Top 10 art exhibitions in London

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.

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.

Anything is possible in science fiction. For countless writers, artists and filmmakers, the ability to create new worlds is a chance to shape a future in their own image. That’s why there's so much amazing science fiction that deals with topics like gender, utopian politics and sexuality. Sub-genre Afrofuturism takes aim at the heart of racial injustice, and this exhibition celebrates the Black artists who wield that utopian weapon. 

Walter Sickert is disintegrating. He’s melting into nothing, disappearing right in front of you in a staggeringly good, muddy, sombre early self-portrait from 1896. This neatly encapsulates what makes the English painter (1860-1942) so interesting: it’s not his handling of paint or how he captures light or anything, it’s the bubbling undercurrent of darkness that courses through his work. 

The V&A’s ambitious new exhibition is a triumphant attempt to complete the near-impossible task of capturing an entire continent through its fashion. Incorporating textiles, design and still and moving images, ‘Africa Fashion’ takes visitors on a compelling journey from the 1960s to the present day in a bid to reshape existing geographies and narratives of style.

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.

Turns out, aliens stink. And they’re hairy too. You can see for yourself, because there’s one here at the Serpentine. You peek through a little peephole in the wall and there it is in the dark, a gargantuan hirsute apparition on an undulating golden carpet, its scent wafting through the space, a heady mixture of wood, metal, dust and sweat.

We put a lot of value on stupid stuff like trainers and caviar and NFTs of monkeys, but our most essential resources – air and water – are treated like they’re worthless. That’s probably because they’re free; and if big businesses can’t make a few bucks out of them, they may as well pollute them to death. So as pollution slowly robs us of breathable air, the Wellcome looks at art and archival scientific material that can help us parse the senseless choking of humanity. 

There’s a chance – a slim one, but still a chance – that even the grumpiest miserable old bastard will have their heart softened by this show about the influence of European decorative arts on Disney.

There’s a post-colonial, anti-capitalist carnival happening at Tate Britain. And if that doesn’t sound like much fun, that’s because it isn’t. It’s serious.