London events in October

Whoever said the Square Mile is purely the domain of bankers and stockbrokers? The seventh edition of this urban sculpture trail will bring a dose of high culture to the City from June 27. It's quite a blokey line-up this year; look out for work by shark-pickling troublemaker Damien Hirst and American schlock merchant Paul McCarthy. You'll find a handy map of the trail here.

British sculptor Shawcross is the next artist to install a specially commissioned artwork on the ceiling of St Pancras's Barlow Shed, as part of the Terrace Wires programme. 

Marking the ten-year anniversary of this Chalk Farm space, Mirza's commission will rework two of his previous pieces into a new installation that will reflect the architecture of what was once a Methodist chapel.

Kneebone's sculpture '399 Days' – originally shown at White Cube in 2014 – is a towering colossus made of porcelain tiles and writhing limbs, and is going to look pretty damn spectacular amongst the objects of Gallery 50a at the V&A. Three other sculptures will also be presented in the Hintze Sculpture Galleries in Gallery 21.

After the phenomenal success of last year's audio-visual extravaganza 'The Infinite Mix', 180 The Strand will be playing host to another behemoth of a group show. It'll all be themed around a quote by experimential artist-musician John Cage, who said: 'Nowadays everything happens at once and our souls are conveniently electronic (omniattentive)." Which, okay, doesn't exactly reveal loads. But with folks like psychosexual animators Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg and tricksy conceptualist Ryan Gander involved, we're expecting something pretty grand. Please note the exhibition will run from October to December, but dates and times are provisional and TBC.

You might not expect to connect with an artist who hails from Ottoman aristocracy and once sat down with Hitler to trade notes on painting. But that’s the cunning of abstraction: through a mesh of colours and spontaneous shapes, we can share and understand a common language, without ever saying the same thing. And that’s what you get with the work of Turkish painter Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid – pulsating hives of colour on large cuts of canvas that unfold in front of the viewer like living Byzantine mosaics, letting the interpretive chips fall where they may. Her painting story is a familiar one: starts out classically trained, strays from figurative work, ‘finds’ herself in the abstract. But in this extensive exhibition of Zeid’s work, the sea change is like a kaleidoscopic sucker punch; her paintings from 1948 onwards literally leave you seeing stars. Tate has done good, giving her biggest pieces room to scream, the same privilege afforded to the macho creations of the RA’s ‘Abstract Expressionism’ show. Zeid led an extraordinary life (as princesses tend to). In 1921, she became one of the first women to study at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. She went on to marry into the Iraqi royal family, and narrowly escaped assassination in Iraq’s 1958 military coup. Yet many in the West have never heard her story, let alone seen her work. Admittedly, her post-abstract period is less impressive. At 57 she cooked her first meal, and was so entranced by turkey bones that she pa

Whoever said the Square Mile is purely the domain of bankers and stockbrokers? The seventh edition of this urban sculpture trail will bring a dose of high culture to the City from June 27. It's quite a blokey line-up this year; look out for work by shark-pickling troublemaker Damien Hirst and American schlock merchant Paul McCarthy. You'll find a handy map of the trail here.

There are stories of John Singer Sargent painting in the field: sploshing colour around with sponges, hissing at his paper, muttering to himself. The American artist is best known for his fantastically accomplished, mildly eccentric society portraits. He was the classic expat Yank Europhile, courting favour (and occasionally opprobrium) among monied sorts in Paris and London. Alongside his day job, though, he painted watercolours throughout his life, and this show of them, the first in this country since 19-bloody-18 reveals Sargent’s manic devotion to his craft. He returns to the same subjects over and over. Venice in particular obsessed him: he would paint in a gondola, so his perspective on the city is sea-level, with buildings and boats looming over the viewer, dashing in the rippling, ever-changing light and water. You sense his freedom away from the salon and the studio: constantly starting over, revelling in the never-finishable. You can see the influence of photography, too. Scenes are tightly, weirdly cropped: nothing is polite or planned. Elsewhere, there are superb studies of Alpine torrents and glacial moraines. Unlike a lot of watercolourists, Sargent could actually paint people, and his workmen, recuperating soldiers, friends and family are all accorded the same democratic casual brilliance. I think this is key to this show: in a Europe increasingly divided and class-ridden, Sargent went looking for subjects and places that didn’t have any attendant societal bag

This exhibition looks set to flip the idea of 'black art' on its head, tracing an underlooked 20-year period of creative innovation among African-American artists, against the seismic backdrop of the Civil Rights movement. 

British sculptor Shawcross is the next artist to install a specially commissioned artwork on the ceiling of St Pancras's Barlow Shed, as part of the Terrace Wires programme. 

Two pieces of legislation set the timespan for this exhibition. One is the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy in 1861; the other is the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967. And it’s the shadow of illegality and widespread prejudice that’s cast over everything on display in this rich and fascinating survey of queer art. Concealment is, without a doubt, the show’s biggest theme. Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon used classical imagery as a veiled means of expressing desire, as seen in his sultry drawing of a Babylonian prince and his androgynous courtesan. Several decades later, Keith Vaughan was using abstraction to the same ends. (Solomon’s career never recovered after he was arrested for attempted sodomy in 1873; Vaughan took his own life in 1977.) Often, it’s as much about the subject matter as it is the artist: there are several pictures of notable LGBT+ figures, including Oscar Wilde, whose portrait by Robert Harper Pennington hangs beside the cell door from Reading Gaol, where he was sent for gross indecency in 1895. The accompanying quote is characteristically pithy: ‘When I am released, I shall only trade one prison for another.’ Not that joy and exuberance are completely absent. It was on the stage, rather than the canvas, that queerness found its least stifled home. Performers like drag queen Jimmy Slater – look out for his wig, earrings and tiara – were seen as nothing more than camp by naïve audiences. That’s another big theme: hidin

The first question that everyone should be asking about the first major UK retrospective of Jean-Michel Basquiat is this: why the hell has it taken so long? The artist's career was short (he died, tragically, from a heroin overdose at 27), but shone all the brighter for it. Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn, and became a graffiti artist in his teenage years. Then, coming of age in the seismic New York art scene of the '80s, he was taken under the wing of Andy Warhol and shot to fame and fortune: a glittering superstar. His paintings are bright, wild, unique and hoovered up everything from anatomical textbooks to African art as influences. To see them assembled en masse is set to be a thrilling experience.   

Twenty-three years down the line, it's easy to forget how Rachel Whiteread shocked audiences with her Turner Prize entry 'House': the concrete cast of the interior of a Victorian house in Mile End. But it won her the prize – she was the first woman to do so – and since then, Whiteread has risen to become one of the most influential figures of the art establishment. She'll always be chiefly for making casts of negative spaces, but her work stretches beyond that – this long-overdue retrospective should flesh out a highly accomplished career.

Not just an extraordinary painter, Henri Matisee was also an avid collector, who picked up all sorts of objects and artefacts during his travels to North Africa, Mali and the Far East. This exhibition will look at the influences these exotic acquisitions had on his art.

He's never captured public imagination quite like his contemporaries Gauguin and van Gogh – but Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was the real daddy of post-impressionism. His innovative way of modelling form with colour and geometric shapes lay out the path for cubism, fauvism and all of the modern art that was to follow. He's best known for his landscapes of the Provençal countryside, but this show brings together his portraits, including paintings of his wife, uncle and himself.  

Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema has long been out of fashion. But his scenes of domestic life in the ancient world – chess-playing Egyptians; spa-bathing Romans – have had a far-reaching influence, even the sword-and-sandals epics of Hollywood. This exhibition will take a fresh look at the nineteenth-century painter.

Marking the ten-year anniversary of this Chalk Farm space, Mirza's commission will rework two of his previous pieces into a new installation that will reflect the architecture of what was once a Methodist chapel.

So dense in detail is American designer Anna Sui’s work that even a crack cryptologist might come unstuck. This retrospective of her work is complicated, tricky but totally absorbing. This is the crystal maze of fashion exhibitions: there are no clues as to where her inspiration came from, other than the clothes themselves, so unless you knew that Barbarossa was plundering at the same time that Louis XVI was on the French throne, you would have no idea that the starting point for a pirate-style dress was in fact Marie Antoinette. With over 125 outfits on show, each as incredibly detailed as the last, you could spend ages in the main space trying to work out what her possible references were. Sui is clearly obsessed with music. There are outfits that look like they’re straight off a tour bus – a pretty blue baby doll dress is very reminiscent of Kurt Cobain raiding Courtney Love’s wardrobe, whereas the dandified versions of flares and jackets, all velvet, faux fur and embellishment are pure Jagger. They’re looks that fit well with the current ’90s revival. She’s an incredibly narrative designer. Rather than her work being displayed chronologically, it’s instead organised by the themes and motifs that run through it. An army of fairy tale characters stand opposite a herd of punks, while on another podium cowboy themes meet a Pennsylvanian country club with some Warhol-inspired embroidery thrown in for good measure. Disparate though her ideas are, there is a clear Sui threa

Indisputable fact: there's no more important painter alive today than Jasper Johns. The 86-year-old artist's influence stretches so far and wide that it's practically immeasurable. He came of age in 1950s New York, in the fertile years between splashy Abstract Expressionism and ice-cool Pop, which was when he created his iconic piece 'Flag', which nodded to both movements. Iconoclastic and experimental, Johns moved the goalposts of painting.

Fifteenth-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck was as much a technical pioneer as he was an artistic genius, mastering illusionistic space in his exquisitely constructed paintings. Five centuries later, his masterwork 'The Arnolfini Portrait' inspired a new wave of artists: the Pre-Raphaelites, a circle of Victorian bad boys who championed his draughtsmanship and symbolism.

Rarely-seen work on paper and other key pieces, spanning 40 years of the artist's career and acquired through the artist's family's generosity.

According to Wikipedia, the town of Becket, Massachusetts, has a population of 1,779 and counts a ‘Mormon pioneer’ among its notable residents. According to the new photographic series by Gregory Crewdson, it’s a desolate, snow-blanketed town of anonymous houses filled with ghost-faced inhabitants. Not exactly tourist board material. After a messy divorce, Crewdson holed up in this tiny Appalachian town where the seclusion effectively did the work of a therapist. Thereafter came this eerie series of meticulously staged tableaux, in which the listless townsfolk appear in drab living rooms, stationary camper vans, gravelled driveways and litter-strewn clearings in the pinewoods that girdle the town. Crewdson has frequently courted David Lynch comparisons throughout his career, and if his previous collection of suburban psychodramas ‘Beneath the Roses’ was his ‘Blue Velvet’, this is his ‘Twin Peaks’. Although it’s probably fairer to go back to both men’s common forebear, the painter Edward Hopper, whose scenes of lonely Americana stripped back the inner workings of the nation’s psyche. Like Hopper, Crewdson uses nudity; voyeuristically at times, but never erotically. These unclothed figures, their flesh pallid and puckered in the wintry light, feel seized up by their own mortality. If it’s the overwhelming feeling of death that hovers over these bleak-midwinter images, the odd moment of life – a pregnant woman, a mother holding her baby to her breast – pushes back. And if ou

Kneebone's sculpture '399 Days' – originally shown at White Cube in 2014 – is a towering colossus made of porcelain tiles and writhing limbs, and is going to look pretty damn spectacular amongst the objects of Gallery 50a at the V&A. Three other sculptures will also be presented in the Hintze Sculpture Galleries in Gallery 21.

You might not think of Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp – one a flamboyant, moustachioed surrealist and Disney collaborator; the other an arch, cerebral conceptualist and chess player – as artistic bedfellows. But this new RA show will tell an entirely new story, and map the unexpected common ground these two twentieth-century greats shared.