6 Shows in London to Look Forward to This Autumn
Autumn is the busiest time for the London art world as dealers, collectors, and art fans descend on the city for Frieze Week and the satellite events that accompany it. As galleries and museums roll out show-stopping exhibitions, it's hard to know where to start.
We've gathered six must-see institutional exhibitions, from Claudette Johnson's large-scale drawings of Black women at The Courtauld Gallery and Philip Guston's cartoonish paintings at Tate Modern to Hiroshi Sugimoto's enigmatic photographs at Hayward Gallery and Sarah Lucas' provocative sculptures at Tate Britain.
Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain (28 September 2023–14 January 2024)
A master in expressions of transgression, Sarah Lucas brings her interdisciplinary practice to the halls of Tate Britain this September for the exhibition Happy Gas (28 September 2023–14 January 2024).
The former Young British Artist who is known for her unconventional attitude presents sculpture, installation, and photography in a survey presentation that explores sex, class, and gender.
The exhibition is her first solo display with Tate Britain and will feature early tabloid newspaper works, her iconic 'bunny girl' sculptures, and a selection of new sculptures made between 2019 and 2023 including ten never-before-seen works.
It's been some time since Lucas' last institutional show in the U.K., so we look forward to seeing her gutsy body of work return.
Claudette Johnson at The Courtauld Gallery (29 September 2023–14 January 2024)
Claudette Johnson's powerful portraits of Black figures take centre stage in The Courtauld Gallery's autumn exhibitions programme.
Known for her decades-long commitment to exposing the invisibility of Black figures within art history, Johnson has a talent for capturing her subjects, and depicting their body and soul.
Her portraits, often large-scale, are made up of gestural lines with real presence. This energetic mark-making frames her subjects' physical attitudes—we see the soft and tender alongside the wary and defiant, each character floating within fields of flat colour or the white of the canvas.
Presence (29 September 2023–14 January 2024) is the first monographic show of her work at a major institution in London.
Philip Guston at Tate Modern (5 October 2023–25 February 2024)
Philip Guston's travelling retrospective makes its final stop at Tate Modern in October, giving fans of the Canadian-America artist a chance to admire his work outside the U.S.
The postponement of the much-anticipated show (delayed in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd) was met with controversy and eventually led to the departure of one of the senior curators at Tate.
Expect to see Guston's iconic fleshy pink palette presenting provocative perspectives on the violence and injustice inherent in the world.
The exhibition is the first major retrospective of the painter in the U.K. in almost 20 years. Tate's display delves into Guston's life work with over 100 paintings and drawings he made during his 50-year career.
Tamara Henderson at Camden Art Centre (6 October–31 December 2023)
Canadian artist Tamara Henderson brings her eclectic oeuvre to Camden Art Centre in an exhibition of painting, film, installation, sculpture, and live performance.
The major new commission, Green in the Grooves (6 October–31 December 2023), focuses on how humankind's behaviours and patterns intervene in wider cosmologies surrounding the earth and the universe.
Henderson offers us four archetypes personified as characters—The Gardener; The Director; Sound; and Light. Through each representation, she unveils different facets of her creative practice. We see experiments in her studio and garden in Australia, an inquiry into unconventional materials alongside more traditional ones, and her curiosity for process.
Henderson's wide-ranging body of work is by turns adventurous, informative, and playful.
Hiroshi Sugimoto at Hayward Gallery (11 October 2023–7 January 2024)
Dramatic, ephemeral, and meditative, Hiroshi Sugimoto's work is as esoteric as it is subversive. With a concern for time and memory, his photographs of seascapes, wax figures, dioramas, and architecture are gloriously alluring.
Time Machine (11 October 2023–7 January 2024) at the South Bank-based Hayward Gallery is the largest retrospective of the Japanese photographer to date, and includes key works alongside lesser-known ones.
The exhibition features photographs from Sugimoto's 'Theaters' series (1976–ongoing). From movie palaces to drive-in theatres, these photographs document cinema spaces with one long exposure, capturing entire films and rendering them into single images radiating striking white light.
Nicole Eisenman at Whitechapel Gallery (11 October 2023–14 January 2024)
Nicole Eisenman's paintings of people are brimming with humour, love, and sorrow. From scenes of queer couples in bars to crowds in poverty, the French-born artist paints the shifting social, cultural, and political narratives prevalent in the United States.
Whitechapel Gallery will soon present What Happened (11 October 2023–14 January 2024), the first major U.K. retrospective of Eisenman's work. The exhibition gathers over 100 works dating from the early 1990s to 2022.
Eisenman's colourful compositions beautifully express the nuanced emotions of everyday life. Her figures embody the love, vulnerability, melancholy, and anger tangled in the highs and lows of contemporary life.
Main image: Claudette Johnson, Kind of Blue (2020). Gouache, pastel ground, pastel. 121.92 x 152.4 cm. © Claudette Johnson. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Andy Keate.
