Seven London art exhibitions closing in July 2024

Summer’s in full swing, but you’ve only got four weeks to catch some of the season’s best exhibitions. Over the past few months, London’s played host to historical masterpieces, modernist experimentation, conceptual cleverness, incredible video art, erotic robots and some beautiful late Michelangelos too. All those exhibitions are closing in July, so get your art skates on and scoot into town. 

Seven exhibitions closing in July 2024

‘The Last Caravaggio’ at the National Gallery

The arrow has only just pierced her heart, but the blood has already drained from Ursula’s fragile body. She is pallid, ashen, aghast at the mortal wound in her chest. All around her mouths are agape in shock, men grasp to hold her up, a hand tries – too late – to stop the arrow. This miserable, chaotic, sombre depiction of feverish violence is the last painting of one of history’s most important artists, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. He would die not long after finishing this, penniless and paranoid, injured and infected. What a way to go out, though. Not with a whimper, and not with a bang, but with a scream of blood-drenched anguish. 

Closing Jul 21, free. More details here. 

‘The Body as Matter: Giacometti Nauman Picasso’ at Gagosian

Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, modern art maestro Pablo Picasso and conceptual pioneer Bruce Nauman walk into a gallery. It’s the setup to a joke I haven’t got a punchline for, and the basis for this exhibition of sculptures by the three of them. They’re all big dogs of art history, but do they have anything in common? Gagosian sure thinks so, but you may not leave this show all that convinced.

Closing Jul 26, free. More details here. 

John Baldessari: ‘Amhedabad 1992’ at Sprüth Magers

In 1992, master of modern American conceptualism John Baldessari (1931-2020) was invited to India. On an artist residency in a swanky modernist villa owned by some wealthy industrialists, he set about documenting, sampling and twisting the world around him, just like he’d always done. This body of work isn’t the best thing he ever did, it’s like John Baldessari’s holiday snaps. But he’s John Baldessari, so even his holiday snaps are pretty great.

Closing Jul 27, free. More details here. 

Hajime Sorayama: ‘I Robot’ at Almine Rech Gallery

Hajime Sorayama dares to ask the questions everyone is too afraid to know the answers to, like: ‘what if there was a sexy robot at the Hindenburg Disaster’ and ‘what if Marilyn Monroe was a sexy robot?’ and ‘what if mermaids were sexy robots?’ and ‘what if Joan of Arc was a sexy robot, but with a genital piercing?’ You’ve always wanted to know, admit it, and now the answers are all right here.

Closing Jul 27, free. More details here. 

Matthew Barney: ‘Secondary’ at Sadie Coles HQ

In a 1978 American football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots, Jack Tatum tackled Darryl Stingley so hard it left him paralysed from the neck down. It was an act of ferocious brutality that was captured on camera and replayed, reanalysed, rewatched a billion times over. That act is at the centre of Matthew Barney’s latest film, ‘Secondary’; a quiet, unnerving, uncomfortable exploration of how bodies can be broken, destroyed and remade, and how violence is humanity’s ultimate spectacle. In Barney’s vision of the stadium as coliseum, we see the strength of society, capitalism and masculinity as a facade, and one that’s slowly, inevitably crumbling to dust.

Closing Jul 27, free. More details here. 

Harmony Korine at Hauser & Wirth

Turns out, not only does Harmony Korine make difficult obtuse films, he makes difficult obtuse paintings too. His show at Hauser & Wirth is full of psychedelic, violent, eye-searing paintings of scenes from his latest film, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’. The movie (starring Travis Scott and Jordi Molla) takes you on a dizzying, weird, fully infrared trip into the world of a masked assassin, patrolling deep undergrowth and lavish villas on a mission to kill a demonic crime lord. The paintings are full of that same tropical violence, 8-bit menace and throbbing, silent aggression.

Closing Jul 27, free. More details here. 

‘Michelangelo: The Last Decades’ at the British Museum

There was a lot of love in the last years of Michelangelo Buonarotti’s life. Already hugely successful, the Renaissance master dedicated his final decades to loving his god, his family, his friends, and serving his pope. The proof of that love is all over the walls of this intimate little visual biography of the final years of his life, filled with his drawings and letters and paintings by his followers. We’ve had a lot of Michelangelo drawing shows in recent years, and his architectural plans aren’t his most interesting work. But his final drawings are incredible. They were never meant to be seen, they're frail, weak things, but they’re also an amazing vision of one of history’s greatest painters using his art to find solace in the darkest of times.

Closing Jul 28. More details here. 

Want more? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London.