Things to do in London today

Keen to see some live music this summer but disinclined to fork out hundreds on London festival tickets? King’s Cross’s Summer Sounds festival is the perfect solution. Coal Drops Yard is once again becoming the ultimate alfresco hangout this August for its free outdoor gig series. Visitors can catch an eclectic programme of gigs encompassing everything from classical and folk music to jazz and indie rock over the eleven day festival. Highlights this year include chaotic Americana-indie band Little Grandad (Aug 14); a showcase marking 35 years of jazz development charity Tomorrow’s Warriors featuring Mercury Prize-nominated vocalist ESKA (Aug 16); a cross-cultural performance of South Asian and Middle Eastern sounds blending the rubab, oud, qanun, cello, tabla, guitar and voice (Aug 17); an evening of beatboxing and DJ sets run by Queer Britain and Sounds Queer (Aug 19) and a session with the English Folk Dance and Song Society (Aug 21).  You don’t even need to book; simply show up from 6.30pm-8.30pm (or 1pm-6pm on Sundays). 

Popping up each summer on the steps where the Regent’s Canal passes Granary Square, Everyman’s Screen on the Canal is one of the city’s best loved outdoor cinemas, thanks to its atmospheric setting, eclectic programming and the fact that it doesn’t cost viewers a penny. Pop down on a sunny afternoon to catch live coverage from Wimbledon every day of the tournament, plus the usual mix of live sports, classic movies, family-friendly flicks and recent hits. So far we know that Devil Wears Prada, Dune: Part One, Some Like It Hot and Paddington in Peru are all on the lineup, and there are plenty more still to be revealed. Best enjoyed with a couple of tinned cocktails and some picky bits from the nearby Waitrose, or classic cinema snacks from Everyman’s on-site bar.  This year, the pop-up has been pimped out by local Kings Cross artist and UAL Central Saint Martin’s graduate Alice Wilson. She’s created a unique folklore-inspired design that will appear across popcorn and the screen itself.   

Battersea Power Station already has an indoor chimney lift experience, a huge food court, a lovely cinema and more high street faves than you can hope to get round in a weekend-long shopping spree. Now it’s adding a free summer funfair to its entertainment offering Electric Summer opens in Power Station Park and along the Coaling Jetty from 29 July, and it’s an entire seaside town’s worth of things crammed onto a Thames-side patch of concrete.  The centrepiece is a full roller rink with sessions ranging from wobbly first-timers to Thursday date nights and Saturday silent discos, plus roller fitness classes if you fancy your cardio with a side of nostalgia. Out on the jetty, pétanque courts turn the riverside into a passable stand-in for the south of France, river views included. There's also a big wheel for skyline views, dodgems, a wave swinger and boardwalk games including Lobster Pot and Blockbuster. We aren’t too sure what either involves, but we’re very intrigued. The Boardwalk Bar’s rooftop terrace is also the obvious spot for an after-work pint with a view. Getting in is free. You only pay if you want to skate or spin around on something.

Canada Water’s dockside is going to be packed with (free!) cultural goings-on for six weeks this summer. As part of the new Round the Dock festival, there’s something going on every single day. Get down to the docks on a Tuesday evening and you’ll get to enjoy a spoken work and live music session from Spit Nights Poetry. On Wednesdays, feed your curiosity at a talk from pub lecture series Pints of Knowledge or on Thursdays perfect your steps at the salsa nights with Timba Britanica. South London Afro-punk collection Steam Down has curated a programme of acts to take over the floating stage every Friday while each Saturday and Sunday will see live jazz and soul performances from the likes of Mark Kavuma, Sophie Faith and Soul Sanctuary Gospel. That’s all on top of dozens of food stalls, loads of family-friendly workshops, a programme of outdoor film screenings and rotating flea markets and craft fairs.   

Alfresco swimming season has officially arrived in London, and with a seemingly hot summer ahead of us, it is more than welcome. To celebrate, Royal Victoria Docks is opening its open-water lido daily over three weeks for Summer Splash. And while other open water swimming can often come with a price tag, this watery oasis is free to use throughout the event.  The lifeguard-supervised swimming spot also features sandpits, deckchairs and sunsafe areas to relax in. Head along to lane swim with a backdrop of stunning city views or look out for a programme of family-friendly activities.  Access to the water is divided into daily 90-minute sessions running at 11:00, 12:30, 14:00, and 15:30. No booking is required, although it’s best to arrive early for each slot.  

This immersive exhibition from Australian filmmaker and architect Liam Young is impressively audacious, taking up multiple spaces in the Barbican, including a rather pungent underground carpark. What is In Other Worlds? Well, it’s not an art exhibition in the classic sense, but a sort of multimedia hybrid of visual art, storytelling, and speculative sci-fi, combined to make the point that while humanity has famously screwed up the planet, the means to un-screw it are within our grasp if we embrace radical solutions. If that sounds a bit worthy for you, then sure, it is kind of worthy. At the same time, it’s weird, psychedelic and vividly imaginative, offering more a sort of fever dream of a possible future than an actual pragmatic solution for climate change et al. At its centre is the mad vision of the Planet City, an unimaginably dense single urban environment in which all ten billion of Earth’s inhabitants live, while the rest of the planet is effectively allowed to rewild, with visits to nature confined to a sort of annual opportunity for every citizen on the planet to be dropped randomly somewhere on the planet. This is obviously an insane idea, but the vision Young and collaborators present is nonetheless really weird and cool. Physically, we’re presented with taller-than-a-person scale models of gargantuan tower blocks comprising of individual homes madly piled on top of one another, while a giant screen projects a Young-directed digital film shows us a vision of...

With admirable chutzpah London’s latest immersive exhibition offers not just a focus on a single event, but a journey through the entire history of human civilisation. Well, ‘entire’ is a bit much: rather than focus on heavily documented eras of humanity, Timewalk – a creation of the DEM Museums in Türkiye – is dedication to using immersive tech to plunge you into a succession of semi-mythical ancient civilisations. Starting at Göbeklitepe in Türkiye – widely recognised as the world’s earliest communal gathering site – its various rooms will take you onward to Babylon, Ancient Egypt, the Maya, and Rapa Nui and more, with the idea being to present these vanished societies not as dusty relics but as living, breaking recreations of how they might have been. We’re not quite sure how they’ll do that – it looks like massive projections might be the order of the day – but ‘cinematic storytelling, multi-sensory environments, and cutting-edge technology’ are promised.

The world’s first fully electric motorsport series returns to London this weekend for the final round of competition in the 2025/26 series. The single-seater series sees eleven top teams and 22 world-class drivers competing over a 2km indoor and outdoor circuit at the ExCeL Centre in the closing weekend of the twelfth championship. It’s set to be a nail-biting finale for the season, with two British drivers – reigning World Champ Oliver Rowland and former champion Jake Dennis – still in the race for the title.  Each race day will feature a practice session and a qualifying round before the race kicks off at 3.05pm. And there’ll also plenty to get the fans revved up between sessions, including a Gaming Arena offering simulation racing experiences, a Kids’ Zone with face painting and colouring, a food court and live music from DJ Josh Baker (Saturday) and rapper AJ Tracey (Sunday).  Start your engines!

Is it art, or is it maths? It’s a question even MC Escher himself couldn’t answer about his own work. While the Dutch printmaker known for his infinite staircases, metamorphosing tessellations and paradoxical buildings was rejected by the art world, he was revered by mathematicians, and is now one of the most famous optical illusionists of all time.  The OG creator of images that make you go ‘Huh?’ is going under the microscope in London with a blockbuster exhibition celebrating his life and work this summer. Created by Italian company Arthemisia and the immersive peeps at Fever, MC Escher: The Exhibition has arrived at Somerset House as part of its world tour.  The family-friendly display is surprisingly big. With more than 150 artworks on show, it tells the story of Escher’s life and work in chronological order, before it gets to the biggies – the ones that have been wheeled out in maths classrooms for decades – towards the end. You’ll see the originals of ‘Waterfall’, where water appears to run upwards, ‘Ascending and Descending’, the looping staircase that goes up and down simultaneously, and ‘Belvedere’ depicting an impossible tower. And you’ll learn about the techniques and mathematics that make these illusions possible along the way.  The meticulous craft that went into his totally baffling work is evident. On a personal level, I can see why Escher was rebuffed by the art world. Many of his works seem like something from a bad acid trip: giant, bulbous ants;...

A hat in the shape of an upside-down shoe; a dress resembling an inside-out human body; embroidered jackets covered with gorgeous pink roses, sparkling zodiac symbols and vibrant vegetables. Elsa Schiaparelli made clothes that were as surprising as they were beautiful. The V&A has plundered the well of ingenuity that is Maison Schiaparelli in its latest landmark fashion exhibition – the first British exhibition dedicated to the Italian designer, who rose to fame in Paris between the World Wars – and there are some real treasures to be found.  With over 400 objects, including 100 ensembles and 50 artworks (by the likes of Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Man Ray), as well as accessories, jewellery, photographs, perfumes and an excellent collection of buttons, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art presents a deep dive into the fantastical and surreal world of the fashion house. Founded on Paris’ Place Vendôme in 1927, the exhibition spans the 1920s to the present day, showing glorious garments from Creative Director Daniel Roseberry, who has been at the helm since 2019.  Excitingly, many of Schiaparelli’s 20th-century creations appear astoundingly contemporary. Knits from 1927, some of the designer’s first works, are patterned with pretty bows that the TikTok girlies of today would die for. There’s also an incredible gold chainmail headdress which wouldn’t look amiss on Florence Pugh in Dune, or on a ‘medievalcore’ Pinterest board. A shirred form-fitting dress with a visible zip – a...

It’s been unspeakably hot in London for weeks, but it seems the temperature is about to cranked up even more. Matthew Bourne’s sultry dance reinvention of Carmen has returned to Sadler’s Wells in all its sweaty, grimy glory after a decade off-stage, and its timing couldn’t be more apt.  Set in the 1950s in the fictional town of Harmony – a midwestern Italian-American community where the residents appear to be permanently horny – The Car Man’s plot mashes up Bizet’s passionate opera (it uses the Rodion Shchedrin score with additional music by Terry Davies) with the erotic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. We meet Luca (the formidable Will Bozier), a drifter who arrives in the dusty enclave looking for work. Upon his arrival, Luca causes quite the stir as he effortlessly cartwheels over diner tables and jibes the mechanics with threats of fisticuffs. Oozing raw masculinity, he immediately catches the eye of the wily waitress Lana (Ashley Shaw), as well as the naive dogsbody Angelo (Harry Ondrak-Wright), and a love triangle begins – when The Car Man premiered in 2000, it was the first depiction of bisexuality in a ballet.  I won’t ruin the plot, but it’s deliciously melodramatic, and buoyed by the highly atmospheric set and lighting, designed by Lez Brotherston and Chris Davey, respectively. The steamy mood is enhanced by plenty of literal mist, as plumes of hot air float across the stage almost constantly, rising from the cars of the garage. There’s also the grinding of...

To be totally clear: Now You See Me Live is a stage-magic spectacular that has little to do with the Jesse Eisenberg-fronted film trilogy of the same name. That is to say, there’s no plot here and if the various participating magicians are using it as a front for fighting capitalism via the medium of high-concept heists, then they’re keeping quiet about it. Nonetheless, the producers of this Australia-originating international touring show have paid for the IP and it’s not a bad investment. After all, the films did in their own absurd way make magicians look cool. If there’s genuinely almost no allusion to the source material beyond a heist-themed mind reading trick at the start, then the grungy, black-wearing aesthetic and branding of the core performers – that’s Enzo Weyne, Andrew Basso, Gabriella Lester and Matthew Pomeroy – as ‘the Horsemen’ serves to give it a more focussed, less cheesy vibe than some of these multi-magician West End spectaculars.  In a way I don’t have a huge amount more to add, other than to note that while the individual names are subsumed by the concept, these are some top-class performers. At best, the magic on display here is jaw-dropping. I would say there are three tricks that are astonishing, none of which I should really spoil, plus there’s a tribute to Harry Houdini from Basso that is utterly nerve-wracking to look at but I think it’s probably fine to divulge that he doesn’t drown trying to pick the locks of his watery prison (or he didn’t...

You don’t have to venture all the way up to Edinburgh for a cracking dose of comedy in August. The Roundhouse has been hosting its comedy fest since 2023 and every year curates a line-up full of the biggest stars on the circuit. Across 18 days this year, you can expect gigs from the likes of Joe Lycett, Ed Gamble, Katherine Ryan, Sam Campbell, Ed Gamble, Sara Pascoe and Vittorio Angelone. Beyond the stand-ups, there’ll be live podcast recordings, theatrical comedy and interactive shows to watch too. Cult US comedy streaming platform Dropout will bring live editions of its hit shows Dirty Laundry, Um, Actually and Crowd Control, Jack Rooke (writer of Bad Boys) will present his first solo show and Adam Buxton and Alexei Sayle will host podcast recordings with special guests Ayoade Bamgboye of SNL UK and last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Sam Nicoresti. If you’re under 30, you can get your hands on tickets for just five quid. 

The lighting may be dim in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s auditorium – reconfigured to resemble an atmospheric 1960s NYC cabaret club – but the star wattage is bright. It’s not hard to see why American musical theatre powerhouse Ben Platt was attracted to the British debut of Mark Sonnenblick’s 2018 off-Broadway show. A two-hander, it’s a great vehicle for his talents as a singer and actor.  But there’s more to this funny, sad and wistful piece – directed here by David Cromer – than that. It’s New York, 1965, and Platt is Trevor, the singing half of a performing and romantic duo, alongside songwriter Arthur (Gregor Milne). It’s an era when being gay is a threat to life and livelihood. We are Trevor’s audience in smoky Greenwich Village club the Never Get as he tells – and sings – the story of their turbulent relationship and contrasting careers.  The way in which Sonnenblick, partly through Trevor’s casual asides, creates in Arthur a fictional superstar of the great American songbook, is a delicious blurring of reality and theatrical invention. This is heightened by his score and lyrics, which are lushly evocative of Cole Porter. They feel like songs you almost remember. But as Arthur (initially) insists on keeping male pronouns in these classically framed love songs, they become – in one of the show’s strongest through-lines – a powerful social lens. But there’s an engrossingly thorny knottiness – which Sonnenblick, to his credit, doesn’t untangle – to Trevor’s increasing...

This review is from 2025. Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical returns for 2026. It’s been years since there was anything secret about Secret Cinema. The immersive entertainment franchise that began life as cool screenings of mystery films in mystery locations has long been too big a deal – and required too big an audience – to leave things to chance. But massive success has left it in danger of looking artistically adrift, locked in a competition with itself to stage ever more lavish extravaganzas based around ever more obvious films.  Its last London show, 2022’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Live Immersive Experience, awkwardly grafted together a lavish immersive theatre experience with its own self-contained plot and a screening of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. The fact you could buy a ticket that didn’t include the film screening felt indicative of where Secret Cinema had found itself.  If the latest doesn’t exactly take things back to basics, then it does at least put the classic 1978 film musical at the heart of the evening: you are going to watch Grease. In fact you’re arguably going to watch Grease twice. In Secret Cinema’s Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical, the original film is shown on large screens that are dotted around the cavernous new Battersea Park venue Evolution, which has been lavishly tricked out to serve as Rydale High, aka the school Grease is set in. But then there are live actors who pop up to take over singing and often talking duties in key...

To state the obvious: if you’ve no idea who or what Dog Man is, Dog Man the Musical is probably not for you. That’s not a criticism of Dav Pilkey’s wilfully silly graphic novels for primary schoolers and it’s not a criticism of this off-Broadway originating stage adaptation. But this is not a show with a jot of interest in winning over a casual musical theatre crowd. And why would it? Pretty much every child under 12 in the entire country (plus their parents) will know what Dog Man is. That’s plenty of audience. And indeed, part of the MO of this musical adaptation – by Kevin Del Aguila and Brad Alexander - is how it leans on the fact ticketholders will be familiar with the plot already in order to bypass the obvious budgetary pitfalls associated with staging a story that climaxes with a group of sentient buildings controlled by a psychic fish facing off against a policeman who has had his head replaced by a dog’s.  Instead Jen Wineman’s recast production smartly taps into the meta framing of the stories, which are billed as the creation of George and Harold, the highschooler heroines of Pilkey’s other famous series, Captain Underpants. (Again, if that doesn’t make sense to you, nobody is making you read this). It’s charming and it’s done with heart The duo are barely a presence in the actual Dog Man graphic novels, but here they’re practically the leads, with the idea being they’ve decided to stage some of their stories using junk lying around the garage. It’s a sweet...

Chaka Khan has lived one hell of a life. A teenage Black Panther turned soul star, she worked with everyone from Whitney Houston to Joni Mitchell, shot at her second husband with a rifle, and battled alcohol and drug addiction throughout her life. Khan was born to spawn her own jukebox musical. She’s got the story, and she’s certainly got the hits. Unfortunately, I’m Every Woman, playing at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre after a limited run at the Hackney Empire, is not a worthy reflection of that life or those hits. It is a messy, overly long piece of theatre, its script a bizarre mix of stilted scenes and strange song choices that squanders lead Alexandra Burke’s talent and does little to convince us of Chaka’s very real star power. This chaotic middle is bookended by a far more sombre scene: a group therapy session between Chaka and her family, as they reckon with addiction and the distance it’s placed between the singer and her daughter Milini (Charlotte St Croix). We then flash back to Chaka’s childhood, the story barrelling at speed past her father’s heroin addiction, experiences of abuse, first loves. Everything in I’m Every Woman goes fast, fast, fast. The hits are cut short to squeeze in more songs, the scenes a jumbled mess of non-sequitors and exposition (‘Speaking of pain, how’s the new medication for your knee?’ follows one particularly emotional moment), designed to propel the story forward, always forward. The plot and timeline quickly become hard to...

This review is from Southwark Playhouse in October 2025. Hot Mess returns for a summer 2026 run at The Other Palace While the millennia-old union between planet Earth and humanity might not be the first coupling that springs to mind when you think of unhealthy relationships, there’s no denying it is pretty toxic. The Earth gives! Humanity takes! The Earth had boundaries, and humanity violated ‘em – first digging up the ground to mine for coal and drill for oil, then jetting into space with a wandering eye, pushing the atmosphere to its limits in a bid to see what else was out there.   It’s safe to say we’ve put our hosting planet through the wringer physically, but what if we’ve left it feeling emotionally drained too? Could the climate crisis with its ruinous wild fires and unforgiving floods be a scorned Earth’s way of telling humanity to do one? It’s a theory! Or at least, it’s the premise of this pop musical romcom from Ellie Coote (book) and Jack Godfrey’s (music and lyrics), the duo who scored a hit last year with 42 Balloons. Earth and Humanity (aka Hu) are personified as a couple and under this guise, their entire, increasingly troubling partnership is explored. Over the course of one breathless hour of back-to-back songs, the big breakthroughs of our species are reframed as our rocking what could have been a peaceful, happy relationship.  It’s a kooky concept, but this two-hander holds up surprisingly well in a production which Coote also directs, largely thanks...

It’s difficult to pinpoint why the moment Paddington walks on stage at the start of his new musical is quite so moving.  Spoiler alert: ‘Paddington’ is a small woman (Arti Shah) in a bear costume (by Tahra Zafar), with a regular-sized man (James Hameed) doing the voice and remote controlling the facial expressions from backstage. Which doesn’t sound groundbreaking but it’s enough to make us believe that Paddington is really in the room with us. Which is surely the point of the endeavor. He’s not the Paddington of the films: he looks different, more teddy-like, and Hameed’s voice is much younger and more boyish than Ben Whishaw’s. He looks more like the Paddington of Michael Bond’s books, but he’s not really him either, on account of all the singing he does and how much more wordy that makes him. He is a new Paddington. But he is, fundamentally, Paddington, right there in the room with us. Does that make it a good performance? I mean sure, he’s a triple threat: adorable, polite and also a bear. The normal rules for a musical theatre lead are suspended here. But Hameed can sing well, and there’s enough expression in both face and body for Paddington to feel genuinely alive to us. Shah doesn’t really dance, but a couple of elaborately choreographed sequences in which our hero pings around causing chaos are impressively physical. Main attraction aside, a fine creative team led by director Luke Sheppard has created a very enjoyable show indeed. It’s by and large a stage...

This lightweight musical about the very ‘complicated’ FBI director J Edgar Hoover – who dominated America’s 20th century,  serving for 48 years – began life as a 1994 radio play starring Kelsey Grammar. Exactly how it ended up making its stage debut 32 years later at an off-West End theatre in Islington I am fairly unclear. But on some level it’s obviously something to do with the big name creative team: Harry Shearer (of The Simpsons and Spinal Tap), Tom Leopold (a writer for Cheers and Seinfeld) and Peter Matz (Barbra Streisand’s musical director, who died in 2002). Given Shearer – who seems to be the driving force behind this production – reputedly makes $300,000 per episode of The Simpsons, it’s not hard to imagine he’s thrown a bit of his own cash at a musical that – while modestly sized – is as big a show as the King's Head Theatre has ever staged. It even has a bona fide US star in the form of Bryan Batt (aka Mad Men’s Salvatore Romano) who plays Hoover. The man was infamous for harvesting kompromat on people he wanted to blackmail, (or people he might want to blackmail one day,) or whose love lives he was just generally interested in. He’s also alleged to have been a closeted gay man and crossdresser: there isn’t really hard public domain evidence for this, especially the crossdressing bit, but certainly he was a ‘confirmed bachelor’ who never married and lived with fellow agent Clyde Tolson, so, er, go figure. The musical goes all in on the idea that Hoover was...

This exhibition will challenge your perception of Japan, as 27 groundbreaking Japanese female artists are displayed at the Photographers Gallery. Spanning the 1950s to the present day, themes covered in the show include identity, pop culture, fashion and everyday life. Internationally renowned photographers will be displayed alongside lesser known, perhaps overlooked, names, with works by Ishikawa Mao, Ishiuchi Miyako, Katayama Mari, Kawauchi Rinko, Ninagawa Mika, Nishimura Tamiko and more. 

This spring, French Vietnamese artist Nhu Xuan Hua will take over both of Autograph Gallery's main spaces with newly commissioned work at the intersection of art and fashion photography. She'll draw on her Vietnamese parentage, reimagining her family photographs to explore the fragility of memory, and what's lost between generations.

Another London summer beckons: clouds clearing, days lengthening, an imaginative structure being erected in Kensington Gardens. Mexican architecture firm LANZA atelier has been chosen to design this 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, which features a ‘crinkle-crankle’ wall. Traditional structures seen in English architecture from the 18th century, these wavy partitions temper climate, create shelter, and are ideal for growing fruit. And fittingly, they’re also known as serpentine walls.  The prestigious architectural commission celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026, with a landmark series of talks programmed in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the charitable organisation founded by the late Iraqi-British architect, who designed the inaugural Pavilion 25 years ago. The programme kicks off with an Architects’ Talk hosted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, with a series of Family Days featuring hands-on workshops, creative activities and performances for all ages scheduled throughout the summer. Check out the Serpentine’s website for further details in due course.   

The Wellcome Collection’s big spring exhibition is a deep dive into perceptions of ageing. Expect the Euston Road institution’s typical blend of art, science and pop culture in the 120+ artworks and objects on display, which range from16th century woodcuts made by German printmaker Sebald Beham to Deborah Roberts’ contemporary collages exploring Black childhood. There’ll also be a spotlight on the Wellcome Trust-funded health research project Age of Wonder – one of the largest studies of adoloscence in the world – and an exploration of how societies can adapt to improve everyone’s experience of ageing.

Henry Moore’s bulbous and undulating sculptures were designed to be seen outside and surrounded by nature. So we’re happy to say that Kew is displaying a huge collection of his works as they were intended at this mega exhibition. The world’s biggest ever exhibition of Moore will open at the botanical gardens, with 30 sculptures on show in the open air and more than 90 works including carvings and drawings displayed in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. Several of his famous and iconic reclining figures will be on view, as well as more abstract and amorphous pieces like the massive bronze marvel ‘Large Two Forms’. 

There’s something irresistably fascinating about seeing into artist’s studios – messy materials, stacks of canvases, and a peek behind the curtain into the work spaces for some of the world’s best creative minds. To coincide with the Courtauld’s major Barbara Hepworth exhibition, the gallery is running a companion show of photographs taken by Paul Laib offering a look inside Hepworth’s London studio that she shared with Ben Nicholson in the 1930s. 

As one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century, Barbara Hepworth made stunning modern creations inspired by the nature and lanscapes of Cornwall, where she lived. Her abstract shapes often featured smooth ovals, holes, undulating surfaces and strings. This summer the Courtauld will stage an exhibition interested in one aspect of Hepworth’s practice: her obsession with colour, which often came up in her work in unexpected ways.  Featuring 20 of her most significant sculptures, alongside 30 drawings, Hepworth in Colour will unite for the first time her early innovative sculptures with colour of the 1940s with major examples of her work with colour from the 1950s and 1960s.  

This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). ‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through...

For Brits of a certain age, James McNeill Whistler will always conjure memories of that scene in the Mr Bean film. But while Rowan Atkinson’s 1997 opus was a memorable introduction to the American Gilded Age painter, Tate Britain’s grand new retrospective will properly acquaint you with his work – minus any snot-related hijinks – through his paintings, prints, and a litany of personal effects.  Using decoration from his Chelsea studio, the opening room establishes Whistler as a bohemian and fashionable man, but the contextual statement also foreshadows his fall from social grace later in his career (thanks to a lawsuit that left him penniless – more on that later). Thus, a unique, non-linear curatorial narrative is introduced. After arriving from New England in Paris in 1855, Whistler prolifically produced moody etchings that express the stoic dinginess of the French capital with dense and dynamic shadows. His first attempts at oil painting also happened here. The medium became an even bigger preoccupation when he moved to an equally morose city: London. Whether it’s choked by smog or cluttered with cargo, the Thames is his muse during his early years in the Big Smoke. The chaotic figuration of ships floating past in Wapping and the spectral abstraction of a frozen river in Chelsea in Ice represent two extremes of how Whistler turns urban ugliness into visual harmony. Conducting tone, colour, and blankness with orchestral balance, he’s acutely aware of the musicality...

In our age of mind-boggling CGI and AI-optimised everything, it’s easy to forget how much pleasure can be had from the simple optical tricks of mirrors and lights. But not for Julio Le Parc. A key figure of the Kinetic and Op Art movements of the 1960s, the late Argentinian artist spent seven pioneering decades making illuminated, kinetic and participatory works, and was still making art at the ripe old age of 97 before his death this past May. This major retrospective celebrates his visionary seven-decade career, spanning from from his arrival in Paris in the late 1950s to his resurgence in the 2010s, with over 60 colourful, immersive (and extremely Instagrammable) works.