For art lovers in London, Frieze London (15–19 October) is undoubtedly a landmark event in the autumn calendar, but the city is already filled with exhibitions worth seeing. Visit the Serpentine Galleries for Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s video-game-inspired exhibition; explore Jonathan Schofield’s return to painting at Vivienne Roberts Projects—after a career as a creative director that included work for Stella McCartney—or head to the Hayward Gallery for Taiwanese artist Val Lee’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. From group shows to career retrospectives, our regularly updated monthly guide to the best exhibitions will help you plan your next visit.
Thinking of looking across the Atlantic? Here are the best art exhibitions to see in New York this month.
London Art Exhibitions: What to See in October 2025
Blitz: The Club That Shaped the 1980s
Design Museum, open until 29 March 2026
Spandau Ballet at its first photo shoot on Warren Street in 1980 (Image credit: Graham Smith)
The Blitz club launched figures including Spandau Ballet, Visage, and Boy George, and transformed London fashion in the 1980s. The Design Museum invites visitors to explore the club’s history and atmosphere through music, fashion, film, and graphic design.
Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion
Barbican Art Gallery, open until Sunday, 25 January 2026
Image credit: Joseph Rigby
The Barbican places dirt and decay at the forefront of fashion’s fascination with deterioration in its latest exhibition. Featuring everything from imitation-stained denim to dresses splattered with mud, the show asks: “Why does fashion get dirty?” Works by Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Maison Margiela, and others examine how dirt has influenced standards of beauty, why it is reappearing in the work of younger designers, and what it may mean for the future of sustainable fashion.
Marie Antoinette Style
V&A South Kensington, until 22 March 2026
Image credit: Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The V&A South Kensington presents a landmark exhibition examining the style of Marie Antoinette, one of the most mythologized queens in European history. Sponsored by Manolo Blahnik, the exhibition brings together 250 objects, traces the eighteenth-century monarch’s origins as a fashion icon, and concludes with work by contemporary designers that demonstrates her enduring artistic legacy.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: Delusion
Serpentine North, until 18 January 2026
Image courtesy of the artist and Serpentine
Berlin-based British artist and game designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is committed to challenging the solitude of gallery viewing. Her immersive new exhibition at the Serpentine encourages visitors to interact with one another.
Presented in the form of a video game, the exhibition offers a multiplayer experience that invites audiences to enter digital portals virtually. Each portal contains conversation prompts reflecting on digital worlds and their often harsh and dangerous real-world consequences. Players follow the prompts and are encouraged to have candid conversations with themselves and others.
Lee Miller
Tate Britain, 2 October 2025–15 February 2026
Lee Miller, Model Holding a Light Bulb, Vogue Studio, London, England, c. 1943 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024
Image credit: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024
This exhibition surveys Lee Miller’s career, from her involvement in French Surrealism to her work in fashion and war photography. Miller first encountered photography in front of the camera as one of the most sought-after models of the late 1920s. She later moved behind the lens, photographing New York, Paris, London, and Cairo. Visitors can see 250 vintage and modern prints, including works that have never previously been exhibited.
Cosima von Bonin: Upstairs Downstairs
Raven Row, 9 October–14 December 2025
Image courtesy of the artist and gallery
Since emerging in Cologne in the 1990s, Cosima von Bonin has produced art that combines humor and melancholy. Upstairs Downstairs presents early works featuring objects and characters that pay tribute to an imaginative childhood. It is also her first solo exhibition in London.
Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude
Hayward Gallery, 7 October 2025–11 January 2026
Image credit: Takuya Matsumi, courtesy of the artist
Taiwanese artist Val Lee presents her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. Combining film, photography, and costume, the exhibition explores ideas of isolation and loneliness. Her narratives are fragmented and ambiguous, and their protagonists are difficult to identify. The work creates a sense of estrangement while immersing viewers in collective memories shaped by political systems.
Jonathan Schofield: Summer Defiance
Vivienne Roberts Projects, until 21 November 2025
Image credit: Jonathan Schofield
Jonathan Schofield’s Summer Defiance marks the former Stella McCartney creative director’s return to painting. The London-based artist graduated from the Royal College of Art in the late 1990s, studying under figures including Peter Doig and Helen Chadwick. After graduating, he felt that the work he wanted to make did not align with prevailing art-world trends. During the pandemic, he returned seriously to painting. “I knew I would not get another chance, so I felt completely free. As a young artist, you are overly sensitive to where you stand between your own point of view and the world of artistic fashion, and that can become restrictive. Since returning to painting, I have felt extraordinarily free because I can paint what I want.”
Conrad Shawcross: Umbilical
Here East, until 2 November 2025
Image credit: Conrad Shawcross
Conrad Shawcross has unveiled his most ambitious rope-making machine to date in London. Combining physics, philosophy, and art, Shawcross creates monumental mechanical sculptures. His latest work, The Nervous System (Umbilical), stands ten meters high and consists of forty interwoven arms that braid an umbilical-like rope in a sequence that never repeats. It symbolizes the movement of our solar system, tracing the planets as they orbit the sun within a rotating galaxy that is itself continually flattening and expanding.
David Bowie Centre
V&A East Storehouse, permanent
Image courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum
David Bowie’s fashion, memorabilia, and personal collections are now displayed at V&A East Storehouse in London, with a range as extraordinary as their creator. The pioneering musician’s archive of 90,000 personal items is similarly accessible and astonishing. Bowie was an instinctive curator—perhaps even a collector of his own life—preserving every fashion statement, scrap of paper, and piece of memorabilia. Together they form an intensely personal map of his life and complement the museum’s 70,000 photographs, negatives, and color transparencies. Alongside rejection letters are the fan letters he preserved with equal care.
Hilary Lloyd: Very High Frequency
Studio Voltaire, open until 11 January 2026
Image credit: © Hilary Lloyd. Courtesy of the artist, Studio Voltaire, London, and Sadie Coles HQ, London
The film work of British artist Hilary Lloyd resists simple classification. She combines multiple media and eclectic sources of inspiration to create new ways of looking, often distributing monitors and screens throughout a space so viewers must experience the exhibition from different positions. At Studio Voltaire, she examines the life and work of playwright, television writer, and author Dennis Potter (1935–1994). Through a series of short films featuring close collaborators, producers, and actors—including Gina Bellman, Alison Steadman, Richard E. Grant, and Kenneth Trodd—Lloyd constructs a theatrical biography of Potter and his enduring influence, culminating in the question: Why Potter?
Riccardo Dalisi
Spazio Leone, until 26 October 2025
Image credit: Callum Su
Founded in 2020 by Naples-born gallerist Gennaro Leone, Spazio Leone is known for supplying London’s leading interior designers with distinctive sculptural works. It now collaborates with designer Oscar Piccolo to present the first UK exhibition of Riccardo Dalisi (1931–2022), one of postwar design’s most radical and playful figures. Spazio Leone brings together six decades of work by the Italian visionary, from whimsical coffee makers to radical community workshops.
Hugh Hayden: Hughmanity
Lisson Gallery, until 1 November 2025
Image courtesy of the artist and gallery
The Texas-born artist is known for exploring the theme of the journey and, more specifically, the recognized symbols of community and faith. In Hughmanity, works include a burning dining table, a child’s dress made from bark, and cigarettes projecting from the American flag. The artist plays with dualities of joy and grief, refuge and danger, while a spiritual current runs throughout.
Christopher Wool
Gagosian, 13 October–19 December 2025
Image courtesy of the artist and gallery
American artist Christopher Wool presents more than fifty works on paper, sculptures, and prints centered on abstraction. Each work explores a broad range of techniques, from screen printing and expressive mark-making to overpainting. Wool’s method includes dragging a turpentine-soaked rag across the surface so the image disappears into a gray haze.
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Robilant+Voena, 16 October–21 November 2025
Image credit: Lorenzo Fiaschi
During Frieze Week, Robilant+Voena joins Galleria Continua to present the first solo gallery exhibition in the United Kingdom by Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou. Twelve selected works demonstrate his mixed-media practice and nuanced visual examination of consumerism, colonialism, the environment, identity, and childhood. Notably, he begins from his own experience. The exhibition combines Tayou’s Central African heritage with his life, travel, and work in Europe.
Charlie Ahearn: Wild Style
Woodbury House, open until 10 October 2025
Image courtesy of the artist
New York artist Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style exhibition coincides with the BFI London Film Festival and is his first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. Audiences can see the filmmaker’s best-known film, Wild Style (1983). The exhibition includes large paintings, screen prints, and mixed-media works dating from the late 1970s to the present. Ahearn has continued painting throughout his filmmaking career, capturing the energy of Wild Style and the downtown communities that shaped it, while documenting vivid moments from the early hip-hop scene.
Noémie Goudal: But It Still Moves
Edel Assanti, 10 October–19 December 2025
Noémie Goudal, Grand Vide, film, 8 minutes, 2024 © Noémie Goudal
Image credit: Noémie Goudal, courtesy of the artist
French visual artist Noémie Goudal examines ecology and earth science in her latest exhibition at Edel Assanti. Spanning three gallery rooms, her work explores geological time through film, sculpture, photography, and performance. Against the severity of the global climate crisis, the exhibition feels both timely and thought-provoking.
Nigerian Modernism
Tate Modern, 8 October 2025–10 May 2026
Image courtesy of the artists and galleries
Nigerian Modernism explores modern art in mid-twentieth-century Nigeria and the artists who led the movement. Visitors travel through works connected to Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos, and Enugu, as well as London, Munich, and Paris. The exhibition presents the multidimensional practices developed by Nigerian artists during the decade surrounding independence from British colonial rule in 1960, combining Nigerian, African, and European techniques.
Rear View: Liverpool–London–Paris
Gagosian, until 4 October 2025
Image credit: © Paul McCartney. Courtesy of Gagosian
Paul McCartney’s backstage photographs from the height of Beatlemania, once thought lost, are displayed in Gagosian’s Rear View: Liverpool–London–Paris. The exhibition also offers an opportunity to purchase signed photographs from McCartney’s collection.
Morning at the Lido
Image courtesy of the artist and gallery
Painter Tarka Kings revisits cool summer days through an exhibition centered on outdoor swimming. Inspired by Georges Seurat, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha, the series of works on paper and plasterboard combines Impressionism, Pop Art, and photorealism. It follows a woman swimming in the Serpentine—where Kings swims almost every day—and considers the potential of urban bodies of water as places of respite.
When You Arrive
Auto Italia, until 26 October 2025
Image credit: Jack Elliot Edwards
Photographs by Bernice Mulenga cover the walls like a living diary. What initially appears chaotic gradually reveals an unchoreographed world filled with tenderness and defiance, presenting friendship, care, and unmistakable solidarity.
Bury Your Master
Pilar Corrias, until 1 November 2025
Image courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London
Manuel Mathieu presents paintings and sculptures in his second solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias. He examines politics, spirituality, and the ways they are inherited. Through abstract two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, Mathieu’s installation confronts reality directly.
Birth of a Nation and The Enemy of All Mankind
Victoria Miro, until 1 November 2025
Image courtesy of the artist and gallery
Canadian moving-image artist and photographer Stan Douglas makes his European debut at Victoria Miro with the video installation Birth of a Nation and his recent photographic series The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly. Both bodies of work investigate race, class, and gender.
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: Incantation
Victoria Miro, until 1 November 2025
Image courtesy of the artist and gallery
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s paintings explore spirituality and expressions of contemporary Black and queer identity. The exhibition also includes works from the artist’s Atoms series, inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself and the line, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Pictograms: Iconic Japanese Design
Japan House, open until 9 November
Image credit: Japan House
Explore the world of pictograms at Japan House London. The Kensington High Street gallery is dedicated to Japanese art, design, and innovation. Its latest exhibition, Pictograms: Iconic Japanese Design, examines Japan’s important role in the development of this symbolic visual language. It traces pictograms from ancient Egyptian tomb carvings to their contemporary use in Japan and around the world, and considers both their history and their future applications as universal symbols.
Marina Tabassum: A Capsule in Time
Serpentine South, open until 26 October 2025
Image credit: © Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), photograph by Iwan Baan, courtesy of Serpentine
Architect Marina Tabassum designed the 2025 Serpentine Pavilion. Positioned along the park’s north–south axis, the elongated capsule-like structure contains a central courtyard. Tabassum drew inspiration from outings in the park, summer, and green gardens and leaves filtering soft daylight. Rooted in her architectural language, the design is contemporary while paying tribute to a specific place, culture, and history.
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Tate Modern, until 19 October 2025
Image credit: © Do Ho Suh
In Walk the House at Tate Modern, Korean artist Do Ho Suh reconstructs homes he has inhabited in Seoul, New York, London, and Berlin. The first object visitors encounter is a closed door, yet it does not prevent entry or obstruct the immediate view of the works distributed through the spacious galleries of the Blavatnik Building. The door forms part of the carefully sewn and constructed Nest/s series (2024), which reproduces thresholds from the artist’s former homes at a 1:1 scale.
1880 THAT: Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader
Wellcome Collection, until 6 April 2026
Image courtesy of the artists and gallery. Photograph by Benjamin Gilbert
At Wellcome Collection, creative duo Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader collaborate on their latest exhibition, 1880 THAT. Films, installations, and drawings explore communication between signed and spoken languages while challenging medicine’s entrenched view of deafness as a condition to be cured. Brick imagery recurs throughout the exhibition, representing the foundations of language, while throwing a brick symbolizes protest. Witty design, humor, and wordplay reveal the complexity of meaning and misunderstanding.
