Phin Jennings

London is good at art. The city has it all: massive mega museums, niche spaces, boundary-pushing galleries and everything in between. If you want to look at things and be perplexed, awestruck, challenged or inspired then this is the city for you.  The problem is.... there’s absolutely tons of it. Way more than any one person could feasibly wade through. Lucky for you, Time Out exists. For decades, our experts have been visiting and reviewing all the sculpture, painting, performance, photography and other art shows on offer. You name it, we’ve (probably, most likely) seen it. If you’re wondering what’s actually worth your time, start here. Check out the best art exhibitions in London right now, and be sure to come back weekly for the latest picks. Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox. RECOMMENDED: Best photography exhibitions in LondonBest free exhibitions in London

Part of an ongoing exhibition series of group exhibitions featuring artists not represented by the gallery, this show will see three painters – Koak, Ding Shilun and Cece Philips – fill Hauser & Wirth’s vast Savile Row space with windows into imagined interiors. All taking domestic architectures as their starting point, each artist’s work becomes a meditation on the psychology of space.

In the Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space, two Iranian-Canadian artists are having fun with language. Sculpture, video and found objects all find their place in this playful exhibition that juxtaposes words and images to show us the precarity of truth and meaning in today’s world. From a hyper-realistic sculpture to a repurposed electric motorway sign, Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi find many ways to combine the quotidian with the uncanny.

‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’. It’s a perpetually instructive aphorism that artists have repeatedly returned to. Francisco Goya used it to name one of his most well-known etchings from the late 18th century, depicting a character whose head rests on a desk, surrounded by shadowy creatures. Centuries later, in 2008, British artist Yinka Shonibare borrowed the image and title for another body of work. And now, the Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani’s new commission for Somerset House takes the ongoing sleep of reason as its starting point. In the grand Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court, she has installed a ten-metre-tall blue figure, who lays supine, gently breathing with closed eyes. We’re told that this ethereal, childlike giant has slept through ‘warnings of present and imminent catastrophes, political and social disaster and environmental collapse.’ Watching its stomach peacefully rising and falling, it’s easy to believe that ignorance is bliss.  Here is a deft balance of content and form Encased in an illuminated casket-like glass box, the figure – the dreamer – is clothed in white lace and mesh. Visitors are invited to step onto its plinth for a closer look at the beautiful hand- painted sculpture, which is both imposing and delicate. On one end, its feet are each the size of a toddler; on the other, flushed cheeks and pink lips give the impression of a fairy tale princess. The Sleeping Beauty parallel is emphasised by an otherworldly, subtly swelling soundscap

Part of White Cube’s ongoing series that sees them present solo exhibitions with emerging artists from outside of their roster, Korean painter Suzanne Song’s forthcoming show will comprise a selection of her precise, illusory abstract paintings. Expect intricately painted geometric patterns disrupted with the appearance of shadows, creases and folds, paradoxically creating three-dimensional space within flat patterns and images. 

Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z and Missy Elliott; boomboxes, turntables and iced-out chains: this exhibition provides an intimate look at the history of one of the last century’s biggest cultural phenomena: hip hop. Through the lens of three photographers, Jamel Shabazz, Joseph Rodriguez, and Gregory Bojorquez, it traverses East Coast, West Coast and beyond to show us the canonical moments, everyday scenes, beefs and friendships that shaped the movement we know today.

The Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray only took up painting during the last decade of her life. Making up for lost time, she produced thousands of paintings in the years leading up to her death in 1996. She worked frenetically, changing her style multiple times. This, her first major European solo exhibition, presents just a sliver of her oeuvre. It’s an impressive introduction to a visionary artist and, to those unfamiliar with Aboriginal art, a new way of understanding art. Naturally, this show needs more exposition than most. It requires European audiences to let go of their art-historical baggage. For example, the colourful works on show here aren’t straightforwardly representational but it would be wrong to call them abstract. Rather than leave us to experience Kngwarray’s work on the familiar-but-inaccurate terms that define western art, the exhibition takes two rooms to provide a potted education on Aboriginal art and life and the artist’s place within it. Dreaming, for example, is an important religio-cultural term that pervades the exhibition, connecting Aboriginal Peoples with their ancestors through the land. This show needs more exposition than most The exhibition finds confident form in its third room, where more than a dozen large-scale acrylic paintings, all replete with coloured dots, surround a procession of batik prints on silk that hang from the ceiling. Interconnectedness is less a feature of these works than an underpinning of them. In each of the pain

Jean-Francois Millet was an artist of the people. Born to a farming family, he spent his life painting rural workers and the conditions of their labour. This exhibition, marking the 150th anniversary of his death, presents an impressive array of his work, which went on to inspire Vincent van Gogh among other artists. Heads down and backs bent, there is a melancholic, weathered beauty to Millet’s characters.

How many people does it take to put on a solo exhibition? When I visit akâmi-, the Omaskêko Ininiwak artist Duane Linklater’s show at Camden Art Centre, three technicians are packing up their tools as a photographer takes installation shots. The show was curated by this year’s New Curators fellows, a group of 11 aspiring exhibition makers. It includes work by Linklater’s son and grandmother as well as his wife, Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom he works under the moniker Grey Plumes. As we approach twenty contributors, I wonder whether the term solo exhibition might be inaccurate. Throughout the show, Linklater playfully questions the idea of singular authorship that underpins the art world and, in many ways, defines our understanding of culture. His message, uniting the three disparate bodies of work on show here, is as clear and simple as it is defiant. His name might top the press release, but it’s not his show; it takes a village. The first room contains a series of arresting, moody canvases awash with the colours of plums, sand and sunsets. Though spartan, they provide plenty to look at. Many are irregular in shape and comprise multiple sheets of linen sewn together. Some are painted with disembodied ornate window frames while others contain rorschach-like splatters. You might imagine Linklater alone in his studio, mixing the colours that make these haunting images, but you’d be wrong. They’re painted with natural materials including tea, sumac and tobacco: in other words

Ithell Colquhoun didn’t sit still, visually or spiritually. This exhibition attempts to make sense of a sprawling oeuvre that engages with an incredibly wide gamut of spiritual, religious and formal ideas. Though not always coherent, it reveals her to be an artist of immense talent and invention. Across her engagements with the occult, Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism and the Jewish Kabbalah, Colquhoun’s eye for composition remains a constant, and might be the best part of a sometimes confusing show. Born in 1906 in India, where her father worked in the British colonial administration, Colquhoun moved to Cheltenham at a young age and went on to study art at the Slade, where she developed an interest in the esoteric. She was a card-carrying surrealist until 1940, when the group’s British leader E.L.T. Mesens declared that members shouldn’t join other societies. A practicing occultist, she took her cue to leave. Throughout the exhibition, various strains of surrealism and ways of understanding the world serve as a kind of tasting menu for Colquhoun. Here, in a relatively small-scale restaging of her broader exhibition at Tate St. Ives, the jumps between various artistic mediums and grand ideas can be jarring. Spanning painting, drawing and a number of more experimental techniques, the diversity of Colquhoun’s output seems to work against the constraints of the exhibition. What might be an expansive exploration often feels like a whistle-stop tour. Standout moments are deeply –

Born in London in 1905, the British artist Edward Burra suffered from acute rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anemia from a young age. He travelled regularly, with a special fondness for Paris and New York. In photographs, though, he appears dour, studious and sickly. Most of the paintings that line the walls of his latest retrospective at the Tate couldn’t be further from this image. In its first room, paintings on paper depict bars, cafés, weddings and cabaret shows, replete with voluptuous and lively characters. Though relatively small in scale, each sheet contains multiple scenes that unfold at once. Burra collapses our sense of perspective, stacking his subjects vertically to fit as much action as he can into each image. Each shape is impossibly smooth and rendered so precisely as to look airbrushed. In these works, painted during visits to France early in Burra’s career, everything is voluminous. It’s not just biceps, breasts and bottoms that bulge; at Burra’s hand, pillars, plant pots, light fittings and fruits become equally taut, fleshy affairs. A dainty champagne coup sits in the foreground of Le Bal (1928), dwarfed by the monuments that surround it – from the tubular streamers that hang from the ceiling to the room’s many animated revellers. In their curvaceousness and volume, Burra’s subjects convey a playful sense of abundance that borders on kitsch. In today’s context, where distorted figuration is the order of the day, it’s a style that feels a little hackney

Another London summer beckons: clouds clearing, days lengthening, an imaginative structure being erected in Kensington Gardens. This year’s pavilion, ‘A Capsule in Time’ by Marina Tabassum Architects, is a modular wooden structure outfitted with translucent screens that will filter the sun’s light like the leaves of a tree, encouraging inhabitants to bask in its diffused glow. The highly adaptable space with kinetic elements is inspired by shamianas: South Asian tents used for weddings, feasts and other ceremonial occasions.

Having studied at Goldsmiths College with them in the late 1980s, the late Pakistani-born intermedia artist Hamad Butt is often associated with the YBAs. As this impressive survey exhibition, travelling from IMMA in Dublin, reveals, the body of technically ambitious and precisely engineered sculptural work completed before his untimely death at 32 is entirely singular. Navigating the thin boundary between desire and danger, this exhibition will reveal Butt as a subtle master of both chemistry and social critique.