Top 10 art exhibitions in London

David Shrigley’s gone full Ronseal. ‘Mayfair Tennis Ball Exchange’, his latest show, is exactly what it says it is: a gallery filled with fresh new tennis balls that you can come and swap an old ball of yours for. That’s it. That’s the show.

Forget the panpipes, because the British Museum is here to show you the real history of Peru. Ok, there are some panpipes here, but there’s also a whole lot of human sacrifice, war, cats, dancing, music and more cats. It’s a wild ride, full of beautiful objects and fascinating history, tracing thousands of years of Peruvian culture. And if you totally ignore how impossible it is to sum up a whole nation’s ancient history in one go, it’s a great exhibition. 

Helen Cammock's latest show is a love letter to cooperation. Not just the idea of getting along and doing things together, but the political movement of the same name. The Cooperative Movement was about protecting workers’ rights in the face of growing industrialisation, a bringing together of labourers and crafts people. And it has its roots in Rochdale, where Cammock went to create the film at the heart of this deeply political and engagingly conceptual exhibition. 

Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) is a victim of his own success. The pivotal modernist sculptor and designer’s experiments with material and light were groundbreaking, and totally shaped how our world looks. That’s an amazing, impressive feat. But his influence also means that walking into this beautiful retrospective feels a hell of a lot like walking into the world’s fanciest Ikea. 

Theaster Gates is going to hit you like a ton of bricks. The American artist’s show here acts as a mini history of ceramics, and that comes with a lot of bricks, and a lot of weight: both metaphorical and physical.

Woodcuts. Most of the time, they’re difficult. Rigid. Fiddly. A bit like me on my morning commute. But it turns out, they can be much more than that. They can be spontaneous, vast, and colourful. This enlightening exhibition shows exactly how.  

Maybe everyone should’ve stopped painting 60 years ago or something. I mean, what can there possibly be left to say with a paintbrush and canvas after Leonardo and Manet and Rothko and Pollock? Turns out, the answer to that is: ‘a shitload’.

Eugenio Dittborn was making lockdown art long before Covid. The Chilean artist spent years of his life under Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. Travel, communication, life in general, all were tightly, suffocatingly controlled. So he turned to airmail. Using huge sheets of paper and fabric that could be folded down into envelopes, he created works that obsess over and explore ideas of movement, oppression and freedom. 

Lubaina Himid wants you to feel like an actor, a performer on the stage set of this exhibition. It’s a nice idea, but actors are fed lines to repeat, they play roles, they do as they’re directed. Instead, this show works best when it forces you to question, confront and undermine the ideas it presents, not perform them.

Deep beneath the street, the machines have taken over. Because 180 The Strand is back again with a labyrinthine, overwhelming, immersive, dizzying group show of computer generated installations to totally lose yourself in.