LONDON IN FRIEZE MODE
14-18 October 2026
Frieze Week is one of the most vibrant moments in London's cultural calendar, bringing an international art crowd to the city. While the fairs may be the main attraction, some of the week's most exciting discoveries happen beyond Regent's Park, across London's museums, galleries, and foundations.
Here is our selection of exhibitions worth making time for while in London.
September 24 - December 12, 2026
Gagosian London presents an exhibition dedicated to René Magritte and his enduring influence on contemporary art. Organized in collaboration with the Fondation Magritte, This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte brings together paintings, works on paper, and sculptures spanning the artist’s career, including some of his most iconic motifs, from apples and pipes to bowler hats and cloud-filled skies. These works are shown alongside those of more than forty artists from different generations, several created specifically for the exhibition, highlighting how Magritte’s distinctive visual language, rooted in paradox, illusion, and the relationship between words, images, and reality, continues to resonate with artists today.
September 18 - October 31, 2026
For his first solo exhibition in London, Louis Fratino presents Prose at David Zwirner, bringing together a new body of paintings that finds beauty and intimacy in the rhythms of everyday life. Moving between domestic scenes, encounters in public spaces, portraits, still lifes, and moments of desire, Fratino draws on both personal experience and the history of painting, engaging with artists ranging from Corot and Bonnard to Lucian Freud and F. N. Souza. Tender and deeply observational, the works transform seemingly ordinary moments into reflections on intimacy, memory, and the experience of looking.
13 October - 14 November 2026
At White Cube Mason’s Yard, North and True North marks Hong Kong-born artist Firenze Lai’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Presenting a new body of dreamlike paintings, Lai explores the complexities of contemporary life in an increasingly digital world, reflecting on our growing dependence on online spaces and the rise of AI. Through her distinctive anonymous figures and ambiguous settings, she addresses questions of belonging, misinformation and the difficulty of defining a single truth, while continuing her broader exploration of the psychological forces that shape both individual and collective experience.
September 25 - November 7, 2026
At Heidi, Trout Fishing in America marks Brook Hsu’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and inaugurates its new London space. Taking its title from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 novel, the exhibition presents a new body of paintings inspired in part by Gustave Courbet’s The Trout (1873), an image Hsu encountered on a postcard that she later used to write to her partner. Through her distinctive, atmospheric approach to painting, Hsu weaves together art-historical references, personal memory and intimacy. Founded in Berlin in 2021 by Pauline Seguin, Heidi has now relocated to London, opening its new space on Maddox Street with Hsu’s exhibition.
2 October 2026 - 10 January 2027
At The Courtauld Gallery, Salman Toor: Someone Like You marks the New York–based artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe. Bringing together 19 paintings never before shown in Britain, the exhibition explores themes of intimacy, friendship, desire, and belonging, alongside moments of solitude and alienation. Rooted in Toor’s personal experiences and memories, his luminous scenes portray queer and immigrant lives navigating different cultures and communities. The exhibition also highlights his dialogue with art history, particularly Baroque and eighteenth-century painting, with The Bar on East 13th (2019) directly revisiting Manet’s iconic A Bar at the Folies-Bergère from the Courtauld’s collection.
![Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954), Untitled [Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird], 1940. Oil on canvas mounted to board. Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art, 66.6. Harry Ransom Center.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/1c181c_a5774f552ee9435c9fb4eff18d8a2baa~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_440,h_569,al_c,q_85,enc_avif,quality_auto/1c181c_a5774f552ee9435c9fb4eff18d8a2baa~mv2.png)
25 June 2026 - 3 January 2027
At Tate Modern, Frida Kahlo: The Making of an Icon looks beyond the familiar image of Frida Kahlo to explore how the Mexican artist became one of the most recognisable cultural figures of the twentieth century. Bringing together more than 130 works alongside photographs, documents and personal memorabilia, the exhibition reveals the many facets of Kahlo, as artist, intellectual, political activist and public figure. Her work is presented in dialogue with that of her contemporaries and later generations of artists, tracing the remarkable influence of her art and identity and examining how her image has been embraced and reinterpreted by communities around the world.
8 October 2026 - 28 February 2027
At the Barbican, Robert Ryman: The Real Thing offers a rare opportunity to experience the work of one of the most influential American painters of the postwar period. Bringing together more than 60 works spanning from the mid-1950s to the early 2010s, the retrospective explores Ryman’s lifelong investigation of painting itself. Best known for his predominantly white, square canvases, Ryman focused attention on the essentials: paint, surface, brushstroke, light and the relationship between a work and the wall on which it hangs. An exhibition that rewards slow looking, revealing the remarkable variety and subtlety behind his seemingly minimal approach.
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