London art exhibitions to see in September

The autumn months in London are a design and art lover's dream. With London Design Festival around the corner (13 -21 September), and Frieze waiting in the wings (15-19 October), the city is buzzing with anticipation. The month of September doesn't hold back, welcoming a variety of must-see London art exhibitions across the city. Explore Paul McCartney’s backstage photographs of Beatlemania at The Gagosian, to Manuel Mathieu’s paintings, and sculptural works at Pilar Corrias. Or cling onto the last fleeting moments of summer at Offer Waterman with Tarka Kings’ series of paintings capturing mornings spent at lidos.

From group shows to major 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 2025

‘Rearview Mirror: Liverpool–London–Paris’

The Gagosian until 4 October 2025

Paul McCartney’s backstage photographs of Beatlemania, formerly presumed lost, are now displayed at The Gagosian exhibition ‘Rearview Mirror: Liverpool–London–Paris’. It also offers the chance to acquire rare and signed photographs from McCartney’s archive.

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Writer Hannah Silver

‘Interior Motives’

Hauser & Wirth until 20 September 2025

Three artists – Koak, Ding Shilun and Cece Philips – bring an uncanny subversion to the domestic environment. The exhibition is dreamlike and offers unexpected visions of domestic space.‘Domestic interiors are familiar to all, but the works lure you in with a false sense of security as the surreal, dreamlike elements add a sense of unfamiliarity,’ says Isabella Bornholt, the show’s organiser and associate director at the gallery. ‘Koak’s eccentric colour palette, Philips’ eerie environments, and Shilun’s fantastical elements almost suggest alternate realities. At the same time, the artists’ use of such devices highlights the surreal aspects of both daily life and the world we live in.’

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Writer Emily Steer

‘Mornings at the Lido’

Offer Waterman from 25 September until 24 October 2025

Reminisce cool summer days at painter Tarka Kings’ exhibition which focuses on wild swimming. The series of drawings on paper and gesso board takes inspiration from painters Georges Seurat, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, merging impressionism, pop art, and photorealism. The series explores the journey of a woman swimming in the Serpentine, where Kings swims almost daily, and the potential presented by bodies of water to offer respite in urban environments.

www.waterman.co.uk

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions & An Archive

Whitechapel Gallery, until 7 September 2025

Born in Lahore and raised in East London, Hamad Butt was a key figure in the city’s 90’s art scene. ‘Apprehensions’ revisits his most ambitious works, including glass-and-gas sculptures and UV-lit installations that are as fragile as they are toxic. Upstairs, ‘Hamad Butt: An Archive’, gathers his sketches, notes and diary entries, revealing an artist intent on precision, sci-fi speculation and risk as a form of beauty. In one note, Butt’s hand-writing reads ‘I want to incorporate into my work, or as my work, a notion of fragility and a sense of balance where this fragility lies’.

Writer: Gabriel Annouka
whitechapelgallery.org

LMK when you reach

Autoitalia, until 26 October 2025

Bernice Mulenga’s photographs cover the walls like a living diary. What looks anarchic at first sharpens into unrehearsed images that are tender and defiant, a portrait of friendship, care and visible solidarity.

Writer: Gabriel Annouka
autoitaliasoutheast.org

Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from 1960’s

The Courtauld, until 14 September 2025

The Courtauld shows Bourgeois’s 60s drawings, full of twisting lines and small gestures that carry emotional weight, hinting at memory, desire and tension, and revealing the seeds of her later sculptures. Alongside, ‘Abstract Erotic’ pairs Bourgeois (once again) with Eva Hesse and Alice Adams, dismantling the body with rage and intensity, where desire is fractured, eroticism stripped out of softness, and unease dominates every form.

Writer: Gabriel Annouka
courtauld.ac.uk

"Bury Your Masters”

Pilar Corrias until from 12 September to 1 November 2025

Manuel Mathieu showcases his paintings, and sculptural works at his second solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias. Here he looks at politics and spirituality, and how they are inherited. Through abstraction Mathieu’s installation works between two and three dimensions, which confronts home truths.

pilarcorrias.com

Birth of a Nation and The Enemy of All Mankind

Victoria Miro from 26 September until 1 November 2025

Canadian video artist and photographer, Stan Douglas, makes his European debut at Victoria Miro with a video installation (Birth of a Nation) and new works from his recent photographic series, The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly. Both media pieces explore themes of race, class and gender .

victoria-miro.com

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: Incantations

Victoria Miro from 26 September–1 November 2025

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s series of paintings explore spirituality, and expressions of contemporary Black and Queer identities. The exhibition also features the artist’s Atom paintings which were inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself and its line ‘For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you’.

.victoria-miro.com

Leonardo Drew: Ubiquity II

South London Gallery until 7 September 2025

At South London Gallery, Leonardo Drew marks the space with his new sculptural installation. This is the American artist’s first solo exhibition at a London institution. His works are abstract, and dance between order and chaos, each having a biolithic quality. The artist also refrains from attaching a specific meaning to each work, instead titles each piece numerically, therefore allowing the viewer to interact with the piece completely independently.

southlondongallery.org

Bill Brandt: Beach Nudes

Atlas Gallery until 13 September 2025

Works from the late British photographer and photojournalist Bill Brandt are celebrated at Atlas Gallery. The exhibition looks at Brandt’s ‘Marlborough Collection’, with many images making its public debut. Many of the photographs were taken on the East Sussex coast and shores of southern France, looking at the female form through an intimate lens. His photography technique made the subject seem elongated and distorted, taking on a sculptural form which is in matrimony with the surrounding rugged context.

atlasgallery.com

akâmi

Camden Arts Centre until 21 September 2025

The exhibition explores power, identity, absence and memory through a curation of objects, ceramics, and paintings. It marks the first major UK institutional exhibition of Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Ininiwak multimedia artist based in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. akâmi is Omaskêko Cree for “across”. It has many figurative and literal meanings that challenge Western notions of temporality. The works reflect the impacts of colonialism, suggest new museum structures, and looks at the differences between fine art and craft.

camdenartcentre.org

House of Kong

Copper Box from 8 August until 3 September

To mark their 25th anniversary, British band Gorillaz have announced an immersive tour through the history of the virtual band created by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett. Delving into the world of singer 2D, bassist Murdoc Niccals, drummer Russel Hobbs and guitarist Noodle, the exhibition will span from the band’s debut single, ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’, released in 2000, through to the present day.

Writer Hannah Silver
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Virtual Beauty

Somerset House until 28 September

In today’s modern world we're hyper-aware in how we present ourselves. These complex changes to beauty in the digital world are explored in ‘Virtual Beauty’, a new exhibition featuring the work of over 20 international artists working across photography, video, installations, and sculpture. They explore our new online reality, questioning who holds the power in defining beauty when social media filters, AI, dating apps, and biometrics are reshaping our understanding of identity, race, gender, and sexuality. The works delve into dystopian themes, nostalgia, and the surreal, shifting between past, present, and future.

Writer: Emi Eleode
Read the full review here

Pictograms: Iconic Japanese Designs

Japan House until 9 November

Delve into the world of pictograms, at Japan House in London. The gallery, located on Kensington High Street, is specifically dedicated to Japanese art, design, and innovation. its latest exhibition ‘Pictograms: Iconic Japanese Designs’ explores Japan’s significant role in the development of this symbolic visual language. The exhibition looks at the origin of pictograms, from ancient Egyptian tomb carvings through to its use in present day Japan, and worldwide. Not only deep diving into its history, the exhibition also looks forward, exploring the future use of these universal signs.

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'A Capsule in Time' by Marina Tabassum

Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine South until 26 October 2025

Architect Marina Tabassum designs the Serpentine Pavillion for 2025. Located along the north-south axis of the park, the pavilion features an elongated capsule-like form, with a central court. Tabassum took inspiration from park outings, summer, and green gardens and foliage which filters soft daylight. The design is rooted in her architectural language, something that is contemporary, while also nodding to a specific place, culture and history.

serpentinegalleries.org

Paul Thek: Seized by Joy

Thomas Dane Gallery until 2 August

The sun is beating down outside the window – it’s the kind of heat to bring out shades. It opens out into an overgrown garden where the undergrowth competes for space in hasty brushstrokes of strong emerald and pale purple. Further away from this chaos, the taller trees calmly blend into the white summer sky in blotches of lime green. Beyond waxy meat-filled Brillo boxes, the artist Paul Thek kept returning to looking at the world through windows and illustrate them in quick paintings – this was one he painted the year before he passed away from AIDS. Currently, it hangs in Thomas Dane Gallery in London, as part of an extensive exhibition of his paintings curated by the critic, writer and artist Kenny Schacter with the designer Jonathan Anderson.

Writer Upasana Das
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‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’

National Portrait Gallery until 7 September 2025

The first impression of entering Jenny Saville’s major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London is one of raw, ample flesh. Viscerally rendered, luscious expanses of flesh create a vulnerable yet powerful aura around Saville’s women, who fill her vast canvases, unabashedly and gloriously taking up space.

Writer Hannah Silver
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‘Abstract Erotic’

The Courtauld until 14 September 2025

Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse delve into art’s ‘uckiness’ at The Courtauld. This new sees artists experiment with the grotesque. For all the titillating promise of its title, ‘Abstract Erotic’ is not an exhibition explicitly about sexuality. Hesse famously spoke of ‘uckiness’ in her art, and these pieces deliver it in spades. If they verge on the grotesque, even the repellant, that’s precisely the point. Some of the latex here has weathered like rotting flesh. But as Mignon Nixon explains in her accompanying essay, Bourgeois’ Portrait (1963) – a congealed mass of burgundy latex lumps, ‘like some scabrous apron or placental lining’ – shows the medium’s capacity for transformation.

Writer Katie Tobin
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Do Ho Suh 'Walk the House'

Tate Modern until 19 October 2025

Do Ho Suh's exhibition, 'Walk the House' at Tate Modern, sees the South Korean artist recreate his homes from Seoul, New York, London and Berlin. Upon entering the exhibition the visitor is confronted with a closed door. But it is not one that blocks passage into the exhibition, or stops you immediately reading the range of works filling the wide open Blavatnik Building gallery. The door is part of the meticulously sewn and constructed Nest/s (2024), a series of 1:1 reproductions of thresholds of homes the South Korean artist has lived in

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Writer Will Jennings

Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots

Serpentine South Gallery until 7 September 2025

Italian artist Giuseppe Penone’s latest exhibition is a retrospective looking at the expansive body of work he has created from 1969 to the present. ‘Thoughts in the Roots’ looks at his lifelong exploration of the relationship between humans and nature. The artist is known for his use of wood, iron, wax and terracotta which helps to create a synergy between artistic and natural process. Through a series of sculptures and installations, visitors can explore the way Penone uncovers nature’s intricate structures.

serpentinegalleries.org

1880 THAT: Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader

Wellcome Collection until 6 April 2026

At the Wellcome Collection creative duo Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader have collaborated on their latest exhibition ‘1880 THAT’ which includes film, installation and drawings to explore the communication between signed and spoken languages, and challenge a medical perspective of deafness as something to be cured. The brick motif is a recurring theme in the exhibition symbolising the building blocks of language, as well as the act of throwing bricks as a gesture of protest. The exhibition is a mix of witty design, humour and word play to uncover the complexities of meaning and (mis)understanding.

wellcomecollection.org