London art exhibitions calendar

John Armleder: Quicksand

• Free

The art collector, Frank Cohen, hailed as the Saatchi of the North, has joined forces with Danish collector, Nicolai Frahm and transformed a former dairy in Bloomsbury into an exciting new not-for-profit art space. The inaugural exhibition presents the largest show ever of Swiss artist, John Armleder in the UK.

Dieter Roth: Diaries

• Free

The late German-Swiss artist, Dieter Roth's prolific career was ultimately a record of his life. This exhibition juxtaposes two installation pieces with his personal diaries in which he would draft out ideas for work.

Patrick Caulfield

Caulfield's incredibly bold use of colour and simple lines made him a pioneer of early British contemporary art. But he himself rejected any such classification, striving instead to be seen in the same light as his French cubist and modernist heroes, Georges Braque and Fernand Leger. This survey shows the artist's progression from early still life painting through to the use of trompe l'oeil effects and the inclusion of photorealism.

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life

Featuring 80 works by the popular and oft-derided Northern landscape painter, this exhibition presents LS Lowry within a wider art historical context and will be the first major appraisal of his work to be seen in London since his death in 1976.

The Spirit of Utopia

This group exhibition features both existing and newly commissioned works by architects, artists and designers who have a desire to act as agents of postive social change in the world, among them Yto Barrada, Peter Liversidge at Pedro Reyes.

Serpentine Sackler Gallery

The Serpentine opens its second venue with a bang, in a refurbished, Grade II-listed, former gunpowder depot. The new gallery, a stone’s throw away from its main space, will have an additional cafe extension designed by architect Zaha Hadid.

Edinburgh Art Festival

The tenth edition of the visual arts accompaniment to the general theatrical and comedic merriment of the Edinburgh Festival gathers traction and pace every year. Hop from major shows at all the big museums and galleries to an art promenade through the heart of the Scottish city.

Victoriana: The Art of Revival

Victoriana’s been having a moment for 20 years now. As well as the revival of performances in the Roman Amphitheatre below stairs, the Guildhall Gallery in the heart of the City is staging an intriguing show of artists from the past 2 decades who have been inspired by nineteenth-century values and aesthetics.

Sarah Lucas

Everybody’s favourite grown-up YBA is given a long overdue survey of her anthropomorphic and tragicomic sculptures, such as her reclining female figure made from ‘Two Fried Eggs and Kebab’ (1992). There’s the additional twist of a tailor-made new work commissioned by the gallery (to give you a flavour, the last piece she made for them was called ‘Space Tits’).

Paul Klee

A wishy-washy favourite of the student bedroom wall and the artist who famously ‘took a line for a walk’ will be put under the Tate’s unerring microscope for this full-blooded retrospective.

Whistler in London

Subtitled ‘Battersea Bridge and the Thames’, this will be the first major exhibition dedicated to American-born artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s time in the capital between 1859 and 1903. John Ruskin acccused him of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ for one of these pictures – Whistler won a farthing in court damages, and had the last laugh.

Kara Walker

One of America’s least compromising artists will finally have a solo show in London, bringing her truly cutting-edge, politically-charged paper silhouettes, on the themes of historical slavery and the ills of white supremacy, to emancipate our souls.