—from Ad Reinhardt to Norman Lewis—while reclaiming the notion on Marshall’s own terms: Within the darkness emerges the faint image of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, asleep in bed moments before his life was taken by Chicago police in 1969. There’s more, and more.
If postcolonial literary criticism “writes back” by rewriting the master narrative—the overarching cultural story imposed by power—Marshall “paints back,” reworking the master image from within. The show’s scale feels perfectly suited to the Royal Academy’s grand galleries: intellectually satisfying, visually forceful, and deeply layered. Make enough time for it.
—Naomi Rea
Wayne Thiebaud, American Still Life
The Courtauld Gallery, October 10, 2025–January 18, 2026
Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes (1963). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © Wayne Thiebaud VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
It’s shocking that Wayne Thiebaud, one of the greatest American painters of the last century—of confectionery, at the very least—is only receiving his first U.K. museum show now, four years after his death at the age of 101. The “laureate of lunch counters,” as critic Lawrence Alloway once called him, Thiebaud rendered humble cakes, pies, sweets, coffee cups, and hot dogs in vivid hues and brushy strokes, bestowing upon these cheap eats a historical if not philosophical gravitas in much the same way Chaïm Soutine did with meat.
The Courtauld’s exhibition, featuring works from the 1960s hailing from numerous American collections—including the iconic Cakes (1963), on loan for the first time outside the U.S. from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.—is a sweet treat indeed, as very few of this Modern master’s paintings are held by museums on this side of the Atlantic.
—Margaret Carrigan
Nigerian Modernism
Tate Modern, October 8, 2025–May 10, 2026
Uzo Egonu, Stateless People an artist with beret 1981. ©The estate of Uzo Egonu. Private Collection.
Just about a week after Nigeria celebrated the 65th anniversary of its independence from the U.K., Tate Modern opens “Nigerian Modernism,” the first exhibition in the country that traces the footprint and evolution of Modern art in the African country against its transformative socio-political backdrop. Featuring more than 250 works of various disciplines by more than 50 artists across five decades, the exhibition links the development of Modern art in Nigeria with the cultural and artistic influences resulting from British colonial rule and the growing emphasis on the country’s own cultural identities and rich heritage amid the calls for decolonization.
Curated by senior curator Osei Bonsu and assistant curator Bilal Akkouche, the exhibition starts from the 1940s, showcasing works by pioneers such as painter and sculptor Ben Enwonwu and ceramist Ladi Kwali, who fused their British training with Nigerian art traditions. The show then explores the legacy of the Zaria Arts Society following the country’s independence in 1960 and artists’ struggle amid the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967. The show concludes with a focus on Uzo Egonu, the Nigerian-born British artist whose work reflects the identity of the Nigerian diaspora.
—Vivienne Chow
Peter Doig: House of Music
Serpentine South Gallery, October 10, 2025–February 8, 2026
Peter Doig, Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.) (2010–2012) © Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved.
Peter Doig is known for his paintings of landscapes drawn from his personal experiences and surroundings. But how would these paintings sound?
In “House of Music,” the British painter takes the opportunity to present what could be understood as a soundtrack for his art for the first time. Music selected by Doig will be played from a set of high fidelity wooden Klangfilm Euronor speakers from the 1950s to accompany the viewing of his recent works on show, primarily created during the artist’s years in Trinidad with his family between 2002 and 2021. The music comes from the artist’s vast collection of vinyl records and cassette tapes accumulated throughout the decades.
Installed alongside the paintings created during the artist’s years in Trinidad with his family between 2002 and 2021 is a restored Western Electric/Bell Labs sound system. Originally from the late 1920s to 1930s, the sound system was created to meet the growing demands for talking movies at the time. The sound system was recovered by Laurence Passera, an expert in the field and a collaborator with Doig on this project.
Want to tune in? Live listening sessions will take place on Sundays under the banner of Sound Service, where musicians, artists, and collectors will share their collections of music.
—V.C.
Karimah Ashadu: Tendered
Camden Art Centre, October 10, 2025–March 22, 2026
Karimah Ashadu, MUSCLE (still), 2025. Courtesy of the artist, Camden Art Centre, Fondazione In Between Art Film, Sadie Coles HQ and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago
Karimah Ashadu burst onto the international stage after her nine-minute video of modish male motorcyclists in Nigeria premiered to acclaim at the Venice Biennale last year. Titled Machine Boys, it earned her the prestigious Silver Lion for Promising Young Artist.
Ashadu, who was born in Nigeria and is now based in Hamburg, continues her probe into performative masculinity and patriarchy in West African culture with her show at the Camden Art Centre, “Tendered.” It features the newly created body of work, MUSCLE (2025), a moving-image installation and series of sculptures sensually depicting bodybuilders in Lagos’ slums.
“I was drawn to the dedication to getting and maintaining that muscle,” the artist told the New York Times, while wanting to expose the “softness” that existed below the surface.
Co-commissioned by the Fondazione In Between Art Film, the exhibition will travel to the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago next year.
—M.C.
Ghost Objects: Summoning Leighton’s Lost Collection
Leighton House Museum, October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026
Annemarieke Kloosterhof, Ghost Objects (2025) for Leighton House. Image: Jaron James.
The west London house of leading Victorian artist Frederic Leighton became a museum in 1926. It is beloved by those in the know for its ornate interiors, most famously the Arab Hall—replete with Islamic tiles, a golden dome, and a fountain—that the artist designed after several trips to the Middle East. The opulent rooms are also home to plenty of artworks, including a painting by the studio of Tintoretto and a trove of Leighton’s drawings.
This year, Leighton House is celebrating its 100th anniversary with a special exhibition, “Ghost Objects: Summoning Leighton’s Lost Collection,” by contemporary paper artist Annemarieke Kloosterhof. Her work recreates four legendary treasures that have been lost from the artist’s original collection, including a 15th-century carved and gilt Italian tabernacle shrine acquired by Leighton for his studio in 1886. Another object, a mysterious brass jardiniere, was very much a product of its time, appearing to blend influences from both Indian art and the Arts and Crafts movement. Kloosterhof’s paper art brings to light the efforts of the museum’s curators to search high and low for many more of these missing pieces, some of which have been successfully recovered and returned to the house.
—J.L-T.
We Sinful Women: The Library Project
The SOAS Library, SOAS University of London, September 18–December 7, 2025
Naiza Khan, New Clothes for The Emperor II (2009), Taimur Hassan Collection. Photography by Justin Piperger.
The beauty of London is its cultural diversity; and as such, among all the blockbuster institutional shows happening this month, the independently organized “We Sinful Women” at the SOAS Library is worth paying attention to.
Following the well-received exhibition “(Un)Layering the Future Past of South Asia: Young artists’ voices” at SOAS Gallery earlier this year, curators Salima Hashimi and Manmeet K. Walia return to the premises of the famed academic institution to stage this exhibition platforming voices of women artists from South Asia and the Middle East, regions that have been gaining momentum on the global art stage in recent years.
Drawing from the private collection of Pakistani collector Taimur Hassan, the show explores how women artists of various disciplines from the region, from Modernists to contemporary, have continuously been redefining themselves individually against a backdrop of shared histories and resilience. Featured artists include Shilpa Gupta, Bani Abidi, and Arpita Singh.
—V.C.
Maxwell Alexandre: Sanctuary and the Shadow of its Walls
Delfina Foundation, October 10–November 23, 2025
Maxwell Alexandre, detail of Pátio do Clube do Flamengo na Gávea (Flamengo Club Courtyard in Gávea) (2025). Photo: Julia Thompson.
Maxwell Alexandre, a former pro in-line skater who hails from Rio de Janeiros’ Rocinha favela, has had a meteoric rise in the art world since 2020, buoyed by solo shows in quick succession at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, David Zwirner in London, and New York’s The Shed. Part of a new wave of Black Brazilian artists reshaping representation and race narratives through figurative painting, his large-scale portraits on kraft paper (pardo) are infused with street culture and nods to his Evangelical upbringing.
For his debut institutional show in the U.K., at the Delfina Foundation near Buckingham Palace, he shifts his focus from people to places. Newly commissioned paintings take as their inspiration the Clube de Regatas, an elite sports club in Rio and transforms the foundation’s basement gallery into an immersive space exploring themes of privilege, leisure, and sanctuary.
—M.C.
Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey
Whitechapel Gallery, October 8–March 1, 2026
Joy Gregory, Stockwell Siren performance from the series “CelebrityBlonde” (2003). Photo: © Joy Gregory.
After the success of Hamad Butt earlier this year, Whitechapel Gallery appears to be on a roll when it comes to bringing our attention to important British artists who have been overlooked. The spotlight is now on Joy Gregory, courtesy of the Freelands Award, a £110,000 ($148,000) prize that she and Whitechapel Gallery won in 2023 to stage an exhibition dedicated to a mid-career female artist. Those not yet acquainted with Gregory’s work will encounter her through no less than 250 works, including film, textile, performance, and, most predominantly, photography. She has explored this latter medium in many of its manifestations, from Victorian cyanotypes to digital.
Early self-portraits and private domestic scenes, both from the early 1990s, offer a highly personal take on Black womanhood. Later works, like Memory and Skin (1998) and Seeds of Empire (2021), are ambitious, research-led explorations of colonial history. A deep sensitivity and humanity is at the core of Gregory’s work, shining through in her newly commissioned film, the result of a two-decade collaboration with the San People of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa.
–J.L-T. More