Time Out London Art

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 huge and amazing, and the city’s independents are tiny and fascinating. So we’ve got your next art outing sorted with the ten best exhibitions you absolutely can’t miss. 

From blockbuster names to indie shows, Time Out Art cast their net far and wide in order to review the biggest and best exhibitions in the city. Check 'em out below or shortcut it to our top ten art exhibitions in London for the shows that we already know will blow your socks off. 

Galleries and museums are great, sure. But can you get a sunburn while wandering around them? How about drenched? Can you get caught in a biblical downpour while meandering past the Dutch flower paintings at the National Gallery. No, you can't, so put some weather-based risk back into your art-loving life by going out and discovering art out in the real world. London does a fine line in public sculpture, from giants of art history like Barbara Hepworth and Eduardo Paolozzi all the way through to a park filled with reptilian weirdos, we've got it all. And when the city's in full summer-y bloom, how could you say no?  We put together a shortlist of the best public sculptures in the city and then got you, the art-loving people, to vote on it. Stand by for the results...

The Wallace Collection contains an exceptional collection of eighteenth-century French furniture, paintings and objets d'art. Galleries are hung with paintings by Titian, Velázquez, Fragonard, Gainsborough and Reynolds. CHECK THIS OUT: The best paintings to see at the Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld has one of Britain's greatest collections of paintings, and contains many works of world importance. Although there are some outstanding works from earlier periods, the collection's strongest suit is its holdings of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. CHECK THIS OUT: The best paintings to see at the National Gallery

Another of London’s great museums, IWM is an attention- grabbing repository of major artefacts: guns, tanks and aircraft hung from the ceiling but it also contains a fine collection of art by the likes of Paul Nash, John Singer Sargent and Percy Wyndham Lewis. CHECK THIS OUT: The best paintings to see at the National Gallery

Lending weight to the idea that the best things come in small packages, the bijou Dulwich Picture Gallery is home to a small but outstanding collection of work by Old Masters, offering a fine introduction to the baroque era through works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin and Gainsborough. CHECK THIS OUT: The best paintings to see at Courtauld Gallery

Korean architect Minsuk Cho and his studio Mass Studies have been selected to design this summer’s Serpentine Pavilion.  You’ll get to spend the warmer months lounging around, watching performances and drinking coffee in a pavilion enticingly entitled ‘Archipelagic Void’, which is apparently comprised of a series of ‘islands’ arranged around a ‘void’. They’re actually five structures arranged in a star shape around a central courtyard area. Each structure of the pavilion will serve a different purpose. There’s an extra gallery space to extend the Serpentine South itself, as well as a library, an auditorium, a tea house and a ‘play tower’. Serpentine Pavilion 2024 designed by Minsuk Cho, Mass Studies. Design render, exterior view. Photo © Mass Studies Courtesy: Serpentine Sorry, did you think there were five spaces? Actually, ‘assembled, the parts become a montage of ten spaces surrounding the void: five distinct covered spaces and five open, in-between areas, each acting as a threshold.’ So that’s ten open or covered islands around a courtyard ‘void’. As confusing and conceptually complicated as that all sounds, the Serpentine Pavilion is always a summer highlight, and here in the depths of winter it’s nice to think in just a few months we’ll be lounging around the park in the sun. See you in the void.  The Serpentine Pavilion, Jun 7-Oct 27. Free. More details here. Nine amazing artists you have to see at Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024. Here are the ten best exhibitio

Ever wanted to know what Sean Connery got up to behind the scenes on the sets of his iconic James Bond films? Well, the answer won’t surprise you: it mainly involved being hairy and handsome while leaning against expensive cars. You don’t have to take our word for it, you can see for yourself at ‘Photographs from the James Bond Archive’, a new exhibition on display until March 21 at the Leica Gallery in central London.  Every movie in the series is covered, apparently: yes, even ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, a film literally no one on earth has ever seen. There are images of the jetpack from ‘Thunderball’, producer Albert Broccoli on the set of ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, and generally just lots of actors looking like stars and crew members looking fed up. You should go, if only because there are some things that just aren’t done, such as drinking a Dom Perignon ’53 above a temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit, and not going to an exhibition of James Bond photographs. ‘Photographs from the James Bond Archive’ is at the Leica Gallery, 64-66 Duke St, W1K 6JD. Until Mar 21. More details here.  Want more art? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London. Want more art, but free? Here you go.  

Banksy fans rejoice (Banksy phobes, avert thy gaze). There’s about to be a whole lot more of the artist's work in London. ‘The Art of Banksy’, the world’s largest touring exhibition of the street artist’s work, opens on May 20 2021 in a huge, 12,000-square-foot warehouse space in Covent Garden (formerly occupied by Belgian mussel merchants Belgo). The exhibition was due to open in April last year following a global tour that has so far taken in Melbourne, Tel Aviv, Auckland, Toronto, Miami, Gothenburg and Sydney – but obviously its opening in London was pushed back.   The show contains the largest collection of official works by the artist, made from 1997 to 2008, including now-iconic images like ‘Girl and Balloon’ and lesser-known pieces. The artworks are all on loan from private collections and the show is entirely unauthorised by the artist – as organisers put it, this exhibition is ‘completely non-consensual’. Tickets are going fast, so book now to avoid disappointment. ‘The Art of Banksy’ opens on May 20 at 50 Earlham Street. Find out more and book tickets here.  Exhibitions an art fanatic cannot wait to see in London. Discover more ‘street art’ on your next London walk.

So we reviewed the new Beyond Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery and thought it was pretty damn great. Those baroque ’n rollers sure knew how to paint. But one thing seriously stood out: side-eye. Not just the amount of it – and trust us, there was a lot – but the quality. This is some of the shadiest painting in history. Look at this flute player who has had enough of your shit:     Cecco del Caravaggio, ‘Interior with a Young Man holding a Recorder’, 1615-20. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford     You literally made him stop playing the flute with your dumb bullshit. Then there’s this dude, who also thinks you’re full of it, but more on the sly:     Cecco del Caravaggio, ‘A Musician’, about 1615. The Wellington Collection, Apsely House, London © Historic England   And then there's these angry ladies who think everyone around them is basically total trash.    Georges de La Tour, 'The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs', about 1630-34. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.     Oh and then there’s this guy, who has absolutely zero side-eye game, but you know you want to invite him to your party. ‘Hey guuurl, I brought peach schnaaaapps!’     Northern follower of Caravaggio, possibly Dirck van Baburen, 'A Man with a Wine Flask', about 1620. Stourhead, The Hoare Collection (The National Trust) © National Trust Images.     Thanks Baroque painters, you're the best. Want more cool art stuff? We asked David Shrigley to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to some impo

Banish the January blues with our guide to the most colourful cultural offerings of the year ahead. 1. Electronic Superhighway You’d expect YouTube, Instagram, image manipulation and the Dark Web to feature in a show about how the invention of computers and the internet have impacted on artists and irrevocably changed the terrain of contemporary art. And they do, in work by current art world darlings such as Jon Rafman, Ryan Trecartin and Hito Steyerl. What the Whitechapel’s ambitious first show of 2016 also offers, however, is a surprisingly extensive history of the subject. The exhibition kicks off with the very recent stuff before taking you back to the paleolithic period (1966), when the group Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), founded by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and including artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, staged ‘9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering’ in New York, a groundbreaking series of events that challenged the conventions of art by incorporating new technology. Whitechapel Gallery. Jan 29 to May 15.   Wassily Kandinsky, 'Murnau The Garden II', 1910. Photo © Merzbacher Kunststiftung   2. Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse Blossoming with over 120 works by Claude Monet and his near contemporaries, including Pierre Bonnard and Wassily Kandinsky, this bountiful show reveals how artists have been inspired by gardens and how gardens helped to shape the development of art from the 1860s to the 1920s. Royal Academy

Frieze London, the diamond-encrusted juggernaut of international art fairs, celebrates its thirteenth year in the capital this year, while its younger (though more sedate) sibling Frieze Masters notches up four years on the other side of Regent’s Park. It’ll take you at least a day to see both, but we’ve been as busy as the Regent’s Park squirrels to round-up the best art to make a beeline for. Here are just a few exhibits not to miss. Hello kitty <img id="3ee2ec5f-9c1e-89eb-afed-8bc7a9e89824" data-caption="" data-credit="" data-width-class="" type="image/jpeg" total="1086848" loaded="1086848" image_id="102911984" src="http://media.timeout.com/images/102911984/image.jpg" class="photo lazy inline">   Cats are massive at Frieze London this year. And none are bigger than Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey’s inflatable Felix on the Galerie Buchholz stand (D8). The feline theme continues over at Sadie Coles (D2), where our favourite YBA Sarah Lucas’s slinky black moggies lurk in an installation painted the same shade of custard yellow as her Venice Biennale show earlier this year. In other cat news: Ryan Trecartin’s collaged kitten sits trapped in a ‘Cage of Desire’ at Sprüth Magers (C5). Mee-ouch.   Signs of irony <img id="6636d90f-7a90-4597-529a-ad51b58719b0" data-caption="" data-credit="" data-width-class="" type="image/jpeg" total="844057" loaded="844057" image_id="102912007" src="http://media.timeout.co

The Chinese artist and activist has been allowed to leave his home country for the first time in four years. Here, he exclusively shares his Instagram pics documenting his momentous trip from Beijing to London, via Munich, for the opening of his retrospective at the Royal Academy.   July 22 Ai Weiwei is reunited with his passport having been banned from leaving China for over four years. It was confiscated by officials at Beijing airport in April 2011, as part of wider crackdown on activists in the country.   July 25 A tender moment on Skype as the artist tells his son Ai Lao, who lives in Germany, that he's received his passport and can travel abroad again.   July 29 At the gates of the US Embassy in Beijing. Having got his passport back, Ai can apply for a visa.        July 30 Ai Weiwei's passport with his UK visa, with a duration of 20 days. The visa has since been extended to six months after an intervention by the Home Secretary. <img id="1407ae57-b8e4-f9ee-ab21-d2f072348460" data-caption="" data-credit="" data-width-class="" type="image/jpeg" total="388494" loaded="388494" image_id="102866333" src="http://media.timeout.com/images/102866333/image.jpg" class="photo lazy inline">È July 30 With Ai Lao and partner Wang Fen after arriving at Munich airport.     July 31 Swimming in the hotel pool of Bayerischer Hof in Munich after being reunited with his son. The six-year-old and his mother have been living in the Germany for the past year, after Ai asked them to le