The latest art and photography exhibition reviews (updated for 2026)

2026 is, according to the Chinese zodiac, the Year of the Fire Horse. In 19th-century London, however, there were real-life fire horses galloping through the city, hauling fire engines and firefighters to burning buildings. Peckham Road Fire Station opened in 1867 to accommodate them, and is the earliest surviving purpose-built fire station in London. Since 2014, though, it has been South London Gallery’s second site (following a 73-year stint as a sausage factory), and for the next few months, it and the gallery’s main building across the road are home to a series of twisted architectural works by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska. The building’s past feels relevant to the exhibition: Sosnowska has made a career probing how architecture shapes us, outlives its purpose and bears witness to a changing city. The Weight of Matter, her first solo show at a London institution in more than 20 years, brings together 14 years of her work across the SLG’s two sites. Her fascination with cities in flux stems from her own experience. Coming of age as Poland’s communist regime collapsed in 1989, Sosnowska watched Warsaw transform as one political and economic order gave way to another. That upheaval became raw material for her sculpture. Steel, concrete, rebar, staircases, handrails and gates – the functional stuff of modernist architecture – are bent, buckled and twisted into strange new forms. In the old engine room, a contorted heap of black steel sprawls across the floor At the Fire...

Got a pesky neighbour who keeps pinching your parking spot? Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying’s father knew the feeling. In car-clogged Taipei, he came up with an ingenious solution: an inflatable decoy of his Toyota Corolla E100. Whenever he drove off in the morning, he’d leave the blow-up Corolla in its place. When he returned later from work, he’d deflate the decoy, roll it up, stow it in the boot and reclaim his space. He might have to fight for his spot for the next six weeks, though, as his trusty decoy is currently parked at the Hayward Gallery as part of his son’s exhibition, A Life of Navigation. It’s one of four works exploring the strange and ingenious ways we navigate our busy, high-stress urban lives. Working across installation, video, photography and sculptural objects, and often incorporating performance, Chihying approaches those pressures with a sense of humour. Another (literal) aisle Chihying explores in this urban obstacle course is the supermarket. ‘The Jog’ (2014), a two-channel video, sees Chihying don his running gear and jog against the checkout conveyor belt as if it were a treadmill, while an unimpressed cashier looks on. It’s an entertaining take on the endless cycles of consumerism and the repetitive grind of city life. On a more immediate level, all the stretching and athleisure makes it a silent, considerably less sexed-up version of Eric Prydz’s ‘Call on Me’ music video. It’s an entertaining take on the repetitive grind of city life...

House of Dreamers is a similar idea to a series of all-ages immersive experiences that flourished around 2024: think the Balloon Museum, think Dopamine Land, think Bubble Planet (which is still going). As a veteran of these sorts of things (my kids go nuts for them), there are very definitely some familiar elements to House of Dreamers: the gigantic ballpit is a classic, as is the pretend train journey where you sit in a carriage and video screens give the illusion of movement. Originating in Italy (it’s the creation of designer sisters Elena and Giulia Sella), what sets HoD apart from the pack is the relentless barrage of aspirational slogans and cookie-cutter ‘you got this!’ positivity. Somewhat ambiguously described as being ‘the first immersive exhibition dedicated to dreamers’, the show occupies a vague middle ground between actually being dreamlike and celebrating hopes and dreams via the medium of messages like ‘enjoy today’ or ‘never give up’. I think maybe when I was younger and didn’t have kids, and my cynicism outweighed my pragmatism, the whole thing would have made me want to scream, especially when my journey ended with an uplifting quote from JK Rowling, personalised just for me (we are given individual wristbands with our names electronically imprinted on them – my kids both lost theirs in the ballpit). But now, I just say live, laugh, love.  The show is relentlessly photo friendly House of Dreamers is perfectly good fun so long as you are aware of what...

There’s a painting that hangs in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that Freddy Mercury used to drag his Queen bandmates to see time and again. It’s a fantastical scene from Romeo and Juliet alive with fairies and mythical creatures, including the legendary fairy Queen Mab, who rushes through the night planting dreams in people’s heads. Mercury was so captivated by it that he wrote and named a song after it: ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’. The painting is the work of the often overlooked Victorian artist named Richard Dadd. The Royal Academy has reunited it with dozens of his other works in Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, the first major exhibition devoted to the artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886. The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques (named the ‘Clique’). Formed by a group of fellow students, its members drew inspiration from Shakespeare and Byron, dressing one another as literary and historical figures to practise their painting. Several of these...

This is a summer when all the romance has been scorched off city life, as successive heat waves make tower blocks suffocate and pavements burn. Even in oh-so-pretty Paris, the city’s whimsical iron railings are suddenly looking more like prison bars. High-density living is dangerous, as our forebears well knew. Dulwich Picture Gallery’s new exhibition follows some of the biggest names in 20th century American photography as they document their country’s major cities, and reckon with its fearsome urge to build upwards and outwards. It’s full of iconic shots that don’t quite build into one towering narrative. Today, New York’s skyline is so familiar that it adorns film credits, baseball caps, and the walls of thousands of crappy Airbnbs the world over. But for the photographers who watched it being built, its heights were unexpected – unnatural, even. Berenice Abbott’s 1933 image ‘Exchange Place, New York’ is four times taller than it is wide – its vertiginous blocks seem to press together, about to crush the ant-like figures scurrying at street level. For her contemporary, Edward Streichen, this new New York is the stuff of sci-fi fantasies: in ‘The Maypole (The Empire State Building)’, he uses double exposure to turn this well-known landmark into an alien cross-hatching of lines, dizzying and unsettling. Photography – a new artistic discipline – was rising up alongside the city, and the possibilities felt endless. “Edward Streichen’s New York is the stuff of sci-fi...

‘Where is Ana Mendieta?’ was the question ringing around the halls of the Tate Modern’s Blavatnik Building just over 10 years ago. It was June 2016, at an opening party for the Tate Modern’s shiny new £260m wing, when around 150 activists invaded the gallery to hold a vigil for the Cuban-American artist who died in 1985 at just 36 years old. Dressed in black and holding funeral flowers, the group had marched across Millennium Bridge carrying banners and placards, before gathering outside the Tate to read poems and share thoughts about Mendieta and her work.  The demonstration was organised in response to the gallery’s decision to display works by Mendieta’s husband, and alleged killer, Carl Andre. A revered modernist sculptor 13 years her senior, Andre was controversially acquitted of murdering his wife, a severe acrophobic, when she fell to her death from the window of his 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment in the early hours of Sunday 8 September 1985, after neighbours heard them arguing into the night. As a rising star of New York’s avant-garde feminist art scene, there’s no knowing what brilliant work Mendieta might still be producing if her career hadn’t been cut tragically short just as she was entering her prime. And despite her friends and family members having long campaigned for her groundbreaking practice not to be obscured by the violent manner of her death, it’s unfortunate that demonstrations outside of Carl Andre exhibitions have been a lot of fans’...

It’s clear from his major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery that Anish Kapoor shares Time Out’s fondness for the colour palette red and black. Although, it must be said, his shades have smarter names: Alizarin Crimson and Vantablack. The latter absorbs 99.965% of visible light, holding the world record for the darkest manmade substance, and Kapoor has purchased the exclusive rights to use it (to the consternation of some of his art world peers).  It's quite a privilege to have a solo show at the Hayward Gallery. Very few artists have been invited back for a second: Kapoor’s last exhibition here was in 1998, long before Chicago’s ‘Bean’ was commissioned, before he won the Turner Prize, and before he became one of the world’s most celebrated sculptors. Nearly thirty years later, this show gathers together many of Kapoor’s greatest hits: concave mirrored surfaces that turn the world upside down; hulking great sculptures caked in thick crimson oil paint, resembling bodies turned inside out. The opening room is dominated by a monumental new work that looks like a bicycle pump has been taken to a Babybel. The jacked-up crimson PVC form bulges against the Hayward’s brutalist concrete, wedged so tightly into the corners that it looks as though, with the slightest nudge, it might pop.  The depthless voids come next; a roomful of works where Kapoor’s Vantablack is put to the test. What appears to be a deep fissure carved into the wall is, in fact, nothing more than a crack-shaped...

For Brits of a certain age, James McNeill Whistler will always conjure memories of that scene in the Mr Bean film. But while Rowan Atkinson’s 1997 opus was a memorable introduction to the American Gilded Age painter, Tate Britain’s grand new retrospective will properly acquaint you with his work – minus any snot-related hijinks – through his paintings, prints, and a litany of personal effects.  Using decoration from his Chelsea studio, the opening room establishes Whistler as a bohemian and fashionable man, but the contextual statement also foreshadows his fall from social grace later in his career (thanks to a lawsuit that left him penniless – more on that later). Thus, a unique, non-linear curatorial narrative is introduced. After arriving from New England in Paris in 1855, Whistler prolifically produced moody etchings that express the stoic dinginess of the French capital with dense and dynamic shadows. His first attempts at oil painting also happened here. The medium became an even bigger preoccupation when he moved to an equally morose city: London. Whether it’s choked by smog or cluttered with cargo, the Thames is his muse during his early years in the Big Smoke. The chaotic figuration of ships floating past in Wapping and the spectral abstraction of a frozen river in Chelsea in Ice represent two extremes of how Whistler turns urban ugliness into visual harmony. Conducting tone, colour, and blankness with orchestral balance, he’s acutely aware of the musicality...

Getting on the tube these days means being bombarded with dozens of ugly advertisements, selling you everything from whisky, to electric toothbrushes and LED facemasks. However, things weren’t always this way. Unlike today’s dull Underground adverts, tube stations during the 1920s and 30s were adorned with strikingly vibrant art deco posters that promoted things to do and places to go around London. Over a hundred of these are exhibited at the London Transport Museum’s latest temporary exhibition, Art Deco: the golden age of poster design, alongside objects like a cigarette case, compact mirror, and tea set that express the decadence of that period.  Back then, a post-war economic boom had propelled consumerism, affording people more leisure time than ever.  Speed, freedom, and opportunity became the ethos of an era that could harness industrial technology in recreation rather than warfare. Such carefreeness is reflected in the bold colours, opulent typefaces, sharp geometry, and indulgent scenes of Londoners enjoying a day out. While a younger audience will be drawn to their vintage aesthetic, older visitors might find them charmingly nostalgic. Art deco didn’t get its name until the 1960s when it came under academic scrutiny; during its day it was simply known as Style Moderne. Which is fitting because many of the artists regularly commissioned by London Transport took vivid inspiration from modernist art movements such as cubism, futurism, and vorticism; unknowingly...