London Gallery Weekend 2026: our critics pick their top shows – The Art Newspaper

For London Gallery Weekend’s sixth version, its organisers are eager to current a gallery ecosystem in fixed evolution. It’s maybe inevitable after a interval by which the artwork market has skilled a chronic downturn that notable closures—like Stephen Friedman Gallery’s earlier this yr—acquire extra consideration than expansions and openings. However there may be a lot to recommend that London’s scene is in impolite well being, and people behind the weekend purpose to point out this off to a wider vary of tourists than may ordinarily attend—together with, they hope, a brand new era of collectors.

Greater than 120 galleries are a part of this yr’s competition and greater than 80 will host a public occasion to coincide with it. Except for the sheer vary of exhibits, among the many large developments since final yr are the expanded galleries of linchpins of the London scene like Sadie Coles and Fashionable Artwork within the West Finish and Maureen Paley within the East, and a bunch of newcomers, together with Sundaram Tagore Gallery, which solely opened its London area in Might 2026, and Pale Horse, which isn’t but a yr outdated.

Under, our critics choose their highlights throughout town.

West and Centralpicked by Ben Luke

Freya Tewelde: Geometry of Elsewhere

Gallery 1957, 1 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, London, SW7 5EW

5 June-25 July

New work by Tewelde, who was born in Asmara, Eritrea, grew up in Saudi Arabia and now lives in London. Reminiscence has at all times been essential to her work, with figures within the collection Roots of Resonance: The Baobab Tree (2022-23) looming out of a dreamlike painterly haze as if by recollection. On this new physique of labor, Tewelde has moved additional into abstraction; whereas she continues to discover the themes of belonging and what she calls “in-betweenness” widespread to earlier collection, she interprets her reminiscences into pure feeling, hoping to construct enveloping work “that may be entered relatively than learn”, she says.

Savannah Harris: Gloria’s

Harlesden Excessive Avenue, 57 Excessive Avenue, Harlesden, London, NW10 4NJ

5 June-26 July

Guests to Harlesden Excessive Avenue could also be shocked that the gallery seems to have been supplanted by a espresso store, Gloria’s, which resembles a widely known upmarket café chain. However that is a part of Savannah Harris’s mission, by which guests can see a number of artists’ work in portray and ceramics whereas having fun with their flat whites. Clearly identifiable are Harris’s vibrant abstractions, filled with natural varieties and geological strata, and incorporating sand as a reference to her Caribbean background in addition to to her investigation of deep time. However different works are by unnamed “outsider artists”. Harris is asking looking questions: what objective does artwork have in city social area, and the way a lot does identify recognition—hers versus these outsider artists—matter in establishing worth?

Ravelle Pillay: Revisitations

Goodman Gallery, 26 Cork Avenue, London, W1S 3ND

4 June-16 July

Pillay’s work start with discovered photos, together with historic household pictures and people from official archives, relating her private South African Indian and British heritage. The works that type Revisitations have an added poignancy since they relate to her father’s demise on the finish of final yr. She transforms her supply pictures by a poetic painterly language in order that, in her phrases, they grow to be “portmanteaus”, a linguistic mix of the unique picture and the unsure parts conjured by paint: subjective feeling, private and collective reminiscence and, now, grief. Pillay makes use of her medium’s capacities to embody the complexities and ambiguities of archives and historic photos not simply as seen and analysed however as felt: by skinny layers, erasure and marking, they’ve a haunting presence.

Candace Hill-Montgomery: A Naked Girl Mutters Nothing…

Hollybush Gardens, 1–2 Warner Yard, London, EC1R 5EY

5 June-18 July

Now in her eighties, Candace Hill-Montgomery is having fun with deserved if lengthy overdue consideration: she is displaying in Better New York at MoMA PS1 in New York till August and, right here, presents her first exhibition with Hollybush Gardens. It’s one thing of a mini retrospective, with works from the Seventies, a interval by which Hill-Montgomery had a residency on the Studio Museum in Harlem and confirmed at Artists House in New York, proper as much as new items. Among the many highlights are her double-exposed pictures by which she layered photos of plentiful produce in Brooklyn grocery shops with footage of her personal works, and her weaves: textile items made on hand-made looms that make reference to a wealth of social, political, inventive and pop-cultural moments and folks.

Rachel Maclean: The Enchantment of Purpose

Josh Lilley, 40-46 Using Home Avenue, London, W1W 7EX

5 June-1 August

For a few years Rachel Maclean has been fascinated by the seething abyss beneath the shiny floor of technological developments, realising her movies, VR experiences, work and sculptures in a sickly confectionary-coloured palette, and with an depth of motion and imagery, that overloads the viewer to the purpose of queasiness. She has skilled her satirical eye on synthetic intelligence for a while, and right here, in addition to work, exhibits her movie They’ve Obtained Your Eyes (2026), additionally at the moment on view at FACT in Liverpool, which equivocates unbearable Twenty first-century tech bros with the visionaries of the Victorian industrial age. Sometimes, whereas questioning AI and the tradition round it, Maclean makes use of its applied sciences to make the work, laying naked the contradictions inherent in our navigation of the digital panorama.

Terry Winters: Alongside the River

Fashionable Artwork, 8 Bennet Avenue, London, SW1A 1RP

5 June-11 July

These eight new work by the US artist mirror his ongoing fascination with the pure world by the medium of abstraction. The images, every titled with a single phrase—amongst them, Area, Scope and Space—relate to an earlier physique of labor known as the Level Cloud Footage, referring to a type of 3D modelling however instantly evocative of pure varieties. The clouds of shapes we see in Winters’s compositions conjure every thing from constellations to murmurations to bacterial mutations, whereas remaining resolutely within the realms of summary form, color and tone. As befits a bunch of works born of a singular response to the pure world, the exhibition’s title was impressed by a quote from Paul Cezanne: “Right here, alongside the river, the motifs multiply.”

Keith Piper: Purple Flags

Niru Ratnam, 71-73 Nice Portland Avenue, London, W1W 7LP

5 June-25 July

A cluster of works from throughout Piper’s profession, together with items made within the essential Eighties interval by which he was a founding member of the BLK Artwork Group. Since that point, Piper’s work has remained remarkably constant in utilizing a spread of media, together with digital applied sciences, to discover systemic racism and narratives of Blackness amid wider social circumstances. The exhibition’s title pertains to his most up-to-date works, the place he makes reference to Operation Increase the Colors, a latest marketing campaign the place the show of English and British flags, purportedly representing patriotism, thinly masks rising far-right xenophobia within the UK.

Hayv Kahraman: What can’t be stated will likely be wept

Pilar Corrias, 51 Conduit Avenue, London, W1S 2YT

5 June-5 September

Kahraman’s newest physique of labor explores each her background as a Kurdish-Iraqi refugee in Europe and in the end the US, and a latest acute trauma—dropping her house in Altadena to the Los Angeles wildfires in early 2025. As at all times, the work are inhabited by figures that act partially as self-portraits, pictured in an area that’s each sparely up to date but evocative of quite a few historic traditions. The impact is heightened by her beautiful use of her medium; right here, in sequences of delicate marbling and marking. Displacement has at all times been on the coronary heart of her work, and it more and more extends past Kahraman’s autobiography to a deeper human dislocation from the pure world amid a local weather disaster. “In a burning world,” the artist writes in an prolonged textual content on the exhibition, “I flip to water: to seas, to rivers, to tears.”

Anne Imhof: Citizen

Sprüth Magers, 7a Grafton Avenue, London, W1S 4EJ

5 June-1 August

Anne Imhof’s efficiency apply, by which her teams of collaborators carry out throughout a number of modes from track to up to date dance to skateboarding, is so distinctive in the best way that it embeds the viewers into the material of the work that it has overshadowed a number of the wider points of her work. Her gallery exhibitions mirror her output within the spherical, involving sculptural environments and items in additional standard media together with portray. Among the many works on view right here is the eponymous Citizen, a four-channel movie referring to DOOM: Home of Hope (2025), Imhof’s multi-part work for the Park Avenue Armory in New York, and a bunch of Wave work, huge items knowledgeable by digital photos of turbulent seas. The work unavoidably conjure the spirit of earlier German traditions, from Caspar David Friedrich’s Romanticism to the photo-paintings of Gerhard Richter.

Caragh Thuring

Thomas Dane Gallery, 3 & 11 Duke Avenue, St James’s, London, SW1Y 6BN

5 June-19 September

Considered one of Caragh Thuring’s most enduring capacities is for shock. Her layered work can use a number of languages, painterly modes and types of expression inside one canvas, fortunately bringing collectively bedfellows one would by no means ordinarily join. Her newest canvases are typical of their scope, with cartoonish varieties introduced into shut relation with photos from artwork historical past and expansive patterns, every bit without delay singular and but coherent inside the wider group. These footage obtain a uncommon stability, being each arresting and endlessly absorbing. Additionally on present at Thomas Dane is Out and About: Prunella Clough work from the Eighties and Nineties, a big gathering of the late work of the lyrical British painter, curated by the previous director of Camden Artwork Centre, Jenni Lomax (5 June-25 July).

East and SouthPicked by Louisa Buck

Gabriele Beveridge: By no means Ends

Seventeen, 270-276 Kingsland Highway, Entrance on Acton Mews, London, E8 4DG

22 Might-27 June

Gabriele Beveridge highlights the inextricable intertwining of the ecological with the commercial in sculpture that mixes natural bodily varieties with industrial processes. Considered one of these newest works in hand blown glass resembles an enormous teardrop hitched to a steel backbone, one other a column of fleshy pink orbs whereas others take the type of balloons that stoop and spill over skeletal steel buildings. Chemical reactions and excessive warmth additionally play an element in making a collection of aluminium panel items, anodised to a sheen by an electrochemical course of earlier than being bathed in sulphuric acid and dripped with dyes leading to branchlike vegetal patterns that, regardless of their synthetic origins, conjure up pure connotations of milk duct anatomy, river networks, and mycelium.

Alvaro Barrington: 92-01 ‘In Livin Coloration’

Emalin, 4–8 Helmet Row, London, EC1V 3QJ

6 June-15 August

On this new physique of labor Barrington explores the affect of the crack cocaine epidemic on the US Black neighborhood in the course of the Eighties and 90s. 4 distinctive environments – every representing one of many 4 seasons – study the wealthy cultural responses that emerged from this period and methods by which the Black neighborhood handled this situation by trend, music, and different artwork varieties. The yr 1992 has grow to be a nostalgic baseline for Barrington, referencing Nineties New York and Caribbean hip-hop, trend, and popular culture. It additionally represents the top of the long-lasting NBC sitcom A Totally different World – the title additionally given to the continuing collection of hand-stitched postcards that Barrington has been making since his MoMA PS1 present in 2017- plenty of that are included on this present. Different new yarn and concrete-based work proceed Barrington’s distinctive materials vocabulary explored in key tasks akin to his Tate Britain Duveens Fee in 2024, and his persevering with participation within the Notting Hill Carnival. Emalin Clerk’s Home is displaying Hungry for Trash, a solo exhibition of recent works by American artist Kembra Pfahler.

Delaine Le Bas: Leap

Maureen Paley, 4 Herald Avenue, London, E2 6JT

4 June-25 July

Centre stage within the gallery’s first exhibition of Delaine Le Bas is the Goddess, a sculptural determine customary from handmade parts and located objects in addition to classic textiles which the artist, who grew up in a Romani household and whose multimedia work interrogates id, illustration and cultural misunderstanding, describes as “a name to motion within the occasions we now discover ourselves.” Additionally on present is a brand new collection of Murano glass works, created in collaboration with Studio Berengo in Venice which attracts on imagery related to witches and folkloric outsider figures as a part of Le Bas’s broader and ongoing curiosity in distinction, individuality and the ability of transformation.

Ally Fallon: On the nonetheless level of the turning world

Hales Gallery, 7 Bethnal Inexperienced Highway, London, E1 6LA

4 June-17 July

Final yr’s winner of the celebrated John Moores portray prize and the youngest ever artist to scoop this prestigious award, Ally Fallon right here continues his exploration into the method of portray, in works that mix each construction and spontaneity and construct on the legacy of English Abstraction . Repetitive labour-intensive rendering of densely patterned flooring drawn each from his rapid environment and wider travels, acts each to floor the work in a recognisable world whereas additionally liberating up the unconscious, permitting ambiance and surprising gestures to emerge. The present’s title is taken from a line in T.S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, a meditation on temporal existence the place consciousness resides within the ‘nonetheless level’ of the current; and Fallon’s work equally interact with time as an summary and elastic situation .

Unyimeabasi Udoh: No Autos

Alma Pearl, Unit T, Reliance Wharf, 2-10 Hertford Highway, Primary entrance on Kingsland Towpath, Regent’s Canal, London, N1 5ET

21 Might-4 July

New work by this London–based mostly Nigerian American artist whose wall-based sculptures interact with the materiality of language, picture and signal. Meticulously fabricated from supplies akin to aluminium and retroreflective glass which can be extra generally related to street infrastructure, their low distinction surfaces are activated by altering gentle and the angle of viewers, variously shifting in look from luminous to opaque and typically the seemingly void. These are accompanied by a bunch of screenprints titled Diversions that are based mostly on pictures of promoting billboards and hoardings captured in London throughout the previous yr. There’s additionally a site-specific set up which maps the gallery in silver masking tape.

Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia: The Altering of Innocence and Expertise

William Hine, 311 Camberwell New Highway, London, SE5 0TF

5 June-25 July

Central to this exhibition of recent work by Glasgow-based Onwochei-Garcia is an set up of large-scale, suspended collages that mix particular person works into dangling immersive buildings. Right here layered compositions rendered in watercolour and pastel on Japanese washi paper depict allegorical scenes that draw on literature, fantasy and folklore, intertwining historic analysis with fictional references. These vary throughout Homeric myths to William Blake’s illustrated poems (which give the present its title) and Goya’s Caprichos etchings. All mix to type advanced and unstable tableaux inhabited by dreamlike fantastical figures and environments. These massive however fragile works are additionally interspersed with smaller work constituted of milk-based casein utilized to items of marble.

Heft: Melissa Joseph; A Skinny Place: Max Bainbridge

Sim Smith, 6 Camberwell Passage, London, SE5 0AX

6 June-18 July

New York-based Melissa Joseph’s first large-scale exhibition within the UK consists of huge felted works constituted of fleece and parts from the panorama which have been created in response to analysis following sheep throughout Scotland. Drawing on her Indian-American upbringing Joseph highlights a resonant parallel between animal intuition and human migration by noting how ewes cross down important spatial information to their lambs. She then makes use of this phenomenon as a lens to discover how human displacement disrupts cultural, emotional, and epigenetic reminiscence. Within the gallery’s second solo present, British sculptor Max Bainbridge’s carved picket works  assume the position of bodily analogues to discover the skinny and porous boundary between people and nature.

Dominic Watson: Vinegar and Piss

The Sunday Painter, 117-119 South Lambeth Highway, London, SW8 1XA27 Might-11 July

Dominic Watson presents a large-scale sculptural set up centred round a galleon constructed from reclaimed picket kids’s playhouses. Guests can enterthis fantastical construction which stands as a portrait of up to date England: a nation adrift, run aground, and in decline. The crew are fragmented figurative sculptures constituted of clay, wax, polystyrene, and papier-mâché who’ve descended into chaos and insanity. Even the feminine figurehead is being sucked dry by breast pumps feeding perpetually voracious mouths protruding from the ship’s sides .The expression ‘filled with piss and vinegar’ used to explain youthful power and combative spirit – however right here it’s reversed to explain a bitter, unhappy and under no circumstances Merrie England, now sustained solely by nostalgia and small minded nastiness.

Serena Korda: The Golem Rises

Cooke Latham, 41 Parkgate Highway, London, SW11 4NP

5 June-3 July

Within the allegorical ceramic frieze that varieties the center of this present, Serena Korda reimagines the Jewish folkloric story of the Golem’s creation to discover the transformative energy of motherhood and the fundamental power of creation. By conjuring a mythic metropolis of girls and merging it with the enduring mythic energy of the Golem, Korda reframes motherhood as a web site of radical energy, creativeness and survival and celebrates maternal creation as elemental and political. However on the similar time, through the use of the language of domesticity – the frieze is constituted of ceramic tiles and two domestically scaled ceramic lamps take the type of robust primal mom figures – Korda additionally acknowledges the enduring and stifling societal stress to slim, comprise, and cultivate the self.

This and That: Francesca Anfossi, Gabriele Beveridge, Jane Bustin, Alan Charlton, Rose Davey, Iain Hales and Gary Woodley

Sid Movement Gallery, 24a Penarth Centre, Hatcham Highway, London, SE15 1TR

5 June-10 July

Co-curated with artist Rose Davey, who additionally contributes by portray a desk made by Gary Woodley, this seven artist blended present proposes that nothing stands alone and that each object, color and concept can solely be understood in relation to a different. In addition to Woodley’s desk and Francesca Anfossi’s stools, each of which solely make sense when sat at, Alan Charlton’s diptych demonstrates the affect of mixed painted and unpainted canvas, whereas Davey’s work examine the impact of 1 color upon one other. Works by Gabriele Beveridge, Jane Bustin and Iain Hales additional reveal how that means emerges from and will depend on the contrasts, areas and relationships between varieties.

London Gallery Weekend, numerous venues, 5-7 JuneThe Artwork Newspaper is a media companion of London Gallery Weekend