Art
Mona Hatoum: Encounters: Giacometti
The Palestinian artist, whose charged vision has encompassed everything from an endoscopy video of her own interior to a fiery red Earth, takes on the revered modernist Alberto Giacometti in the second of a series of dialogues between his sculptures and living art. They share a surreal eye for the organic. JJ
Barbican, London, 3 September to 11 January
Hilary Lloyd: Very High Frequency
Acerbic, radical and wildly inventive, playwright and television dramatist Dennis Potter (1935-1994) is the subject of Lloyd’s new work, which includes archival footage from Potter’s plays, texts and television interviews, new commentaries and live, performative interludes. Potter’s continuing relevance, his politics and his stoicism in the face of death provide the core of Lloyd’s project. AS
Studio Voltaire, London, 10 September to 11 January
Theatre Picasso
Most of Tate’s Picassos – plus myriad major European loans – star in an exhibition that positions the constantly transforming creator as a showman of modern art. It juxtaposes his masterpieces with photos and films revealing he was always ready to paint for the camera, or pose in a minotaur mask. JJ
Tate Modern, London, 17 September to 12 April
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
Nearing 70, Marshall has long deserved a major European retrospective. A towering presence in American art, he paints black experience and culture, everyday life and art history. His art is filled with symbolism and visual complexity, celebrations of black aspiration and what it means to be a painter. AS
Royal Academy, London, 20 September to 18 January
Marie Antoinette Style
There was nothing especially stylish about the execution of the last French queen in 1793, after years of misogynist vilification. Hopefully this exhibition will do justice to Marie Antoinette as a victim of political hate, as it tracks her life and image through art and fashion, from the 18th century to the modern day. JJ
V&A, London, 20 September to 22 March
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
In the newly commissioned work Prisoners of Love, the words and songs of Palestinian prisoners are counterpoised with testimonies, poems and stories recorded across the occupied West Bank, speaking of love and loss and home. Orchestrated across multiple screens, this cumulative, stitched-together audio-visual narrative is described by the Ramallah and New York-based Palestinian artists as a “poetics of resistance”. AS
Nottingham Contemporary, 27 September 2025 to 11 January
Turner prize 2025
Often reviled, the Turner show is an annual checkup on what’s seen as significant. This year’s features Nnena Kalu’s obsessive cocoon-like wrappings, Rene Matić’s celebrations of relationships, Mohammed Sami’s painted explorations of war, fear and exile, and Zadie Xa’s amalgams of textiles, sculpture, sound and light. The debate’s the thing, whoever wins. AS
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, 27 September to 22 February
Lee Miller
This daring photographer, who moved between reportage and art, gets a retrospective that transports the viewer back to her troubled age. Miller was a combat photographer in the second world war, and posed in Hitler’s bathtub, yet was also a surrealist who experimented with dreamlike effects. Perhaps she proves reality itself is a dream. JJ
Tate Britain, London, 2 October to 15 February
Made in Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egyptian art fills us with awe and can look so mysterious it seems to come from another planet – but it was all created by human hands. This exhibition asks not about the pharaohs, but the inspired artists and artisans who created all those stupendous sarcophagi and delicate wall paintings. JJ
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 3 October to 12 April
Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures
Pounding montages of London life as witnessed by one loving couple walking out from their Spitalfields home every day, picking up nitrous oxide empties, autumn leaves and other clues to the city’s enormous milieu. This survey of Gilbert & George’s pictures made since 2000 includes their moving self-portraits, the duo playing among sets of bones. JJ
Hayward Gallery, London, 7 October to 11 January
Nigerian Modernism
Combining a multiplicity of African and European traditions, and tracing artistic networks and groups within Nigeria and in Europe, Nigerian Modernism takes us from early calls for decolonisation in the 1940s to the post-independence economic boom, civil war and beyond. Presenting the work of more than 50 artists across 50 years, this should be both instructive and a blast. AS
Tate Modern, London, 8 October to 10 May
Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life
Wayne Thiebaud, who died aged 101 in 2021, was best known as a painter of shop-bought cakes and hotdogs, the paint as thick as icing. Mistaken for a pop artist, he saw himself more as an heir to Chardin, Manet or Cézanne, and the European still-life tradition – though this show is as American as apple pie. AS
The Courtauld, London, 10 October to 18 January
Peter Doig: House of Music
As a student, Doig thought he might end up designing album covers, and references to music have been a constant in his art. For this show, new and recent paintings are accompanied by a collection of restored analogue speakers, which will allow DJs and visitors to hear selections from Doig’s record collection in the gallery. Real music and painted music: the soundtracks of the artist’s process. AS
Serpentine Galleries, London, 10 October to 8 February
Claire Fontaine: Show Less
For over 20 years, Palermo-based conceptual artist Claire Fontaine (actually the collective of Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill) have been provocative and thoughtful; their neon Foreigners Everywhere signs proved the leitmotif for the 2024 Venice Biennale. Bricks and book jackets, gentle watercolours and a vandalised Courbet … much more than a succession of one-liners, their art stirs things up. AS
Mimosa House, London,10 October to 6 December
Artes Mundi 11
This year’s edition of Artes Mundi sees six global artists on display in five venues across Wales. Always enlivening and surprising, this biennial art prize presents spoken word and performance, painting and installation, indigenous knowledge, hidden histories, water divining and who knows what more, with a £40,000 prize for the winner. AS
Various venues across Wales, 24 October to 1 March
Wright of Derby: From the Shadows
A long overdue celebration of this visionary painter of the Enlightenment, whose images of scientific experiments transport the viewer into candlelit dramas featuring dying birds and distant planets. Wright paints erupting volcanoes, firework displays and gothic horror stories with the same curiosity. A sublime artist, and a British great. JJ
National Gallery, London, 7 November to 10 May
Harold Offeh: Mmm Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet
Blurring work and play, Ghanaian-born Offeh’s work is a sometimes slapstick affair. Often social and collaborative, his art winningly embraces parody and failure. Whether celebrating the joys of dancing badly, or recreating the album-cover poses of Grace Jones or Luther Vandross, Offeh offers both a kind of self-portraiture and an appeal to the imagination. AS
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 15 November 2025 to 1 March
Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas
Hambling paints and sculpts in a slapdash expressionist style that she seems to have learned off Francis Bacon on a drunken night in Soho. Lucas is renowned for ironic, angry readymades involving kebabs and fried eggs. But these contrasting artists from different generations are friends, and they combine forces for this two-gallery, one-street display. AS
Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London, 20 November to 1 January
Caravaggio’s Cupid
One of the most shocking and challenging artworks you will ever see comes to London. Caravaggio’s portrait of his model, Cecco, posing as the god of love is an insouciant satire on all the civilised virtues, emblems of which this street urchin treads underfoot. It is a bomb in the museum. JJ
Wallace Collection, London, 26 November to 12 April
Turner and Constable
Of all the exhibitions marking JMW Turner’s and John Constable’s 250th birthdays, this is the big one. The Tate’s unrivalled collection of works by the duo promises to see the lives and legacies of these contemporaries juxtaposed on a grand scale. Breathe in the Romantic air and light. JJ
Tate Britain, London, 27 November to 12 April
Design and architecture
Space
After four decades of wowing visitors with its Apollo command module and crinkly astronaut suits, the Science Museum’s space gallery will reopen in September with a dazzling array of recent innovations – from prototype electric propulsion technology, to a “rolly-polly” moon rover, to the Soyuz capsule that carried Tim Peake to the International Space Station. OW
Science Museum, London, from 20 September
Home Ground: The Architecture of Football
Hot on the heels of the Lionesses’ victory at the Euros, the RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) continues the celebrations with an exhibition on the history of football stadium design. Brimming with architectural models, photographs and archival material, the show will chart the evolution from the earliest stands to Everton’s futuristic new spaceship of a stadium. OW
Tate Liverpool + RIBA North, Liverpool, 15 October to 25 January
Wes Anderson: The Archives
No other film director can lay claim to having such a recognisable aesthetic as Anderson, a man whose name has become synonymous with pastel colour palettes, retro interiors and symmetrical compositions. This blockbuster exhibition will feature more than 600 objects, including original storyboards, sketches, paintings, puppets, and dozens of meticulous miniature models to bring his surrealist world to life. OW
Design Museum, London, 21 November to 26 July
Fungi: Anarchist Designers
Step into the magical world of mycelium this autumn, with an exhibition on the far-reaching power of mushrooms, mould and mycorrhizal networks. This research-led show will explore everything from mapping the toxic effects of “fungicide cocktails” on banana plantations in the Philippines, to an interactive, multisensory work on how yeast has changed human digestion. OW
Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, 21 November to 2 May
