In the UK, autumn’s first chill invariably brings one thing to mind: Frieze. The titanic art fair, however, is not what we’re here to discuss (that’s all to come in less than a fortnight’s time). The bounty of contemporary art on show across the country this season is of such a calibre that this list doesn’t quite cover everything worth seeing right now. But it will give you a pretty good start – not to mention plenty of conversation fodder once Frieze week is in full flow.
Louis Fratino: at David Zwirner (until 31 October)
If you’ll allow me the obvious pun, while the scenes depicted in Louis Fratino’s paintings may be relatively prosaic, their mottled surfaces ripple with poetry. Strangers stealing kisses on a crowded platform in the depths of the New York subway; a studio session in the nude; a moment of melancholic solitude on a balcony… In his first London show (and his first since signing with the mega blue-chip gallery), the prodigious painter transfigures ostensibly plain experiences, investing them with intimacy and feeling, with each work offering a reminder of the richness and poignancy inherent to those life moments we might gloss over.
Olu Ogunnaike: Did I fall here? at Hollybush Gardens (until 31 October)
This marks Olu Ogunnaike’s first solo show at Hollybush Gardens, a gallery whose roster features the likes of Lubaina Himid, Jasleen Kaur and Cynthia Hawkins. Unfolding across a sculptural arrangement of charred, empty frames; hazy prints of personal photos on plywood boards; and charcoal dust renderings of pictures lifted from the artist’s camera roll on stainless steel mirrors, Ogunnaike offers a precise contemplation on the relationship between image, matter and memory in the formation of personal identity. For such a personal show, its success lies in its impressive sense of detachment, with Ogunnaike resisting the temptation to teeter into outright navel-gazing.
Martine Syms: (until 7 November) & Nicole Eisenman (until 21 November) at Sadie Coles
If there were a gong for the buzziest of the season’s billings, Sadie Coles HQ would be the frontrunner. At its Kingly Street space in Soho, Martine Syms presents two new reality-warping films. Over on Savile Row, you’ll find a show of truly out-of-this world paintings by Nicole Eisenman. A painter of modern life in a truly Baudelairean sense, Eisenman acknowledges and lifts the bleakness and absurdity that colours contemporary life with a stargazing whimsy and affected naïve levity, fleshing out the fear, bitterness and wonder that colours being a person today with uncanny precision. Make sure to check out the artist’s hulking sculptural installation in the courtyard of the Royal Academy straight after.
Pope.L: at Modern Art (13 October to 14 November)
At Modern Art, a survey of the late, great artist’s radical output across its half-century span with a particular focus on the paintings – including the last works he completed before his death in 2023. Alongside wall-based works – including those from his vinyl series – you’ll also find screenings of the artist’s physically gruelling performances, like the genesis of his repeated “Crawl” series – in which the artist crawled distant stretches of New York City’s streets, here in Midtown office worker tailoring, in a rejection of “verticality” that called blunt attention to the violence implicit in the perspectives routinely applied to marginalised peoples.
Wakaliga Uganda: at Chisenhale Gallery (until 6 December)
is a new commission by Kampala-based artist collective Wakaliga Uganda that exemplifies the Ugandan filmmaking collective’s playfully sharp – not to mention deliriously camp – take on cinema. Prompted by the real-life repatriation of sacred relics from the UK to Uganda in the early 1960s, beneath its larger-than-life surface, the film cleverly broaches themes of post-colonial national ideology and the reclamation of pre-colonial spirituality, all through the stylistic prisms of western action and Hong Kong martial arts films. Lo-fi, high brow.
Lumps and Bumps at Rose Easton (3 October to 12 December)
Fashion loves art – a well-known fact. But does art love fashion? This side of the relationship is a little thornier, but a new show at East London gallery Rose Easton (the site, incidentally, of A Letter’s recent show) makes a case in the affirmative. Responding to Comme des Garçons’s seminal spring/summer 1997 collection, “Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress”, Lump and Bumps, which takes its name from the collection’s nickname, takes its conceptual premise as an opportunity to convene works by artists whose works similarly revel in offness and excess as opposed to expected perfection, including Sylvie Fleury, Charlotte Kingsnorth and Caitlin MacQueen.
Evelyn Taocheng Wang: at Goldsmiths CCA (until 13 December)
In Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s hotly anticipated solo show at Goldsmiths CCA, the Chinese-born, Netherlands-based artist presentsa densely layered, brilliant sardonic, layered portrait of the peculiar cultural mythology of these isles. With a sense of humour drier than most Brits, the show draws on everything from caricatures of Mr Darcy to Margaret Howell sweaters to prompt contemplation on the nuanced disparities between how Britain thinks of itself, and how it is thought of beyond its own direct sphere of influence. Useful perspective for us all!
Paul Pfeiffer: at Thomas Dane Gallery, 3 Duke Street (13 October to 19 December)
Off the back of a big summer of sport, Paul Pfeiffer’s show at Thomas Dane Gallery couldn’t feel more timely. A master chronicler, critic and appraiser of how mass spectacle shapes and steers culture at large – often with a laser focus its unchecked masculine charge, violence and bravado – the Filipino-American artist’s new video installation at Thomas Dane Gallery explores the networks – infrastructural, cultural and media – that underpin and sustain bullfighting, one of the most controversial yet adamantly preserved sporting spectacles of them all.
Cindy Sherman & Lorna Simpson: at Hauser & Wirth (both 13 October to 23 December)
Few artists have underscored style’s essential role in constructing identity quite as adamantly as Cindy Sherman. Her never-ending output of cinematic characters – all played by herself – have upheld, unpicked and informed typologies of womanhood, their styling a crucial window into their dense psychologies. This pioneering legacy is furthered in a new show at Hauser & Wirth, which debuts her new Fabric Matrons series. It incorporates fabrics and pieces sourced from Chanel’s archive in images that exude a poetically Vreelandian glamour – both in the sense of their opulence and their aura of another time. Rounding out the gallery’s blockbuster season, a solo show by Lorna Simpson comprising mixed-media works that collage images drawn from Black style and lifestyle magazines and , as well as the archives of the Library of Congress, Reuters and Associated Press, painting over them to both blur and enhance the tensions between the objective and staged realities present in the images.
Prem Sahib: & Gordon Matta-Clark: at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (both 10 October to 3 January 2027)
It may not feel like the season for a seaside jaunt, but De La Warr Pavilion’s autumn/winter programme will reward your efforts. On the ground floor, a survey of one of Britain’s most quietly influential, astutely conceptual contemporary artists, Prem Sahib. Works from across his career – including (2006), the artist’s seminal video installation, and his (2014) series are given new context, arranged in a shrewd dialogue with both one another and the Modernist landmark. Upstairs, a presentation of photographic and film works by the late Gordon Matta-Clark, documenting his radical architectural interventions.
British Art Show 10: A Chorus of Strangers at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry (October 2 to January 10 2027)
Every five years, the British Art Show offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary snapshot of the most exciting contemporary art practices to be found on these isles, bringing names like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Simon Fujiwara and Anthea Hamilton to art-lovers outside of the London bubble. The travelling exhibition’s 10th edition, curated by Ekow Eshun, takes the current sociocultural backdrop of precarity, anxiety and division as a prompt to imagine new pathways towards empathy and shared imagination. The line-up is stellar: Okiki Akinfe, Liz Johnson Artur, Alvaro Barrington, Jesse Darling, Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan, Nnena Kalu, Lindsey Mendick, Jack O’Brien and more.
Salman Toor: at The Courtauld Gallery (until 10 January 2027)
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Salman Toor’s solo show at the Courtauld marks the Pakistan-born, New York-based painter’s first major solo show in Europe. As Alice Newell-Hanson writes of the painter in British ’s September issue, Toor’s “luminous, dreamlike scenes – often rendered in shades of emerald – explore themes of belonging, community, sex and love but also alienation and uncertainty”. Melding personal experience and fiction, the painter’s tableaux, delicately dappled with swirling feathered brushstrokes, couldn’t feel more urgent, tender or real.
Alex Margo Arden: at Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation (9 October to 23 January 2027)
It’s been a big couple of months for Alex Margo Arden, the Royal Academician who’s enjoyed a sparky ascent since graduating in 2023. As well as featuring in the British Art Show (and a feature in ’s October issue), she’s also opening a solo show at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in Chelsea, following her receipt of the foundation’s inaugural prize at the last edition of Frieze. In Margo Arden contemplates the material legacy of Amy Winehouse, presenting installations of meticulously researched, sourced and arranged, like-for-like replacements of objects she once owned.
Amar Kanwar at Serpentine North Gallery (until 31 January 2027)
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Across a trio of film installations – including a new seven-channel work debuting at the Hyde Park institution – the New Delhi-based audiovisual artist presents works that ponder the implications and consequences of colonialism and the aftermath of 1947 Partition. Meandering between documentary and travelogue, it’s the sort of deeply contemplative work well worth dedicating an afternoon to exploring.
Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970 – Now at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (until 31 January, 2027)
More than mere chronicling, documentation is a crucial form of activism in itself. Over the past five decades, that’s been proven by Sunil Gupta, a photographer who has turned his craft to bringing the nuances of lives typically consigned to the margins to dignified light. A landmark show at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge – spanning 140 works, shot across Gupta’s migrations between Delhi, New York, Montreal and London – is testament to the artist’s vital work, with a particular focus on his adamant representation of gay life at its fullest.