Ten great things to do in London for Frieze Week 2026

Frieze Week is back in London, and with it comes the annual rush of openings, exhibitions, performances and parties. Across the city, galleries, museums and a few less predictable venues are making the most of the crowds descending for Frieze London and Frieze Masters.

This year, Yuko Mohri has turned the Barbican’s cast-offs into a wonky concert of leaks, clangs and whirring machinery, while Esteban Jefferson is taking on the British Museum from a gallery just around the corner. Rebecca Warren returns with her first London show in 15 years, Issy Wood puts herself in the frame at the National Portrait Gallery, and Georg Baselitz’s battered Heroes get their first dedicated UK exhibition.

At night, things get a little less civilised. Cult queer party Anal House Meltdown takes over Bolding Gallery for one night only, while at London Performance Studios, Sam Cottington’s new play The Front follows two people who discover, somewhat inconveniently, that they can’t die. Here are ten things worth seeing, doing and staying out late for during Frieze Week 2026.

The Front at London Performance Studios

A trip to the theatre might not be the most obvious addition to a Frieze Week itinerary, but The Front makes a convincing case. The new play was written by artist and writer Sam Cottington, who has recently exhibited at Nir Altman in Munich and Ginny on Frederick in London, and produced by London Performance Studios, with multidisciplinary artist Middleton Maddocks as production coordinator.

Showing for two nights only (16 and 17 October) at London Performance Studios in South Bermondsey, The Front follows its protagonists Carol and Stephen, who meet and discover that, for reasons unclear to either of them, they are unable to die. Their lives unfold across more than a century, taking them from Belgium and the Western Front at the close of WWII to an isolated farmhouse in Bavaria as the Second World War escalates, and finally to the outskirts of present-day Berlin. Cottington describes the play as an exploration of how history feels, rather than how it was.

Yuko Mohri at Barbican

Yuko Mohri has spent a fair bit of time rummaging around behind the scenes at the Barbican. During a residency earlier this year, the Japanese artist explored its workshops and back rooms, salvaging old wires, metal scraps and street lamps that once belonged to the building. Now some of that material has found its way back inside for In Concert, her new installation taking over The Curve.

Mohri, who represented Japan at the 2024 Venice Biennale, is known for kinetic sculptures that combine everyday objects with less stable forces such as water, air, gravity and magnetism. Here, cymbals clang according to water pumped through dangling tubes, a triangle held by a spoon occasionally announces itself, and a firehose drip feeds into a lampshade. Elsewhere, water leaks through a stack of bathroom sinks while fans blow against lengths of old wiring. Savage machinery this is not. Mohri is more interested in things leaking, failing, being patched up and starting again, turning the Barbican’s own cast-offs into a wonky concert for a building currently undergoing its own repairs.

Rebecca Warren at Maureen Paley

It’s been 15 years since the British artist Rebecca Warren last had a show in London. Maureen Paley has been there from the beginning, giving Warren an early exhibition in 2000, years before she was nominated for the Turner Prize, elected as a Royal Academician and awarded an OBE for services to art.

Now, 25 years later, Warren is back at the gallery with an entirely new body of work spanning both the gallery’s Bethnal Green spaces. Warren is best known for sculptures in bronze, clay, and steel that play fast and loose with the human figure, shifting between the bodily, erotic, cartoonish and abstract. For this exhibition, she imagined making a retrospective of her own work, but as a ‘slightly different version’ of herself, allowing forms and ideas from earlier periods of her practice to reappear in new works. At its centre is There Will Be Another You (2026), a life-size bronze reclining female figure whose body seems to melt and morph, with exposed sinews and wires, two right arms and no left. Go to East London to see this show. You won’t regret it.

Esterban Jefferson at Herald St

At the Acropolis Museum in Athens, empty spaces have been deliberately left for sculptures currently held in the British Museum. These gaps became the starting point for ‘British Museum’, Esteban Jefferson’s first solo exhibition with Herald St, fittingly staged at the gallery’s Museum Street space, just around the corner from the museum itself.

Jefferson photographed the empty spaces and plaster casts standing in for missing sections of the Parthenon Frieze, before following the objects to London. At the British Museum, he became interested not just in the artefacts but the visual clutter around them: air purifiers, fans, temperature monitors and other machinery used to preserve the collection. These details appear alongside ancient objects in a new series of paintings, drawing attention to the systems through which museums display, preserve and lay claim to their collections.

Frieze Artist-to-Artist: Paul Robas (Alice Amati) nominated by Louise Giovanelli

For her first appearance at Frieze London, Alice Amati presents a solo booth by Vienna-based Romanian painter Paul Robas, invited to take part in the fair’s Artist-to-Artist section. Now in its fourth edition, the initiative invites seven established artists to each nominate a peer they believe deserves wider recognition.

Robas was nominated by British painter Louise Giovanelli (who co-founded Apollo Painting School with Amati). Robas, who studied in Cluj-Napoca before completing his MFA in Vienna, is interested in what happens to an image as it moves between digital and physical forms. Starting with photographs, both found and his own, he edits, collages, and projects them before translating them into paintings.

His technique is particularly cool, working with encaustic, an ancient technique using wax that he encountered through his study of Roman-period Fayum mummy portraits. Combined with oil, ink and acrylic, the wax gives his paintings their ghostly, fading quality. Elsewhere in Artist-to-Artist, look out for South African artist Unathi Mkonto at Goodman Gallery, nominated by Yinka Shonibare, and Eusung Lee at Seoul’s Cylinder, selected by Ayoung Kim.

Anal House Meltdown x Bolding Gallery club night

This is one night and one night only. And judging by how other events in the series went down, it’s worth rearranging whatever you had planned for Friday 16 October. Anal House Meltdown (AHMD) is landing at Bolding Gallery for Frieze Week. The cult queer party was started in 2011 by artists Prem Sahib, Eddie Peake and George Henry Longly, and has since developed a history as itinerant as it is unpredictable.

Previous incarnations have materialised everywhere from Dalston basements to the volcanic island of Stromboli. For Prem Sahib, a British-Indian artist whose work often draws on the architecture and material language of queer spaces, the party began as another form of space-making – one that takes place on the dance floor. This time, Mayfair’s Bolding Gallery provides the setting, with Barkley Bandon, Lali, Eddie Peake and Debonair playing into the night. There’s no guest list, the bar is cheap and doors open at 8pm. Don’t leave it too late.

David Crouch Rare Books at Frieze Masters

The late Andrew Edmunds left his name to one of Soho’s best-loved restaurants, a candlelit institution on Lexington Street. Less well-known, perhaps, was the extraordinary collection he assembled alongside it. Over half a century, Edmunds, who was also an art dealer and collector, amassed more than 10,000 caricatures and satirical prints dating from around 1680 to 1850. At Frieze Masters, Daniel Crouch Rare Books (specialists in antique maps, atlases, plans and sea charts) presents highlights from the collection, including more than 1,200 prints by James Gillray, 300 works by William Hogarth and over 500 by Thomas Rowlandson.

Sex, food, fashion, politics, race, empire and national rivalry all get the treatment, with works ranging from Gillray’s The Plumb-pudding in Danger to the only known copy of a 1779 satire on Mrs Phillips’s sex shop. Savage, gossipy and frequently ridiculous, the prints are ancestors of today’s political cartoons and internet memes.

Es Devlin at Design Museum

Few people have shaped the way we experience live performance quite like Es Devlin. Over three decades, the British artist and designer has worked across theatre, opera, art, fashion and music, creating stages and kinetic sculptures for everyone from Beyonce and Adele to U2, as well as the Olympic Games.

Now the Design Museum is bringing it all together for ‘Es Devlin: Other Worlds’, the first European retrospective of her 30-year practice. It begins with a reconstruction of Devlin’s London studio, complete with books, tools, and maquettes, before opening out onto Come Home Again, her illuminated drawings of 240 species of plants and animals found in London. At its centre is 30-Year-Desk, where 30 revolving projects including her work on The Lehman Trilogy and the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show, before a bright red passage leads to Infinite Library, a kinetic installation of more than 2,000 books. Devlin describes herself as an ‘everythingist’. ‘I feel like, these days, you need somehow to find permission to be an everythingist because it feels like there’s a sort of pressure always to find your thing,’ she says. ‘And actually, maybe the thing is everything.’

Issy Wood at National Portrait Gallery

So the National Portrait Gallery is launching a new programme devoted to contemporary portraiture, and Issy Wood is first up. Born in North Carolina and raised in the UK, Wood paints people, body parts, clothing, animals, and anything else in her studio, working on linen as well as less conventional surfaces including velvet and clothing, often cropping her subjects so tightly that portraiture and still life begin to overlap.

Wood has quickly become one of the most recognisable painters of her generation. She was taken on by London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa before graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2018, and has since developed a practice that extends beyond painting into music and writing. For the NPG, the focus turns to Wood herself. Eleven self-portraits made since 2020 are being shown together for the first time, seven of them never previously exhibited in public. She has described the paintings as substitutes for photographs of herself, with the painted image standing in for the real one. Three self-portraits have already entered the NPG’s collection, making it the only UK national institution to hold one.

Georg Baselitz at Thaddaeus Ropac

Georg Baselitz was 27 years old when, over the course of a single year, he made around 60 paintings, 130 drawings and 38 prints. At the centre of this burst of activity were his Heroes series: paintings of monumental, battered figures, barefoot and dressed in rags or torn military uniforms, stranded in ravaged landscapes.

Now, for the first time in the UK, an exhibition devoted exclusively to the series brings together key works from this formative period at Thaddaeus Ropac. Having left East Germany for West Berlin, Baselitz found himself caught between the state-sanctioned realism of the East and a West Germany swept up in the newfound optimism of the so-called German Wonder. It was the summer of 1965 that Baselitz began the Hero paintings, shortly after a residency at Villa Romana in Florence, where he had become fascinated by the distorted, or, as he called it, 'excessive,' figures of 16th-century Mannerists including Pontormo and Parmigianino. Against the backdrop of post-war Germany, his own figures emerged as partisans, rebels, painters, shepherds and poets. 'They’re not heroes swinging their fists,' Baselitz said. 'They look broken, destroyed, ragged, tattered. And that’s how I wanted them.'

Frieze London 2026 runs from 14-18 October, frieze.com