Eddy Frankel

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 huge and amazing, and the city’s independents are tiny and fascinating. So we’ve got your next art outing sorted with the ten best exhibitions you absolutely can’t miss. 

Action movies get a bad rap. Not necessarily from the general public, of course. Audiences love ’em, for the most part, especially if you expand the definition to include superhero flicks and comedies like The Fall Guy. But for hardcore cinephiles, action is too often regarded as cinematic junk food, replacing all story and substance with eardrum-shattering explosions and mindless violence. Sure, you can enjoy one every now and then, but a steady diet of loud noises, death-defying stunts and one-liners? That’s for the normies to consume. Here’s the thing, though: if the main point of any film is to make you feel something, what produces more visceral feeling than a good action flick? Anyone who’s ever had their senses rattled by a truly great action movie knows that there are few moviegoing experiences that can compare. Another thing: not all action movies are loud and dumb. Some are nearly operatic in scope and balletic in their grace – and sometimes, you might even actually care about the person dodging bullets and delivering throat chops. This list of the greatest action films ever made is proof that the genre is more versatile than it appears. We polled over 50 experts in the field, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo, along with Time Out’s writers. The results show that, when done right, there are few things more plainly awesome than an action movie. Written by Eddy Frankel, Eddy Frankel, Yu An Su, Joshua Rothkopf, Trevor Johnston, Ashle

There's so much more to London art than just painting or sculpture. Instead of boring old brushstrokes and dull old canvases, you can lose yourself in all kinds of new worlds by tracking down the best photography exhibitions in London. From sweeping landscape scenes to powerful portraits captured by daring individuals, photography in London offers a full-exposure of thought-provoking, visually captivating art. Look away from the Instagram feed for just a minute and go explore. RECOMMENDED: Check our complete guide to photography in London  

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

If you can somehow prize the iPad out of your child's filthy mitts and get them out of the house, you'll find a city full of amazing cultural experiences for kids. Historical relics and heirlooms not for them? Drag them through a hall of Egyptian mummies, fighter planes or dinosaur fossils instead. They might not thank you now, but they'll appreciate it when they get to your age.    RECOMMENDED: Discover 101 things to do in London with the kids and here are the 17 best day trips from London.

Has movie music ever been better? With legends like John Williams and Howard Shore still at work, Hans Zimmer at the peaks of his powers, and the likes of Jonny Greenwood, AR Rahman, Mica Levi, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross knocking it out of the park, the modern film score is a Dolby Atmos-enhancing feast of modernist compositions, lush orchestral classicism and atmospheric soundscapes.What better time, then, to celebrate this art form within an art form – with a few iconic soundtracks thrown in – and pay tribute to the musicians who’ve given our favourite movies (and, to be fair, some stinkers) earworm-laden accompaniment? Of course, narrowing it all down to a mere 100 is tough. We’ve prioritised music written for the screen, but worthy contenders still missed out, including Dimitri Tiomkin’s era-defining score for It’s a Wonderful Life and Elton John’s hummable tunes for The Lion King.To help do the narrowing down, we’ve recruited iconic movie composers, directors and broadcasters like Philip Glass, Carter Burwell, Max Richter, Anne Dudley, AR Rahman, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, Edgar Wright and Mark Kermode to pick their favourites. Happy listening!Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all time.🪩 The 50 best uses of songs in movies.💃 The greatest musical movies ever made.

While London has stacks of family-friendly things to do – from parks and museums to play areas and activity centres – it’s always nice to treat the kids (and yourself) to a day trip. Luckily, you'll find fresh air and adventure just an hour or two outside the city's hectic centre. Whether you’ve got a Saturday, half term or summer holiday to fill, we’ve got plenty of ideas for London day trips with kids, by train or by car. You’ll find brilliant ideas for animal lovers, daring adventurers and youngsters (and parents) who just want to run free in the great outdoors. From ancient castles and retro theme parks to enchanted trains and real-life steam engines, these are London’s best family-friendly day trips, all within easy reach of the capital.   RECOMMENDED: The best day trips from London RECOMMENDED: The best areas of natural beauty near London

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, 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.

It’s set to be another blockbuster year for art. There’s Kahlo in Paris and Munch in Oslo. Horror in Melbourne and hip hop in Toronto. Graphic design in Tokyo and Navajo tapestries in New York. Whatever your cup of tea, 2024 has a little bit of something for everyone. So if you’re planning a city break, why not plan it around one of these must-see art shows? These are 2024’s biggest and best exhibitions, all over the world. RECOMMENDED:🗺️ The 24 best things to do in the world in 2024🌃 Europe’s best city breaks for 2024

The bitter winds of Brexit, Covid and economic downturn finally blew a terrifying gale across London last year, claiming multiple gallery victims. It’s been a tough few years that many galleries have survived, but Simon Lee, Fold, and Darren Flook in Mayfair and Fitzrovia didn’t manage to endure. The Zabludowicz Collection and the Jewish Museum also closed, as did Gagosian’s Britannia Street branch. Are these the end times for London’s art scene?  Simon Lee, founded in 2002, was one of London’s most successful major galleries, specialising in the upper end of the art market: big artists making big art for big money. They had spaces in Hong Kong and New York, they represented painters and photographers like Christopher Wool, Dexter Dalwood, Rachel Howard, George Condo and Michelangelo Pistoletto, taking them to art fairs around the world. And they did interesting, adventurous stuff too, not just rampant commercial painting shows. In 2014 they held a wildly popular sale of Larry Clark photos that allowed visitors to rifle through boxes of his test prints and pick one up for just £100 (I bought one so full-frontally raunchy I’m almost too embarrassed to have it on display), they showed mythical queer black art by April Bey and hyper-militaristic weirdness by Mai-Thu Perret. They were the model big gallery, in other words.  But things were not going well. In July last year, after a few months of eerie, shuttered silence, Simon Lee announced that they were going into administratio

This year has been a belter for live music. Our cities have come alive with pop comebacks, raging metal shows and some damn good dance tunes. We’ve fully embraced our tastes, however cringe they may be (there’s no shame in loving something). We’ve screamed out lyrics, two stepped to our heart’s content, moshed in a festival field and everything in between. Gen Zers bragged about ‘escape room pop stars’, veteran jazz fans stroked their chins to legends of the scene and some of us unleashed our inner teens by watching pop-punk superstars. Here are Time Out’s favourite live music moments of 2023 – taking in picks from all over our huge, juicy global network of editors.  RECOMMENDED: 🎬 The best movies of 2023🕺 The 23 best songs of 2023🎵 The 30 best albums of 2023

From head-spinning literary debuts to masterful novels from authors at the height of their power, big-name autobiographies to binge-worthy cultural histories, here are our editors’ favourite page-turners of 2023. Add these lot to your ‘to read’ pile, stat. RECOMMENDED: 🎬 The best movies of 2023📺 The best TV shows of 2023🎵 The best albums of 2023

There’s a primal urge in us to return to the cave.  The cave is where we, as early-humans, once dwelt, and Goshka Macuga is ushering us back home. The Polish-born, London-based artist has filled Bloomberg’s gallery with vast gleaming stalactites and stalagmites. They erupt from the floor, drip from the ceiling, glistening in pinks and browns and purples and blues. They look like ceramics, but they’re resin-coated foam, dominating the space with their bodily, physical, penile presences. As objects, I like them plenty, but they’re pretty generic: there’s a lot of gloopy geological ceramic-y art out there. It’s Macuga’s ideas that make this work, because this cave echoes the one below; the ancient Roman Temple of Mithras under the building (an archaeological site discovered when constructing the vast office block that houses this gallery) is an underground sanctuary, a place of worship. The cave as a concept symbolises safety, a metaphorical, prehistoric womb for humanity to crawl back to.  And we need that safety, because the world is harsh, the world is dangerous. Three paintings on the wall, loaned from the Imperial War Museum, show wartime destruction; a cloud of bomb debris shaped like a clown’s face over Kensington from 1944, a wounded horse rampaging through London during an air raid in 1938, St Clement’s Dane church ablaze in 1941. War, destruction, pain, annihilation; tragedies that have beset this city for centuries, and continue to beset the world at large now, but th

It’s all material to Lonnie Holley, everything. Past traumas, trash found on a creek bed, shared histories, scrap metal, the news, old padlocks. All of it can be twisted into new shapes by him. Since the 1970s, he’s been at the forefront of a loose movement of Black American artists from the Deep South exploring the legacies of slavery and everyday injustice that shape their society. The recent work here continues his ongoing fascination with imbuing the scraps of life with meaning and narrative. The opening space is filled with rough, rusted assemblages, half-broken sculptures made of found wire, metal, stone, wood. Sometimes the wires are twisted into the shape of faces, but most are just clever visual compositions, like neat little abstract Rauschenbergs or Armans.  But there’s always meaning there. In the next gallery a little tower of forks padlocked together references Holley’s years of enforced labour as a teen, a tap coming out of a bottle of bolts nods to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Everywhere you look there’s symbolism: gas masks and barbed wire for war, ladders for escape, locks and chains for containment. In the best work, a basketball is constricted and strangled by metal mesh and barbed wire, the perfect embodiment of how Holley can express so much about the Black American experience with such poor materials. The paintings here are much less good. These compositions made of countless faces in profile just aren’t that attractive, interesting or original.

Sex, gore and sacrilege; Penny Slinger knows how to tell a surreal story. The LA-based, London-born artist has been at the forefront of feminist art since the 1970s, and this gothically atmospheric exhibition pushes her ideas deeper into the weird, repressed psyche of society than ever before. It’s based on a book of collages that was meant to come out in the ’70s, but was withheld after Slinger’s previous book, ‘Mountain Ecstasy’, was seized and burned by British customs for being deemed pornographic. The show is full of clever black and white collages and double exposures. A stately home fuses with a naked female body, its grand door becoming her genitals. Vines outside the building become rotting, eviscerated corpses, tree limbs become hands bound with ropes. Rituals take place; women are trussed up and surrounded by engorged men, a nun touches herself in a loft, groups of naked women embrace. Then it gets more surreal; scorpions emerge, figures wear bird heads, dolls walk through the halls of the house. It’s intended as a pictorial romance, a story of love told through collage. A new film in the back room expresses these ideas best, but the narrative is pretty hard to grasp in exhibition form. Instead, this feels like a traumatic psychedelic trip through English values, a Hammer Horror-esque journey into sexual repression and gender oppression in middle-England, a plea for freedom in a stuffy, unjust society. The stately home is a haunted, sickly stand-in for the nation i

‘It is an extraordinary experience to live as though life were punishment for being Black,’ says South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990). An extraordinary experience that he captured the brutal daily reality of in the 1960s. His photographs, smuggled out of South Africa and published as a book decades ago, were among the first public documents of apartheid shared in the west. They tell a horrifying story of repression, aggression and cultural suppression. Cole captures the crushed commutes of Africans on Blacks-only trains, the inhuman degradation of work in the mines, the ludicrousness of segregation signs, the exploitation of Black workers in white homes, the pain of life way below the poverty line. He documents the crowded classrooms, the dirty hospitals, the kids sleeping in streets. There’s so much pain, so much injustice. But he also finds joy and entertainment, always in the face of adversity; a couple dancing, a kid learning an instrument, people finding solace in church. It’s a special body of work. Not because his photos here are ‘good’ in an artistic sense, but because the story he’s telling needed to be told, and he tells it with a shocking honesty that’s devastatingly powerful.

The current war in Ukraine isn’t the country’s first major conflict. Stuck between east and west, Ukraine has been fought over and pulled apart for centuries. In the early twentieth century, it endured World War I, then a long war of independence and was eventually absorbed into the Soviet Union. And throughout all that vicious, bloody turmoil, Ukrainians made art. It’s not a surprise, the early twentieth century with its countless conflicts saw the birth of countless modernist movements, and here at the RA are embryonic forms of lots of them. Futurism, cubism, constructivism, and on and on, with almost all the works sourced from two Ukrainian museums. It starts with a splintering, a shattering. Landscapes by Sonia Delaunay, Alexandra Exter and Oleksandr Bohomazov explode the world into pieces, rendering hills and buildings as semi-abstract swirls and hard geometric lines. When the world around you is falling apart, it makes sense that you’d render it in such broken terms. War wins, conflict wins, the state wins, art loses. And when your country is so heavily fought over, it makes sense that you’d try to grasp onto a sense of identity. Works by Jewish painters in the 1910s are attempts to develop and expand what Jewish-Yiddish culture might be. Traditional folk art fuses with modernist design in costumes for avant garde performances by Anatol Petrytskyi and murals for a chess club by Vasyl Yermilov. Simple colourful images of noble farmhands by Mykhailo Boichuk show workers t

Artists spent centuries making art about light – the divine rays of the Renaissance, the shimmering seascapes of Turner, the foggy hazes of the Impressionists – but it wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone really thought to make art with light. British artist Anthony McCall was one of the first, creating pioneering films that used projectors to trace shapes in the air, somehow seeming to turn nothingness solid. It was a trick that the world wasn’t ready for. His immersive, smoke-filled environments, shown in New York lofts, were met with relative indifference, so he left art behind for decades. But the world caught up, and a ubiquitous trend for immersive art in recent years has seen his work reappraised. Now he’s at Tate Modern, taking over the galleries that until recently were home to the blockbuster Yayoi Kusama ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’. It’s a tough immersive act to follow. Kusama’s work is big, glitzy, selfie-friendly, but McCall’s isn’t. And in the wider context of London and its epidemic of heinous Klimt and Dali light shows, or even the good stuff like you see at places like 180 The Strand, can McCall’s simple, geometric films keep pace? It feels physical, like the light is hitting you slap bang in the face. After a room of sketches and an early film showing men in white overalls lighting fires at dusk, you’re plunged into darkness. The four light works here are quiet, ultra-meditative things, nothing more than shafts of white in a pitch black room. In the earliest work,

In the right hands, art can be a devastating weapon. And South African-born artist Gavin Jantjes uses it with brutal force. He left South Africa with a degree in graphic design and fine art in 1970, and made it to Germany where he was granted political asylum. There, he combined his righteous anger at the state of his native country with an eye for design to create a series of ultra-confrontational political screenprints. They’re collaged aesthetic manifestos, calls to action, visual poems that still resonate today. They’re on display in a room upstairs in his show at the Whitechapel Gallery, and they’re incredible. A 1977 triptych combines newspaper clippings, press photos and images of barbed wire to expose the violence of the Soweto Uprisings, the 1974 series ‘A South African Colouring Book’ attacks the dehumanising language and symbolism of apartheid with fusions of text and African art, all sourced from Western archives. These screenprints are a searing indictment of exoticism, division, apartheid, injustice, and most of all, of racism. The fact that they’re posters, that they’re so direct and loud with their messaging, is what makes them so successful. A celestial approach to exploring Black spirituality But Jantjes wasn’t limited to screenprinting, and the rest of the show is made up of paintings on canvas. In earlier works, he continues to explore outwardly political themes – violent suppression of student uprisings, colonial division – but now rendered in post-surrea

You’ve got a big job on your hands if you want to retell one of the most overtold stories in English history. But the National Portrait Gallery still looked at the tale of Henry VIII and his six famous wives and thought: yeah, we can do this. Sadly, they can’t. The famous divorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survived narrative has been reframed and recounted so many times it has become as much folklore and popular culture as history. There have been plays, films, books, novels, songs and on and on. So the National Portrait Gallery takes two approaches here; firstly, they look at the way Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr have pervaded contemporary culture. There are Christmas tree decorations and mugs with their likenesses, costumes for plays, posters for films, designs for clothes worn in 1970s TV shows. The idea is that the six wives have taken on a cultural significance that supersedes their historical roles. But it’s undermined by how much of a mess it is, how the wives aren’t properly introduced, how little explanation or exposition there is. It ends up just feeling like a bunch of stuff, the historical figures treated more as symbols than individuals. The six wives have taken on a cultural significance that supersedes their historical roles The second approach the gallery takes is a more historical look at portraits of the queens and their families. Katherine of Aragon is poorly rendered and overpainte

In 1951, an African American woman had her cells harvested while being treated for cancer. She was not asked, and she gave no consent, but the doctors took them anyway. Those cells became essential in future medical research, but she was forgotten. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, and an effigy of her floats in mineral oil in Tavares Strachan’s Hayward show. This is what Bahamian artist Strachan does. He uncovers hidden Black histories – histories ignored, forgotten, erased by dominant white western narratives – and gives them new life. He doesn’t place Black stories into the history books, he writes his own history book; an infinitely more confrontational, powerful move. The show opens with chaotic collages that meld together images of colonialism, scientific diagrams and important figures in Black history. There’s Haile Selassie looming over Elizabeth II, King Oba as an astronaut, W.E.B. Du Bois as some kind of astral traveller. Selassie appears again in a totem made up of shields and footballs in a field of rice plants arranged in the shape of an African pictogram in the next gallery. Strachan’s hectic collision of symbolism and history is a head-spinning journey through Blackness. It all culminates in ‘The Encyclopaedia of Invisibility’, a staggeringly ambitious research project dedicated to preserving missing histories. It’s installed as a floor-to-ceiling archive of framed pages, all filled with lost stories. It’s a monumental attack on how we commemorate our past, and who

Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, modern art maestro Pablo Picasso and conceptual pioneer Bruce Nauman walk into a gallery. It’s the setup to a joke I haven’t got a punchline for, and the basis for this exhibition of sculptures by the three of them. They’re all big dogs of art history, but do they have anything in common? Gagosian sure thinks so, but you may not leave this show all that convinced. A long gaunt Giacometti bust faces you as you enter, a loping man strides feebly behind, a lone leg – emaciated and weak – balances nearby. Giacometti’s work is heavy with the legacy of war, worryingly frail, brutally scarred. Picasso isn’t so burdened. His work here is a bunch of games, experiments with human form, a body shaped like a crucifix, a pregnant woman made of orbs, tiny figures that toy with ideas stolen from the ancient world and African dolls. Nauman’s work is weirder and darker than both. Casts of hands are bound with rope, animals are beheaded and reassembled, fists smash into each other. The gallery says that all three artists use the body as base material, but so does the vast majority of figurative sculpture. It’s hard to understand what unites these three artists, why they’re being shown together, other than them all being famous and influential; it could be any three of countless sculptors.  Giacometti, as the only artist here fully dedicated to the craft of sculpture, comes across the best. His works are so pained, so tense, so absolutely full of the scars of

You can contain the whole history of a nation in a tarpaulin. At least, Rheim Alkadhi can. The artist, who grew up in Iraq, uses the sturdy plastic material to recount endless stories of colonial exploitation, capitalist greed and ecological disaster. Tarpaulins are made out of the residues of crude oil refinement, a process Iraq has seen a whole lot of. Its oil reserves have been fought over and exploited for decades, leaving the country in tatters. Tarps are then used to cover heavy goods lorries that move freely across borders, or become improvised tents for displaced peoples. They are a material leaden with symbolism and grim historical and international narratives. Alkadhi cuts them up and reshapes them. Some are collaged and pinned to the wall like works of industrial minimalism, others are arranged into spiral and wave shapes, but the best are the ones left almost whole and hung up like a painted canvas.  They’re grimy, dirty things, rust-stained, oil-stained They’re grimy, dirty things, rust-stained, oil-stained. Serial numbers are left on, rips are unmended. You look at the patterns on the tarpaulins as if they were made with a brush, the result of feverish mark-making by some contemporary descendent of the abstract expressionists, furiously smudging their feelings into the canvas. But the marks are made by tires, oil, sand, dirt, filth, the paintings were composed by time, by everyday use, by the material’s own history, by the country’s history. The floor-based work

In 1992, master of modern American conceptualism John Baldessari (1931-2020) was invited to India. On an artist residency in a swanky modernist villa owned by some wealthy industrialists, he set about documenting, sampling and twisting the world around him, just like he’d always done. But here the classic Californian Baldessari-isms (palm trees, traffic lights, etc) are replaced with images of Indian street scenes, piles of mopeds, kites being flown from roofs, men on bicycles, endless beautiful flora. Those photos get overpainted and put next to screen-printed newspaper clippings of cricketers and politicians, collaged with huge truck mudflaps painted by local artisans with cartoony visions of demons, mosquitoes and futuristic trains. All those elements get composed into angular assemblages, a snapshot of India in the 1990s.  But I don’t think Baldessari was patronising or self important enough to think he was actually documenting a nation in flux, painting a portrait of nascent industrialisation or western influence post-independence or anything like that. Instead, I think he saw India as a place rich in aesthetic potential, just like anywhere, somewhere filled with signifiers and symbols he could chop up, reassemble and re-codify. This body of work isn’t the best thing he ever did, it’s like John Baldessari’s holiday snaps. But he’s John Baldessari, so even his holiday snaps are pretty great. 

The Art Fund Museum of the Year prize is like the Oscars for public institutions in the UK. Every year, all the best galleries and cultural spaces in the country put on their tuxedos (picture editor please insert image of the British Museum in a bow tie here) and wait nervously to see who will be crowned the museum equivalent of Best Actor. This year, at a no doubt tense and highly competitive awards do, the prize was given to London’s very own Young V&A. The Bethnal Green museum got handed the £120,000 prize at a ceremony at the National Gallery, beating off stiff competition from Dundee Contemporary Arts, Craven Museum, Manchester Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.  Young V&A used to be called the Museum of Childhood, but closed down for a £13million refurb a few years ago and remerged in July 2023 with its new name and all new displays. It’s a genuinely brilliant place to take kids, filled not only with great displays of toys and historical artefacts, but also rammed with interactive elements and play areas. It’s part-soft play, part-cultural experience. The best of both worlds for those with little ones.  Vick Hope, who judged the prize, said ‘the Young V&A is such a special and unique place, offering an experience for children (and their adults) like no other out there.’ Until they put a ball pit in the middle of the British Museum, that is inarguably true.  Find out more about Young V&A here. Want more? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London.  Get the latest

We’re only in July, but London’s art institutions have already started announcing their exhibition programmes for 2025. The Tate did it a couple of weeks ago, and now the RA’s getting in on the act, promising a new year filled with new art. Well, some new art, and some very, very familiar art too.  Things are kicking off in January with ‘Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism’, an ultra-colourful look at how modernism took hold over in that bit of South America. It will feature over 130 artworks from the 1910s to the 1970s by ten Brazilian artists, including quite a few you might have seen in Raven Row’s very good and very recent exhibition ‘Some May Work As Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s-70s’.   Then you’ll get the chance to say ‘did you know Victor Hugo could draw? Yes, him who did Les Mis, he could draw, no really’ to all your mates down the pub after you’ve been to ‘Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo’ in March.  The Summer Exhibition comes next, as it inevitably must, before ‘Kiefer/Van Gogh’ in June pairs postwar-German art giant Anselm Kiefer with history’s favourite Q-tip dodger Vincent Van Gogh. The RA did a huge Kiefer exhibition back in 2014, and no one’s saying he’s not deserving of a revisit but there are other artists. The autumn will bring a very exciting major look at the work of American painter Kerry James Marshall, one of the most important artists around today, while October sees the RA look eastwards with ‘A Story of South Asian Art: Mrin

クロード・モネは霧のロンドンが大好きだった。 この先駆的なフランス人画家は、1899年から1901年にかけてロンドンを3度訪問。テムズ川の眺めを見事なまでに幻想的に描いた作品郡は、1904年にパリで初めて展示され、センセーションを巻き起こした。翌年、モネはロンドンでの展示を試みたが、計画は頓挫。以来、これらの作品がこの街で展示されることはなく、長い時が過ぎた。 そしてついに、モネの願いがかなうことになった。2024年9月から「チャリング クロス橋」「ウォータールー橋」「ロンドン国会議事堂」を描いた21点が「Courtauld Gallery」で展示されるのだ。そう、このギャラリーからモネが多くの作品を描いた「サヴォイ ホテル」はすぐ近くにあり、わずか数百メートルしか離れていない。 モネが世紀末に急速に工業化が進んだロンドンで魅了されたのは、濃いスモッグ。街を包み込み、太陽の光が紫、オレンジ、グレーの超現実的でサイケデリックな毛布のようにろ過される様子に引かれたのである。彼は夢中になってテムズ川の景色を100枚近くも描き続けた。今回の展示では、1904年の最初の展覧会から18点、その後に描かれた3点を観ることができる。 テムズ川の絵はモネの最も重要な作品郡の一つであり、この展覧会は美術史的にも野心的な取り組みだといえる。120年過ぎても、決して遅くはない。 展覧会「Monet and London. Views of the Thames」は、9月27日（金）から2025年1月19日（日）まで開催される。 関連記事 『There’s going to be a big show of Monet's dazzling Thames paintings in London this autumn（原文）』 『学生にとって世界で最高の都市はロンドン』 『ロンドンのLGBTQ+スポット10選』 『草間彌生の「カボチャ」がロンドンのケンジントン ガーデンズに出現』 『ロンドンのギャラリーが草間彌生展の開催を発表』 『ロンドンで大人気の舞台「となりのトトロ」がウエストエンドへ移籍』 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  

The art world really loves to take the summer off. If you're expecting to see exciting new exhibitions in August, prepare for disappointment. But July still has some new art surprises up its billowing sleeve. The month features big installation art, political invective, pioneering feminism, quiet landscapes and even a cave. Something for everyone, then. Six new London art exhibitions in July Dominique White, courtesy of Whitechapel Gallery and Max Mara Art Prize Dominique White: ‘Deadweight’ at Whitechapel Gallery Four huge new sculptures, inspired by ideas of the sea and creating worlds of Blackness, take centre stage in Dominique White’s show. The whole thing is the result of a White winning the Max Mara Art Prize and spending six months on a residency in Italy, where she submerged these works in the Mediterranean. Big, clever, salty art: brine and brawn. Dominique White: ‘Deadweight’ is at Whitechapel Gallery, Jul 2-Sep 15. Free. More details here.  Penny Slinger © Penny Slinger / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York Penny Slinger: ‘Exorcism: Inside Out’ at Richard Saltoun Gallery Pioneering feminist artist Penny Slinger is wrapping Richard Saltoun Gallery in images for this ambitious new show. It’s based on a book of the same name that was meant to come out in the 1970s, but was withheld after Slinger’s previous book ‘Mountain Ecstasy’ was seized and burned by British customs for being deemed pornographic.  Penny Slinger: ‘Exorcism: Inside Out’ at Richard Saltoun Gal

Summer’s in full swing, but you’ve only got four weeks to catch some of the season’s best exhibitions. Over the past few months, London’s played host to historical masterpieces, modernist experimentation, conceptual cleverness, incredible video art, erotic robots and some beautiful late Michelangelos too. All those exhibitions are closing in July, so get your art skates on and scoot into town.  Seven exhibitions closing in July 2024 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, © Archivio Patrimonio Artistico Intesa Sanpaolo / foto Luciano Pedicini, Napoli ‘The Last Caravaggio’ at the National Gallery The arrow has only just pierced her heart, but the blood has already drained from Ursula’s fragile body. She is pallid, ashen, aghast at the mortal wound in her chest. All around her mouths are agape in shock, men grasp to hold her up, a hand tries – too late – to stop the arrow. This miserable, chaotic, sombre depiction of feverish violence is the last painting of one of history’s most important artists, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. He would die not long after finishing this, penniless and paranoid, injured and infected. What a way to go out, though. Not with a whimper, and not with a bang, but with a scream of blood-drenched anguish.  Closing Jul 21, free. More details here.  Artwork © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2024; © Succession Alberto Giacometti / DACS 2024; © 2024 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS Photo:

Claude Monet loved foggy old London. Between 1899 and 1901, the pioneering French artist came to the city three times, painting stunning, incandescent visions of views across the Thames. And now, for the first time, they’re going to be shown here. The works were first displayed in 1904 in Paris, and caused a sensation. Monet wanted to bring them to London the next year, but the plans fell through. Monet’s wish will finally be fulfilled in September 2024 when 21 paintings of Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and Houses of Parliament will go on show at the Courtauld Gallery, just a few hundred metres from the Savoy where many of the works were painted.  Monet was attracted to the dense haze created by London’s rapid industrialisation at the turn of the century, the way it created thick smog that enveloped the city and filtered the sunlight into surreal, psychedelic blankets of purple, orange and grey. He was obsessed, and would go to paint almost 100 views of the Thames. But here we’ll have the chance to see 18 paintings from the original 1904 exhibition (the other three here were painted later), the first time this has been attempted since that first show.  Monet’s Thames paintings are among his most important works, and this exhibition is an ambitious art historical undertaking. Better 120 years late than never. 'Monet and London. Views of the Thames' is at the Courtauld Gallery, Sep 27-Jan 19 2025. More details here. Can’t wait? Here are the best exhibitions you can see

日本のコンセプチュアルアーティストのパイオニアである草間彌生は、近年、没入型インスタレーション「Infinity Mirror Rooms」のおかげで世界で最も人気のあるアーティストの一人となった。 しかし、彼女は派手な照明や鏡のトリックだけでなく、巨大でサイケデリックなカボチャをモチーフにした作品も手がけている。2024年7月4日（木）から、そのうちの一つが「サーペンタイン ギャラリー」のプログラムとしてロンドンで展示されることになった。 展示場所はサーペンタイン ギャラリーが位置する「ケンジントン ガーデンズ」内のラウンドポンド付近。置かれるのは、高さ6メートル、直径は5.5メートルの大きさを誇る黄色いカボチャの作品だ。同ギャラリーは、2000年に草間にとってイギリスで初めての回顧展を開催した場所。今回の展示は、ゆかりの地への回帰を意味するものでもある。 草間自身は、「巨大カボチャに愛を込めてロンドンに送ります。子どもの頃からカボチャは私にとって大きな癒やしでした。触るととても優しく、色も形もとても魅力的です。謙虚であると同時に愉快であり、生きる喜びを私に語りかけてきます」とコメントを寄せている。 このニュースは、ロンドン東部のギャラリー「ヴィクトリア ミロ」が、夏の終わりに「Infinity Mirror Rooms」も新作を含む草間の個展を開催することを発表したことに続くもの。2024年のロンドンは、「草間一色」になりそうだ。 関連記事 『A huge Yayoi Kusama pumpkin is coming to the Serpentine（原文）』 『ロンドンのギャラリーが草間彌生展の開催を発表』 『東京、6月から7月に行くべきアート展』 『野外で楽しむアートミュージアム7選』 『ついに開幕、カルティエと日本 半世紀のあゆみ 「結 MUSUBI」展をレポート』 『特別展 大成建設コレクション もうひとりのル・コルビュジエ ～絵画をめぐって〜』 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  

You know what the Tate does; it pumps out high quality blockbuster exhibition after high quality blockbuster exhibition, year after year. And 2025 is promising to be no different, with a whole bunch of just-announced shows that run the gamut for classic landscape painting all the way to contemporary installation art. The year kicks off with a show of work by experimental, extravagant performance artist and designer Leigh Bowery at Tate Modern (Feb 27) before a very exciting look at brilliantly weird English video artist Ed Atkins at Tate Britain (Apr 2).  In the summer, Tate Britain is giving long overdue attention to two important modern artists: Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun (both Jun 13). Burra’s work is full of grim grit and urbanity, and Colquhoun melded sexuality and mythology into surreal visions of the occult. At the same time, Tate Modern will be hosting a show of immersive fabric works by Korean artist Do Ho Suh (May 1) and the first major European exhibition of work by Emily Kam Kngwarray (Jul 10), celebrated as one of Australia’s greatest artists.  John Constable , The White Horse , 1819 © The Frick Collection, New York . P hoto: Joseph Coscia Jr In the autumn, they’ve got a huge group exhibition called ‘Nigerian Modernism’ (Oct 8), an in-depth exploration of art photography called ‘Global Pictorialism’ (Dec 4) and what can only be described as an entirely unnecessary Picasso show, ‘Picasso: Three Dancers’ (Sep 25). Surely we have had enough Picasso exhibiti

It looks like London has succumbed to its annual bout of art measles, because the Royal Academy is covered in red dots. It’s not really an infectious disease, but instead a sign that the Summer Exhibition is back, and all those little red stickers mean the works on the wall are selling. The Summer Exhibition, an annual open call show that allows anyone to submit work for selection, gives amateur artists a shot at relative stardom in rooms curated by big time Academicians. It’s an opportunity to see your neighbour’s watercolours hung next to a Rose Wylie painting, if they pass the muster. This year’s edition, as ever, has a lot of good, and a lot of bad. There’s an almost staggering amount of miserably sombre monochrome landscape painting, and genuinely endless images of pylons and gas holders. In better news, I only counted four works by Sir Michael Craig-Martin, which, while still four too many, is still about a quarter of the amount usually included. The best room is curated by the painter Hurvin Anderson; he seems to have nabbed almost all the joy, talent and ideas submitted, and the whole space is genuinely excellent. Veronica Ryan’s second room, filled with sculptures and oddities, is great too. But as usual, the most important thing with the Summer Exhibition is that it’s fun, and this year is no exception, despite all the pylons and grey landscapes.  Here are our 10 favourite artworks at the Summer Exhibition  Frank Bowling at the Summer Exhibition. Photo: Time Out F

June’s got it all for art fans. It’s a busy month in the art world, with major summer openings at almost every London institution, covering pretty much every base you could want covered. There’s immersive light art, classical painting, influential sculpture, conceptualism, video art, huge amounts of photography and then the artistic smorgasbord that is the Summer Exhibition. Forget the sunshine and tins in the park with your mates, go into a dark, cool, quiet art gallery this summer instead. You won’t get a tan, but you will be culturally fulfilled, which is almost better.  Nine amazing London art exhibitions opening in June Zanele Muholi 'Ntozakhe II, Parktown' (2016) Image courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Gallery © Zanele Muholi Zanele Muholi This mid-career survey of South African visual activist Zanele Muholi captures the breadth and power of an extensive body of work dedicated to presenting a multifaceted view of Black LGBTQI+ individuals. This show originally opened near the start of the pandemic, and has now been expanded with more recent work, all tackling big important themes like labour, racism, sexism and sexual politics. Zanele Muholi is at Tate Modern, Jun 6-Jan 26 2025. £18. More details here. Sculptor Alberto Giacometti at Work in Studio (Photo by Pierre Vauthey/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images) ‘The Body as Matter: Giacometti, Nauman, Picasso’ What do modern art behemoth Pablo Picasso, sculptural master Alberto Giacometti and conceptual pioneer Bruce Naum

There’s a new star in Kensington Gardens’ universe: ‘Archipelagic Void’ is the latest Serpentine Pavilion, designed this year by South Korean architect Minsuk Cho and his studio Mass Studies, and it’s an astral delight. The star-shaped structure is the 23rd Serpentine Pavilion, and spreads itself out across the grounds of the gallery in a mixture of open and covered spaces. Each branch of the building – called ‘islands – is a unique shape, and over the course of the summer will play host to a variety of performances and events. The largest structure features an auditorium, while others will house a library, a tea room, a six-channel sound installation and a climbing wall, all arranged around a central courtyard.  Photograph: Iwan Baan Courtesy: Serpentinedefault The concepts behind the design are a little obtuse and messy, but the Serpentine Pavilion is always a summer highlight anyway; a place of architectural innovation, cultural events and shady refuge for when the heat of the London summer gets too much to bear.  The Serpentine Pavilion is open now until October 27, free. More details here. Want more? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London right now. 

Japanese conceptual pioneer Yayoi Kusama has become one of the world’s most popular artists in recent years, thanks in large part to her immersive Infinity Mirror Room installations. But she’s not just about fancy lights and mirror tricks; she also does a fine line in enormous, psychedelic gourds, and the Serpentine has announced that it’s bringing one of her gargantuan pumpkins to London this July. The towering yellow squash (measuring a whopping 6 metres tall and 5.5 metres in diameter) will take pride of place in Kensington Gardens, and will mark Kusama’s return to the Serpentine, the location of the first British retrospective of her work in 2000. Kusama herself said: ‘I am sending to London with love my giant pumpkin. Since my childhood pumpkins have been a great comfort to me, they are such tender things to touch, so appealing in colour and form. They are humble and amusing at the same time and speak to me of the joy of living.’ News of the pumpkin’s arrival comes hot on the heels of the announcement that east London gallery Victoria Miro will be staging a new show of Kusama work, including an ‘Infinity Mirror Room’, later in the summer, making for a Kusama-tastic 2024.  Let’s hope this pumpkin is properly nailed in place, lest it suffer a similar fate to the Naoshima pumpkin which was swept to sea by a typhoon a few years back. Yayo Kusama’s ‘Pumpkin’ (2024) will be unveiled in Kensington Gardens on Jul 4. Free. More details here.  Want more? Here are the top 10 exhibi