Eddy Frankel

This city is absolutely rammed full of amazing art galleries and museums. Want to see a priceless Monet? A Rothko masterpiece? An installation of little crumpled bits of paper? A video piece about the evils of capitalism? You can find it all right here in this city. London’s museums are all open as normal again, and the city’s independents are back in business. So here, we’ve got your next art outing sorted with the ten best shows you absolutely can’t miss. 

Art plays an essential role in London’s unparalleled and inimitable culture scene. It’s one of the city’s greatest and most vibrant creative scenes, and you can see it almost everywhere. There are an estimated 1,500 permanent exhibition spaces in the capital, most of them free. Whether you’re looking for contemporary or classical, modernism or old masters, there’s a gallery catering to your next art outing. But after you’ve exhausted the latest art exhibitions in London, choosing a gallery can be tricky business. So we’ve created a shortlist of all the London galleries you need to visit. Organised by size and including institutions like the National Gallery and independent stalwarts like the White Cube, we present the 50 best galleries in London.  RECOMMENDED: All the best art, reviews and listings in London.

For a genre obsessed with corpses and morgues, death metal is showing some pretty encouraging signs of life. It’s nothing compared to the genre’s 1990s heyday of Cannibal Corpse having a cameo in ‘Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’ or Napalm Death performing on ‘TFI Friday’, but in 2023 the scene is reaching a peak of critical engagement and popular respect it hasn’t seen for a long, long time. It’s impressive, considering its mix of guttural vocals, blastbeat drums, noise, atonality, morbidity and vast walls of distortion.  American bands like psychedelic alien-obsessives Blood Incantation and death metal labels like 20 Buck Spin are lauded and loved way beyond metal circles; the likes of Undeath and Gatecreeper are crossing genre boundaries; gigs and festivals are selling out; Cannibal Corpse T-shirts are being worn by Kardashians: it’s all kicking off.  Photograph: Okay Mike And in among this rising international tide of death metal popularity, British bands are carving out their own identity, reducing the genre to its barest, bleakest elements. Some are even calling it the New Wave of British Death Metal, in a nod to both the 1970s denim-and-leather pomp of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Saxon (known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal), and to the UK’s place in the history of death metal itself, thanks to 1980s originators like Bolt Thrower, Carcass and Napalm Death.  Rising from the grave As you’d guess from the name, the New Wave of British Death Metal is a uniquely Briti

London’s gallery scene just can’t be killed. Pandemics, economic downturns, Brexit, shifts in fashion, insane rent hikes: none of it has stopped the number of galleries in this city from growing and growing. And that, obviously, is a very good thing for art lovers, because it’s in the smaller, newer spaces that the younger, weirder artists get to flourish. If you want to take the pulse of art in this city, these are the galleries to jab your fingers into, and you’ll find that the blood is very much still pumping.

Could the British Museum finally be on the verge of sending back the Parthenon Marbles? For decades, the museum’s controversial position has been that the Parthenon Marbles (brought to Britain by Lord Elgin in hugely dodgy circumstances in the nineteenth century) are legally theirs, and that they had no intention of even contemplating sending them back. And anyway, to do so would require an act of parliament, and nobody’s got time for that. So things weren’t looking too rosy for the repatriation situation. But in November 2022, rumours bubbled up that secret talks had been held between George Osborne – the Chairman of the BM’s board of trustees – and Greek officials. Those rumours were confirmed as true, and then in early January 2023, The Telegraph reported that a deal had actually been drawn up that would see at least some of the Parthenon Marbles returned to Greece on long-term loan. An exciting development, for sure, but how likely is it? Is it all talk, or is the BM really about to lose its marbles?   It’s not as clear or optimistic as the headlines would imply. The BM says the marbles were acquired legally, and therefore belong to them. Greek authorities dispute that, claiming that Lord Elgin’s expatriation of the sculptures was nothing more than theft. Either way, the British Museum’s collection is protected by the British Museum Act 1963 which legally prohibits the splitting up of national collections.  And it’s worth bearing in mind that this all comes in the wake of

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.

Every year is a good year for art in this city, thanks to our huge number of world class museums, galleries and art institutions, and 2023 is shaping up to be a doozy. From classical painting to modern installation, feminist trailblazers to political upstarts, it's got a bit of everything.  RECOMMENDED: The best art in London right now  

Every year, New Contemporaries brings together the UK’s best young artists and recent graduates and whacks them all under one roof (or two roofs, in the case of South London Gallery and its adjacent Fire Station space). It acts as a sort of state-of-play for young art in this country, a way to take the pulse of creativity in the UK. And this year's showing is as good as ever. There's a bunch of painting, loads of installation, plenty of cleverness and oodles of ideas. Here's our pick of the best of the bunch.  Rudy Loewe Rudy Loewe Ultra bright, ultra simple painting that’s full of joy, like Alex Katz at Carnival.  Zearo Zearo Zearo’s super simple portraits, some on homemade paper, are oddly intimate. They feel private, like you’re being let in on a secret just by looking at them. Danying Chen Danying Chen A puddle of green goo seeps out of a woman’s eye as a gaggle of gods leer over her. It’s brilliantly painted, intricate and filled with a tense, threatening aura. Charlotte Edey Charlotte Edey Edey’s striated, pixelated hand embroidery could represent eyes or pearls or breasts. Whatever they are, this feels like seriously spiritual, ceremonial, sacred geometry. Tom Bull Tom Bull A house is covered in thick black liquid, creating a  gloopy, sticky, tacky, gothic structure. Bull’s sculpture is vile, suffocating, diseased, but also somehow deeply attractive. Would cost at least £1800pcm to rent in Camberwell. Rosalie Wammes STUDIO STAGG Two big, clay structures – l

Picking the best London art exhibitions of 2022 is a little like picking your favourite child, if you had hundreds of kids and nearly all of them were awful. Sadly, 2022 will not go down as a great year for art: the pickings were slim. Galleries emerging from the pandemic had big bills hanging over their heads, and nothing pays off bills like boring painting, so we were treated to a whole year of incredibly dull canvases filled with images of absolutely nothing. It was peak banker art. There was also Damien Hirst. And Kaws. Honestly, it was more traumatic than the actual pandemic. I have never been to so many bad, cynical, tedious exhibitions in such a short space of time.  So these good ones are the exception, the few ugly ducklings who blossomed into art swans, or something.  Mike Nelson at Matt’s Gallery Mike Nelson, The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction), 2022, detail. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London. Master of sombre discomfort Mike Nelson returned to London (after his incredible Tate Britain installation in 2019) for a tiny show at Matt’s Gallery. The installation was just a small, suffocatingly claustrophobic bedroom filled with travel books. You got locked in and left to rot with your dreams of escape and freedom. Dreams that would never be fulfilled. The perfect post-pandemic punch in the face. Read the review here. Francis Bacon: ‘Man and Beast’ at the RA and ‘The First Pope’ at Gagosian Installation view, Francis Bacon, © The Estate of Fra

How did London’s world-famous museums acquire their magnificent permanent collections? Did they buy the fantastical objects they display? Ask for them nicely? Receive them as gifts? In some cases, yes, they absolutely did and it was all above board and ethical. But in a lot of cases, absolutely not. And the stories of how those objects came to be in British possession are often shocking and deeply shameful; they were acquired through conquest, colonialism, violence, war. Many were – essentially – stolen, looted. As a result, there are growing calls for them to be sent back to the countries they were taken from, for historic wrongs to be righted and for those treasures to be repatriated. The Maqdala Treasures, the Benin Bronzes, the Parthenon Marbles – all things that we got in dodgy circumstances, and all things their home countries want back. And as the years go by, those calls are sounding more and more like the right thing to do. Repatriation of cultural artefacts isn’t a new thing. Artworks looted and stolen from Jewish families during the Third Reich and World War II have been given back to their rightful heirs for decades. But repatriation isn’t straightforward. There’s literally a British law forbidding it; the British Museum Act 1963 was created to make it illegal to give looted and nicked treasures back to the people we looted and nicked them from. It’s a convenient excuse, really: ‘Can I please have this artefact back? You stole it from my ancestors when you conquer

Did cavemen invent immersive art? When they painted bulls and stags on cave walls, and lit them with flickering firelight, were they presaging Yayoi Kusama and teamLab? Some scholars think so, believing that palaeolithic cave art is a direct ancestor of the modern, technological art wonders that have become so popular. Others think that immersive art is a contemporary con, a clever ruse designed to separate punters from their cash with the promise of the perfect selfie. Con or caveman, it doesn’t really matter, because immersive art is absolutely everywhere, especially in London. We’ve got immersive Van Gogh and Klimt experiences, with classic art projected across the walls of Docklands warehouses; we’ve got immersive-specific art galleries like Superblue; we’ve got Kusama ‘Infinity Mirror’ rooms at Tate. We’re drowning in immersion.  The combination of technological wizardry, participatory high jinks, sensory overload and full-body experience has proved to be totally irresistible to London’s art-loving public. But it’s nothing new. Immersive art has been drawing the crowds in this city for decades.  Courtesy The Estate of Gustav Metzger and Hauser & Wirth © The Estate of Gustav Metzger and The Gustav Metzger Foundation There’s an argument to be made for theatre as the first truly immersive artistic experience in London – with new technology in the late nineteenth century leading to bigger, bolder, more intense production styles – but when it comes to art, things happened a

Ah, autumn, when the drizzle gets pumpkin spiced and the mould starts creeping back into your bathroom. But as we wave a sad goodbye to the warm weather, we also get to say a cosy, cheery hello to Frieze Sculpture, a now-regular way of feeling less miserable that winter is coming. Curated as usual by Claire Lilley from Yorkshire Sculpture Park, this year’s free installation of big public artworks is as strong as ever, and it’s totally free to visit. The works are dotted around Regents Park and feature some seriously big names. Here are five works you shouldn’t miss. Five artworks to see at Frieze Sculpture 2022 Emma HartPhoto by Linda Nylind Emma Hart, ‘Big Time’, 2022Sundials are a genuinely pointless idea in this damp, grey, moss-choked country – when do we ever get to see the sun?! But that hasn’t stopped the brilliant Emma Hart from making a whole bunch of them for Regents Park this autumn. And guess what, they’re gorgeous, funny and anthropomorphic, and they add some much needed colour to Regents Park. Ugo RondinoneFrieze Sculpture Park in Regents Park. Photo by Linda Nylind. 13/09/2022. Ugo Rondinone, ‘Yellow Blue Monk’, 2020This Swiss-born artist creates big, ultra-bright totems of primary coloured rocks, like Stonehenge done by 4 year olds. This giant menhir doesn’t stray too far from his usual artistic path; a big slab of blue rock with a little blob of yellow plonked on top. Playful, direct, childish and a lot of fun. Wood/HarrisonFrieze Sculpture Park in Rege

Some old people tell the same stories over and over again. They probably don’t mean to, they’re just a bit forgetful. And the National Gallery seems to have forgotten that the story of the Eurocentric birth of modernism has been told countless times. It’s the most written-about period of art history ever. The narrative of how Monet led to Cezanne who led to Van Gogh who led to Picasso is as overexposed, over-explored and over-baked as it’s possible for art to be.  So what could the National Gallery possibly have to tell you about European art from 1890 onwards that hasn’t already been written about and shown to death? Well, the answer is absolutely nothing. This is an exhibition filled with familiar big hits by familiar big names. Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard are all here, so are Klimt and Matisse and Picasso. You know these artists; you know how they shaped modern art, hell, you probably even know all of these paintings. This show has no reason to exist. It’s boring, uninventive, tired, safe and unnecessary. But, goddamn it, it’s beautiful. You want to be cynical, but then you walk in and see Cezanne’s mountain, Van Gogh’s snowfield, Signac’s shimmering pine and Gauguin’s tumbling sea and you get all tongue-tied like you’ve just bumped into your crush who is way, way, way out of your league. You just fall in love despite your cynicism, despite yourself.  So I guess we have to go over this again. The Impressionists – a group of French artis

Refusing to conform is meant to be dangerous. But Finnish artist Pilvi Takala shows that nonconformity is something much worse than dangerous: it’s uncomfortable. Takala pulls pranks, insinuates herself into everyday situations and tests everyone’s limits. It’s like ‘Trigger Happy TV’ but art, with all the laughs swapped for squirms.  In the earliest work on display, she’s filmed at a party for old Finnish couples. She’s overdressed, way too young and totally alone, waiting for a partner who never shows up. They take pity on her, invite her to dance, drink and share tables. But she remains a hauntingly discomfiting presence, an outsider making everyone’s night creak with tension and awkwardness. On the one hand, why is she there? But on the other, why shouldn’t she be?  You realise how fragile yet pervasive our conformity is Another video shows her dressed as Snow White and trying to get into Disneyland Paris. As kids stop her for photos, security guards try to kick her out for not being the ‘real’ Snow White but also somehow looking too much like the ‘real’ Snow White. ‘I thought the “real” Snow White was a drawing?’ she protests. She’s quietly, tensely, awkwardly testing the boundaries between capitalist reality and animated fiction.  The best work here uses hidden cameras to follow her on a month as a marketing trainee at Deloitte. Instead of working hard, making tea and looking busy, she stares blankly into space for hours and rides the elevator all day. When confronted

You can distract a baby with a rattle, a magpie with a shiny bit of metal and a Londoner with an immersive experience that’ll look great on TikTok.  That’s what ‘Thin Air’ is, a vast warehouse in the Docklands filled with intensely immersive laser light shows by various international artists and collectives that will get the likes flooding in for just £25. The production values are staggering: the lights are eye-burstingly bright, the sound is chest-rattlingly loud. It all looks incredible, but sadly it all means absolutely nothing.  In the first work, by James Clar, ‘your viewing distance is obscured’. Then 404.zero try to ‘redraw the space through light’ with a huge room of strobing red, art collective Setup ‘create ever-shifting boundaries in light and shadow’ with LEDs, Kimchi and Chip with Rosa Menkman ‘offer considerations on new ways of seeing or visual perception’ with smoke and mirrors, and Matthew Schreiber uses lasers to ‘reimagine light and space to explore unseen forces’. That’s a lot of fancy ways to say ‘Ooh, shiny lights’. Art should be about something, it should have ideas, purpose, meaning, sometimes maybe even emotion The UCLA Art Studio installation is different. You stand in front of a camera and a screen re-renders your image in different digital styles. It’s literally your selfies as art, TikTok filters as interactive gallery installation. Then you speak into a microphone and it turns your sounds into images, including the ripples of Joy Division’s ‘Un

The American south is a scarred land: scarred physically by farming, violence and war, and scarred emotionally by the brutal legacy of slavery. And out of those scars came some of the twentieth century’s most important cultural movements: blues and jazz. But far less appreciated is the visual art of the American south, a wrong the Royal Academy is trying to right with ‘Souls Grown Deep Like The Rivers’, an exploration of the paintings, sculptures and installations of Alabama, Georgia and their neighbouring states.  This isn’t the pristine, clean, easy art of the history books. This is the dirty, broken, rough, improvised art of the streets. The gallery is filled with chunks of driftwood and scraps of discarded metal. They’re assembled into the charred, vicious canvases of the influential Thornton Dial or welded into twisting new forms by his son Thornton Jr. Lumps of trash – wires, chairs, photocopiers – become semi-abstract assemblages in the hands of Lonnie Holley, sheets of corrugated iron become canvases for Mary T Smith. Everywhere you look there is spray paint and glue, rubbish and rust. Part of that is an aesthetic tendency towards the rough and makeshift, and part of it is necessity. These artists existed, and largely continue to exist, well outside of the established art system. Money is scarce, materials are scarcer, so they work with what they have to hand. It’s their world, literally, reshaped and put on display. Stunning geometric canvases of total artistic free

You can almost hear Denzil Forrester’s paintings. The Grenada-born British artist has been filling his canvases with images of London’s sweat-drenched reggae and dub dancehalls for decades, and now in his 60s, his work is still pulsating with the rhythm and movement of the clubs.  In his world of purples and pinks, speaker stacks are monolithic totems, limbs are blurs of movement. One work here shows his family sewing bags, a memory from when they first moved to Hackney; a speaker hangs in the background, sound as essential as an overhead light or cool air from a fan. Dreamy, foggy memories pervade these works, with visions of humid porches and undulating Caribbean hills in among the images of dancehalls and Black London partiers. Forrester’s no longer just painting the here and now of his London culture, but letting his past and childhood seep into the visual mix, meshing together into a joyous lilac and mauve portrait of his life. I don’t think they’re all great paintings, but they’re lovely, simplistic, super bold things, with Forrester letting his totally unique aesthetic just go wherever it wants. But one work here strips away the music and memories, leaving only the harsh brutality of real life for Black people in London. ‘Q’ shows a black girl, stripped almost naked, her hands clasped awkwardly together, a jacket thrown carelessly over her shoulders, barely concealing her body. Her clothes and phone lie on the floor. Around her stand three police offices, ominous prese

Lee Scratch Perry didn’t just dub music, he dubbed the whole world. The Jamaican sound pioneer took sonic source material and twisted it into untold trippy new shapes. And he did it with his art too. The works in this show are salvaged from his famous Black Ark studio in Jamaica – which he apocryphally burned to the ground in 1979 – and his later Blue Ark in Switzerland. The exhibition is exactly what you’d expect: a hectic tornado of found imagery, scrawled text and painted pictograms, all coalescing into a vibrant portrayal of how Perry’s brain worked.There are canvases across the walls, plastered in pages from science books, nature magazines and Perry’s own gig posters. They’re covered in images of Haile Selassie and Stone Cold Steve Austin, Jesus and a whole bunch of chimpanzees. He’s painted teardrops around them, written ‘supremacy’, ‘birds war’ and – over and over – his own name.  These are stuttering, no-holds-barred collages filled with visual samples from music, culture, religion and the cult of Lee Scratch Perry. There are stones all across the floor, folders filled with articles about how Perry was an afrofuturist visionary. It’s a total mess, a collision of Basquiat, pop and reggae culture that barely marks sense. If it was by anyone else, it would seem contrived, but it’s not, it’s by the brilliant Lee Scratch Perry. This is a portrait of a singular, eccentric genius, and genius is rarely anything but untidy.

If nothing else, you’ve got to admire Josef Albers’s obsessive dedication to one thing and one thing alone: colour. Across his long career, the hugely influential German modernist experimented endlessly with colour theory, toying with what worked and what didn’t, what melded and what clashed. A lifetime of tinkering led to a whole body of stunning colour studies, and the handful of works on display here are gorgeous. This is Albers’ ‘Variants/Adobe’ series, a bunch of abstract geometric experiments inspired by his trips to Mexico and the desert plains of the American Southwest. They find him messing with viewers’ perception of colour, over and over. No colour is meant to overlap here, instead, each contrasting shade is created by juxtaposition. Your brain perceives them one way in one context, another way in a different one. The ochre looks darker next to blood red than it does next to bile brown; yellow looks brighter next to green than next to beige, etc etc. Each little canvas here is a world of illusions, where your eyes are forced to compete with your brain to figure it all out. Each work is made of the same geometric elements: wide rectangles in the background, two pillars in front, all in slightly different dimensions. It could be a face with eyes, a cat’s ears, a building with two chimneys. You perceive all of it differently, individually. That’s Albers’s point: what you’re seeing isn’t a universal truth, it’s a personal one. The colours are yours to interpret, they’r

Porn is everywhere, just a click away, as freely available as celeb gossip and pictures of your friends’ lunch.  But until 1967, any representation of the male nude which even hinted at homosexuality was subject to the Obscene Publications Act. Horniness – and specifically queer horniness – was illegal, so homosexual desire was forced underground. That didn’t stop it from flourishing, obviously, and the results are all over this in-depth exhibition of photos of male bodies from all across London from the 1950s to the 1980s. Despite the brutal repression of homosexuality, London was full of places where it quietly flourished. Bodybuilder Spencer Churchill flexes at the Serpentine Lido for the photographer Paul Hawker, young men lounge in the nude at Highgate Men’s Pond for John S Barrington, tough lads whip off their shirts in King’s Cross for Martin Spenceley. London was alive with eroticism, you just had to know where to look.  This show is a celebration, a glorification of the male form  And once you knew, you could purchase. Lots of the images here skirt around the legality of the male nude by being available in bodybuilding magazines, or as a catalogue of physiques for fitness buffs to emulate at home. One amazing image shows Spencer Churchill tensed and glistening while wearing a posing pouch that you could scratch off to reveal the goods beneath. It’s a fascinating portrait of hidden mid-century male desire in London. But there are ethical questions here too. John S Ba

BOB is a complex character. It’s not just some bloke, it’s an AI lifeform, or a series of AI lifeforms, invented by artist Ian Cheng. BOBs have been generative artworks, films, installations, all with minds of their own. BOB even took over the Serpentine in 2018 as a menagerie of AI animals. Cheng’s work is complex, multi-layered, filled with lore. BOB even has its own wiki.  And it appears here in this latest work as a character in an anime about a young girl called Challice, whose scientist father melds her personality with an AI. Where is the line between human consciousness and artificial intelligence? Who is making the decisions? Challice becomes more and more BOB-like, the tech takes over. It’s intense, ultra-smart, hectic. If you go in the mornings, you can pause the film with an app, explore the different elements on screen. In the afternoons, it switches to cinema mode.  Upstairs, a generative video follows the trials and tribulations of Challice’s pet turtle as it tries to navigate her room. It’s real, it’s intelligent; a live simulation of a digital turtle figuring the world out in real time.  But Cheng’s so big on ideas and tech experimentation that the actual aesthetic results feel like an afterthought. If the film was better scripted, more beautifully made, we’d have something genuinely excellent. Instead, the execution just doesn’t match up to the ideas.Which is a shame, because the ideas are awesome. Cheng uses BOB to ask big, sweeping questions about the natu

You shouldn’t give kids drugs. But if you do, you should film it. That’s what Haroon Mirza did. He arranged a kids’ mushroom-tea ceremony (not the psychedelic kind, but dizziness-inducing fly agaric), complete with gongs, singing bowls and wafts of smoke. The results are shown here accompanied by self-playing bongos and throbs of synthesiser drones, emitting steady tones at 111khz. The frequency is meant to heal, the mushroom tea is meant to collapse time. The installation builds and builds in intensity, gets louder and louder, the bongos start to play themselves, the drone pulsates, all reaching a fever pitch of sound and light, a hippy drum circle come to life. You don’t see a whole lot of tripping kids, but that’s not the point. It’s about the moment, the transcendence.  Next door you find more deep throbs, a solar panel tied to a rock and some lasers. Upstairs, three ant colonies are powered by more speakers and solar panels, little micro-universes of critters going about their lives in their non-hierarchical societies.  You could see all this as art about alternate ways of living, about psychoactive drugs, ant societies, and healing frequencies in a late capitalist world where those things genuinely feel like an escape. Though obviously Mirza is exploring these systems of belief, I’m not sure the engagement with those ideas is that deep or that serious here. Does Mirza really want us to live like ants? Does he really think frequencies can heal? Or – more likely – is he j

There’s one pretty notable difference between ‘David Hockney: Bigger & Closer’ and the other immersive experiences in town: the artist is alive. All the other ones just involve the organisers taking pivotal historic – dead – artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt, wiping their arses with their legacies, and then charging the public to look at the smears. Frida and Gustav didn’t get to have a say in what’s been happening to their art. But David Hockney is fully involved in this shit. And that matters. Immersive art is big business, but it’s just projections of old paintings. Hockney’s installation at brand new immersive art and theatre venue Lightroom is meant to be different. It’s meant to be better.  Lightroom sends you descending deeper and deeper into the bowels of King’s Cross, until eventually you stumble on a room erupting with digital colour. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling projections show Hockney paintings of flowers and valleys and fields and copses. There’s a section on the history of perspective, a little live-action bit about theatre. Rousing, throbbing classical music soundtracks every eruption of green and yellow. Hockney narrates, talking about how he likes painting and flowers and spring. It’s just photos of goddamn paintings Some of the works are adaptations of his digital iPad drawings, others are huge renderings of his massive recent landscape paintings, or classic older Hockney images. And then it sort of hits you that you’re just loo

There’s nothing left in Mike Nelson’s art. No life, no soul, no humanity. Only ghosts, dereliction and emptiness. The British artist specialises in narratives of abandonment, creating discomfiting immersive experiences filled with only the remnants of lives once lived. He wants you to untangle the webs he weaves, and they are very, very tangled.  His massive show at the Hayward starts in the dark. ‘I, Imposter’ is a room filled with doors and shelves stacked with old floorboards and light fixtures, all bathed in blood-red light. It’s an old Nelson installation, packed up and whacked in storage. These are doors to buildings that no longer exist, synagogues and Turkish social clubs that were long ago demolished. They can no longer lead you into their private worlds because those worlds are gone.  More doors follow. ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ is a labyrinth of countless filthy empty rooms: a bar, a gambling den, a prayer room. There are sleeping bags strewn across the floor, cigarette butts extinguished in a rush, ceiling fans left whirring despite the occupants of this dilapidated space having vanished. This was a hot place, drenched in smoke and sweat. But there was hope here too. Something was being built, a world for travellers tired of travelling, dreaming of making something new. But they failed. Failed and fled. All that hope is now gone. Who were they? Where did they go? What were they building? It’s disorienting, dizzying, scary and brilliant.  It’s disorientin

イギリスが誇るアーティストであるギルバート＆ジョージは、自分たちの重要性と遺産を誇示することをためらわない。その証拠に2023年4月1日（土）、ロンドンのスピタルフィールズに自分たちの作品だけを集めた美術館「Gilbert & George Centre」をオープンすることになった。彼らがこうしたスペースをオープンするというニュースは数年前に伝えられ、建物の工事も2015年に始まっていたが、それがいよいよ実現する。 この美術館は、近くのフォーニアー・ストリートにある彼らの有名な自宅と同じような、3階建てのジョージアン様式のタウンハウスを改装してオープン。3つの展示空間のほかにリサーチセンターも置かれ、年に「1つか2つ」の展覧会が開かれる予定だ。 ギルバート＆ジョージを扱うギャラリー「タデウス・ロパック」は公式ウェブサイトで、「（ここは）彼らの芸術的遺産のための永久的な家。訪問者に彼らの歴史的な絵や新しい絵にできるだけ広くアクセスできるようにし、また彼らの活動に関する研究と学術のための場所にしていきます」とコメントしてる。 オープニング展覧会は、イギリス初公開の「The Paradisical Pictures」となる。この展示で彼らは、自分たちなりの天国を表現。生い茂った緑、腐った花、性的な風刺、そしてもちろん彼らの絵でう埋め尽くされるものになりそうだ。 この展示について彼らは、「ほとんどの人が天国を『アフターパーティー』と思っているようだが、我々は『イク前のパーティー』と考えている」と、絶妙な言い方で説明している。 関連記事 『Gilbert & George are opening their own museum in London next month（原文）』 『東京、2月から3月に行くべきアート展』 『日本初、藤田嗣治の作品だけを常設展示した美術館が軽井沢にオープン』 『パリのルーヴル美術館が来館者数を1日3万人に制限』 『ジャコメッティの作品を集めた新しい美術館がパリに誕生』 『デイヴィッド・ホックニーがロンドンの新スペースで没入型展を開催』 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  

If you’ve ever needed a sign to go to Somerset House, this is it, because its courtyard is about to be filled with giant spiralling motorway signs. It’s part of an installation by Indian artist Jitish Kallat called ‘Whorled (Here After Here After Here)’ and features huge signs for destinations around the world and out into the universe. Two 168-metre spirals will twist and interlock in the middle of the vast neo-classical courtyard, all based on the ‘visual language’ of UK motorway signage. It’s not just a tangled mess of motorway signs, though. Kallat’s work ‘draws upon sacred geometry and alchemical diagrams’, allowing visitors who walk through it and see their distance from the moon, distant stars and Scunthorpe.  It’s about how everything is connected on a cosmic level, but it also carries a warning, because many of the places mentioned on the signs have been badly impacted by rising sea levels, while others are under immediate threat of flooding, something which hits pretty close to Somerset House considering its proximity to the Thames.  Alongside the installation itself, there are also plans for performances in and around the work in April. ‘Whorled (Here After Here After Here)’ is at Somerset House, Feb 16-Apr 23. Free. More information here. Want more art? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London. Want more art, but free? Here you go.  

National art treasures Gilbert & George aren’t shy about hyping up their own importance and legacy. And to prove it, they’re opening their very own museum, dedicated to themselves, in Spitalfields on the first of April. The Gilbert & George Centre is a three-storey Georgian townhouse, just like their own famous home on nearby Fournier Street, which will be home to three exhibition spaces, a research centre and will present ‘one or two’ exhibitions a year.  The space will be ‘a permanent home for Gilbert & George’s artistic legacy… providing visitors with the widest possible access to their historical and new pictures, as well as a place for research and scholarship on their practice’. This has been a long time in the offing, with the original announcement of the gallery/museum space circulating years ago (they’ve been working on the building since 2015), but it looks like it’s finally going to happen.  The opening exhibition is set to be the first UK showing of ‘The Paradisical Pictures’, which find the artists occupying their own version of heaven, filled with overgrown greenery, rotting flowers, sexual innuendo and, of course, Gilbert & George. ‘We will start with “The Paradisical Pictures” because we realise that most people think of paradise as “the after party” and we think of this as the pre-cum party,’ they say, which is as good an explanation as any. The Gilbert & George Centre opens at 5a Heneage St on Apr 1. More information here. Want more art? Here are the top te

London is the best city in Europe for street art, according to a new report. More specifically, Shoreditch is the place to be if you want to breathe in paint fumes and learn the difference between graffiti and graffito (one’s plural, the other’s singular, naturalmente). The report is the result of what is no doubt some very rigorous, serious, scientific research conducted by a website called Radical Storage (if you didn’t think there was anything radical about storage, just wait until you see what they can do with an Ikea Kallax), which looked at social media data for users tagging images as #streetart in specific locations across platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest. Shoreditch nabs top spot as ‘Europe’s hotspot for street art’ thanks to the ‘combination of social-media engagement for the district’s street art, as well as volume and quality of art pieces registered online.’ Separately, London as a whole is ‘the best city overall for street art’, due to being ‘the most engaged city on social media for street art’.  Other popular street art destinations included the Trastevere neighbourhood in Rome, which is ‘the most popular neighbourhood for street art on social media’ (though it’s unclear how that’s different from being ‘Europe’s hotspot’ or ‘the best city overall’), Mitte in Berlin and Montmartre in Paris.  Radical Storage (seriously, they have a way with a cardboard box you wouldn’t believe) has also figured out that the most popular art destinations in Europe h

Take a trip through Disney history as the animation/theme park/kids’ entertainment behemoth celebrates 100 years of mice, belles and snowmen with a major new exhibition. And not just any exhibition, but an immersive one, because it wouldn’t be 2023 if you couldn’t immerse yourself in something at some point. ‘Wonder of Friendship: The Experience’ will be a journey through the friendships of Disney’s best-loved characters, taking place in the surprising environs of brutalist former office block 180 The Strand.  Best known for trippy, high-production-value, ultra-cutting-edge video art exhibitions, this is 180 getting a little more family-friendly. The show will feature 1,000 square metres of installations all themed around ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Lilo & Stitch, ‘The Lion King’ and Mickey and Friends. Visitors will be able to trip down Alice's rabbit hole, smell the scents of Lilo & Stitch’s Ohana Bay, and dance with Donald and Goofy. The whole thing is aimed at young adults and visitors will be able to use QR codes to bring characters to life in augmented reality. Tickets are £17.50 and are on pre-sale to H&M members here, but the show is only on for just over a week before it travels to Germany and France, so availability will be very limited. And even though it’s aimed at young adults, it’s totally fine to be fully grown and still love Disney. We won't take the Mickey. ‘Wonder of Friendship: The Experience’ is at 180 The Strand. May 12-21. Tickets available here. Want more i

The world has been gripped by Yayoi Kusama fever for years now. The 93-year-old Japanese artist is everywhere, and everyone’s cashing in: fans queue day and night for her exhibitions; the Tate’s ‘Infinity Rooms’ are sold out months in advance, despite only allowing visitors two minutes in each room; her artwork sells for millions; her polka dots are on T-shirts and tea-towels.  But that fever seems to have reached record new temperatures, and it looks like everyone’s brains have been boiled. Luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton has collaborated with Kusama – or at the very least her studio – for its latest 450-piece collection, and has decided that the best way to flog these exorbitant wares is with an army of terrifyingly lifelike animatronic versions of the artist in all of their shops, staring at visitors, waving benevolently and potentially stealing their souls. We went down to Louis Vuitton’s New Bond Street store (there’s another one in Harrods) to see if we could withstand her withering robotic gaze, and it was as uncomfortable as you’d imagine staring at an animatronic version of a beloved (but very old and vulnerable) artist would be. Crowds of people were gathered outside the window, waiting for Robo-Kusama to lifelessly nod or wave. There was an eerie hush, punctured only by startled murmurs when the robot moved, with people taking pictures and mainly asking each other ‘who is that?’ It had the air of a medieval village freakshow, the serfs coming out to gawp at some

The Queen was given her first corgi at the age of seven, and it triggered a lifelong love of the oblong canines that became one of the long-serving monarch’s defining characteristics. Sure, some rulers may be remembered for brokering peace deals, or humanitarian work, or amassing important collections of priceless art. But not our Liz; her thing was low Welsh dogs.  And now a display at the Wallace Collection is set to celebrate that passion for pooches with pictures of the Queen and her beloved corgis from throughout her life. There are images of her with her first dogs Jane and Dookie in 1936, cradling Susan as a puppy in Windsor Castle in 1944, flanked by a pack of the things on the way from Balmoral to London in the 1960s. And it’s not just corgis on display, but dorgis too, a breed made when one of the Queen’s corgis boinked her sister Princess Margaret’s dachshund Pipkin. Inbreeding is clearly a very royal hobby.  It doesn’t end there, though, because the Wallace Collection is going absolutely barking mad at the same time with a major exhibition called ‘Portraits of Dogs from Gainsborough to Hockney’ (March 29-October 15), a proper historical exploration of dog portraiture.  It’s great news for lovers of royalty and canines, but a nightmare for all of us republican cat lovers. ‘The Queen and Her Corgis’ is at The Wallace Collection Mar 8-Jun 25. More details here. Can’t wait? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London you can see right now. Want more? Here’s some free a

2023年1月下旬、ロンドン中心部のジャーミン・ストリートに、3階建ての新しい写真ギャラリー「Centre for British Photography」がオープンする。 同ギャラリーは、有名なアートディーラーであるジェームス・ハイマンが設立。1900年から現在までの、イギリス在住もしくは同国で活動した経験を持つアーティストの作品にファーカスを当て、展覧会を通して紹介する。さらに外部キュレーターや地域の美術館とのコラボレーション、地域イベントなど、「写真」を軸にした企画も展開していくという。 オープニング展覧会は、2つ。一つは女性やノンバイナリーの人々が撮った写真を広める活動をしている組織「Fast Forward」とのコラボレーションとなる「Headstrong: Women and Empowerment」。もう一つは「The English at Home」というハイマン・コレクションで構成される展覧会で、家というプライベートな空間でのイギリス人の姿を探るものになるという。加えて、小規模だがヘザー・アジポンや才能あふれるジョー・スペンスなどの写真家やアーティストの作品も展示される。 展示替えは年に数回実施。トークショーやイベントなど、展示以外のプログラムも今後アナウンスされる予定だ。 「The Photographers' Gallery」や「V&A Photography Centre」、そして膨大な数の写真専門ギャラリーがあるロンドンは、「The Centre for British Photography」のオープンにより、ますます写真作品好きのパラダイスになるといえるだろう。 関連記事 『London’s getting a huge new photography gallery（原文）』 『東京、特殊写真館6選』 『東京、ベストギャラリー29選』 『東京、専門別図書館26選』 『六本木、定番アートギャラリーリスト』 『デイヴィッド・ホックニーがロンドンの新スペースで没入型展を開催』 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  

A brand new, three-storey photography gallery is due to open in Jermyn Street in central London this month, and guess what? It’s free. Founded by renowned art dealer James Hyman, the Centre for British Photography will feature work from 1900 through to the present day, with a focus on artists living and working in this country. There will be outside curators, collaborations with regional museums and community events, all with photography at their heart. The gallery is opening in late January with two main exhibitions. The first, ‘Headstrong: Women and Empowerment’, is a collaboration with Fast Forward, an organisation that promotes photography by women and non-binary people. The other exhibition is ‘The English at Home’, an exploration of us lot in our private spaces, all drawn from the Hyman Collection. Alongside those two shows will be smaller displays of work by photographers and artists like Heather Agyepong and the brilliant Jo Spence.  Exhibitions will change throughout the year, and a programme of talks and events is due to be announced too. Alongside The Photographers' Gallery, the V&A Photography Centre and the vast amount of photography-specific galleries, London has become a photography lover’s paradise lately.  The Centre for British Photography, Jermyn Street. Opens Jan 26. Free. More information here. Can’t wait? Here are some photography exhibitions you can see right now. Want more? Here are the top ten art exhibitions in London.

You’ve been steeped in Van Gogh, dunked in Klimt and plunged in Kahlo, now it’s time to be soaked in Dalí, because the immersive art train just won’t stop chugging along. The latest projection-based extravaganza from the people who allowed you into Frida and Diego’s bedroom will be a journey into the bamboozling mind of Spanish surrealist supremo Salvador Dalí. Using cutting-edge technology to project his works and create interactive installations, ‘Dalí Cybernetics: The Immersive Experience’ at The Boiler House on Brick Lane promises to send visitors spiralling through his dizzying world of long-limbed elephants, melting clocks and atomised faces.  The organisers are calling it ‘a collective metaverse experience’ that ‘allows visitors to enter the metaverse in groups and with complete freedom of movement.’ It’s unclear if anyone, anywhere, knows what that means.  The installation has already been a hit in Barcelona and now it’s coming over here, hot on the heels of the announcement of a David Hockney immersive experience and all the other immersive stuff that London has been drowning in. ‘Dalí Cybernetics: The Immersive Experience’ is at The Boiler House, from Dec 21. More details here. Want to know what’s behind all this immersive art in London? Here’s a whole history of the genre. Want some art that’s NOT immersive? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London right now.

King’s Cross will soon be home to Lightroom, a new immersive art space, and is launching with a heady, ultra-colourful installation by the giant of British art that is David Hockney. Lightroom is a four-storey-high digital art space designed for cutting-edge projection and sound work, harnessing the power of the latest technology to really drop you in the art.  The show will take visitors on a journey through Hockney’s whole career, featuring iconic artworks alongside set designs and specially commissioned new pieces, accompanied by a Nico Muhly soundtrack and a Hockney voiceover. It’s half art exhibition, half theatrical installation. Big Dave has been, he went to visit last week, and gave it the full Hockers seal of approval. Here he is gazing in wonder at his own creation. Justin Sutcliffe This isn’t the first, or the only, immersive art experience in London. There’s an unstoppable tidal wave of digital art shenanigans happening in this city, with immersive Klimt, Van Gogh and Kahlo exhibitions, as well as Frameless, a new permanent digital art space in Marble Arch.  The difference here is that while those projects take existing works and turn them into digital environments, Lightroom intends to focus on new art, designed specifically for the space. Frida Kahlo never meant for her art to be projected up and down the walls of a Docklands warehouse so some company could make a packet selling tickets to people who love taking selfies, you know. But Hockney himself has been

A little slice of Warrington is coming to London. The Cheshire town was home to the artist Eric Tucker, who died in 2018, and whose art beautifully depicted working-class life in the industrial north. Now, two galleries are being converted into his house and favourite pub.  Tucker is known as the ‘Secret Lowry’ – a nod to his similarities with one of the great chroniclers of everyday English life, LS Lowry – and you can see why: he has the same knack for capturing the warmth, togetherness and (often) grimness of northern England, and a similarly naive, untrained aesthetic. He kept his art largely private throughout his life, shrouding his painting and drawing practice in so much secrecy that even his family didn’t know the full extent of his creativity. But what he left behind is an incredible visual diary of Warrington’s working class, of the people and pubs of his town, filled with tenderness and richness. Alon Zakaim Fine Art has been turned into a recreation of Tucker’s terraced home and studio, complete with personal items loaned by the artist’s family. Nearby, Connaught Brown gallery has been turned into Tucker’s favourite pub, with a fully functioning oak-panelled bar stocked with a specially brewed bitter. There are also almost 50 original Tucker artworks on display, creating a totally immersive slice of northern life right in the heart of Mayfair. It’s like going to the north without leaving London, which means you don’t have to take out a mortgage for the train fare