Eddy Frankel

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

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. 

Turns out it’s not the eyes that are the window to the soul, but the teeth. At least in Rachel Jones’s art they are. Her ultra-vivid take on abstraction – all endless clashing colours and textures and shapes – finds inspiration in an oral fixation, with all the shapes based on teeth, tongues and uvulas. It’s like Clyfford Still with a degree in dentistry, but Jones’s beautiful canvases also explore all the hidden meanings in smiles and frowns, the messages we send with our mouths, and the endless racial and culture symbolism of teeth, making her the most interesting abstract painter working today. Rachel Jones, photo by Jess Hand What would you say your art is about? ’I’m interested in exploring the subtle ways that colour can be used to describe or communicate ideas around interiority. Abstraction allows me to approach this in an experiential way, using colour, texture, and line to stimulate physical and psychological responses in the viewer. Colours have strong cultural associations with certain moods, emotions or states of being. I’m fascinated by the fact that subtle contradictions underlying my palette can create feelings beyond what we usually associate with specific hues. For example, something bright is not necessarily happy, and combining certain colours together can be calming or alluring or an act of confrontation.’ What inspires you? ‘I collect random pictures of stuff I see in books and on the internet, but I’m mostly inspired by literature and nature. I love T

Somehow, despite everything standing in its way, art is flourishing in London. We’ve got rising rents, exorbitant studio fees, a lack of opportunities and a suffocating cost of living crisis, but still, the young artists of this city are making work, and doing it brilliantly. It would be easy (and lazy) to depict the London art world as entirely rarefied, nepotistic and exclusionary, but the truth is far more open, interesting and varied. There are artists from countless different backgrounds, with different viewpoints, working in all different parts of the city. And the work they make is varied too. If you go by what the galleries are showing, you’d think London is nothing but wall-to-wall hazy figurative painting, but the variety out there is staggering. Satirical housework performances, immersive rodent-based film installations, ceramic friezes, Frasier Crane, Tupac Shakur, ska, Mariah Carey, sausages, teeth, paintings, sculptures, photos and everything in between; young London art in 2023 is weird, diverse, funny, exciting, challenging.  For me, this is the most exciting young crop of artists I’ve seen since I started at Time Out, more than a decade ago. They’re dealing with major topics like racism, exclusion, mental health, gender, sexuality and poverty, but with a ludicrous amount of joy, pop culture references, fun, aggression and weirdness, it’s actually, really, genuinely, properly thrilling.  So here are our nine favourite young artists working in London today, pic

Where once Pudvine’s paintings were full of grinning dinosaurs and violent, giant penises (his own, obviously), recently they’ve become rife with tortellini, aliens and Frasier Crane. What his art has lost in Jurassic penility, it’s gained in pop culture surrealism, but its aims are still the same: this absurd, ridiculous, shocking, diaristic weirdness is an exploration of the artist’s own fears and anxieties, his worries about death and masculinity, his insecurities, his pangs of guilt and his loves and passions. It’s just everyday life, with all its cocks and supermarket own brand pasta on display for everyone to see. Glen Pudvine, photo by Jess Hand What would you say your art is about?  ‘I’d say it changes a little bit from time to time. But a theme that runs throughout is trying to understand myself and being here, living right now. Using my practice and my paintings to do that is the physical manifestation of dealing with those questions. I know thats bullshit though. I’m never going to answer anything really. Just going to be asking questions forever like a kid. And that’s perfect for me.’ What inspires you?  ‘Generally, it is things that leave me in awe by making me feel very small and that remind me of our finite time. So seeing a Caravaggio or a Bosch definitely inspires me. Seeing St Peter’s Basilica too. And I love and hate crypts, particularly the Catacombe dei Cappuccini in Palermo. But to be honest I’m really inspired by athletic achievements. Getting into ot

With vicious humour and big, bold aesthetics, Olivia Sterling brutally lampoons contemporary ideas of race and representation in modern Britain. Bodies get fed through meat grinders, hands drip with melting ice cream, bums are smeared with sunscreen, skin tones are codified and ethical lines are crossed. Gory, funny and brilliantly painted, it’s like a classic cartoon dragged kicking and screaming into the present day, and you never know whether to laugh or cry. Olivia Sterling, photo by Jess Hand   What would you say your art is about?  ‘My work is often about food, relating food and people together, commenting on the different ways people are seen as consumable. It is also about comedy, how fundamentally comedy is about normal things turned odd or odd things turned normal and that’s something I aim to do in my painting.’ What inspires you?  ‘In terms of people, I return to Francis Bacon and Philip Guston all the time, obviously Lubania Himid as well. I love Cheyenne Julien, Sasha Gordon and Brianna Rose Brooks as well – wonderful figure painters, also currently really into Jack Smith, John Bratby. I stare at a lot of pictures of food as well, mostly stills from films. I also wouldn’t be the artist I am today if I hadn’t spent too much time inside as a child watching 50s cell animation cartoons – Tom and Jerry and Silly Symphonies. I’m also extremely motivated by revenge.’ What are the challenges of being an artist in London? ‘Obviously, the main challenge is living in Lon

Proudfoot’s enigmatic approach to ceramics has made her one of the most unique artists working in the medium today. Her flattened, shadow puppet-esque, glistening assemblages are full of bodies that are being pulled apart and sewn together, hybrid creatures and oodles of hair and wax and food. The result is a bunch of bodily, eerie, gorgeous sculptural installations that feel like they’re hiding countless, unknowable narratives. Paloma Proudfoot, photo by Jess Hand What would you say your art is about?  ‘It feels like it’s changing all the time but it usually comes back to different ways of understanding the human body, both physically as a sculptural entity and conceptually as the vehicle through which we navigate life. I work predominantly in ceramics now but much of this stems from my background in clothes making, specifically the way the body is segmented and made into flat patterns before it is reformed and augmented in cloth. In this dissecting and mapping of the body I draw parallels to anatomy, often blurring cloth and skin in my ceramic works.’ What inspires you?  ‘I take a lot of inspiration from conversations with friends and collaborators, particularly my work with the performance group Stasis, who I have been collaborating with for the last decade. I spend a lot of time in the studio on my own so working with them gets me out of habits I develop and always throws up new inspiration.’ What are the challenges of being an artist in London? ‘There are many, but pri

What is nostalgia if not a kind of grief? Adam Farah-Saad uses symbols of his youth to mourn its passing. His 2021 show at Camden Art Centre had a fountain filled with Ka grape soda, Mariah Carey posters and a Virgin Megastore CD tower playing Sugababes and Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’. Farah-Saad reframes all these signifiers of youth, all this nostalgia, to create genuinely moving portraits of all the memories that make up our lives. Adam Farah-Saad, photo by Jess Hand What would you say your art is about? ‘I have trouble claiming my art to be about this or that particular theme in any universalising kind of sense. I am not seen as a research/project based artist, although my artistic process is underlined with intense and nuanced forms of “research” which come from the navigation of my own life, past and present and future desires. I hope to give a chance for audiences to feel into the work and connect to it through their own life experiences. Therefore, although it might not be explicitly seen as a “queer practice” or “working-class practice” etc, it ends up being about all of those things and more, as it is an extension of a constant questioning of my own life as I move through it; through the places and the relationships and the emotions. Some people connect with the layered artistic manifestations of this journey that I put out there and value it, some people don’t.’ Who inspires you, what are your influences? ‘Mariah Carey, Brent Cross Shopping Centre, Grindr, my friend

Rosie Gibbens puts her body on the line in humorous, scathing, surreal attacks on gender roles and femininity. In performances, films and sculptures, she manipulates symbols of domesticity to show how absurd the whole charade is. She gives blowies to a wodge of toothbrushes, twirls nipple tassels with a desk fan, dances seductively with ducks and office equipment, and makes blobby, soft sculptures out of her own body parts. Her art is a bunch of brilliant, visceral, clever, satirical visual gags, and the joke is on us. Rosie Gibbens, photo by Jess Hand What would you say your art is about? ’It’s my way of digesting the world around me. I highlight absurdities that I observe in society, making them stranger in my artwork through exaggeration or purposeful misinterpretation. These observations are often based around gender performativity, sexual politics, consumer desire and the slippery overlaps between these. My body always features in some way, usually alongside adapted everyday objects and I often approach my work as perverse product demonstrations. This is because I’m interested in the ways that identity is formed through desire for commodities, particularly as tools that (often falsely) promise to enhance our bodies or optimise our lives. I hope that my work can hold the magic balance between entertaining and unsettling.‘What inspires you? ’Some things that I am inspired by are: pointless inventions, make-up tutorials, cartoon bodies, exercise equipment, domestic gizmos

Art is a weapon for RIP Germain, aimed straight at the heart of oppressive power structures. His conceptual approach has seen him create intense installations at places like the ICA, filled with things like hydroponic systems, masked security guards and Tupac Shakur chains. His work has loads of ultra-dense cultural references and nods to illicit worlds, but the whole thing is geared towards undermining the system, and exploring the Black experience in the process. It’s deeply and intentionally complex, it’s art without answers, only questions intended to jab the system in the ribs, over and over.  RIP Germain, photo by Jess Hand What would you say your art is about? ‘Adding a lot of grey to the black and white.’ What inspires you?  ‘There are too many to name, and I’m not really interested in listing as it never gives you the total picture. I will always be drawn to the output of the fearless renegade though, I will say that.’ What are the challenges of being an artist in London? ‘Where do I start? Lol… just having enough money to eat, pay your bills and spend a meaningful amount of time making art is a huge challenge. The majority of studio spaces are so expensive that just to have a chance at making work, the rest of life becomes a contortion to sustain that space. One friend of mine has three jobs, her only studio time is late at night or on a Saturday; someone else I heard the other day is living in a guardianship with no shower so they go to the council gym to wash.

Rene Matić calls it ‘rudeness’; a self-invented genre for a self-invented way of approaching British culture through film and photography. With tons of biographical detail, and a super-confrontational aesthetic, Matić delves into the complex ways West Indian and white working class culture mix and interact in Britain, all while nabbing ideas from the history of northern soul, 2-tone and ska. The result is a harsh, bright, but always tender look at this country and what it has become, a mixture of intimacy and aggression that manages to shock and attract you at the same time. Rene Matic, photo by Jess Hand What would you say your art is about? ‘My practice is concerned with “rude(ness)”, an evidencing and honouring of the in-between. I draw inspiration from dance and music movements such as Northern soul, ska, and 2-tone as a tool to delve into the complex relationship between West Indian and white working-class culture in Britain, whilst privileging queer/ing intimacies, partnerships and pleasure as modes of survival. Ultimately, it is about what saves us, if anything, in the end.’ What inspires you? ‘My biggest influence is love, where it lives where it is lacking.’What are the challenges of being an artist in London?‘The challenge is always money and access. It is the same for anyone trying to make a living in this country.’ What one thing could be done to better support young artists in London ?‘Real CARE.’What would you do with the Turbine Hall? ‘Turn it into a dance ha

Through a haze of gore, animalism, fetish club aesthetics and nods to 1980s dystopian cinema, Jenkin Van Zyl makes art about freedom and escape. A recent show at Edel Assanti gallery led viewers through a giant rat’s mouth into a hospital/maze to watch a film. Another show at Rose Easton saw a huge latex beast trapped in a filthy glass cage. His work is full of latex costumes and biomorphic prosthetics, sensuality and grime, it’s sensual and terrifying, and it will absolutely make you wish you could dance with rats. Jenkin Van Zyl, photo by Jess Hand What would you say your art is about? ‘Desire, entropy, devotion, gossip, monstrosity, holes, fantasy and failure, bodily autonomy and the power structures that try to contain them, time as a Möbius strip, journeying to the end of the rainbow, sweat, competition, community, costume, the carnivalesque, reinvention, mischief, transformation, and deviance. I think that art is an important means to create pockets of progress and imagination within the larger political landscape of decay, deadlock and the long state of emergency.’What inspires you? ‘I am drawn to fringe and subcultural communities, places where alternative ways of living are mapped out. I’m excited by what we can learn from the vital and complex world building that occurs within these spaces and the ways the body can be reimagined inside of them. My work often makes reference to different forms of nightlife, and the joy, ritual and tensions that erupt from it, but a

Beauty’s a pretty big topic. Almost all of art history, up until postmodernism, dealt with it in some way, whether that’s the divine kind, the physical kind or the ooh-isn’t-that-poppy-field nice kind. But with its usual combination of art, artefact and science, the Wellcome Collection is looking at the physical kind, with diversions into gender binaries, issues of race, the cosmetics industry and what that means for beauty standards.  The whole space is decked out in pink fabric and concrete, like a real life Juno Calypso photo (two of which show up later). It starts with a bust of Nefertiti and seventeenth century drawings of the devil attacking vain women. There are perfect-figured Roman sculptures and turn-of-the-century French corsets, copies of Vogue and a reclining marble Hermaphroditus.  But the show gets so caught up in trying to make points that it forgets to tell a coherent story. It wants to tell you that beauty is a tool of colonialism, a perpetuator of whiteness, or used to enforce gender norms. But it doesn’t bother to explain how beauty went from Rubens to Kate Moss, or the Venus of Willendorf to Nefertiti, how different beauty standards are in Africa or Asia, or how beauty has changed, evolved, mutated.  The points made aren’t the issue, it’s just that it feels like being stuck in an argument instead of walking through an exhibition, being lectured instead of educated.  There are still great things here. Those unsettling Juno Calypso photos, Narcissister’s to

It’s rare that the title of an exhibition carries as much weight as this. But with her show of paintings of Black figures, Claudette Johnson is giving space to features, bodies and figures that have historically existed only on the margins of art. Here, at the Courtauld, surrounded by Renoirs and Manets and Cezannes, Blackness is present. She set her stall out early on in her career, coming to relative prominence as part of the BLK Art Group alongside Keith Piper and Eddie Chambers, announcing herself with paintings of Black people (both real and imaginary) that are far too big for the paper they’re painted on. They burst out at the top and sides of the picture plane, their presence too large to contain. The earliest works here, from her student days in the early 80s, are both soft and defiant. The figures hold relaxed poses in fuzzy fabrics, but their faces are nothing but full-frontal confrontation: lips set, eyes hard, daring you to say they don’t belong in a gallery context. They’re not brilliant paintings, but they make their point brilliantly. They make their point brilliantly By 1990, her approach changes and matures. The figures are still too big for their paper, but now the dark pastels are dappled, smudged, more minimal and spare, there’s more blankness, more attention to the texture of skin. Her more recent work is by far her best, full of space and pictorial cleverness, neatly composed with figures set against big planes of blue or yellow or vast fields of white.

We might just be designing our own doom. With the pursuit of AI, the creation of ultra-powerful machine intelligences, we’re engaging in the kind of uniquely human and hubristic act that just might spell the demise of the species. And American artist Zach Blas knows that when the world starts ending, we pray.  That apocalypse isn’t just sci-fi speculation and fearmongering either, it’s a legitimate concern of the tech innovators at the heart of AI research. They speak about AI like an imminent, unstoppable messianic arrival that must be bowed down to. It’s that quasi-religiosity that’s at the core of Blas’s ‘Cultus’, a throbbingly loud, heady, shadowy installation that imagines AI beings as future gods.  ‘Cultus’ itself is meant to be a ‘god generator’, creating AI idols for viewers to worship. In the middle of the space, surrounded by offerings on pyramidal plinths, a pulsating green orb dances with lights. Its undulating surface becomes a series of masked, alien, terrifying faces intoning big, scary religious sermons. These are the four AI gods: Expositio, Iudicium, Lacrimae and Eternus. Four panels hang on chains describing prayers to each god, obscure swirling symbols cover a dais, techno pop chants echo through the dark space. This is the Mithraeum of the future, a temple to new deities borne of some twisted reverse-creation myth.  The whole thing is kind of like the set of a BDSM episode of Red Dwarf, and it’s visually super impressive. But its future gothic techno imme

The whole gallery screams and screeches with fragments of clashing sound. A room is filled with sand and blankTV screens, robotic fingers play dissonant chords on an electric organ, traffic roars as glass shimmers with images of the Empire State building. Raven Row has been turned into a Lutz Bacher jukebox, and it’s playing all the hits. The American conceptualist (1943-2019) was a magpie, a thief, a sampler, picking up bits of visual and sonic culture to reassemble, twist, break and make into something new. Gentle piano notes and soft romantic voices greet you in that room full of sand as four screens show nothing but white light, like you’re watching a love film after the apocalypse. Upstairs, a tiny split-second clip of Leonard Cohen loops and stutters, two radios blare pop hits at each other, a massive speaker spreads the gospel of Matthew out of an open window onto the streets below.  It’s brutal, weird, physically affecting (though the two rooms of sculptures lack the impact of the audiovisual work). The gallery’s been left disorientating and maze-like, you stumble through endless doors, going from room to room, accidentally looping back on yourself, encountering all these dizzying fragments of sound that are familiar but somehow unplaceable: traffic, bible passages, human voices, but all ripped to shreds, stripped of meaning and intent. What you're left with is an incredible portrait of countless things: the city, the body, popular culture, religion, the past and pres

This show originally opened just before the pandemic and was closed after just a few weeks. This review dates from then. There’s a sadness to this show by the great British artist David Hockney. It feels like a long look backwards, with each room telling a story of ageing and facing the slow, creeping suffocation of time. Hockney has drawn portraits of the same small group of people throughout his life: himself, his mother, and his friends Celia, Gregory and Maurice. Each sitter is clumped together here in their own mini-exhibitions so you can watch Hockney’s progress from naïve man to world-conquering artist to experimental old fella over and over again. Early works are shaky but bursting with excitement. The ‘feel’ of Hockney – the cool, distant quietness of his art – is there in self-portraits as a schoolboy from the 1950s, even if the ‘look’ isn’t. But by the 1970s he knows who he is. Sepia ink captures the tender heartache of his mother on the day of his father’s funeral. His friend the designer Celia Birtwell is ghostly and ethereal in pinks, blues and greens like she’s a spirit he can’t quite commune with, and the curator Gregory Evans is all gentle curves and throbbing sexual energy. The 1980s bring experimentation. Gregory is a burst of cubist shapes, Hockney’s mother is a whirl of different perspectives while doing the crossword. But it’s also when the first hints of ageing start appearing. Gregory’s face is saggy and morose, Hockney’s own is contorted and angry. B

Twisting bodies and undulating flesh, all smooshing and sploodging into half-abstract semi-chaos: you know what you’re getting with Christina Quarles. The American painter has a distinct visual language, one you maybe saw at the South London Gallery in 2021 or the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2020. It’s all limbs and skin, contorting and writhing. But it’s not a limiting set of art parameters, as she proves in this new body of work in the huge, swanky new Pilar Corrias space in Mayfair. Because her once serious, dark, emotional exploration of identity through the human nude is now flooded with heat and light. A throbbing, red and orange sun bakes the skin of all the figures in the first work you see, choking the canvas in yellow humidity and grey smog. A pool ripples in another, a moment of cool, easy relief. There are vast blue skies, shimmering summer flowers.  Bright patterns are swimsuits and summer dresses, or psychedelic terrazzo that seems to mutate into skin.  The bodies still dominate, still intermingle and morph, but they’re languid and lounging, swimming, caressing, holding. It’s all sultry, sensual summer love. Quarles is pushing the clash of textures and techniques more than ever, mixing washed-out watercolour with sharp lines, thick oils, patterns and flat planes.  Some of the paintings feel rushed, unfinished, still wet, but the rest of the show’s great (especially the smaller, denser, more intense works on paper downstairs), an explosion of joy, sensuality and s

If you get caught smoking as a kid, the best punishment is to be locked in a closet and forced to smoke a whole pack. It’ll put you off for life. Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg is taking that same approach, not for ciggies, but for rampant over-sexualisation and intense female objectification. She’s shoving it so brutally in your face that you might never find anything sexy ever again.  She’s become TikTok famous lately for ‘Continental Breakfast’, a series of interactive sculptures that force performers into positions of extreme physical vulnerability, futuristic dentist chairs for sex dungeons, leaving you legs splayed, face down, ass up; that’s the way she likes to make discomfiting sculptural installations. Here at The Perimeter, the sculptures are almost all of human figures. From the window outside you spot a woman bent double, waving a selfie stick trying to take a picture of her own genitals; as you walk in, a pregnant figure in bondage is tending to a pushchair covered in black zips. Upstairs, more bondage, more twisting, more splaying. The figures wear Balenciaga crocs, bondage gear sewn together out of fake handbags; their bodies are folded in half, heads between legs, contorted in metal contraptions, or spread out over a table, digging their nails into thick carpet.  I think the chairs of ‘Continental Breakfast’ are probably better individual sculptures, but the works here are still brilliant. It all sits somewhere between HR Giger horror porn, luxury luggage and h

Who is Nicole Eisenman? She doesn’t seem too sure herself, so what chance do the rest of us have? The New York-based French artist’s work is so full of clashing influences, disparate styles and dense references that she becomes impossible to pin down. In her early work from 1990s New York, she creates satirical paintings that mash together high renaissance influences with caricature and comic book references in searing cultural critiques of the artist’s place in society. Naked swimmers fondle in a pool, a hanged woman gives birth, a kid sells women’s pee like it’s lemonade. It’s all cartoony, gross, quick, clever. Eisenman found early success with these works, but it was fleeting, so then she paints herself as The Thing receiving a letter addressed ‘Dear Obscurity’ and as a nude woman bound in rope by her gallerist.  All this early work feels like French satirist Honoré Daumier going to therapy, hanging out in hip New York instead of revolutionary France, looking inwards instead of outwards.  It’s all cartoony, gross, quick, clever She eventually gets less introspective. The early 2000s brought the Bush administration, an economic crisis and a war on terror. Things get panicky, heightened. She paints group scenes of people in bars or around dinner tables, anxious paintings of worried people, full of nods to Otto Dix and interwar European painting.  Upstairs she depicts art classes where each figure is painted in a different style, a sculptor staring at his own bust, sharp re

Sometimes, big, clever art is there to make you feel small and stupid. Or at least insignificant. That’s what the best work of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto does. His retrospective at the Hayward finds him toying with light and dark, reality and fiction, life and death, all to make you go slack jawed in awe at your pitiful place in the universe.  It starts with vultures and deer; all perfectly posed, perfectly lit, classic nature photography. But they’re too perfect: stare long enough and you realise the landscapes are painted backdrops, the foliage is plastic, the animals are stuffed. They’re dioramas from the American Museum of Natural History, shot to look real, with dramatic long exposures, shifting light, a world of details and idealised compositions that could never happen in the wild.  These are some of the earliest works here, but he pulls the same trick years later at Madame Tussaud’s, using the techniques and tactics of portrait photography to capture images of the wax works; Napoleon all vulnerable and forlorn, Fidel Castro aged and weak, Princess Diana meek and soft. Down in the basement, he shows images of waxworks of serial killers and psychopaths. He’s forcing you to balance on the cusp of reality and fiction, life and death. But it’s smarter than that, because he’s also trying to make you ask why: why do we preserve these animals in dioramas, these historical figures in a museum? What are we scared of losing? What have we done? Quiet pictures of the

If an immersive light show in the basement of an office block about the cosmos, nature and humanity sounds familiar, it should. We’ve been here before. This is London-based art collective United Visual Artists’ third appearance at 180 The Strand, following on from a solo show in 2019 and then an appearance in the ‘Future Shock’ group exhibition. But this time it’s bigger, flashier and louder. But in the schtick is still the same (it’s even quite of few of the same works): dizzying light installations in pitch black rooms, dealing with topics like celestial bodies, the sounds of animals, psychoanalysis and information overload.  It starts with stuttering numbers and algorithmically generated headlines, then swinging pendulums of light that cut the room in half. There’s a circle of LEDs that chirp with the sounds of an African nature reserve, a throbbing, strobing light that spins and glitches like the world’s least useful desk lamp, orbs in clouds of smoke being circled by spotlights. That’s the good stuff. Other things here look like fancy desktop screensavers or awkward ’90s music videos. Those are less good.  But it’s still 180, so it’s all incredibly well produced, utterly beautiful, mind-bending, gorgeous and ultra-immersive. If that’s all you want out of an art experience, it’s genuinely and unsurprisingly excellent. But don’t think too hard about any of it. Because what can the strobing desk lamp tell you about chaos theory? What do the orbs say about space and our plac

A faceless, grey corporate office; patterned carpet tiles, neon strip lights, shredded paper; suffocating, windowless, airless. This is early 2000s corporate America as seen by Avery Singer. But this isn’t just any date in the early 2000s, this is 9/11. The American artist’s immersive, trippy, beige installation is a meditation on tragedy and collective trauma, on one event which tore apart a country, and shattered Singer’s own youth. She lived down the road from the World Trade Center, her mother worked there. She was 13 or 14, teetering on the brink of adolescence, when tragedy hit. Who she is, what America is, was fundamentally altered by 9/11. You enter the gallery and face a wall of lifts, portals to a seemingly endless array of offices. Panels over the windows behind you are meant to ease vertigo for high rise office workers. Inside hang portraits of people impacted by the attack, a painting of a severed hand found on a window sill miles away, a police car. One of the portraits is of Marcy Borders, famous for a photo of her outside the World Trade Center covered in dust, staring emptily, sallow and broken. Another is of Stan Honda, who took that photo and helped disseminate and proliferate an iconic image of tragedy. The last is of Rachel Uchitel, whose fiancé died in 9/11, her eyes heavy with mascara, her ears and fingers draped in jewellery. Borders died of lung cancer after dealing with alcohol dependency, Uchitel endured years of substance abuse, ending up on a cele

The cost of trade isn’t just financial. The goods we consume have historically been paid for in blood too, in actual lives. And this human cost of the history of trade is at the heart of this year’s Turbine Hall installation. Ghanaian artist El Anatsui has draped the cavernous space in vast reams of fabric. The first is a huge red and gold sail, a symbol of the transatlantic trade of goods and people, and how ships ferried both across the ocean. Many of the slaves from West Africa were forcefully sent to work on sugar plantations to fuel the alcohol industry, creating spirits which would then be sent to Europe before making their way back to West Africa. Now look close: that gleaming golden sail is made of bottle caps. It’s a whole circular economy of trade, goods, lives, culture and history, billowing in the Turbine Hall. In the back of the space, a vast black sheet hangs from the ceiling to the floor, made of brandy and whisky bottle tops, flattened and knitted together. It could be a fence for containing, a wall for defending, it could be a crashing wave. Whatever it is, it ripples with the same symbolism as the sail: Africa, trade, exploitation, countless bodies.  The central work – human-like forms which coalesce into a globe if you stand in the right spot – is too easily dwarfed by the bigger pieces. And those big pieces are in turn dwarfed by the Turbine Hall. It’s just such an enormous, impossible space to deal with, in this doesn't deal with it as others have.  But i

London is full of amazing free museums, all stuffed with world class art. But forget them, because what we really need is a new museum you have to pay for with worse art. That’s what seems to be on the cards, as a planning application – first reported on back in August by Ianvisits – has been approved for what some have called a ‘major modern art museum’ in Marble Arch. It’s called Moco and aims to take over a huge 1920s building at the top of Oxford Street, filling three floors with art by the likes of Kaws, Yayoi Kusama and Banksy.  Now that planning permission has been granted (they have to change the space’s designated use from retail to learning and art), this will be Moco’s third site in Europe. Their other two outposts – one in Amsterdam, the other in Barcelona – apparently attract a million visitors a year. Those are both ticketed venues, with adult tickets costing €14.95 (£13) in Barcelona and €21.85 (£19) in Amsterdam. The museum’s focus seems to be pop, street art, graffiti and NFTs, with displays of work by the likes of Banksy, Stik and Kaws. The Moco website also says it shows art by Basquiat, Warhol and Kusama; big names, but it doesn’t specify what works it has in its collection, which should be a slight cause for concern (if you have a really good Basquiat, you shout about it). Oxford Street’s had a rough time of it lately, with major brands closing their stores, footfall plummeting and rent going through the roof. So never mind that you can see major works by

ロンドンには入場無料の美術館がいくつもあり、世界の名だたる芸術作品が集められている。だが、そうした施設のことは忘れよう。なぜなら、今必要なのは、もっと身近なアートに出合える、有料の美術館なのだから。 まさにそんな美術館が実現するようだ。ウェブメディアのianVisitsがこのニュースを最初に報じたのは2023年8月のこと。その後、建物の使用用途を商業用から教育・芸術用に変更するという手続きを経て、計画を進める許可が下りた。 場所は300以上の店が連なる大通りであるオックスフォード・ストリートで、すぐそばには、通りのシンボルであるマーブル・アーチが位置するという立地だ。1920年代の巨大な建物の3フロア全てを使い、カウズ、草間彌生、バンクシーといったアーティストの作品を展示することが計画されている。 美術館は私立で、名称は「Moco」。オランダのアムステルダム、スペインのバルセロナに続き、ヨーロッパで3つ目の系列館となる。アムステルダム、バルセロナの施設には年間100万人近くが来場しているようだ。どちらも入場料が必要で、前者は21.95ユーロ（約3,460円）、後者は14.95ユーロ（約2,360円）となっている。 メインで扱われるのはポップアートとストリートアートやNFTで、バンクシー、スティック、カウズといったアーティストらの作品が展示されるようだ。 公式ウェブサイトには、バスキアやウォーホル、草間らの作品もコレクションに含まれるとある。しかし、どの作品を所蔵しているかは明らかになっていないのはやや気になる。というのも、価値の高い作品を所蔵していたら、声高にアピールしそうなものだからだ。 オックスフォード・ストリートは近年、大手ブランドの相次ぐ撤退、客足の激減、家賃の高騰といった困難に見舞われてきた。そのことを踏まえれば、今回のニュースは歓迎すべきものだろう。 だから、国立の美術館で最高峰の作品を無料で見られることは、いったん忘れて喜ぼう。バンクシーの大規模展が（内容が良くなく、価格が高くとも）すでに開催済みであることも、「主要作家」の「大規模展」が次から次へと開催されることも脇に置こう。少なくとも、アメリカ風のキャンディーショップではなく、美術館がオープンするのだから。 関連記事 『London is officially getting a big new modern art museum（原文）』 『新たな体験とコンテンツの発信拠点「TOKYO NODE」がオープン』 『築地本願寺でイギリスと日本が融合、最新ジャズを堪能した夜』 『歌舞伎町の元廃ビルを舞台にアート展「ナラッキー」が開催』 『京都をアンビエントの聖地へ、コーネリアスやテリー・ライリーら集う大展覧会開催』 『世界で最も素晴らしい無料観光スポットは？』 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

October is the biggest month in the art calendar. You can blame Frieze for that, because literally every museum and gallery times its big autumn shows to coincide with the art fair, which takes place in Regents Park in the middle of the month. Major exhibitions at the Tate and Serpentine, eye-popping extravaganzas at 180 The Strand and Hauser & Wirth, outdoor sculpture parks, indoor art wonderlands, October has it all. One of these days I’m going to send Frieze my therapy bill for years of autumnal trauma.  The best London art exhibitions to see in October 2023 Frieze Seoul 2023 Photo by Lets Studio. Courtesy of Lets Studio and Frieze Frieze Frieze Sculpture is already open, and free, but if you want to see what the art world is really up to, you’ve got to head into the tents of Frieze and Frieze Masters. Any gallery worth its champagne flutes will be there, selling works by their biggest artists. No, you can’t afford any of it, but it’s still nice to window shop isn’t it.  Frieze and Frieze Masters are in Regents Park, Oct 11-15. Details here.  Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam © The Estate of Philip Guston Philip Guston This exhibition has been dogged by controversy, and has been repeatedly postponed and delayed as a result. Initially due to go on display in the USA, the show was pulled due to the inclusion of Guston’s paintings of hooded Klu Klux Klan figures, which some worried might be seen as racist. Obviously they’re not ra

You might think autumn would be a stupid time to open an outdoor sculpture exhibition. And you’d think right. It’s cold, windy, rainy and damp. This is indoor art’s time to shine. But that hasn’t stopped Frieze from returning to Regent’s Park once again with their annual outdoor sculpture extravaganza. Sigh. Go get the beanies and brollies, we’re going arting. Six awesome artworks to see at Frieze Sculpture 2023 Josh Smith, Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze. Josh Smith, ‘Friend’ It might be called ‘Friend’, but New York-based artist Josh Smith’s sculpture doesn’t look all that friendly. That’s because it’s based on the figure of the Grim Reaper, who probably isn’t someone you’d want to go for a pint with. It’s huge, and stands with arms outstretched in the middle of the park, waiting to smother you in its embrace and sweep you off to the ‘other side’. Or the pub.  Hank Willis Thomas, Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze. Hank Willis Thomas, ‘All Power To The People’ Hank Willis Thomas recently unveiled a major public sculpture in Boston inspired by the Civil Rights movement in America, and this piece tackles similar themes. The work is an enormous Afro comb, emblazoned with a raised fist and a peace symbol. What it lacks in subtlety it more than more than makes up for in directness.  Ayse Erkmen, Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze. Ayse Erkmen, 'Model for Moss Column' Moss has been big in art for a few years

The north staircase at Tate Britain is home to a new work by Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili, and it’s a jaw-dropping, mesmeric, gorgeously colourful tribute to the Grenfell Tower fire. The work has been kept tightly under wraps, but was opened to the public today. The mural spans huge walls, with the central part dedicated to the artist Khadija Saye, who died in Grenfell Tower. Ofili and Saye had met just a month before the fire, when both were exhibiting in Venice, and their meeting had a huge impact on him.  The ultra-colorful mural acts as a work of remembrance, both to Saye and the other victims of Grenfell. Saye sits in the middle of the piece holding an incense pot – in a pose that echoes one of her own photographs, also on display at Tate Britain – surrounded by mythical imagery and glowing orange, yellow and blue paint. Ofili rarely uses his work to directly address contemporary political issues, but there are echoes in this new mural of his famous ‘No Woman, No Cry’, a painting in memory of Stephen Lawrence. ‘A statement of sadness was manifested in “No Woman, No Cry”. That feeling of injustice has returned. I wanted to make a work in tribute to Khadija Saye. Remembering the Grenfell Tower fire, I hope that the mural will continue to speak across time to our collective sadness.’ 'Requiem' is open now at Tate Britain. More details here. Want more art? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London. Want more art, but free? Here you go.  Stay in the loop: sign up

Macaques, pallas’s cats, mason bees and hundreds more animals you’ve barely heard of star in this year’s edition of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Taking place as usual at the Natural History Museum, this year saw just under 50,000 entries by photographers from 95 countries, all vying for the crown of King of the Photographic Jungle (aka the Grand Title).  Photograph: Pietro Formis / Wildlife Photographer of the Year The selection this year includes bison bashing through deep snow, a tiger cub being rescued from a Ukrainian zoo at the outbreak of the war with Russia, a snow leopard about to turn an adorable little pallas’s cat into a delectable furry snack and the deathly stare of a truly grim but delightfully named underwater predator, the stargazer.  Photograph: Donglin Zhou / Wildlife Photographer of the Year There are various categories, like ‘plants and fungi’ and ‘animal portraits’, as well as separate prizes for young photographers. Sixteen ‘highly commended’ images have been released so far, before the winners are announced on the 10th of October at a ceremony hosted by TV presenters Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin.  Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the exhibition, is at the Natural History Museum, Oct 13-Jun 30 2024. £17. Details and tickets here. Can’t wait? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London right now.  Can’t wait, won’t pay? Here are some free exhibitions instead.  Listen to Time Out’s brilliant new podcast ‘Love Thy Neighbourho

August, as usual, has been largely bereft of new exhibitions. The whole art world just shuts down, it's wild – where does everyone go, what are they doing? No one knows, it's one of life's great mysteries. But things are already ramping back up, and this September looks like a great one for art lovers, with major new film works, fashion exhibitions and painting shows galore. Does it make up for having to spend a whole month 'reading' and 'watching TV' instead of looking at paintings? No, but it's a start.   The best London art exhibitions this September Christian Marclay, © Christian Marclay. Courtesy White Cube Christian Marclay: ‘Doors’ If you want to restore the international reputation of a mundane household object, you’ll want to get Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay on the blower. First he made clocks somehow engrossing in his epic ‘The Clock’, 24 hours of movie footage of clocks and watches arranged chronologically. And now he’s gone and made ‘Doors out of videos of people opening, entering and walking through doors in cinema history. Rumours that his next project is about wainscoting remain unsubstantiated.  Christian Marclay: ‘Doors’ is at White Cube Mason’s Yard, Sep 6-30. Free. More details here.  Photo by Rob Harris Tenant of Culture Tenant of Culture rips apart the bloated body of the fashion industry and rearranges it into brilliant new shapes. ToC takes discarded clothing and reshapes, remodels and refashions it into twisted tapestries and biomorphic

Gas prices, going up. Food prices, soaring. Rent? Forget about it. But one place where the cost of living isn’t going to tear your current account to shreds is the National Gallery. Recently, they unveiled a ‘pay what you wish’ scheme that allowed visitors to pay as little as £1 for access to their big blockbuster exhibitions, and they’ve just decided to extend it.  While most of the museum is already free to visit, its big shows of major artists like Michelangelo and Caravaggio can cost over £16 to see. But for their recent Lucien Freud and After Impressionism exhibitions, they trialled allowing visitors in for just a quid on Friday evenings. And it worked, people flocked to luxuriate in the glow of those art historical masterpieces. Now, you’ll be able to do the same for their upcoming exhibition of paintings by seventeenth century Dutch master Frans Hals. According to the gallery, more than a fifth of visitors who took advantage of the scheme had never been to a paid exhibition before, so they’re getting new faces through the door – which can only be a good thing. You may not be able to afford to heat your home this winter or feed your family, but maybe the warmth and nourishment of cheap art will sustain you through the colder months. Probably.Frans Hals is at the National Gallery, Sep 30-Jan 21 2024. More details and tickets here. Pay what you wish is 5.30-9pm on Fridays. Nine art exhibitions we can’t wait to see in London this autumn. Time Out’s brilliant new podcast,

Unbelievably, summer is almost over. Despite months of drizzle, grey skies and cold wind, yet more drizzle, grey skies and cold wind are just around the corner. Autumn is looming. But don't get too glum, because with all the bad weather comes a whole bunch of great art. Autumn is the best time for exhibitions in London, with every major gallery saving its big shows for the colder months, and this year's sweater season is looking damn exciting for art fans. The best autumn exhibitions in London Julianknxx (c) Studioknxx Julianknxx  The mononymic Julianknxx has been popping up in various London institutions in recent years (180 The Strand, the Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern’s ‘A World in Common’ exhibition) with haunting, hallucinatory video celebrations of Blackness. Now it’s the Barbican Curve’s turn to play host, and this is the artist’s most ambitious work yet, fusing poetry, music, performance and film.  Julianknxx: ‘Chorus in Rememory of Flight' is at the Barbican Curve, Sep 14-Feb 11 2024. More details here.    Portrait of Marina Abramović Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives Photograph by Paola + Murray ©, New York, 2015   Marina Abramovic This show has been in our ‘most anticipated exhibitions of next year’ lists for what feels like forever because it just keeps getting delayed. But maybe this is the year we finally get the RA’s huge, major Marina Abramovic retrospective. Or maybe the annual postponement IS the art. Marina, you so crazy. Marina Abramovic is

In an unprecedented meeting of minds, two of the finest talents of their respective generations have come together for a newsworthy painterly collaboration. One helped shape the course of twentieth century art, the other is a super cute guy who sings about watermelons. That’s right, David Hockney has turned his eye to Harry Styles.  The portrait was painted over two days at Hockney’s home in Normandy last May. It finds Styles lounging in an armchair, dressed in jeans and a bright cardigan, with a string of pearls around his neck. It’s Hockney at his loosest and freest. Is it also Hockney at his best? No, not really – but he’s 86, so give him a break. The painting is one of 30 new portraits by the artist going on display at the National Portrait Gallery later this year as part of a revamped version of their ‘David Hockney: Drawing From Life’ exhibition, which opened in 2020 but was forced to close early due to the pandemic. There have been a lot of Hockney shows in London over recent years (and that one was among the worst) but maybe the addition of these new portraits will help push it towards greatness, who knows.  ‘David Hockney: Drawing From Life’ is at the National Portrait Gallery from Nov 2. More details and tickets here. Can't wait? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London you can see right now.  Want more? Here are London's best free exhibitions.  Time Out’s brilliant new podcast, ‘Love Thy Neighbourhood’, is out now. Listen to the first episode with Bimini in Bank

Once again, the Square Mile has been littered with public art. Sculpture In The City, the annual open-air exhibition of, you guessed it, sculptures in the City, is back for its twelfth edition. This time, it’s spreading major artworks by 18 artists all around the squares, alcoves, doorways and streets of the UK’s financial district.  London has a lot of sculpture trails and temporary public displays, but Sculpture In The City has maybe the highest calibre of artist of them all. The works selected for this year’s exhibition are by some of the best young artists  around, and some of the biggest established names too. If this was in a museum, you’d be impressed, so don’t be put off by the fact you have to navigate people who work in finance just to see the art.  Here are our favourite works at Sculpture In The City 2023 Victor Lim Seaward, courtesy the artist and Brooke Bennington. Photo by Nick Turpin Victor Lim Seaward, ‘Nest Series’Not enough art doubles up as animal accommodation, but Victor Lim Seaward’s gloopy, weird, gorgeous 3D-printed enamel sculptures are also functional birds’ nests. The inside is insulated, there’s drainage, coconut hemp nesting material and each one has been designed to conform to RSPB guidelines. It’s probably the only way you can live rent free in central London, you just have to be a bird.  Simeon Barclay, courtesy Workplace. Photo by Nick Turpin. Simeon Barclay, ‘Pittu Pithu Pitoo’One of the UK’s smartest young conceptually-focused artists,

‘The Art of Banksy’ is a big deal for Banksy fans: a huge, sweeping exhibition all about the naughtiest of naughty art boys with his spray can and silly little stencils. In 2021, after touring around the world and popping up in cities like Melbourne and Toronto, the biggest Banksy exhibition in the world took up residency in Covent Garden, before going off on more travels. It was meant to reopen this July, and apparently it’s going to be bigger and better than ever, but has just been delayed until September because of 'production issues'. When it does eventually return, it will be on Regent Street in a massive 2000 square metre space. There will be 110 works including ‘Girl With Balloon’ in no fewer than three different colour variations, ‘Flower Thrower’ and ‘Rude Copper’ as well as loads of sketches and previously unseen works.  It feels important to note that although the show contains the largest collection of official works by the artist, made from 1997 to 2008, it is entirely unauthorised by the artist. As organisers put it, this exhibition is ‘completely non-consensual’. Ethical? You wouldn't Bank-sy on it.  Tickets for ‘The Art of Banksy’ start at £17.50 and are on sale now. More details and tickets here Want more art? Here are London’s top ten exhibitions. Want more art, but free? Here are London’s best free art shows.