The season for art exhibitions is beginning to shift into gear after a quiet but balmy August. Buckle up and get your diary at the ready, as our monthly round-up is rammed full of exhibitions, retrospectives and installations across the city. Dive into the Royal Society of Sculptors Summer exhibition, which has been curated by designer Henry Holland, while Turner Prize-winning artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan takes over the Barbican for four days at the end of September. Kraków-based artist Krzysztof Grzybacz looks at the body as a construct at Pace London, and Courtney Bae explores the complex landscapes of eating disorders at her selling exhibition at Sworders. Discover the abstract world of Cuban artist Carmen Herrera or dive into colour with Korean artist Ha Chong Hyun. From group shows to career retrospectives, plan your next visit with our frequently updated guide to the month’s best offerings.
Heading across the pond? Here are the best New York art exhibitions to see this month.
London art exhibitions: what to see in September 2026
The Royal Society of Sculptors Summer exhibition, curated by Henry Holland
Royal Society of Sculptors from 19 September to 28 November 2026
Designer Henry Holland has curated the Royal Society of Sculptors Summer exhibition titled ‘There’s No Place Like It’. Visitors will find the once-derelict basement of Dora House, transformed into a welcoming flat for visiting artists with flexible studio space and a home for the Royal Society of Sculptors’ archive.
Repercussions: A takeover by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Earshot
Barbican Centre from 23 to 26 September 2026
Turner Prize-winning artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan takes over the Barbican, which will see the Centre’s venues become an interdisciplinary platform. Expect to see installations, performances, screenings and live music explore the impact of sound, from noise pollution to the importance of silence.
Krzysztof Grzybacz, Haruspex
Pace London from 3 September to 3 October 2026
Kraków-based artist Krzysztof Grzybacz presents Haruspex, the artist’s first solo show in the UK. Here, people will see a presentation that looks at the body as a construct and how it holds memories of our past selves. The artist is known for exploring the relationship between the human body, nature, and everyday objects. This presentation is no different, except for the shift of focus to how the body is used as a contoured map, layering memory, instinct, and lived experience.
‘Nourishing: Reflections of Resilience’
Sworders’ London Gallery from 1 to 11 September 2026
Contemporary artist Courtney Bae presents a selling exhibition at Sworders’ London Gallery. Here, her collection of portraits and landscapes explores the complexities of eating disorders, recovery, and human resilience. Her relationship with the subject matter is deeply personal, informed by a long-standing close relationship with a loved one living with an eating disorder. The exhibition features people with lived experience and was developed in partnership with SWEDA, a charity supporting those affected by eating disorders across the South and West of England.
Carmen Herrera
Lisson Gallery, London from 24 September until 7 November
Curated by art historian Marie Perennès, Lisson Gallery looks at drawings, paintings and sculptures by Carmen Herrera, which span the final decade of the artist’s life. Born in Havana in 1915, the artist moved to Paris from 1948 to 1953, where she explored line, form, colour and geometric abstraction.
Ha Chong Hyun
Lisson Gallery, London from 24 September 2026
Korean artist Ha Chong-Hyun marks his inaugural show with the gallery, which surveys his experimentation over the past six decades. The artist is best known for his monochromatic and minimalist pieces sprinkled with abstraction.
The Unclassified
Korean Cultural Centre from 25 September until 31 December 2026
The Unclassified is a group exhibition of four leading contemporary Korean and Korean-heritage artists, Meekyoung Shin, Ayoung Kim, Siren Eun Young Jung, and Gala Porras-Kim. They examine how museums shape how we remember and interpret culture. As a result, the exhibition looks at alternative ways of thinking about culture and heritage.
Ella Walker
Courtauld Gallery from 3 September 2026
One of Walker's previous exhibitions at Pilar Corrias
Artist Ella Walker has been invited to create two site-specific commissions for the Courtauld Gallery, which will be presented in The John Browne Entrance Hall. Walker is known for her romanticism with Renaissance touches painted across large canvases that take on a dream-like quality. Her creative worlds are situated around female figures who rise above expected behaviour and transcend fixed roles.
courtauld.ac.uk
Lucy Dodd: ‘The good, the true and the beautiful’
Sprüth Magers from 18 September until 24 October 2026
A figure of Diana, the woodland huntress on earth and luminous celestial body in the sky, is at the centre of Dodd’s latest exhibition ‘The good, the true and the beautiful’. The name and figure are personal for Dodd, as her grandmother bore the same name, and it continues to extend outward to Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales. Dodd currently resides on the Moray Coast in Scotland, and draws the materials of her surroundings into her work. Peat collected from the shores of the Findhorn River, copper ink, spirulina, cochineal, and local herbs comprise her pieces.
Jonathan Wateridge
GRIMM Gallery from 3 September to 3 October 2026
A new series of the artist's work will go on display at GRIMM Gallery. The exhibition will feature the artist’s atmospheric paintings which merge the world of classical painting with a mythic undertone. The series feels warm and abstract, which juxtaposes with the concept it is drawn from, peripeteia — the sudden reversal of fortune in Greek theatre — depicting points where tension and tragedy quietly accumulate.
grimmgallery.com
Liorah Tchiprout: The Family Katz
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery from 4 September to 3 October 2026
In Tchiprout’s new paintings, a fictional Jewish family, the Katzes, are portrayed. The artist captures the family’s social circles and life around their imagined home in London’s Gunnersbury Park. The artist painted from life, as well as from the study of her idiosyncratic dolls, a series of small, hand-crafted mannequins inspired by her close friends and family, as well as characters from literature and film.
Lucie Rie / Hans Coper: Life at the Wheel
Offer Waterman, London from 18 September until 31 October 2026
The exhibition will showcase the important role that Lucie Rie and Hans Coper had in shaping public perceptions surrounding ceramics in Britain and beyond. The exhibition features over 200 works, showing the artists’ creations side-by-side for the first time since 1997. The exhibition will span the full breadth of both artists’ careers, from Rie’s early works made after completing her studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, to those made during the decade they spent working together at Albion Mews, and later works made by Coper after his move outside London.
‘Sensual / Mutual’: Del La Grace Volcano
Auto Italia from 17 July 2026 to 25 October 2026
Del LaGrace Volcano is an American artist, performer, and activist, currently based in Sweden. Across their career, Volcano has crafted a distinct photographic practice which spans portraiture and documentary, producing images that capture queer, trans, and feminist visual culture. ‘Sensual / Mutual’ marks their first institutional show in the UK, showcasing works from San Francisco and Santa Fe in the 1970s and 80s, challenging representations of gender and sexuality.
Bruiseless
Belmacz 17 July 2026 until 7 October 2026
Contemporary art gallery and jewellery showroom Blemacz presents ‘Bruiseless’. It brings together the work by German artist Ja Jess’ and French-Venezuelan artist Andrea Marcellier. Together they explore genetics and the act of giving and losing – captured in Jess’ still lifes of egg donation and Marcellier’s masturbatory sculptures.
Chardchakaj Waikawee: ‘Youth’
Graces Mews from 31 July until 19 September 2026
In Thailand, the phrase ‘wai run’ describes youth as an attitude. As a spirit. This term inspired artist Chardchakaj Waikawee for his first solo show. Through film photography, the artist extends a simple description of age, but instead captures an attitude. The work is set in Bangkok, with photographs taken between 2008 and 2020. The presentation displays people living on the margins of the city’s streets, individuals often rendered invisible due to circumstance or economic position. The imagery is also documented in the artist’s debut monograph charting the decade-long project
Bold Tendencies: ‘Euphoria’
Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park until 12 September 2026
Bold Tendencies – a non-profit arts organisation atop a multi-storey car park in south-east London – is all about exercising your joy. For 2026, the chosen theme is Euphoria, and the line-up includes new commissions by Andreas Gursky, Louis Morlæ, Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban, Tarek Lakhrissi, and Emma Hart. ‘It’s been reflected in very extreme, different ways with the five. The immediate interpretation is about highs, but you can only know the high if you know the low,’ observes Barry. ‘It’s a theme of contrasts, like the wider reflections I have about Bold: you can't have success without failure, joy without sadness…’
Writer Zoe Whitfield
‘Ana Mendieta’
Tate Modern until 17 January 2027
Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta’s multidisciplinary practice encompassed sculpture, film, performance, photography, painting and drawing, but she is best known for her ‘silueta’, or ‘earth-body ', works, in which she outlined her body in nature.
More than 120 of Mendieta’s works are now on view in a new retrospective, including a nude woman’s form in a tomb covered with sprigs of small white flowers, the flaming form of a body on a sandy landscape, and the shape of a body on a shoreline, being slowly eroded by the tide. The exhibition takes us through Mendieta’s practice, from her teenage years up until around 1984, exploring her whole body of work.
Writer: Amah-Rose Abrams
tate.org.uk
Ellen Gallagher: Art on the Underground programme
Ongoing
Transport for London recently revealed the latest in its ongoing series of Art on the Underground commissions for the cover of the pocket Tube map, courtesy of American artist Ellen Gallagher. Her piece, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, 2026, is the 42nd commission in the series and is an exploration of the capital’s long maritime history.
Writer Jonathan Bell
Rudy Loewe: Intimacies of Care - Spaces of Grief and Possibility
Wellcome Collection until 7 February 2027
Looking at the lived experience of Black people whose mental healthcare in the UK is shaped by racist discrimination, multidisciplinary artist Rudy Loewe asks viewers to consider alternative approaches to care. Through a collection of paintings and sound, the exhibition reimagines a mental healthcare system that is supportive.
Ashiesh Shah: Taamr
Carpenters Workshop Gallery until 20 September 2026
Taamr is an exhibition that celebrates the revival of Indian crafts. At the heart of the showcase is Shah’s sculptures, which echo symbols of transformation. The work is a combination of aesthetics that captures woven, held, or structured in copper. Collectively, the exhibition is visually tactile and acts as a commitment to long-held traditions with a contemporary visual and sculptural language
Anish Kapoor
Southbank Centre's Hayward Gallery until 18 October 2026
For the Mumbai-born, Turner Prize-winning artist, Anish Kapoor, the scale of his work is important for the physical reaction it incites in the viewer. This is seen in his first retrospective in for 28 years. which squeeze, drip, and disorient in the Hayward’s Brutalist enclaves.
The Trixie Sullivan Archive
Handel Hendrix House, ongoing
Jimi Hendrix's memorabilia goes on show at his former home, Handel Hendrix House. A vast selection of the musician's treasured possessions is displayed. Such is the treasure trove of detail about the legendary musician’s period living in London that’s contained in a cache of paperwork saved by Trixie Sullivan.
Frida: The Making of an Icon
Tate Modern until 3 January 2027
In a major new exhibition, ‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’, Kahlo’s work is presented alongside that of her peers and later artists influenced by her legacy, including Kiki Smith, Judy Chicago, and Ana Mendieta. She created around 150 works in her lifetime, a third of which were self-portraits. More than 30 of these representations are here, tracing the way Kahlo’s self-perception developed, fractured, and rebuilt itself throughout her lifetime.
Project a Black Planet: A Season
Barbican Centre from June until September 2026
The influence of Pan-Africanism on modern arts and culture is explored and celebrated at the Barbican this summer season. The term ‘pan-africanism’ was coined in the early 20th century and is used as an umbrella term for political and philosophical movements advocating for self-determination, anti-colonial resistance, and transnational solidarity among peoples of African descent. Across the summer season, this is unwrapped across thirty events spanning art, cinema, music, performance, and talks.
Hepworth in Colour
The Courtauld Gallery until 6 September 2026
Barbara Hepworth is best known for her sculptural pieces inspired by organic forms and seaside landscapes of Cornwall, where she resided. Discussing her pioneering use of colour in sculpture with her son-in-law, the art historian Alan Bowness, Hepworth stated ‘In a way my colour has been accepted, but never understood’. This exhibition is dedicated to her work in colour, from her early sculptures from the 1940s to drawings, and more renowned pieces from the 1950s and 1960s.
The Sun and The Moon: Art Inspired by the Celestial
Saatchi Gallery until 8 September 2026
Spanning across two floors of the gallery this celestial exhibition looks at both sun and moon and how it has inspired creativity across cultures and time. The group show, which is presented as a 24 hour cycle from dawn to dusk, showcases works from emerging and established artists who were invited to interpret the sun and moon.
Nhu Xuan Hua: Of Walking on Fire
Autograph until 19 September 2026
Rooted in language’s inability to fully convey complex family histories, Nhu Xuan Hua reimagines archival photographs from her family’s time in Vietnam and their early years in Europe. Her work, which sits between art and fashion photography, explores how stories are conveyed across generations, and how the memory and recollection of such can be fractured.
Julio Le Parc: Light. Colour. Action.
Tate Modern until 3 May 2027
Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc presents seven decades of works, which invites visitors to join in themselves. His kinetic sculptures uses light and movement across mirrored surfaces to create a mesmerising spectacle. The interactive nature of the installation allows for art to be enjoyed by all.
The Everythingists by Es Devlin
V&A East Storehouse until 18 October 2026
The work by the Russian artist Natalia Goncharova is the inspiration for Es Devlin’s exhibition at V&A East Storehouse. ‘Everythingism’, (Vsechestvo in Russian) was used to describe Goncharova’s work which spanned across painting, theatre design, fashion and performance art. Devlin, who is equally not enclosed to one medium, relates to this terminology. ‘The Everythingists’ showcases Devlin's sculptural drawings inspired by Goncharova’s painted backdrop made for 1926 Ballet Russes production of The Firebird.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
V&A from 28 March 2026
Designer Elsa Schiaparelli wearing black silk dress with crocheted collar of her own design and a turban, photograph by Fredrich Baker, Vogue, 1940
The V&A welcomes the UK’s first exhibition on fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, spanning her work from the 1920s, to the fashion house’s evolution today, under the creative director Daniel Roseberry. His contemporary designs have created conversation in recent years; including a dress with faux-taxidermy lion heads, to a delicate lung dress boasting a string of golden veins.
The Music is Black: A British Story
V&A East Museum from 18 April 2026
Also at the V&A is ‘The Music is Black: A British Story’, an exhibition charting 125 years of Black music-making in the UK. It is a deep dive into how this music shaped British culture.
The Coming of Age
Wellcome Collection from 25 March 2026
At the Wellcome Collection, ‘Coming of Age’ explores the perceptions of aging from adolescence to adulthood. Specifically it looks at how societies can adapt for us all to age better. The exhibition is rooted in the statistic that people are living longer. In the UK one in ten children are expected to live beyond the age of 100. The question the exhibition asks is ‘Who gets to live longer and “age well”?’ Bringing together different perspectives from art, science and popular culture, ‘Coming of Age’ explores the assumptions made about life stages and asks what greater longevity means for all of us.
Cecily Brown: Picture Making
Serpentine South Gallery until 6 September 2026
Inspired by Kensington Gardens, painter Cecily Brown presents her green compositions which dance with bold brushwork, and colour, resulting in dynamic movement within her pieces. Nature and park life are at the forefront of Brown’s work. Here you will see her exploring this theme through scale and colour, along with a sprinkling of romance from couples, woodland scenes and nature walks. It is a hopeful exhibition, which highlights the beauty within the English landscape, the nostalgia of children’s book illustrations, and has a hint of warning through cautionary tales, all of which are gestures to Brown’s own memories.
The David Bowie Centre
V&A East Storehouse, permanent
Fashion, memorabilia and personal ephemera from David Bowie, now on view at the V&A East Storehouse in London, are as wondrous in their range as their creator. The pioneering musician's 90,000-item personal archive are equally accessible, and – like the artist at the heart of it – equally wondrous in their range. Bowie was an inveterate curator – you might say hoarder – of his own life, keeping every quicksilver fashion statement, every scrap of paper, every piece of memorabilia, amassing a deeply personal life-map that accompanies the Centre’s 70,000 photographs, negatives and colour transparencies. So, alongside the rejection letters are fan correspondence that he kept with equal assiduousness.
Writer Craig McLean
Read the full review of The David Bowie Centre