Eddy Frankel

This city is absolutely rammed full of amazing art galleries and museums. We've got everything from major contemporary art museums to high end commercial galleries, stunning local institutions to incredible independent spaces. That means that there are a lot of exhibitions to see.  But how do you sort the good from the bad? How do you decide which shows are worth spending your meagre free time on? Well, we're here to help. We go to every major exhibition in London, and a lot of the smaller ones, and we figure out what's a masterpiece and what's a disasterpiece. Our art editor (me!) spends his week trudging the streets of London, going from gallery to gallery, to help you figure out what's worth heading into town for. Our critera is simple: we want the best. It doesn't matter if it's painting or conceptual installation, if it's old or new, it just has to be good. Really good. And this list right here is the best art we've seen recently, and it's updated throughout the week. Eddy Frankel is Time Out's art editor, he literally forces himself to get out of bed every day just to go look at paintings and sculptures. It's a tough job, but apparently someone's got to do it.  Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.

Looking at great art in London usually won't cost you penny. Pretty much every major museum is free, as is literally every single commercial gallery. That's a helluva lot of art. So wandering through sculptures, being blinded by neon or admiring some of the best photography in London is absolutely free. 'What about the really good stuff, I bet you have to pay to see that,' you're probably thinking. Nope, even some of them are free. So here's our pick of the best free art happening in London right now. RECOMMENDED: explore our full guide to free London

London can be a pretty expensive place to go out in, and there's the small matter of the deepening cost of living crisis to boot. But there's no need to lock yourself away, because almost all the art here is free to see. Most of London's major museums – as well as many of its smaller institutions and literally every commercial gallery – are free to enter, so you can see world-class art and artefacts without getting out your wallet. From the Tate to Gagosian, the National Gallery to Camden Art Centre, you've got your choice of literally hundreds of amazing art spaces, all free. Want to see masterpieces by Raphael and Turner, or contemporary abstraction by future art stars? You can, and you don't have to pay.  Our list of brilliant, and totally free, art galleries and museums in London covers the four corners and centre of the city, so wherever you live, there’s a gratis cultural experience near you. Go forth and enjoy, and save your pennies for something else. RECOMMENDED: The best free things to do in London.

London is absolutely world-class when it comes to museums. Obviously, we’re biased, but with more than 170 of them dotted about the capital – a huge chunk of which are free to visit – we think it’s fair to say that there’s nowhere else in the world that does museums better.  Want to explore the history of TfL? We’ve got a museum for that. Rather learn about advertising? We’ve got a museum for that too. History? Check. Science? Check. 1940s cinema memorabilia, grotesque eighteenth-century surgical instruments, or perhaps a wall of 4,000 mouse skeletons? Check, check, check! Being the cultured metropolitans that we are, Time Out’s editors love nothing more than a wholesome afternoon spent gawping at Churchill’s baby rattle or some ancient Egyptian percussion instruments. In my case, the opportunity to live on the doorstep of some of the planet’s most iconic cultural institutions was a big reason why I moved here at the first chance I got, and I’ve racked up countless hours traipsing around display cases and deciphering needlessly verbose wall texts in the eleven years since. From iconic collections, brilliant curation and cutting-edge tech right down to nice loos, adequate signage and a decent place to grab a cuppa; my colleagues and I know exactly what we want from a museum, and we’ve put in a whole lot of time deliberating which of the city’s institutions are worth your time. So here’s our take on the 25 best ones to check out around London, ranging from world-famous cultural

I moved to this city in the deep, dark depths of the pandemic. My first flat was, obviously, awful. The landlord was dodgy (shock). It was full of mould. The shower was next to the kitchen and had no door. Still, though, I look back on those days fondly. One rare sunny afternoon we climbed out of my flatmate’s window to sit on the roof, drinking homemade Bloody Marys and blasting the Bad Boy Chiller Crew from a box speaker into the sticky, polluted air of Kingsland Road. We got quite a few glares from passers-by, but also a fair amount of smiles.  Whether you’re moving here for study, work, family, or another reason, your first months in London will be challenging, but you’ll probably look back on them with such fogged-up rose-tinted glasses it will hardly matter anyway. Use this time to meet as many new people as you can and to make mistakes. Be broke, go to M&M world (don’t actually), get lost on the tube. That said, there are some things I wish I’d known before coming here. Hindsight is a blessing, as they say. But we’re not gatekeepers, so we asked Time Out staff to share their top tricks and tips for anyone moving to the capital. Some of these folks have been born and bred here. Others are adopted Londoners, like you might well be one day. Listen up, take note, and good luck. 

If you can somehow prize the iPad out of your child's filthy mitts and get them out of the house, you'll find a city full of amazing cultural experiences for kids. Historical relics and heirlooms not for them? Drag them through a hall of Egyptian mummies, fighter planes or dinosaur fossils instead. They might not thank you now, but they'll appreciate it when they get to your age.    RECOMMENDED: Discover 101 things to do in London with the kids and here are the 17 best day trips from London.

Every parent knows the desperation of trying to find something to do with their kids that isn't mind-numbingly tedious. There are, after all, only so many soft plays a human can handle. And while taking the little ones to a museum or gallery may seem like a nice way of culturally enriching your child, it can also be fraught with danger: smashed sculptures, torn paintings, and not to mention the risk of boring your child to literal tears. But there are plenty of art exhibitions that are perfect for kids in London, and this regularly updated list will pick the best of them.  What do you want from a child-friendly art exhibition? Colour, fun, interactivity, and an almost total lack of breakables. These exhibitions should tick most of those boxes for you. Good luck.  Art exhibitions for kids

There's so much more to London art than just painting or sculpture. Instead of boring old brushstrokes and dull old canvases, you can lose yourself in all kinds of new worlds by tracking down the best photography exhibitions in London. From sweeping landscape scenes to powerful portraits captured by daring individuals, photography in London offers a full-exposure of thought-provoking, visually captivating art. So in this list, we've compiled reviews of the best photography exhibitions in London. How do we know they're the best? Because we've been: we've quite literally dragged ourselves (well, our art critic has) to every photography exhibition worth going to and figured out what's snappy and what's crappy.  Eddy Frankel is Time Out's art editor, every day he wakes up and consumes endless, copious amounts of art and photography. It's a terrible physical diet, but it's very mentally enriching.  RECOMMENDED: Check our complete guide to photography in London  

Everyone loves a good action movie, even if some won’t admit it. Film school snobs may pretend to turn up their noses, but no matter how cultured you’d like to think you are, there’s a part of your lizard brain that loves explosions and shootouts and badass one-liners – and it needs to be satisfied.  But action flicks needn’t be dumb, loud or graphic to succeed. Some find beauty in orchestrated violence. Others might crane-kick you right in the heart. Some even have – gasp! – character development. And so, to help put together this definitive list of the greatest action movies ever made, we reached out to some of the people who understand the action genre better than anyone, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo. Pull the pin, light the fuse and batten down the hatches – these are the most pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat thrill rides ever put to film.  Written by Eddy Frankel, Eddy Frankel, Yu An Su, Joshua Rothkopf, Trevor Johnston, Ashley Clark, Grady Hendrix, Tom Huddleston, Keith Uhlich, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Dave Calhoun and Matthew Singer Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🪖 The 18 greatest stunts in cinema (as picked by the greatest stunt people)🥋 The 25 best martial arts movies of all-time

As the sun starts to set earlier and the leaves turn from green to golden and orange hues, you might start to think about changing your own habits with the turn of the season. The arrival of autumn is no reason to start staying in or swapping London’s rich cultural scene for the sofa. In fact, the capital comes alive in autumn – just as much as summer. There are new theatre shows taking over the stages of the West End and belong, artistic masterpieces forming the focus of fresh exhibitions at the city’s art galleries and still plenty of music festivals galore. The parks are covered in crunchy leaves and perfect for an autumnal walk and there are plenty of places in the city to head to for a day out. Weekends are ready to be filled with nostalgic fun of exhibitions like Power Up or intellectually stimulating events like New Scientist Live. There are series that celebrate our city, like Totally Thames Festival and the annual architectural extravaganza Open House, and others that offer a different perspective on our streets, buildings and communities. Yes, autumn is here and there is a bountiful harvest of brilliant stuff to get up to. Better start filling up your diary.  Want more? Find out what else is happening in September, October, and November 2024.    

Has movie music ever been better? With legends like John Williams and Howard Shore still at work, Hans Zimmer at the peaks of his powers, and the likes of Jonny Greenwood, AR Rahman, Mica Levi, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross knocking it out of the park, the modern film score is a Dolby Atmos-enhancing feast of modernist compositions, lush orchestral classicism and atmospheric soundscapes.What better time, then, to celebrate this art form within an art form – with a few iconic soundtracks thrown in – and pay tribute to the musicians who’ve given our favourite movies (and, to be fair, some stinkers) earworm-laden accompaniment? Of course, narrowing it all down to a mere 100 is tough. We’ve prioritised music written for the screen, but worthy contenders still missed out, including Dimitri Tiomkin’s era-defining score for It’s a Wonderful Life and Elton John’s hummable tunes for The Lion King.To help do the narrowing down, we’ve recruited iconic movie composers, directors and broadcasters like Philip Glass, Carter Burwell, Max Richter, Anne Dudley, AR Rahman, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, Edgar Wright and Mark Kermode to pick their favourites. Happy listening!Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all time.🪩 The 50 best uses of songs in movies.💃 The greatest musical movies ever made.

While London has stacks of family-friendly things to do – from parks and museums to play areas and activity centres – it’s always nice to treat the kids (and yourself) to a day trip. Luckily, you'll find fresh air and adventure just an hour or two outside the city's hectic centre. Whether you’ve got a Saturday, half term or summer holiday to fill, we’ve got plenty of ideas for London day trips with kids, by train or by car. You’ll find brilliant ideas for animal lovers, daring adventurers and youngsters (and parents) who just want to run free in the great outdoors. From ancient castles and retro theme parks to enchanted trains and real-life steam engines, these are London’s best family-friendly day trips, all within easy reach of the capital.   RECOMMENDED: The best day trips from London RECOMMENDED: The best areas of natural beauty near London

There’s a limit to how much you can say about Francis Bacon; to how many times you can talk about viscerality, the anguish of existence, the torment of love, etc etc etc, over and over. But we’ve apparently not reached that limit yet, because the National Portrait Gallery’s put on a big show of Frankie’s portraiture, and someone’s got to tell you if it’s worth 23 quid. Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was a giant of modern art, maybe the twentieth century’s greatest painter. He’s been analysed and over-analysed for decades. It makes you walk into this exhibition (coming only two years after the Royal Academy’s Bacon show) and think ‘oh god, more Bacon? I’m already full, my cholesterol is going through the roof!’ Little bacon joke for you there. But then you  see the paintings – the writhing bodies, the contorted grimaces, the screaming faces – and damn it, call your cardiologist, you’re ready for another helping. The show isn’t particularly well-organised , but it doesn’t matter. It starts with a pope and ends with a violent triptych of his lover George Dyer, and in between it journeys from friends to romantic partners to fellow artists and visions of himself. And the majority of it is stunning. The opening corridors are filled with skeletal, corpse-like figures, shrouded in black and grey, locked in the cages he framed so many of his sitters in. Some are screaming into the void, others hang awkwardly in the darkness. There are some rare, strange Bacons here. There’s a twisted multi

The everyday has radical poetic potential in Haegue Yang’s work. The South Korean artist looks at blinds, envelopes, drying racks and paper and she sees dance, sculpture and movement. You enter this show through a curtain of clanging metal bells to be greeted by laundry drying racks, all stacked and twisted and draped with lightbulbs. Abstract images on the wall are made out of collaged graph paper and envelopes, big movable sculptures are made of straw, Venetian blinds, fluorescent lightbulbs. A bundle of her stuff out of storage is piled into some kind of structure. Yang improvises everyday objects into sculptures, drawings, into art. By the time you see her shrine-like compositions made of origami paper and big creatures made of straw, you realise that Yang is trying to relate the everyday and the domestic to ideas of the ritual, the historic and the sublime. It’s a quest to find spiritual meaning in the drudgery of daily life. This thought is expressed best in the straw beings and in the upstairs galleries, where sound, scent and video combine. Venetian blinds are draped over sinks and lightbulbs, making domestic minimalist sculptures. The best work combines a concerto by Korean contemporary classical composer Isang Yun with a huge structure made out of blinds. This is when the romantic, radical poetry of everyday things comes most alive, though that may be more due to the angular, emotive music than the sculpture. Yang’s ideas are nice enough, but too well trodden and to

A vast engine spins, spilling noxious, viscous liquid onto the floor of the Turbine Hall. Mire Lee’s machine is draped in tentacles which ooze and flop around, drenching the cavernous space. The Korean artist’s machine isn’t useless, it produces, it makes products. Hung from the ceiling of the Turbine Hall, stretched taut on metal frames, are countless ‘skins’; ripped, clay-coloured fabrics which look like leather made from some unknown creature…maybe even made from humans. And that’s the point. By dragging the Turbine Hall’s industrial past back into the present, reanimating the corpse of Britain’s power, she’s talking about the human cost of industry, the shocking violence of manufacturing, the exploitative drive of capitalism. This is where it ends up: a broken, rusting machine spewing out vile, useless products at shocking human cost. Over the course of the exhibition, more skins will be produced and hung grimly from the ceiling. Does it look a bit like a steampunk laundrette, or the world’s least appetising butcher shop? Totally, but it’s still the best Turbine Hall installation for years. The machine itself looks like a flayed body, its flesh suspended from the rafters, its blood and plasma splashing on the concrete, its turnine a faltering, exposed heart; these are the remains of industry, the decrepit, shattered limbs of a manufacturing past that has been left to rot. It’s like all of modern society being forced to look in the mirror, and finding only a corpse staring

You know a gallery is absolutely winging it when they say their new show is an attempt ‘to fold or stretch time’ and ‘consider new conceptions of the “historical”’ while also being about climate change, clairvoyance and the ‘plasticity’ of the body. Which is to say that Raven Row is flying by the seat of its incredibly nonsensical pants in this exhibition somehow about all of those topics, curated by Denmark-based theorist and art historian Lars Bang Larsen. Trying to unravel why all this art’s been put in the same exhibition will melt your brain. There are psychedelic drawings by a tragic Belgian artist from the 1960s called Sophie Podolski, some fancy plant pots by Öyvind Fahlström, little Perspex sheets about international law and territory disputes by Dierk Schmidt, an extract from a film about baby development by Emanuel Almborg, psychic abstract paintings by Anu Ramdas…just writing this out makes me feel like I’m having an aneurysm. Some of it’s good – especially the incredible tapestries made as a collaboration between the Black Panthers and the Zapatistas – but good god in heaven what does any of it have to do with any of it. It’s kind of great as an exercise in total nonsense All this before you even realise that there are two - two!! - mini-exhibitions within the exhibition. Downstairs there’s a display of modernist tapestries, and upstairs (in the gallery’s amazing timewarp apartment which is rarely opened to the public) there’s a show filled with drawings, hair a

Nicola L. is not built for 2024. The Moroccan-born French artist (1932-2018) used her art to push a utopian, subversive agenda that sits pretty awkwardly with progressive modern politics. A film here comes with a warning that it was made back when attitudes towards cultural appropriation were different, the main installation comes with an apology that it’s not wheelchair accessible, and all the radical ideas here have been moved on from. But it’s still a lot of fun. She made furry suits that multiple people could wear at once to become one giant collective body (as did Lygia Clark, currently on show at Whitechapel Gallery), banners that double as masks for 11 faces emblazoned with the words ‘same skin for everybody’; there are jumpsuits to allow you to become the sky or the sun. It’s radical politics in the form of pyjamas. She got into film eventually, making an awesome video of hardcore punk legends Bad Brains tearing CBGBs to shreds in 1980. But her best work flirts with design, sculptures that double as furniture: chests of drawers shaped like women’s bodies, an iron shaped like a knob, a lamp that looks like luscious red lips. It's a sneering, clever use of design to kick back against misogyny. It’s not all great, and it hasn’t all aged particularly well, but it’s full of joy, anger, resistance, noise and loads of pyjamas. 

If you like GDPR training, you’re in for a treat at the Serpentine. Tech experimenters Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s series of mediaeval church altars and choral compositions is actually a deep dive into the intricacies and legal frameworks of AI modelling. The quasi-historical approach helps to make you feel safe in the uncomfortable, scary waters of new technology. An organ made of computer cooling fans heralds your entry into the space, it whirrs and hums out melodies composed by the artists. Its structure is adorned with gold curlicues, flower motifs and an engraving of some holy baby as if it’s a relic from an impossible church that’s both of the past and the future.  Then a choir of voices starts echoing through the space, but these voices are not real: they’re generated. Herndon and Dryhurst created a dataset by recording English choirs singing hymns they’d composed, and then prompted an AI model to make new music out of the information. The sound of the human choir is played in one of the rooms, echoing out of another ecclesiastical, sombre, church-like structure in silver and gold, mixing with its AI progeny as both sets of sounds echo through the galleries. A final room allows you to sing and have an AI choir respond. It’s the only bit that doesn’t quite work, sounding more like a cheap harmoniser pedal than the sonic tech of the new millennium. It’s presented like the early stages of some new cult All the solemn mediaeval aesthetics here are a bit ostentatious

What do you do when your world is falling apart? When regimes are oppressing, corporations are exploiting, society is crumbling and economies are collapsing? Well, you can fight, you can make art, or you can just live. The Indian artists in the Barbican’s big autumn show do all three. In 1975, India declared a state of emergency and suspended democracy; in 1998, it developed nuclear weapons. The 25 years in between were decades of total tumult, which all of the art here tries in some way to address. It’s a dizzyingly varied show. Navjot Altaf’s monochrome images of fists and mobs are angry, punk politicism, while Pablo Bartholomew’s photographs of parties and families are tender everyday intimacy. Nalini Malani’s early video work is a subtle, semi-abstract expression of disillusionment and anger, while Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings are desperate critiques of rampant, destructive urbanisation. All these different approaches all still similarly moving stories.  Other works show people trying to live, to get by, in difficult times; the everyday scenes of Gieve Patel’s paintings, the gay men just existing next to landmarks in a country where homosexuality was a punishable offence in Sunil Gupta’s photos. There’s a tangible sense of nostalgia and grief India was a place in flux, and places in flux need moulding, influencing, like in Sheba Chhachhi’s portraits of female activists. But in all this turbulence, things are lost, and there’s a tangible sense of nostalgia and grief to a

Chaos, noise, torture, lies, laughter and trauma. Mike Kelley’s show at Tate Modern is not an easy or comfortable place to be, and that’s how he would've wanted it. The hugely influential American punk-performer-poet-conceptual-weirdo died in 2012 after dedicating his life to a long, unstoppable process of constant, ceaseless subversion. This exhibition is room after room of conventions and expectations being undermined, twisted and destroyed. He came out of west coast art school CalArts in the 1980s with countless ideas about performance, minimalism and humour. He howls into rickety wooden megaphones, builds impossible birdhouses, advertises himself as a medium with ectoplasm spurting from his nose. He uses cardboard and whoopie cushions, creates an installation about a mythical monkey island. All of it surreally explores dozens of clashing ideas about belief, psychology and behaviour. It's the project he’d spend the rest of his career pursuing. In the late 1980s he got into the idea of adolescence. He plays with heavy metal imagery in amazing, juvenile banners, he defaces history textbooks, he draws piles of garbage, he recreates images from high school yearbooks, he makes installations out of stuffed toys that are filthy and gross (some of which were used for the cover of Sonic Youth's 'Dirty'). Adolescence is an in-between place where people are still being moulded, still have potential to undo the damage. The past is a place that’s constantly longed for, but impossible

Lygia Clark and Sonia Boyce, two artists separated by decades and continents, but brought together at the Whitechapel Gallery to explore their aesthetic connections and similarities. Does it work? Are they linked in some deep, profound, interesting way? No. Clark was a Brazilian modernist, who over the course of her career moved away from 2D geometric abstraction towards artworks you could touch and interact with, artworks that could shape your emotions. There are some beautiful examples of her clever abstract paintings and drawings here; a clash of white and green triangles, a piercing composition of sharp red and black spikes. But her ‘bichos’ are the real draw, neat little metal structures you can fold and reshape, allowing you to become an integral part of the art-making process. Later, Clark would get into psychology, creating artworks that had therapeutic uses; bags of ping pong balls that act as sensory toys, multiple jumpsuits sewn together forcing six people to function as one body. It might work as therapy, but it’s not great art. Then there’s a not-quite-successful attempt to show how Clark’s participatory artworks relate to English artist Sonia Boyce, who has also co-curated this show and whose work takes over the upstairs galleries. A 2006 video piece comes first, showing a white man and a Black woman having their hair braided together. It’s an incisive, tense metaphor for the awkward relation of the show’s title, people forced to find a way to share uncomfortabl

Bodies lie splintered, shattered, in pieces on the floor in Geumhyung Jeong’s installation at the ICA. Skeletal appendages – ribs, femurs, spines and skulls – are abandoned on the concrete, wires and motors and batteries left half connected to tibias and hips. Tables along the walls are littered with mechanical scraps and body parts. This robotic graveyard is a work in progress, the artist comes into the gallery periodically to try and desperately assemble a functional robot out of this detritus. She’s part-roboticist, part-choreographer, part-artist, on a quest to somehow make a living being out of the scraps of everyday technology. In the back room, screens show CCTV images of her welding, soldering, screwing robot pieces together. Now that spinal column twitches, a leg flexes, a head turns, but never successfully, never well. These things she builds flail and fall and fail You could ask, legitimately, why is it more interesting or better to watch an artist build a robot than, you know, a roboticist? Jeong is obviously less good at this than a robotic scientist, and the results of her work are tangibly less advanced, less useful, than anything coming out of literally any robotics lab anywhere in the world. These wouldn’t have been impressive robots 20, 30 years ago. So why should you care? In the end, it’s not about the robots, or the technology, it’s about the failure. It’s about Jeong trying to build a functional body - one that moves and dances and interacts - but const

You know how you get all tongue-tied and stupid, blushing and awkward, in front of someone way too beautiful? Monet will do that to you too. There are 21 views of the Thames here, 21 paintings almost too gorgeous to be real.  He came to London a couple of times, the old impressionist master. He stayed at the Savoy each time, and looking out from his balcony across the river, he saw in the fog of London a swirling miasma of psychedelic light. The play of sun and fog and smog created fields of orange and pink and grey and blue that smothered the bridges and choked the Houses of Parliament in a heavy blanket of pure colour. He came back again and again, eventually painting 120 images of Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. He wanted to show a bunch of them in London in 1905, but it’s taken until now to finally happen. It starts with sulphurous yellow and bubble gum pink, the pillars of Charing Cross Bridge just a series of green shoots growing out of the fetid river. And it only gets more abstract. Everything is sickly and pallid, belching fumes and thick smog. Then the sun tries desperately to poke out, but its rays are smothered. It’s reduced to a faint, weak dot fighting through the fog. It resets your eyes, forcing you to look and look and look It still has its power, though. Poke your head through to the next room and there it hangs above the gothic towers of Parliament, cursing the city to live under a blood-red pallor. The eight paintings o

‘Know thyself’ it says in thick red letters on a wall at this year’s Turner Prize exhibition. Those words, a directive from Ancient Greek priestess Pythia, are a common thread running through all four artists’ work: this is art about the urge, the desperate need, to figure out who you are. Pio Abad comes first, with a display exploring colonial history, lost narratives of oppression and the role of museums in perpetuating both. Abad spent time in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, diving into the archive and store rooms for hidden stories. Here he combines objects from the collection with his own reactions to them. There's a bloody, violent watercolour from an 1897 expedition to Benin, a vast drawing of a deer hide, marking the first contact between Native Americans and British colonists, there are recreations of jewellery from the collection of kleptocrats Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, bladed weapons from Mindanao in the Philippines. Taken together, this acts as an archive of centuries of global upheaval, colonial violence and political unrest. But in trying to take in everything from Pocahontas to Benin to Tsarist jewellery to museum collections to contemporary conflicts, it ends up pretty unfocused and unclear, like eight different exhibitions happening at once. Glasgow-based Jasleen Kaur’s installation is a space for gathering. A huge carpet sits under a false ceiling littered with objects: bottles of Irn Bru, Scottish money, pamphlets for the Indian workers union of Glasgow. Symb

Marking the art calendar’s annual marquee moment, Frieze London has opened the doors to its big tent. That means the general public finally gets to see what every major gallery in the world thinks is worth bringing to the big white yurt in Regent’s Park. If you come to Frieze looking for a satisfying, moving, profound art experience, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, this is a chance to take a big gulp of rarified art world air, to see what all the biggest galleries in the world – and some of the best smaller ones – think is worth sharing, celebrating, championing, and flogging. Is this year’s Frieze better than last year’s? Worse? No, it’s pretty much the same thing you always get: big trophy art, loads of abstracts, awful still lifes, bad pop and questionable conceptualism, all aimed at billionaires with infinitely more money than taste. There’s some great stuff here, and a genuinely jaw-dropping amount of dross too. Just like every year. It’s expensive, ludicrous, overblown, silly, and a lot of fun. Just like every year. It’s a pretty overwhelming experience - there’s a lot of art to take in, and it can be hard to separate the good from the bad. So here is our pick of the must-see artworks at Frieze London, just seven things we think are just about worth the price of entry. RECOMMENDED: 🎨 The ultimate guide to Frieze Art Fair London.🍁 The best art to see this autumn. Eight things we loved at this year’s Frieze London Stephen Shearer at Frieze, photo: Time Out Stephen Sh

One of Europe’s biggest art galleries is opening a London space next year, and it has found some seriously swish new digs. Perrotin – a Parisian art gallery which has represented some of the biggest names in art, including Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan and Sophie Calle – has announced that it will open its first London outpost in Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair in 2025.  The gallery will be taking over the five star luxury hotel's ‘Art Space’, a 350 square metre space that has hosted a rotating series of exhibitions since 2021.  Perrotin’s founder and director Emmanuel Perrotin said in a press release that ‘it’s important to have a gallery in the British capital. We have a long-standing relationship with the UK art scene and collectors. I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to set up the gallery in the right conditions. I’m delighted to offer our artists a new exhibition platform and new projects in such a prestigious environment.’ Perrotin already has multiple galleries in Paris, as well as outposts in New York, Las Vegas, Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai. It really is a proper international mega-gallery, and if you can't wait for its London outpost, you can see what Perrotin is up to at this year's Frieze art fair here. Perrotin will open in Claridge's in 2025. More details here. Can’t wait? Here are the top 10 exhibitions in London you can see right now.  Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and reviews to events and trends. Just follow our Time Ou

Are you healthy, robust and capable of staggering feats of endurance? Well, if you want to take on October’s insane number of exhibitions and art events, you’ll have to be in the shape of your life, because next month is a cultural ultra-marathon that’ll test even the fittest of art-thletes. Pretty much every museum is opening a big exhibition next month, as is every single gallery, all to coincide with Frieze. So here, we’ve compiled the best shows at London’s major institutions, the headline acts that you can’t afford to miss. 12 unmissable London art exhibitions and events in October 2024 Mike Kelley, Ahh...Youth! 1991. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved / VAGA at ARS, NY Mike Kelley: ‘Ghost and Spirit’ at Tate Modern In a dizzying collision of sculptural installations, found objects, performance and sound work, American artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012) tore apart ideas of America and youth. The results are often disconcerting, filled with stuffed toys and grime, but always about something essential, important, underground, powerful. This is art for the punks, the hobos and the freaks, so you normies better beware. Mike Kelley is at Tate Modern, Oct 2 2024-Mar 9 2025. More details here.   © Sonia Boyce.All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024Courtesy of the artist, APALAZZO GALLERY and Hauser & Wirth Gallery. Lygia Clark and Sonia Boyce at Whitechapel Gallery Forget boring old paintings on walls and sculptures on plinths, leading Brazilian modernis

Have you had enough of being bombarded with advertising? Well, so has Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. The guy who put a massive fake sun in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is now coming to Piccadilly Circus and blurring out all of its massive, famous digital advertising boards.  The new artwork, called ‘Lifeworld’, will take over the iconic screens in central London in October, and will be simultaneously shown in Seoul, Berlin and New York. The piece is created by feeding images of the public space in which it’s being shown directly back at viewers, but abstracted. ‘It’s not about banning the screens,’ he told the Guardian, ‘but the blur is an attempt to reach out and say, “Here’s something beautiful”. It’s about slowing down. It’s about tenderness. It’s about abstraction.’ It’s about tenderness, people.  Anyway, this Eliasson news comes hot on the heels (or at least tepid on the heels) of the announcement that he will be unveiling his first permanent sculpture in the UK, creating a ‘tide-trapping’ artwork in Cumbria.  Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Lifeworld’ will launch on Oct 1 at 8pm. Free. More details here. Want more art? Here, have the top ten exhibitions in London. Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and reviews to events and trends. Just follow our Time Out London WhatsApp channel. Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox. 

The newest sculpture to take over Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth has been unveiled today (Wednesday 18), and it’s an enormous monument to trans lives. The work, ‘Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant)’ by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, is a moving symbol of grief and solidarity made up of hundreds of plaster casts of the faces of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people. The 850 mask-like casts (each individually taken by Margolles in Mexico and London) will be arranged around the plinth itself, rather than placed on top of it. And being made of plaster, they will slowly erode and disintegrate in the damp British weather.  Mexico has the second highest murder rate for trans and gender-diverse people in South America, while violence against those same groups in the UK only recently hit a record high. Margolles’s work is a powerful tribute to the victims of that violence and hatred, and a defiant statement against transfeminicide. Photograph: James O Jenkins Margolles’s work will be in place for two years before being replaced by a work by American artist Tschabalala Self, with Romanian sculptor Andra Ursuta taking over in 2028. Find out more about both of those artworks here. The new Fourth Plinth sculpture, ‘Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant)’ by Teresa Margolles, was unveiled on Sep 18. More details here.Want more art? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London. Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news an

Picasso dabbled. The great master of 20th century art constantly tinkered, messed with and experimented with new forms and mediums beyond painting and drawing. He was big into sculpture, spent a lot of his later years making plates and pots, and the British Museum has just announced a big autumn show about another one of the many artistic arrows in his creative quiver: printmaking.  And there’s a lot to choose from, because Pablo made over 2,400 prints over the course of his career, taking in everything from the stark misery of the early Blue Period through his cubist experimentation and his later more freeform mark-making. This show will feature his earliest works from 1904 all the way to pieces from his 1968 series of 347 prints called ‘The 347 Suite’.The show will include the largest number of works from ‘The 347 Suite’ ever assembled, filled with Pablo’s etchings, drypoint and aquatints ruminating and looking back at his life and legacy. Picasso was prolific, inventive, innovative, experimental and special, so even if this is the 10,000th show dedicated to his work in London in the past 10 years, it’s still something to look forward to. ‘Picasso: Printmaker’ is at the British Museum from Nov 7. More details here. Can’t wait? Here are the top 10 exhibitions you can see in London right now.  Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and reviews to events and trends. Just follow our Time Out London WhatsApp channel. Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Tim

August is art’s time of slumber, a month absolutely bereft of exhibitions as all the galleries take an entirely undeserved break from the entirely unarduous task of putting on shows. But come September, and everything starts kicking off. Well rested and ready to fight, London's galleries are coming out swinging with a season of genuinely exciting exhibitions. There's impressionist megastars, post-impressionist megastars, expressionists, conceptualists, modernists and photographists. There's post-colonialism, pre-digitalism, post-androidism. There's everything you could possibly want, as long as you want loads of art.  14 London exhibitions to see this Autumn Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1888; © Musée d’Orsay Van Gogh: ‘Poets and Lovers’ If you pronounce it like an American, it’s time to Van Gogh crazy and if you pronounce it like the Dutch, then you’re going to need some Van Gogh syrup, because everyone’s going to absolutely lose it for Vincent this autumn. The National Gallery is going big on one of art history’s megastars, and they are not holding back. ‘Starry Night’? Got it. ‘The Yellow House’? It’s in here. Big hits, big ticket prices: welcome to 2024’s biggest blockbuster exhibition.  ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ is at the National Gallery, Sep 14 2024-Jan 19 2025. More details here. Zak Ové, The Mothership Connection, 2021, Gallery 1957. Frieze Sculpture at Regent’s Park Once again this October, Regent’s Park will play host to Frieze art fair and its calmer, mo

Autumn is the best time of year for art exhibitions in the UK, but before the country’s major institutions and galleries put on their big end of year shows you’ve still got the time to catch their summer extravaganzas. This is your last opportunity to see everything from clever, funny installation art to big, imposing sculptures at country houses, powerful Black painting to immersive conceptualism. Seven UK exhibitions closing soon   Dion Kitson, installation view, courtesy Ikon, photo by Tom Bird   Dion Kitson at Ikon, Birmingham, until Sep 8 Kitson, in his first ever institutional show, brilliantly and often hilariously mixes found objects and weird ephemera, to take weird, funny, satirical stabs at British culture. This is a minimal, stark, and often silly look at the way British towns are slowly but inexorably falling to pieces.  More details here. Ewen Spencer, Necking, Twice as Nice, Ayia Napa, 2001 at Focal Point Gallery, Courtesy the artist. ‘After The End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024’ at Focal Point Gallery, Southend on Sea, Until Sep 14 The ubiquity, affordability and availability of the camera has made it an essential tool for countless contemporary artists. Here, Focal Point Gallery looks at how working class photographers use cameras to document the reality of everyday life in the UK.  More details here. Lynda Benglis at Turner Contemporary, installation view. Copyright and courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo by Beth Saunders.  

Fashion lovers are going to lose their heads over the V&A’s big autumn 2025 exhibition, focusing as it does on the sartorial tastes of one of history’s most notable bonce droppers. 'Marie Antoinette Style' will look at Marie Antoinette, the French queen who was put to the guillotine in 1793 during the French Revolution, and her enduring impact on fashion, design and culture, as well as ‘the origins and countless revivals of the style shaped by the most fashionable queen in history’. It’s just one of many big blockbusters that the V&A has announced for next year. The other shows coming include a look at the glamorous, glitzy history of French luxury brand Cartier (Apr 12-Nov 16 2025) and ‘Design and Disability’ (Jun 7 2025-Feb 15 2026) a celebration of the impact of people with disabilities on the course of fashion and design in what the museum is describing as ‘both a celebration and a call to action. The exhibition will show where and how disabled, Deaf, and neurodiverse people and communities have always been important and radical contributors to design history and contemporary culture.’ Over at Young V&A in Bethnal Green meanwhile, ‘Making Egypt’ (Feb 15-Nov 2 2025) will give young historians the opportunity to uncover all sorts ancient gods, myths and legends from the land of the pharaohs.  'Marie Antoinette Style' will be at the V&A from Sep 20 2025. More details here.  Can’t wait? Here are some exhibitions you can see right now.

Talvez já tenha ouvido a grande notícia. Não, não é sobre guerras, economia ou fome. Não, a grande notícia é esta: os Oasis estão de volta. Para celebrar este importante, este monumental acontecimento, Londres vai acolher uma grande exposição de objectos ultra-raros da banda, em Outubro. A ter lugar no The Cumberland Hotel em Marble Arch, a exposição – intitulada “Together We'll Fly” – reunirá a maior colecção de sempre de memorabilia dos Oasis, e contará com merchandise autografado, passes para os bastidores, malas de avião e muitas das guitarras de Noel Gallagher. “Eles definiram uma geração e todas as gerações seguintes”, disse Kyle Dale, uma das pessoas por trás da exposição, porventura exagerando um bocadinho. “Para os fãs, ver esta colecção, desde a primeira demo até aos seus actuais projectos a solo, é uma verdadeira experiência única.” Esta experiência única é a segunda iteração desta exposição em particular, com a anterior a ter lugar em Manchester no passado mês de Junho. No entanto, esta é maior e mais abrangente, e contará também com uma série de perguntas e respostas apresentadas pelo jornalista musical John Robb. “Together We'll Fly” estará no The Cumberland Hotel, de 18 a 20 de Outubro. Mais detalhes e ingressos aqui. Como comprar bilhetes para os concertos dos Oasis + Tudo o que tem de saber sobre o MEO Kalorama

オアシスが再結成するという、重大かつ重要なニュースはもう聞いただろうか。この記念碑的で非常に重要な出来事を祝して、2024年10月にロンドンで「超」レアなオアシスの記念品を集めた展覧会が開催される。 マーブル・アーチにある「The Cumberland Hotel」を会場とするこの展覧会のタイトルは「Together We'll Fly」。オアシスの記念品コレクションの展示としては過去最大規模となり、サイン入りグッズやバックステージパス、フライトケース、ノエル・ギャラガーが実際に使っていたギターなどが並ぶ予定だ。 この展覧会の関係者の一人であるカイル・デイルは、オアシスとこの展覧会について、次のように語っている。 「彼らは一世代を定義し、その後の全ての世代を定義しました。ファンにとって、彼らの初期のデモから現在のソロプロジェクトまでを網羅した決定的なこのコレクションを見ることは、まさに一生に一度の体験だといえるでしょう」 この特別な展覧会は、6月にマンチェスターで開催されたものの巡回企画。しかし、今回はより大規模で包括的なものとなり、音楽ジャーナリストのジョン・ロブが主催するQ&Aセッションも行われるという。 「Together We'll Fly」の開催期間は10月18日（金）〜20日（日）。チケットのイベントのウェブページで購入できる。 関連記事 『There’s an exhibition of ultra-rare Oasis memorabilia coming to London（原文）』 『テキサス発祥の人気のフェス「SXSW」がロンドンに上陸』 『ロンドンでダミアン・ハーストの無料絵画展が開催』 『ロンドンで大人気の舞台「となりのトトロ」がウエストエンドへ移籍』 『ロンドン交通局、地下鉄などをよりアクセシブルしていく新計画を発表』 『普遍の熱帯音楽、Septeto Bunga Tropisの髙井汐人にインタビュー』 東京の最新情報をタイムアウト東京のメールマガジンでチェックしよう。登録はこちら  

The National Gallery is currently in the middle of renovating its Sainsbury Wing, and a ‘time capsule’ has been found buried inside one of the building's columns. But it doesn’t contain treasures from the past or a warning for the future; instead it’s a letter from one of the wing’s main founders, John Sainsbury, complaining that the column itself is an architectural error and he wishes had never been built.  That’s right, it’s a whinge from the past. As The Art Newspaper reports, the letter, from 1990, finds Sainsbury criticising the architects (Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown), for placing two decorative false columns in the middle of the gallery’s foyer despite his objections. The architects (who Sainsbury was otherwise happy with) seemingly had no idea about the secret letter, because Sainsbury wandered into the space during construction and just popped the letter in the column without anyone else being made aware.  The perfectly succinct letter, on Sainsbury’s supermarket letterhead, reads: ‘If you have found this note you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been placed in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. I believe that the false columns are a mistake of the architect and that we would live to regret our accepting this detail of his design. Let it be know that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary columns’. A rare example of b