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

Eventually we’re going to have to stop doing this. At some point, we’ll all realise that there’s just nothing left to say about impressionism and we’ll stop trying to reframe this one tiny window of art history in a million different ways just to sell more tickets to ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ listeners from Surrey. But today is not that day, because the RA is looking at how that revolutionary group from nineteenth century France used paper. Unnecessary? Hugely. But, begrudgingly, quite good, because this show is full of intimate, small-scale beauties. Traditionally, drawing on paper was saved for preparatory sketches or learning and lessons, but the impressionists rejected tradition. They elevated the humble drawing, seeing paper on a par with canvas. It had its benefits too. Paper was cheap and light, so were pastels and gouaches and charcoal, they could be transported easily, used quickly. Italian artist Giuseppe de Nittis captures a feverish snapshot of two women in carriage, Edgar Degas sketches a wriggling hyperactive toddler, Manet freezes the traffic of a wet Parisian street in juddering grey ink wash. Paper was fast, immediate, spontaneous; the polar opposite of studied, overworked Academic perfection. Degas’ works on paper are jaw dropping, perfect things The big names of impressionism are well represented (Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Cezanne) but only one of them stands out as a genuine devotee and master of the medium. Degas’ works on paper are jaw dropping, perfect t

In a 2020 interview, young Belgian painter Bendt Eyckermans said ‘my paintings are no great enigmas’. But this show of sombre images, full of symbols to decode and narratives to unravel, sure makes that seem like bs.  It’s the works’ very enigmatic-ness that’s appealing. The paintings are full of camcorders and Polaroid cameras. Clothes are discarded on a sofa, statues are casting dramatic shadows in dark rooms, two women embrace while cradling model hearts in their hands. A woman’s legs rest on a blanket on the floor while a video camera points at some unseen action out of frame. Men’s hands hold those camcorders, but they remain largely faceless. What are we seeing? The filming of some erotic love story? Porn? Whatever it is, all we’re witnessing is the witnessing itself, we’re seeing the documentation, not the event. We’re voyeurs of the voyeurs. In the next room, a woman from an earlier work is now wrapped in a heavy shawl. Another camera on a tripod is reflected obliquely in a blue vase behind her. The event has happened, this is its aftermath. A small model heart is wrapped in rope and left on the ground. Smaller works show a man chiselling stone and stills from movie studios idents. Eyckermans is inviting you into this dark, complex world of watching and making, of films and cinema and sensuality and emotional tenderness, of the gaze and where it’s aimed. These are tense portrayals of what’s seen and unseen, said and unsaid. They’re beautiful paintings; uncomfortable,

In tiny ceramic compositions, Ron Nagle conjures infinite imaginary worlds. The American sculptor, who has been ploughing the same dreamy, psychedelic, hyper-colour furrow since the 1960s, creates small things (none bigger than 16cm) to make you think big. The little ceramics here look like alien rock formations, lunar landscapes, volcanic eruptions on desert planes, modernist houses, perfectly surreal French pastries and furniture for extra terrestrials. Each one is a world unto itself. Some look like adobe brick houses plonked on purple desert floors, others feature impossibly undulating geological features, like mountains curving up into the sky. There are branches of driftwood, globs of lava, sinkholes and menhirs. Nagle toys brilliantly with texture. There’s all this sandy roughness and rocky grit that then gets splooged over with perfect, slimy, shiny smoothness. He plays with perspective and size too. If the house by the water is ‘human’ size in this universe, then how huge is that abandoned branch? How vast is that mountain? How enormous is that chair? They’re unreal, beautiful, mind-bending, cosmic micro-worlds, full of nods to brutalism and deserts and the spaces that bodies inhabit, or could inhabit in some ideal future, on some distant planet, on Nagleworld. They’re gorgeous -universes you desperately want to inhabit. Shrink me down, beam me in, I want to live here.

You wouldn't get away with it these days. But in the eighteenth century, you could go spend a few years in Turkey, come back with a big beard, and call yourself ‘the Turkish Painter’ like Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) did. Call it cultural appropriation or just an incredibly embarrassing gap year, but it worked. Liotard was a sensation. He was a leading miniaturist and a master of pastels, able to sell his beautiful depiction of a woman and a young girl sharing breakfast for 200 guineas, a good wodge in 1754. So good, that 20 years later he took a second stab at it, likely hoping for another big sale. This later version was an almost exact replica but done in oils, and the two have been united here at the National Gallery for possibly the first time since 1773.  It’s the most luxurious game of spot-the-difference ever. The same elements appear in both: two figures in stunningly rendered clothes, their hair sculpted in the styles of the era, sit at the breakfast table. The young girl dips her bread into a cup of coffee that’s just about to overflow. The table is laid with a pewter coffee pot and a clashing set of porcelain teacups. This is high society, with its high society tastes in fashion and food and decorative arts, captured with gentleness, precision, tenderness and unbelievable skill. I’m not sure they’re perfect. The woman’s thumb feels fat and flat, the hair a little lifeless, but that’s what you pick up when you stare at two versions of the same work for an hour.

Stripped of the fashions of his day, sat bleakly against a plain blue wall, Johannes Froben doesn’t look like a sixteenth-century printer. In Hans Holbein’s portrait, he could be anyone, at any time. He looks to his left, his hair thinning, his cheeks sagging, his skin sallow, his arms tucket miserably into his black coat. It’s so stark, so quiet, so rueful and heavy with years of worry and effort. Holbein was special.  And he had to be to make it in the Tudor Court. Arriving from Basel with nothing but a letter of recommendation from humanist philosopher Erasmus, Holbein worked his way to the very top of English society, painting aristocrats, lawyers, politicians, soldiers and, eventually, the king himself.  This deeply atmospheric show at the Queen’s Gallery brings together sketches and drawings by Holbieng into a single vivid portrait of sixteenth-century life. Like any good Tudor story, it starts with war and marriage: there’s a huge battle scene of Henry VIII defeating the French, portraits of impossibly ugly European royals being married off around the continent as political pawns.  But the first sight you catch of Holbein’s drawings is a group of sketches for a larger portrait of the family of Sir Thomas More, a lawyer who was Holbein’s first proper patron. The drawings are such light, soft things; features barely delineated, the chalk barely pressed to the paper. The lips are thin mists of peach and pink, the eyes gentle, ghostly blues and greys. So much care is given

It’s almost as if you can’t have beauty without destruction, or riches without exploitation. The story of Myanmar, told here at the British Museum, is one of abundance and plenty being met with dominance and greed over and over again. Squeezed in between China, Thailand, Laos, India, Bangladesh and a vast ocean, Myanmar is a nation of riches. It has oil, rare earth elements, teak, rice, silver and ports for trade. And before British colonial rule it wasn’t a nation but a loose collection of states, kingdoms and kinships that grew and shrank as they fought and expanded. In intricate manuscripts and wall hangings, you learn about how groups in central Myanmar attacked east into Thailand and west into India capturing whole populations as spoils of war. A silk cloth here is made by captured Manipuris, the gold Qu’ran box belonged to seized muslims. A illustrated text shows King Mindon bringing in people from neighbouring regions but all dressed in Burmese clothing, whole populations co-opted and integrated into Burmese society, their skills and labour as valuable as any resource. Sliks, textiles and gems were traded across the region. States and borders were fluid, Burmese society was a multifaceted thing. And then the British took over, bringing with them an all-encompassing form of violent administrative bureaucracy that would obliterate countless existing social structures and unite all these states into one nation. A huge gold Buddha here was looted by a British naval office

If anger is an energy, there’s enough here to power the Tate for decades. The gallery is buzzing with the violent ire and shrieking fury of second-wave feminism, because after all the freedom and liberation promised by the Swinging Sixties, British women in the 1970s had to deal with the reality: that not much had changed. And they were furious. This is an exhibition of 100 feminist artists and collectives kicking violently against the system. It’s a sprawling, complex mess of a show. It opens with photos of marches and Women’s Liberation conferences, equal pay placards and protest posts, a world where society was being remade, and art was too. The most interesting early art here uses performance and photography. Penny Slinger presents herself as a cake, ready for male consumption, Anne Bean screams underwater, Hannah O’Shea covers herself in animal markings, Cosey Fanni Tutti cuts wound-like holes in her clothes, Helen Chadwick transforms herself into a kitchen. Performance and its documentation allowed these artists to centre themselves, to tell stories with their own bodies. They became their own zines, their own pamphlets and placards. Their bodies became weapons against sexism, domesticity, the burden of care. 1970s anger became its own movement. Punk is everywhere here; it’s in Linder’s iconic photographic montages and meat-draped performance with her band Ludus, it’s in The Raincoats’ Gina Birch’s incessant ear-piercing scream film, Delta 5’s Chila Kumari Singh Burman’

Lie back and think of the English countryside: do you picture rolling hills, bales of hay, endless green, quaint villages, rural idylls, bucolic perfection, Gainsborough, Constable, Turner? Of course you do, it’s in our national psyche, so ingrained in our public consciousness that it has its own visual vocabulary. But this little exhibition at the William Morris Gallery proves English landscape art is about much more than undulating hills and gambolling lambs.  But it does start with a sombre-ly hyperbolic, ultra-dramatic Gainsborough of a farmer crossing a bridge in a deep, dark valley, an explosive Turner vision of a misty sunset and neat little Constable prints of the four seasons. This is the English landscape. It’s quiet, calm, verdant. Almost utopian.  But we all know that’s only part of the picture. Stunning photos of the industrial north west by Chris Killip show a miserable nation torn apart by poverty and terrible weather. Staged images by Jo Spence find her face down and naked in a field as a murdered trespasser or a rebellious land rights protester. The English landscape is a fractured, contested place.  It’s quiet, calm, verdant. Almost utopian.  It’s also not just English. British artist Hurvin Anderson paints patterns from the ironwork gates around homes in his parents’ Jamaica, Anthea Hamilton makes a kimono patterned with British grasses, Jeremy Deller creates a motorway sign for the A303 headed to ‘Built By Immigrants’. The English landscape is a construct

Max Hooper Schneider has witnessed the birth of life, and he’s witnessed its death too. The American artist got a place on a scientific expedition to deep sea hydrothermal vents, where fungi and bacteria are spewed out, giving life to the seas. But he’s also been to the reefs of Fukushima, where life has been obliterated by nuclear holocaust.  His sculptural work here is art for the end times. He makes grisly, oily, grimy little dioramas of life after ecological collapse, after the death of the planet. Each is a dystopian, cyberpunk world unto itself; one is an arcade bathed in sickly green light, the screens of its machines shattered, weeds growing through the cracks in the ground. Another is a bar, its stools empty, its drinks un-drunk, its tiny screens all showing episodes of ‘Cheers’. There’s a library that has become an oil well, a room which has become encased in mushrooms and cereal.  In the biggest work, a crayfish has become a mini model train, running on tracks around screens showing images of deep sea creatures. It’s surreal, dark, miserably funny. All the detritus of modern life, the pop culture, the entertainment, the consumption, left to rot forever.  The copper sculptures are a little generic looking and art fair-y, but the dioramas are great. Like Mike Kelley doing post-apocalyptic Polly Pockets. This is life after the fall, after humanity has retreated to the earth’s crust in a desperate bid for survival. This is what we’re doing, what we have done, to oursel

There’s a sadness to this exhibition by the great British artist David Hockney (which originally opened in 2020 but closed after just 20 days due to the nationwide lockdown; this is the same show with a new series of portraits added). It feels like a long look backwards, with each room telling a story of ageing and 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-exhibition 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’

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.

Would you like a slice of the father or mother? Maybe a nice cup of bathwater to wash it down? Well you’re in luck, because all are on offer in Bobby Baker’s ‘An Edible Family in a Mobile Home’ at Tate Britain. The installation is part of the gallery’s big ‘Women In Revolt’ exhibition, which takes a furious, hectic look at British feminist art from 1970-90. Baker’s installation is a recreation of her 1976 original, and is plonked in the grounds in front of the Tate. Back then, Acme - the arts organisation - was giving prefabricated micro-homes to artists. Baker turned hers into this installation, papering over the walls with pages torn from newspapers and placing sculptural figures in each room. But not made of marble or clay, these figures were made of cake. It was Baker (really embracing her nominative determinism) exploring what the modern family represents, who plays what roles and why. Bobby Baker's Edible Family at Tate Britain, 2023. Photo by Madeleine Buddo. But she was also making an artwork that could be part of the community, that could reach out to the people around her. She wanted to make something ‘local and accessible’ she says. ‘I was living in an area surrounded by families with young children that I wanted to acknowledge.’ In the 2023 version, there’s a fruitcake father sat watching TV, a coconut cake baby in a cot, a garibaldi figure in a bath, and a human made of meringues lying in bed. They’re all delicious, and as clever and insightful now as they were

November is a pointless month, it’s like February with an ego, because at least February has the good sense to be fewer than 30 days. But here it is anyway, November with its cold misery and total lack of either autumnal cosiness or Yuletide pleasantness. Makes me sick. But at least the art is going to be good eh?  London’s best November exhibitions David Hockney Painting Harry Styles, (With Portrait of Clive Davis) Normandy Studio1st June 2022Photo: JP Gonçalves de LimaDavid Hockney Painting Harry Styles, (With Portrait of Clive Davis) Normandy Studio1st June 2022Photo: JP Gonçalves de Lima David Hockney: ‘Drawing From Life’ This major Hockney exhibition opened just as the pandemic tightened its grip and was forced to close early as a result. So they’ve decided to bring it back to give everyone a chance to seeing it (with the addition of some new portraits, including one of Harry Styles). Is it worth this resurrection? Well, our review back in 2020 gave it three stars, so make of that what you will.  David Hockney: ‘Drawing From Life’ is at The National Portrait Gallery, Nov 2 to x. More details here. Gina Birch, still from Three Minute Scream, 1979. Courtesy the artist ‘Women in Revolt!’ After all the freedom and liberation promised by the Swinging Sixties, British women in the 1970s had to deal with the reality: that not much had changed, and there were plenty of battles still to be fought. This brilliantly confrontational show promises to look at the artists who sto

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