London Art Week is a twice-yearly event, offering the best of pre-contemporary art in London’s traditional fine art district. What sets London Art Week apart from other events is not just the quality of the works for sale – which range from antiquities to modern painting – but the historical breadth and scope of the exhibitions on offer.
If you are going to Frieze Art Fair don't miss our guide: Are you ready for Frieze Art Fair 2018?
This year, 40 exhibitors – 37 dealers and three auction houses – hope to pique the interest of collectors and museum curators with their displays. So pack away the beach towel and turn your mind to indoor activities instead. Autumn is peak period in the art world with the annual circus of art fairs heralding a flood of new exhibitions and opportunities to either spend or just look. Let's start to figure out how you can get the best of this London Art Week, and make sure you spend all your free time checking out what's on offer here: IdeelArt - MTArt Agency.
SERPENTINE GALLERY | PIERRE HUYGHE | Solo Show
Pierre Huyghe, one of the world’s leading conceptual artists and known for creating complex immersive ecosystems, will present a major new exhibition at the Serpentine this autumn. The gallery will become a porous and contingent environment, housing different forms of cognition, emerging intelligence, biological reproduction and instinctual behaviours.
(Oct. 3 - Feb. 10 / 2019)
WHITECHAPEL ART GALLERY | ELMGREEN & DRAGSET | This Is How We Bite Our Tongue
Working together since 1995, artist duo Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Norway) produce beguiling spatial scenarios that explore social and sexual politics and unveil the power structures embedded in the everyday designs that surround us. In their uncanny installations, institutional spaces are transformed into metaphors for individual desires and collective identities with subversive wit and tongue-in-cheek melancholy. This exhibition juxtaposes a survey of their emotional figurative sculptures with an extraordinary new large-scale installation that meditates on the fate of civic space.
(Sep. 27 - Jan. 13 / 2018)
CHISENHALE GALLERY | LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN | Earwitness Theatre
Chisenhale Gallery presents a new co-commission by Beirut-based artist and ‘private ear’, Lawrence Abu Hamdan. "Earwitness Theatre" develops Abu Hamdan’s enquiry into the political effects of listening, presenting a new commission that explores the hallucinatory world of the earwitness. Abu Hamdan’s work questions the ways in which rights are being heard and the way voices can become politically audible.
(Sep. 20 - Dec. 9 / 2018)
VICTORIA MIRO | YAYOI KUSAMA | The Moving moment when I went to the universe
The Moving moment when I went to the universe - a major exhibition of new works by Yayoi Kusama - will take place across the Wharf Road galleries and waterside garden. The exhibition will feature new paintings, including works from the iconic "My Eternal Soul" series, painted bronze pumpkin and flower sculptures, and a large-scale Infinity Mirror Room, created for this presentation, Kusama’s twelfth exhibition at the gallery.
(Oct. 3 - Dec. 21 / 2018)
ART FAIRS
October is art fair season in London, but it’s not just for over-rich bozos in fur coats: there’s something for everyone. The big one is Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park, featuring the best galleries in the world, a free sculpture park and a top-notch public programme. Sunday Art Fair is for the hipper galleries, 1-54 at Somerset House is all about art from Africa, PAD is full of gorgeous bits of design and Moniker is the place to go for your street art needs. Get ready to be much poorer financially, but infinitely richer culturally.
(Oct 1 - 7 / 2018)
DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY | RIBERA | Art of Violence
"Ribera: Art of Violence" is the first UK show of work by the Spanish Baroque painter, draughtsman and printmaker, Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), displaying his most sensational, shocking and masterfully composed works. Ribera is one of the titans of Spanish Baroque art. Born in Valencia, Spain, Ribera emigrated to Italy as a young artist in 1606. He spent most of his career in Naples, where he influenced many artists including Salvator Rosa and Luca Giordano. He is often regarded as the heir to Caravaggio for his dramatic use of light and shadow, and his practice of painting directly from the live model.
(Sep. 26 - Jan. 27 / 2019)
TATE MODERN | ANNI ALBERS | Solo Show
A long overdue recognition of Albers’s pivotal contribution to modern art and design, this is the first major exhibition of her work in the UK. As a female student at the radical Bauhaus art school, Albers was discouraged from taking up certain classes. She enrolled in the weaving workshop and made textiles her key form of expression. She inspired and was inspired by her artist contemporaries, among them her teacher, Paul Klee, and her husband, Josef Albers. This beautiful exhibition illuminates the artist’s creative process and her engagement with art, architecture and design.
(Oct 11. - Jan. 27 / 2019)
WHITE CUBE BERMONDSEY | DORIS SALCEDO | Solo Show
White Cube is pleased to present a major exhibition of work by Doris Salcedo at Bermondsey. Featuring the large-scale installation Palimpsest (2013−17) and a new series of sculptures entitled Tabula Rasa (2018), the exhibition reflects Salcedo’s continued focus on the experience of mourning and the connection between violence, anonymity and public space.
(Sep. 28 - Nov. 11 / 2018)
HAYWARD GALLERY | Space Shifters | Group Exhibition
Hayward Gallery’s new major exhibition Space Shifters features artworks spanning a period of roughly 50 years by 20 leading international artists that alter or disrupt the visitor’s sense of space. The works in the exhibition focus the attention of the viewer on the act of perception whilst transforming their experience of the Gallery’s distinctive architecture. Often constructed from reflective or translucent materials like glass, resin and mirror, the artworks in the show aim to elicit responses that are both physiological and psychological.
(Sep 26 - Jan 6 / 2019)