Eddy Frankel

The London art world takes a long break over August so all the curators and dealers can go sun themselves in St Tropez. They deserve a break. But come autumn, it’s all guns blazing, full steam ahead with exhibitions. Big museum shows in September? You’ve got it. Major art fairs in October? Um, yes. Neat little commercial gallery shows November? Done. So here are the shows that make us super excited for sweaters and pumpkin spice latte weather.  Can’t wait? Here are the ten best exhibitions to see right now. 

Art happens: it always happens. No matter what society is going through, no matter what tragedies or injustices, artists will create work. And as Ukraine suffers under the relentless Russian invasion, now in its sixth month, the country’s artists are carrying on, creating, making. Street-art gallery BSMT Space is celebrating that cultural perseverance with an exhibition of young artists from across Ukraine, and pulling it together has required some herculean efforts, including a five-day drive to Lviv.  The show is called ‘Stronger Than Arms’, a reference to an old Ukrainian film about war in the east of the country, and has been entirely curated by two of the gallery’s younger members of staff: Olga Fedorova, who is Russian, and Polina Usenko, who’s Ukrainian.  ‘Olga and I were struggling to come to terms with the developing situation between our countries,’ says Polina. ‘I was working on settling my father and his family into their new life in Sussex (they fled my hometown Dnipro in Ukraine on the third day of the war) and the myriad issues which come with a drastic move to a foreign country, as well as just processing the complete and utter shock of the events unfolding. A creative project of this nature was exactly what I think we both needed during what felt like the greatest abyss of our lives so far.’ Denys Metelin It’s a sentiment echoed by Olga: ‘For me, being Russian, doing this exhibition is a way to speak up. Before this terrible invasion, these two beautiful co

Sure, the Tate’s great, the Hayward is wonderful and the National Gallery is a delight. But not all art in London is big and overwhelming, lots of it smaller, more experimental, more intimate. That’s where the city’s smaller, commercial galleries come in. Want giants of nineteenth century art? Feminist icons? Experimental youngsters? Weird conceptualism, twisty abstraction? You can find all of it in the galleries, and all of it is free. So here are the smaller shows we’re most excited about this autumn, and if you can’t wait, here are the ten best shows you can see right now. 

Art plays an essential role in London’s unparalleled and inimitable culture scene. It’s one of the city’s greatest and most vibrant creative scenes, and you can see it almost everywhere. There are an estimated 1,500 permanent exhibition spaces in the capital, most of them free. Whether you’re looking for contemporary or classical, modernism or old masters, there’s a gallery catering to your next art outing. But after you’ve exhausted the latest art exhibitions in London, choosing a gallery can be tricky business. So we’ve created a shortlist of all the London galleries you need to visit. Organised by size and including institutions like the National Gallery and independent stalwarts like the White Cube, we present the 50 best galleries in London.  RECOMMENDED: All the best art, reviews and listings in London.

London’s major galleries and museums are all open as usual, but check on the galleries’ websites before visiting, you may need to book a slot in advance. 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. London’s museums are all open as normal, and the city’s independents have been back in business for ages. So here, we've got your next art outing sorted with the ten best shows you absolutely can't miss. 

There was a time when all art had to do was be on a wall, maybe sometimes sit on a plinth, and that would be good enough, people would go look at it and leave thinking ‘nice, that was some art’. But over the past few years, audiences have started asking for more. People want to lose themselves in art, to be immersed in it. It’s not enough to look at Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, now you need to be actually inside it.  And it’s absolutely everywhere. Recent years have seen an explosion of immersive art exhibitions in London. There have been shows where Gustav Klimt and Vincent Van Gogh paintings have been projected on walls, rooms filled with smoke and bubbles, spaces filled with mirrors and lights by artists like Yayoi Kusama and TeamLab. And it’s growing. Every year, there are more and more of these heady exhibitions. Later this year will see the opening of Frameless, a gallery which claims to be ‘London’s most immersive art experience. Ever.’. One that boasts of having ‘no white walls’.  But what’s wrong with white walls? Why this eruption in the popularity of immersive art? And what would old Vincent have to say if he knew his paintings were being projected across a warehouse in the Docklands for people to take selfies in?  Yayoi Kusama ©TateInfinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life by Yayoi Kusama, installed for the Kusama Exhibition at Tate Modern , February - June 2012 Intention matters A lot of art is intentionally immersive. There are works where the

If your idea of a good time is a bunch of rich old people lecturing you about climate change, then boy are you in for a wild ride at this year’s Summer Exhibition.  Climate is the main theme of the annual open call show this time, and the academicians (the artists who pick the work and curate the show) have taken to it like ducks to polluted water. Every room is filled with art about the environment. There are paintings of eroded landscapes and flooded cities, photos of rubbish dumps, images of swelling seas, and seemingly endless statement prints, all yelling at you with bollocks like ‘climate justice’, ‘mass extinction includes YOU!’, ‘why are they screwing up my planet?’ and the very useful ‘the world is fucked’. It’s like a whole show of Keep Calm and Carry On posters for people who think only taking a plane twice a year makes them honorary members of Greenpeace. It’s not that environmentalism is bad, obviously, or that we shouldn’t care about the climate, but do we really need to be this intensely patronised? Do you need Grayson Perry to remind you to recycle? None of this art does anything, it just pats itself on the back for looking like it does. And also, most importantly, almost none of the art is anywhere near good. You know how the band on the Titanic kept playing as the ship sank? Well, imagine if there was a lecture theatre below deck with an artist giving a talk about the dangers of icebergs at the same time. That’s what this is. Pointless and self-important. Bu

London’s art museums and galleries kicked back into life in early 2022 with a brilliant series of exhibitions, including big hitters like ‘Francis Bacon: Man and Beast’ at the Royal Academy and Hew Locke’s wild carnival installation at Tate Britain. But the summer is looking just as good. Whether you’re after ecological explorations, immersive environments, classic modern painting or just an exploding shed, summer 2022 has got some art for everyone.

After two years of delays and cancellations, London’s museums and galleries look like they’re gunning for a year of full-force, all-out, no-holds-barred art in 2022. We’ve already had our first proper blockbuster in what feels like forever thanks to the five-star extravaganza that is ‘Francis Bacon: Man and Beast’ at the Royal Academy, and there’s even more to get excited about in the coming months. Whether you fancy a critical look at sex work at the ICA, an exploration of international surrealism at the Tate, or an exploded shed by Cornelia Parker, early 2022 is going to provide a feast for the eyes. 

NFTs were everywhere in 2021, a metaphorical plague to accompany the literal one we were all dealing with. They were ubiquitous, hyped, and very annoying. Non Fungible Token? More like No F’in Thanks.  But they’re here, and they’re here to stay, so let’s do a little primer, because NFTs are a complicated, convoluted mess of a concept. A large part of that is by design – artists and investors want their thing to feel special, unique, alluring. Creating an impenetrable linguistic framework is part of the propaganda of art.  But it’s actually fairly simple. For a start, an NFT in itself is not art. An NFT is a contract, which you can use to sell art. Let’s say you have an image you’ve made, and you want to make some money off it. You can create an NFT to function as a traceable contract for the image, proving who made it, and showing who bought it. The image itself is just an image, the NFT is the contract that’s created and exchanged to prove ownership of the image. MORE 2022 TRENDS:🚆 Why train travel is going to be on your 2022 bucket list🌳 From parklets to urban forests: how cities will get a whole lot greener in 2022🧙 Why 2022 is going to be the biggest ever year for fantasy on screen But people are constantly talking about NFTs as if they’re art, rather than contracts for art. So is there an NFT aesthetic? Yes, definitely. And when people talk about NFTs as if they are works of art in their own right, they’re often talking about things like CryptoKitties or Bored Ape, c

What makes it so special? This beautiful mews house near King’s Cross has been converted into a miniature museum, designed to showcase the art collection of Alexander Petalas. He puts on two shows a year and lets us grubby members of the public swan about the gaff (shoes off though, so wear your nicest socks) and ogle his wares. Considering it’s a totally domestic setting, this is as far removed from your granny’s living room as you can get. We’re talking cast concrete floors and swooping staircases, here. Real nice stuff. What’s on show? It opened in 2018, and past shows have included ceramics by Ron Nagle, paintings by Carmen Herrera and a group show of paintings by young black artists. Right now, there’s a whole show dedicated to Sarah Lucas, one-time YBA and now one of the UK’s most important and influential living artists. There are glistening bronzes, cast resin toilets, blobby soft constructions and some melons for boobs. It’s some seriously classic Sarah Lucas, which is a surprisingly rare thing to find in London. How do I get in?  It’s free to visit, you just have to book via www.theperimeter.co.uk. There are also guided tours – usually led by Petalas himself – every Thursday. RECOMMENDED: Discover more venues you’ve never been to in London.

Painting has always happened. Other art trends might come and go – big conceptual installations, video, performance art, ceramics – but figurative painting always ticks along in the background, bobbing in and out of fashion across the years. And right now, it’s big. The Hayward Gallery’s major autumn exhibition, ‘Mixing it Up: Painting Today’, proves it: this sprawling exhibition of contemporary painters working in the UK isn't all big names and art megastars, instead, most of the wall space is given over to young, relatively-undiscovered artists from across the country. It’s a celebration of painting’s enduring staying power, and it’s brilliant. Painting has been around for so long that anyone working in the medium today has to acknowledge its past  Those younger artists are the most exciting bit of the show, and they are just the tip of the figurative painting iceberg. Gareth Cadwallader, Issy Wood, Somaya Critchlow and Lydia Blakeley are just some of the London artists on display. Then over at GCCA in New Cross there’s a brilliant show of Olivia Sterling’s beautiful, humorous, political canvases, and down in Brixton, you’ll find Dale Lewis’s big paintings of gory everyday life at Block 336. Olivia Sterling Those are just the artists with big shows, we haven’t even spoken about artists like Luke Burton, Shadi Al Atallah, Marcus Nelson, etc. etc. etc. The list is seriously long. All these artists mine the history of painting - it’s impossible not to, painting has been aro

This building has a voice. Or at least a sound: a deep, throbbing, juddering rumble, all captured by artist Trevor Mathison and played back into the space. He recorded the sound of Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art – the blips and statics of its echoey rooms – then twisted and transformed them. They gurgle out at you in the opening gallery of this show, while in the middle space hefty speakers pump out the hiss and throb of archival Mathison recordings and a live microphone picks up the sound of New Cross Road and plays it in an adjacent corridor. It all becomes one big mixed composition, old works collaged with the sound of the building and the street rushing by. It sounds great. Hectic, busy, discomforting, all clashing sirens and white noise. But it’s hard to grasp what it’s about or why it was made. Is it an audio portrait of the building? Is it tape loop experimentation for its own sake? The drawings and paintings here are pretty enough, but the archival material is just some cassettes and a photocopied article about Mathison. In German. There’s no information, no conceptual thread to grab on to, no context. It’s just a lot of sound, with none of the fury explained. It works as a sound composition. It would work as a tape or digital recording, but it doesn’t quite come across as an exhibition. The building has a voice, but there’s not enough here to help you understand what it’s trying to say.

‘Welcome to Hell’ says Hadi Fallahpisheh as you walk into his show. It’s written in gold-lined letters on frilled banners, a joyful introduction to an awful place.  Fallahpisheh doesn’t deal with the nice and fluffy side of life. Well, it’s here, in the shape of stuffed cuddly toys and brightly painted ceramics, but it’s all nightmarishly twisted and falling apart. Symbols of youth and nostalgia are everywhere. There are cosy quilts, a Joy Division duvet cover, cartoon cats painted on photographic paper and all those cuddly toys. But it’s childhood gone very badly wrong. Two mannequins of kids are shamefully facing the wall, a teddy bear has its head shoved into a pot with its legs spread, a painting shows a dog with an erection dreaming of a cat shagging a mouse.  There are fences all over the gallery, keeping you from getting close to the art, and three teddies are locked in a huge pink cage. As Fallahpisheh says in another banner work, this is a ‘prison of mind’, a jail made of childhood memories, torture at the hands of your sickly nostalgia and rose-tinted dreams of youth.  It feels like the photo paper paintings are the main focus here, and they’re tricky and interesting enough in their own right, but everything else here – the ceramics, the duvet covers, the prison bears, the teddies – just sort of distract you from them. Other artists have dabbled with the sinister teddy bear aesthetic – Paul McCarthy, Charlemagne Palestine – but none in quite as creepy or heavy-hande

What will future archaeologists find when they discover your flat in 3000 years, perfectly preserved in ash after the terrible 2024 eruption of the Muswell Hill volcano? Flatscreen TVs and thousands of tote bags and reusable coffee cups and hidden jazz mags?  Be careful what you leave behind, is what I’m saying, because people like Mariana Castillo Deball might be around. The Mexican artist has taken inspiration from the beautiful Roman era Temple of Mithras – the ruins of a 1,800 year old place of worship right in the heart of the City, now open to visitors with contemporary art installations shown alongside it – to create an exhibition all about ancient trash, the rubbish that those Romans left lying about. Three pillars stand around the space, made of stacked clay recreations of vases, amulets and combs found downstairs in the temple itself. A curtain covered in drawings of Roman writing tablets divides the room, and the wall at the back is carved with designs and faces.  Castillo Deball is elevating these everyday bits of discarded Roman life – left abandoned right here 1800 years ago – into a celebration of human creativity. All these little aesthetic gestures – the carvings and patterns – have lasted centuries. She’s showing how art, and life, isn’t meaningless and forgettable: it survives, it endures, it’s beautiful. She’s showing how objects can tell endless mesmerising stories of identity and history. Even the rubbish. But does the art here tell you anything that the

Imagine if gum was allowed to accumulate on the underside of a desk for thousands of years. That’s what the smaller new works by Phillip Allen look like: thick, globby accretions of lumpy textured colours. They’re so 3D they look like they’ve literally been chewed up, masticated and spat on to the canvas.  The English artist’s paintings are bright, semi-abstract things. The centre of each is filled with swooping flower patterns in lilac, pink and Dunlop green, and all around their edges is that thick goo. They look like 1970s wallpaper with a bad skin disease, or mounds of psychedelic guano. The bigger works in the main gallery aren’t quite so extreme, but they’re still heavily textured. They could be landscapes, or maybe they just hint at landscapes: you spy stamens and petals and grass billowing among the colours and shapes. These ones are made by glueing tiny polystyrene balls to the canvas, creating undulating, bumpy fields to paint over.  Allen’s dayglo visions of trippy fields and hazy valleys are like a joyful version of Frank Auerbach, and they look good enough to eat, or at least have a good chew on.

The megalithic mother of all art fairs, Frieze London returns to Regent's Park once again. For five days, 160 of the world's best contemporary art galleries all come together under one giant marquee roof, offering visitors the chance to either line up some mega purchases or just do some serious art window shopping. 

The corpse of the fashion industry is on display at Camden Art Centre. Its bloated and vile and pungent, left here to rot, part-embalmed, by Tenant of Culture (Hendrickje Schimmel to her mum and dad).  ToC’s work involves collecting discarded old clothes and repurposing them into new sculptures. The room here is filled with synthetic waterproof polymers and chemically produced plastics that were once twisted into shoes and jackets and then chucked away by careless consumers like me and you. Tenant of Culture has collected those fabrics, washed them, dyed them, bleached them and reshaped them. Dozens of transparent plastic handbags have been turned into coats, denim has been dyed acid yellow and transformed into a long, hanging tapestry, hiking shoes have been sewn together into a bizarre, enormous boot. In all this dyeing and reshaping and recycling, Tenant of Culture is loudly condemning not just fast fashion, but the more general scourge of waste in society, and the greed that elicits it. You feel icky walking around the space, knowing you’re complicit in the damage on display. But the works here aren’t quite divorced enough from the fashions that inspired them; they look too much like something you might actually see on a runway to really get their ideas across. You end up wishing the work had been taken further, made more grotesque, more alien. As it is, you get the point, but you also sort of wonder if you could pull off that see-through jacket.

There’s a glut in Benjamin Cohen’s new exhibition, a surplus, an abundance. A looped four-second video shows 2.8 million gallons of water flowing over Niagara Falls. In the corner, there’s a huge pile of thousands of mint-green polystyrene packing chips. An abandoned loaf of bread as you walk in is preserved in resin, dozens of souvenir T-shirts are packed as flat and small as they’ll go. But this abundance feels temporary, or just slightly off. All that water flowing over the falls seems somehow inconsequential, that bread is inedible and those packing chips are 94 percent air. The gallery assures visitors that the packing chips will be recycled. Cohen tried to use eco-friendly sugar-based alternatives, but it led to a rat infestation. A suitably, grimly surreal punchline to the artist’s ideas. Cohen’s work is full of playful, punny, clashing narratives, empty promises and visual anticlimaxes. There’s a temptation to read it all as a comment on consumerism, on the greed of Western overconsumption in the face of increasing global poverty, world hunger and environmental collapse. And that’s probably a pretty valid interpretation. But it’s also just about how materials and substances can tell or hide stories, how their purpose can be so easily undermined.  It might be full of letdowns and disappointments, but at least the rats got a decent dinner.

If you think videogames are just for sweaty nerds with Quaver-dust-encrusted keyboards, then The Photographers’ Gallery might just smash your preconceptions into a million pixels. Its new show explores the artistic potential of videogames, and there’s a lot more to it than how they made Pacman such a nice shade of yellow. The gallery isn’t saying that videogames are art. Because they’re not art: just like cinema, videogames are their own thing. Instead, this is about how artists exploit the mechanics of gaming to create works.Cory Arcangel probably sums it up best. In one video here, he’s removed everything but the clouds from the original ‘Super Mario Bros’, in the other he’s left nothing but the road from ‘F1 Race’. He’s taken gaming out of games, leaving tranquil, 8-bit minimalism. It’s about finding beauty where everyone else finds entertainment Justin Berry and Joan Pamboukes take similar approaches, the former screenshotting beautiful mountain vistas, the latter focusing just on the sky in otherwise violent games like ‘Metal Gear Solid’, creating flat planes of meditative colour out of worlds of gore. It’s all classic Duchampian recontextualisation, using the artist’s eye to reframe images from one of the most pervasive bits of modern aesthetic culture, finding beauty where everyone else finds entertainment. Downstairs, the art is all about memetic reproduction. Lorna Ruth Galloway replicates Ed Ruscha’s famous photos of gas stations but in GTA V, and Roc Herms creates

After the past few years of isolation and misery and disease, everyone’s been dreaming about a holiday. Especially Lydia Blakeley. The English painter’s new show is full of images of empty beaches, tranquil pools, oysters by the sea, deck chairs and lapping waves. They’re fantasies of idealised, wistful, idyllic holidays. But there’s something off about them, something not quite right in all their barren, soft focus, sun-drenched atmosphere: they’re in an uncanny valley of chill, where relaxation is haunted by some unknown threat. The paintings, some done directly on sun loungers, are inspired by a 1995 Microsoft advertising campaign that asked 'where do you want to go today?’, the implication being that you don’t need to leave your office to travel, you can do it all from the comfort of your enormous, bulky desktop PC. These paintings are in an uncanny valley of chill. Blakeley depicts gorgeous rock gardens, cool plunge pools, palm trees over villas, oysters on ice, views out of a plane window – the paintings are clean and crisp but sun bleached, like they’ve been pulled out of a 1980s holiday brochure, their colours lightly faded. The deckchairs act as swooping, alluring canvases for images of frothy shores and waterslides. Cool chests dotted around the space are filled with cactuses and healing crystals. The rose quartz is for love vibrations, the amethyst heals the spiritual body, the green calcite cleanses negative energy. You get the sense that Blakeley doesn’t buy int

Art is serious. It’s meant to be experimental, avant-garde, intellectual, rigorous. But Milton Avery is something else: Milton Avery is joyful. Not that the American painter (1885-1965) isn’t avant-garde or intellectual, it’s just that the body of clever, innovative, influential art he left behind is so full of humour and explosive colour that it will make you feel elation as much as mental stimulation. Maybe it’s because of his non-art background. Avery came from a working-class family, taking a job in a factory from an early age. Art came thanks to evening classes, a separate, late, non-vocational passion, not a serious, careerist pursuit. His early landscapes here from the late 1910s owe hefty debts to American and French Impressionists. Simple little plein air depictions of trees and rivers. Nice enough, but nothing special. By the 1930s, though, something clicks. Tiny brushstrokes get replaced with big thick daubs, intricate detail with sweeping visions, realism with colourful fantasy. These landscapes are filled with big flat splodges of colour, enormous beige hills, rippling red forests, shimmering blue grasses. Where the Impressionists use colour to capture light, Avery uses light as an excuse to paint colour, to celebrate the endless hues of the world. It will make you feel elation as much as intellectual stimulation. Everything here is representational, but only just. Trees aren’t really ultramarine like in ‘Blue trees’, faces aren’t featureless planes like in ‘Poe

Who needs to reinvent the wheel when you can just kick it in a bit instead. That’s what Billy Childish does. Whether it's in his guise as a musician, a poet or an artist, he’s not exactly revolutionary. Instead, he takes a past style – garage rock, expressionism – and smacks it about, roughs it up, gives it some spit, some edge, some punk.  These paintings follow in the same style furrow he’s been ploughing for years now, just with a bit more death and water than usual. There are nude women swimming and diving, losing themselves in languid aquatic worlds. There are shadowy birch forests, withering flowers, piles of skulls. It feels like Billy considering mortality and lust at the same time, twin Freudian drives that pulse through his life and through these paintings.The big green swimmer is a pretty ugly painting, but the rest are great. They’re sombre, penumbral meditations on loss and eath and pretty women, neat collisions of Edvard Munch and Peter Doig.Throughout the run of the show, Billy will be set up downstairs, painting new works for the exhibition as a performance piece you can go and watch. It’s to prove he’s still there, he’s still alive, and he can still kick that wheel in a bit.

Disease, poverty, injustice, death and loneliness. It’s been a brutal few years around the world, and the evidence is written across the walls of the Whitechapel Gallery. The London Open is their big triennial open submission show, with thousands of artists’ work whittled down to 45 sculptors, painters and filmmakers, all making art that manages to reflect the stomach-turning tumult we’ve been living through. And it’s amazing. It starts with Rafal Zajko’s robo-futuristic sculptures that churn and digest wheat, living things that exist just to consume. Feels familiar.  Candida Powell Williams comes next with her mythological, hyper-colour ceramic sculptures that look like fever dreams in a playground, before you get to William Cobbing’s brilliantly anxiety-filled ceramic masks and Eve Fabregas’s enormous melting condom-like sculptures. It’s such a great, playful opening to the show, and it feels like such an antidote to London’s endless commercial art scene with its ceaseless, anonymous, boring figuration.  Not that there isn’t painting here, it’s just that most of it’s good. Gareth Cadwallader’s perfect little uneasy canvases are beautiful but unsettling, Mohammed Sami’s huge works are violent and overwhelming, Jason File’s pretty images of dots and flowers are actually toilet paper patterns and Alicia Reyes McNamara’s paints a world of sensual, twisty psychedelia. It’s the best group of paintings I’ve seen together for a long time. Society might be at its sickest, but art c

世界で最も有名でありながら、最も正体不明なストリートアーティストであるバンクシーの新しい展覧会が、2022年8月下旬から、ロンドンのギャラリーで開催されることになった。 会場は、王立取引所にある「Red Eight Gallery」。このギャラリーで、バンクシーをテーマにした展覧会が開かれるのは初めてだ。同ギャラリーではバンクシーを「現代史で最も物議を醸し、興味深く、話題のアーティスト」と表現している。 Banksy, 'HMV Dog' 展示されるのは「Girl with a Balloon」や「Happy Choppers」など、一目でバンクシーと分かる作品ばかり。ほとんどはサインなしの500枚程度のエディション作品だが、アルミニウムにステンシルを施した一点もののオリジナル作品「Laugh Now」や、サイン入りの「No Ball Games」「Christ with Shopping Bags」なども登場する予定だ。 これらの傑作の販売価格帯は、2万5,000〜250万ポンド（約406万〜4億617万円）。600枚作られたサインなしのエディション作品が1枚2万5,000ポンドというと高額に聞こえるかもしれないが、本当にそうなのだ。 この展覧会は、イギリスの金融街の中心で開催される。バンクシーの名前の最初の5文字が銀行を意味する「Banks」なのを気付いているだろうか。同展には「Banking on Banksy」というタイトルが付けられている。 「Banking on Banksy」は、8月25日から9月15日まで開催される。 関連記事 『There’s a new Banksy exhibition opening this month（原文）』 『バンクシーの3作品がサザビーズのオークションに出品』 『ついに姿を現したBanksy』 『インベーダー作「ドット絵アトム」を渋谷区が撤去へ』 『東京、隠れ家アートギャラリー6選』 『東京、8月から9月に行くべきアート展』 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  

Banksy, the world’s most famous, yet somehow most anonymous, street artist is the subject of a new exhibition in the City of London this month. It will be the debut show at Red Eight Gallery at The Royal Exchange and will feature prints of some of his most instantly recognisable works, including ‘Girl with a Balloon’ and ‘Happy Choppers’. The gallery describes Banksy as ‘the most controversial, interesting, and talked-about artist in modern history’, and most of the works are unsigned and editioned in numbers like 500, though included in the show are ‘Laugh Now’, a one-off original stencil on aluminium work, and signed versions of ‘No Ball Games’ and ‘Christ with Shopping Bags’. Banksy, 'HMV Dog' And how much will one of these masterpieces set you back? Well, prices range from £25,000 to £2.5million. £25,000 for an unsigned edition in a run of 600 might sound like a lot, and that’s because it really, really is. But it’s a Banksy exhibition in the centre of the UK’s financial district, you don’t think those first five letters of his name are an accident do you? They’ve literally called the exhibition ‘Banking on Banksy’. ‘Banking on Banksy’ Red Eight Gallery, The Royal Exchange, EC3V 3LR. Aug 25-Sep 15. Free. More details here. Want more art? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London. Want more art, but for free? Here are the best free shows in London.

Damien Hirst is going to do what countless people have always wanted to do to his art: destroy it. He hasn’t suddenly developed a late in life taste for pyromania, though. Instead, it’s all part of his upcoming exhibition ‘The Currency’, at his own Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall. ‘The Currency’ is a collection of 10,000 primary-coloured paintings created by Hirst in 2016, and 10,000 corresponding NFTs of those artworks. When purchasing one of the works, collectors had the option to either keep the physical artwork and destroy the NFT, or keep the NFT and allow the physical artwork to be set alight.  All 10,000 works have sold, and you can see the ratio of NFT-keepers to painting-keepers here. There’s sure to be plenty to burn throughout the run of the exhibition. And the artworks are set to be destroyed at specified times, published in advance, so you can go and watch it all happen in real time.  But if you’re thinking ‘Hold on, aren’t we in the middle of an unprecedented cost of living crisis? Aren’t people being pushed into poverty by rising gas, electricity and food prices? And now one of the world’s most famous artists is burning artworks in his purpose-built mega-gallery? Even if you ignore the environmental impact of creating 10,000 NFTs, aren’t physical versions of works from ‘The Currency’ being sold on the secondary market for between £20,000-£30,000? People can’t afford to eat and he’s just, like, burning money?’ Yes, it’s almost like Damien Hirst is so out of t

There was once an Astronomy Song of the Year award for the best song about stars, but after Simply Red released ‘Stars’ in 1991 they retired the competition, knowing that Mick Hucknall’s masterpiece would never be beaten. But the prize for best photo of stars, Astronomy Photography of the Year, that’s still going strong to this very day, and this year’s shortlist has just been announced.  Crossing the Madison © Jake Mosher Filled with images of ‘the Milky Way rising, galaxies colliding, stellar nurseries, the luminous Aurora Borealis dancing across the night’s sky and Saturn balanced by its moons’, this year’s images are a stellar trip around the cosmos. There are various categories, including ‘Skyscapes’, ‘Aurorae’, ‘People and Space’, ‘Our Sun’, ‘Our Moon’, and ‘Planets, Comets and Asteroids’ showing that astronomy photography is more than just twinkly lights and big telescopes. A recurring theme in this year’s selection is pollution, both of the air and light variety, with haze and smog and human interference interfering with our vision of the night sky.  The Crescent Nebula © Bray Falls The winning images will go on display at the National Maritime Museum on September 17, and in the meantime the shortlist can be viewed here. It’s enough to make you want to fall from the stars, I hope you comprehend. The Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist is right here. Want more art? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London right now. Want more art, but free? Here are the

London’s Courtauld Gallery got themselves into a bit of a sticky situation when two protestors showed up and glued themselves to one of their Van Goghs yesterday. The protestors were young supporters of Just Stop Oil, a group which just wants to stop oil, obviously, and is calling ‘for the government to end new oil and gas and for art institutions to join them in civil resistance.’ The duo – Louis McKechnie and Emily Brocklebank – stuck themselves to Vincent Van Gogh’s 1889 work ‘Peach Trees in Blossom’, a bucolic vision of the undulating southern French countryside. Fortunately, they only glued themselves to the frame, so the painting remains undamaged.  Louis said: ‘As a kid I used to love this painting, my dad took me to see it when we visited London. I still love this painting, but I love my friends and family more, I love nature more. I value the future survival of my generation more highly than my public reputation…It is immoral for cultural institutions to stand by and watch whilst our society descends into collapse. Galleries should close. Directors of art institutions should be calling on the government to stop all new oil and gas projects immediately. We are either in resistance or we are complicit.’ London’s art galleries and museums have a long history of accepting sponsorship from oil companies, and attracting waves of protests in the process. The Tate was sponsored by BP for 26 years, until Liberate Tate’s attention-grabbing tactics – including pouring oil into

Two bold new sculptures have just been unveiled outside Hackney Town Hall. They’re the work of young British artist Thomas J Price, and are stark, beautiful tributes to the Windrush Generation. Opened on June 22, Windrush Day, the two nine-foot high bronze sculptures were created by scanning 30 multigenerational local Black residents, creating composite figures that act as representations of the history of the area, and the enduring impact of the Windrush Generation on Hackney, London and the UK in general. Unlike most public sculptures Price’s work isn't a glorification of someone famous or notable, but a celebration of the ordinary people who came to the UK 74 years ago and profoundly changed this country. The work, called ‘Warm Shores’, also isn’t displayed on a pedestal, a very deliberate move: ‘It is important that my figures are not placed on plinths,’ says Price, ‘to disrupt a sense of hierarchy that surrounds many public monuments. They exist amongst the public and daily life and are an extension of the people who inhabit these spaces. It was very important to me to continue this approach with the Hackney Windrush Commission, which is why the two figures have been positioned in the square directly outside Hackney Town Hall.’ Price’s combination of conceptual intent, clever technological wizardry and unapologetically confrontational aesthetics make this work some of the best public art London has seen for a very long time. Go see it, but no need to rush, thankfully it

The gleaming screens of Piccadilly Circus will be paused tonight, and their brazen displays of capitalist excess swapped for a work of art by the world's favourite performance artist, Marina Abramović. At 20.22, for three minutes, the car and TV ads will be silent, and Marina will roar.  Well, she won’t roar, but she’ll show some art. The work is called ‘The Hero’, and it's a celebration of – a call for – modern heroes. It features Marina herself sat on a white horse, waving a huge white flag. It’s an old piece, filmed in 2001 in the wake of the death of her father, who was a Yugoslav partisan in the Second World War. The work will be on display at 8.22pm every day until August 31, here in Piccadilly and at similar locations around the world. The whole thing is organised by Circa, an organisation that has been taking over the Piccadilly screens and whacking art up since 2020, with previous artists including Yoko Ono, Ai Weiwei and David Hockney.  ‘Our planet needs uncorrupted heroes with morality, who embody courage and bring real change,’Abramović explains. ‘Every day in this world is a shaky, uncertain, constantly changing landscape. For Circa 2022, we have this white horse. This white flag. This beautiful land. We need heroes that can bring new light to illuminate us. Heroes that can inspire us to be better, and to work together, not against each other. Heroes who care.’ Not quite sure how sitting very still on a white horse will bring about heroes with morality and cou

With much fanfare, it has just been announced that Soho Photography Quarter is here, but what is it? Well, apparently it's a brand new, permanent outdoor 'cultural space' smack dab in the middle of Soho, aiming to bring world class photography to the public, for free.  It's all based around the square outside of The Photographers' Gallery, a newly refurbished pedestrianised space just off Oxford Street. The plan is to present a rotating program of photography on huge billboards, changing twice a year. The first one, open now, is by Indigenous Australian contemporary artist Dr. Christian Thompson. 'Being Human Human Being' is the name of his installation, which features photographs celebrating ideas of identity and diversity.   It's not all just pretty pictures, though. There are plans for live events, artist talks and sound installations too. Have they realised that it drizzles 89% of the time in London? Seems like a very damp oversight, but good luck to 'em. Go see it while it's still warm and dry-ish out, that's our advice.  Soho Photography Quarter is open now. More details here. Want more photography? Have a look here. Want some art, not just photos? Here are the ten best exhibitions in London. 

Every year, the Serpentine Pavilion shows up to herald the start of summer, and it’s back again for 2022, designed this time by American artist Theaster Gates. But put away your sunscreen and ice creams, because this isn’t the pavilion of classic idyllic English summers, of Pimm’s and strawberries and bucolic frolicking in Hyde Park. This is a serious, stark, austere business.  That’s because Gates doesn’t deal in frivolous fun; he deals in big topics. Through sculpture, installation and film, his work tackles subjects like housing inequality, structural racism and the concept of Blackness. Previous works have seen him building community centres in his native Chicago and creating exhibitions that function as critical histories of clay. The ‘Black Chapel’, his imposing, cylindrical Serpentine Pavilion, doesn’t stray too far from that path. The inspiration at the heart of the work is the Rothko Chapel, a prayer space in Texas, with art by abstract expressionist master Mark Rothko. Gates’s building follows a similarly meditative template, creating a space for quiet contemplation, like being inside a giant vase, but in a very very relaxed way.  Serpentine Pavilion 2022 designed by Theaster Gates © Theaster Gates Studio. Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy: Serpentine. At the entrance is a functioning bronze bell, salvaged from a church in Chicago, and inside are tar paintings by Gates – a nod to his recently deceased father, who worked for years as a roofer. The design references ‘the b

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much is a thousand pictures worth? Shitloads, probably, but there's only way way to find out, and that's by going the UK's biggest photography fair. And lucky for you, it's happening next week, because Photo London is back, taking over Somerset House once again for a week of exhibitions, booths and events. The fair attracts the biggest photography galleries in the world, and with them come the biggest photographers. This year, participating galleries include Magnum Photos, the Lee Miller Archives, Goodman Gallery and Christophe Guye Galerie. You can expect to see work by big names like Richard Avedon, Wolfgang Tillmans, Martin Parr and countless others. And guess what, it's all for sale. How much, you ask? Well, if you have to ask, you probably can't afford it, as they say. Lots, basically. It's all very, very expensive. Just find your favourite one, Google it when you get home, then ctrl + shift + p, easy peasy, you're now an art collector, congratulations. It's not all rampant art commercialism though, as each year the fair picks one artist out to celebrate as a 'Master of Photography' with a dedicated exhibition, and this year it's photographer and filmmaker Nick Knight. There are also a whole bunch of events, including tours, readings and talks with artists like Melanie Manchot, Conor McDonald and Polly Braden. Something for everyone, unless you think photography is the lowest of all the arts (yes, even below mime), in whic

Thom Yorke is a modern Renaissance man. Not only is he the singer in Radiohead, one of the world's leading bands that sound like Radiohead, but it turns out he's also an artist. Can he do maths or science or design buildings like the Renaissance men of the 1400s? No, but standards for Renaissancing are different in 2022.  Art is nothing new for the singer. He's been drawing for years, working most often with collaborator Stanley Donwood, who he met at university in Exeter in the 1980s. Donwood is responsible for all the Radiohead artwork from 1996's 'The Bends' onwards, but their relationship appears to have been at its most fruitful between 1999 and 2001, when the band was working on their now-classic 'Kid A' and 'Amnesiac' albums. The two would constantly send visual ideas to each other - often using something called a fax machine - and in the process managed to create a body of work, mainly comprised of drawings, that's now going on display at 8 Duke Street.  The drawings range from the cartoonish to the macabre, and are often violent, nightmarish and aggressive, but also tinged with silliness and cutesy humour. Unsurprisingly, considering the lyrical content of many of Yorke's most well known songs, the drawings tackle some big, dark, political ideas, with works about management buyouts, money-burning furnaces, sperm monsters and a stick man getting kicked in the nuts.  The show is on for just a couple of days, so book in quick if you don't want to be left high and dry.

Urgh, looking at art is so twentieth century. In the future, we won’t just LOOK at art, we’ll get to be inside of it. And guess what? The future’s here, because things like the immersive Van Gogh experience are real, and they’re damn popular. Ever dreamed of meandering through ‘Starry Night’ or doing shots of absinthe in ‘The Night Café’? Well, dream no more, because you can.  And after the huge success of that Van Gogh experience, it’s Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s turn to be given the immersive treatment. Opening next month, ‘Mexican Geniuses: A Frida and Diego Immersive Experience’ will be your chance to lose yourself in the great couple’s work. How will they treat the more extreme, emotional, violent aspects of both of their work? Probably very sensitively. The whole shebang launches on May 28 at Dock X in London, with tickets starting at £19.90. This will be a 360-degree digital experience, made up of giant screens, VR and sound elements to help you totally lose yourself in this iconic work. Each visit lasts around an hour, which should give you plenty of time to take it all in. Viva Mexico!  ‘Mexican Geniuses: A Frida and Diego Immersive Experience’, at Dock X from May 28. Tickets start at £19.90, available here. Can’t wait? Here are London’s top ten exhibitions on right now. And here are the best free art exhibitions on right now.