Things to do in London today

I am sitting on a rhinestone-encrusted pew, my feet resting on a furry leopard print rug. I’m looking at an altar that’s decorated with bedazzled condoms, votive candles and a photograph of a tree in Hampstead Heath emblazoned with the words ‘Take me to the f*ck tree’. I haven’t joined some strange new sect of Catholicism – I’m actually looking at a shrine dedicated to the late George Michael.  Reliquaries devoted to Prince, Dolly Parton and the Spice Girls; home videos of pilgrimages to Andy Warhol’s grave; and a piece of gum chewed by Nina Simone are just some of the things you can see at Somerset House’s new exhibition Holy Pop!, which explores the excesses of fan culture through photos, artworks, videos and memorabilia.  The free exhibition interrogates what it means to be a fan in our modern, secular world, and makes the case that a steadfast devotion to artists, musicians and celebrities is a contemporary type of spirituality. The show is an ode to anyone who has run a Tumblr dedicated to Lana Del Rey, has a room full of Marvel memorabilia at home, or harbours an immoderate obsession with anime. An installation that could easily be construed as creepy has a profound effect. This melange of objects and artworks under an umbrella theme is typical of Somerset House exhibitions, which have previously explored the grand themes of soil and cuteness. As well as the various real fan shrines, highlights include a number of vibrant and camp artworks. There’s an original...

Before I enter The Music is Black: A British Story I’m handed a pair of headphones with a sensor on top. These will be my auditory guide through an exhibition that tells the story of Black British music from the past 125 years. As I move through the show, my ears are blessed with the sounds of composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, ‘Silly Games’ singer Janet Kay, Sade, jungle pioneer Shy FX and Little Simz. What is a music exhibition without the melodies, after all?  Kicking things off with a bang, the V&A East’s first exhibition explores the trailblazers, visionaries and unsung heroes of Black music in the UK from the 1900s to the present day. From swing and jazz, to jungle, grime and trip hop, no genre goes uncovered. More than 200 objects from the V&A’s collection are displayed, with photographs, instruments, fashion, sheet music and artworks on show.  The Music is Black doesn’t shy away from the murky past. At the beginning, you are confronted with the horrifying realities of slavery and colonialism – from a graphic showing the volume of slave ship voyages through the 16th to 19th centuries, to the 1633 Royal charter legalising the trade of enslaved Africans. There are items, like an Ethiopian prayer book, marked as looted by British troops (although there’s no mention of returning it). The stark opening is a grave reminder that early protest music paved the way for the tunes we listen to today.  It’s a comprehensive and triumphant ode to some of the best...

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...

If streetwear is a religion, Nigo is one of its deities. The man behind A Bathing Ape (Bape, for short) is worshipped by hypebeasts the world over, not only for his pioneering approach to streetwear but also for his cultural footprint. Inextricably linked to hip hop – Nigo is besties with Pharell, and everyone from Biggie Smalls to Drake and Lil Wayne have donned his designs – the Japanese designer’s work is characterised by bold camo prints, Warholian pop-culture references and brash graphics.  For the first time, the man behind Bape and Human Made, and the creative director of Kenzo since 2021, has his own London retrospective. The Design Museum’s exhibition features 700 objects – 600 of which come from Nigo’s personal archive – including records, toys, magazines, music videos and a whole lotta clothes, spanning the ‘80s to the present day.  Nigo: From Japan With Love starts with a joyful recreation of the designer’s teenage bedroom – a dream of an ‘80s boudoir displaying Nigo’s own teenage relics: a lava lamp, a Kangol hat, stacks of hip hop records and his very first vintage piece – a shredded Levi’s type II denim jacket. It then moves through a selection of his most treasured objects, which range from Star Wars figurines to a Mr Peanut canvas jacket, and an absolutely amazing 1970s McDonald’s uniform from Hawaii, where the traditional flowers of the Hawaiian shirt are replaced by illustrations of burgers, fries and shakes. His obsession with Americana and vintage...

It’s worth saying from the off that I don’t think there’s any perfect way for a brand new, big budget, one hour David Bowie film spectacular to pan out. He did so much stuff, that has been written about and discussed so exhaustively that almost anything you do with a new project will flirt with either cliché or perversity, especially with a relatively brief runtime.  The latest original work from dedicated immersive film house the Lightroom – directed by Mark Grimmer – is definitely not perfect. There are bits that had me rolling my eyes, especially the sections where cutesy animated cutouts of Bowie doing stuff like ‘reading important books’ or ‘hanging out in art galleries’ are used to illustrate recordings of his musings on the creative process. Bowie’s voiceover is, I’m sorry to say, not that thrilling. I get it: there is simply not enough time or space to bring in his many, many collaborators, so having archive audio of Bowie’s ponderings on his art and craft that roughly correspond to whatever area of his career the film is highlighting at the time makes sense.  Still, it’s not hyper-illuminating and feels like it all comes from the same era of his career (I’m guessing the ’90s/early ’00s). Video footage of a profoundly awkward 1975 interview with Russell Harty feels like it provides a much more interesting look at Bowie than his assured latter-day ponderings.It’s also worth saying that despite a vaguely chronological trajectory, you will almost certainly be very...

This audacious, family-friendly immersive exhibition from filmmaker and ‘speculative architect’ Liam Young takes over the Barbican for a few months and offers a series of wild imagined ideas about what the future of humanity might look like – speculative, of course, but rooted in real technology and climate-based possibilities. Which maybe sounds a bit doomy, but Young’s takes on the future are pointedly not dystopian, and asks us to hope rather than despair.  It’s his first UK exhibition, but he’s enlisted a few friends to help out, with voices provided by Sky at Night host Dame Dr Maggie Aderin and actors Richard Ayoade, Alma Pöysti, Adam Young, Denise Gough and Natasha Wanganeen. Exactly what will be involved precisely is a little hard to imagine from the fairly wild provided images (which are all film stills), but it should be pretty damn spectacular.

London Rivers Week has been committed to celebrating and restoring London’s rivers for 10 years now. In that decade, the need to appreciate our city’s waterways has only grown. The theme of the charity event this year is ‘Know Your Local River’, encouraging Londoners to connect with and take pride in the river nearest to them. To help you do that, there’ll be guided walks, exhibitions, volunteer sessions, lectures, workshops, clean-ups and talks going on in every corner of the capital. See the full programme here. 

Skate boarders, roller skaters and BMXers have been hanging out at the Southbank’s Undercroft since the ‘70s. Back then, the area had no chain restaurants, no street vendors and certainly no tourists. The Southbank was a barren stretch of pavement along the Thames that was home to ‘two pubs and a sweet shop’. Here, London’s first generation of skateboarders, borrowing from a culture that was growing in California, fell in love with the area’s abundance of make-shift concrete ramps (which they called ‘pigeon-shit banks’), open paved surfaces, blocks and railings. The Southbank Centre itself was an impenetrable office building, and the haughty people inside were not happy about the growing community of skaters that was gathering beneath it. Things are looking quite different these days.  In a new pay-what-you-can (and free for skaters) exhibition celebrating 50 years of the Southbank Skate Space (AKA the Undercroft), the Southbank Centre is telling the story of the iconic graffitied, low-ceilinged skate haven through oral histories, photographs, films and sound art.  As well as giving a granular timeline of the skate park, accompanied by vibrant photographs (although I would have liked a few more photos), Skate 50 is all about the Southbank’s resilient and pioneering skate community. There are recorded interviews with some of the park’s OG boarders – like Lorraine Rossdale, one of the first British female skaters in the 1970s. She recalls earning her stripes as the first...

Southbank Centre's REPLAY: A Limitless Recycled Playground is a very fun place indeed. It was wildly popular with families last year, and now it's back for 2026 for under 12s to have an hour-long dose of interactive creative fun. Herd Theatre has colourful, interactive wonderland for kids to create and play in, full of with recycled materials ready for repurposing and making. The experience is accompanied by a score made of recycled sounds, as well as prompts to encourage kids and adults to play side by side.

There is a sober spine of historical fact just about propping up this cheerily lurid new immersive exhibition. Much as Cleopatra: The Experience is jam-packed with fanciful CGI, information panels do repeatedly acknowledge that we know relatively little about the life of the last and most famous of the queens of Egypt.  Obviously, we do know a fair amount. She ruled the country after deposing her brother-slash-husband (it was a thing then!) Ptolemy XIV. She then shrewdly hooked up with Julius Caesar, correctly reasoning that rising power Rome could protect Egypt, before less shrewdly hooked up with his co-successor Mark Antony – not a bad idea per se, but she backed the wrong horse in the struggle for control of Rome. But, the displays point out, much of our current received wisdom about Cleopatra is basically just salacious gossip dreamed up by Roman historians in the centuries after her death. There is an awful lot of fairly mind-boggling digital spectacle But what this latest immersive touring show from MAD – Spanish purveyors of This Sort Of Thing – has the courage to do is say ‘no, Cleopatra almost certainly didn’t kill herself with an asp. But what if we nonetheless showed you a VR CGI film of her getting menaced by a gigantic asp in the afterlife? What about that, eh?’ There is an awful lot of fairly mind-boggling digital spectacle in Cleopatra, which I should point out is fairly cagey about describing itself as an ‘exhibition’. And with a team of over 80 artists...

Care – stylised as CARE – is acclaimed writer-director Alexander Zeldin getting back to his roots. Kind of. After the cartoonishly overwrought stab at Greek tragedy that was The Other Place, his newest is a naturalistic yarn about an English retirement home, that harks back to his breakthrough Inequalities trilogy of plays about the fraying social contract in austerity Britain. It’s not quite the same, though, because while contemporary stresses on the British care system are alluded to, they’re not really the point here. Despite an aesthetic that teeters on kitchen sink, Zeldin is one of the few Brit directors whose career has really taken off in Europe, and Care in fact began life in France. It’s been reworked, but it’s ultimately a play about a more universal care home experience. That experience centres on Linda Bassett’s Joan, a grandmother who has been placed in the show’s unnamed home for what – as she sees it – is a couple of weeks to recuperate from a nasty fall. She has a family: a daughter, Lynn (Rosie Cavaliero) and two grandsons, Laurie (William Lawlor) and Robbie (shared by Charlie Webb and Ethan Mahony), but they’re clearly having a tough time following the death of Lynn’s husband. So Joan is checking into a home for a bit. Or so she thinks.   It’s an extraordinary performance from Bassett. I don’t normally get too dewy-eyed about the emotional cost of acting, but it must surely be an unsettling thing to be an older actor when so much of the best work...

Obviously Peter Shaffer’s landmark 1973 play Equus has dated in some ways. It has gone from a story set ‘now’ to a ‘70s period drama. Its views on psychiatry are, at the very least, simplistic, speaking of an era where the concept was novel. But my god: it’s hard to see that mainstream British theatre ever getting more extreme – certainly psychologically – than Shaffer’s opus. It’s a seethingly sexual, deeply unsettling interrogation of the Apollonian versus the Dionysian that centres on Alan Strang, a young man who – as the play begins – has just brutally blinded six horses. But why? And what’s to be done? In some way Shaffer’s great achievement is simply in going there. Inspired by a real life incident (that involved the blinding of 26 horses), if the author was any less earnest in the way he ploughs into Alan’s unimaginably disturbing actions and psychology, it wouldn’t work. And indeed the naughty tittering elicited from the tabloid press when Daniel Radcliffe took on the role of Alan almost 20 years ago says it all - this is difficult stuff to talk about sincerely.   Interestingly, though, 2007’s D-Rad-starring revival has ushered in a modest renaissance for the play, which wasn’t touched for over 30 years after its original NT run ended in 1975 but has now been done a fair bit, with an ultra-modern 2019 version at Stratford East, and now this from the Menier. Historically Equus has been about scale and spectacle, with the six actor-dancers playing the horses...

  Ava Pickett has had the career start every writer dreams of. Your debut play about Anne Boleyn (but not really about Anne Boleyn) becomes the hottest ticket in town at the Almeida Theatre and earns you two Olivier nominations. In the process, you gain the attention of it-girl star of the moment Margot Robbie, who declares you a generational talent. Oh, and you’re also writing a film about Joan of Arc with Baz Luhrmann. Because why not. Pickett’s ascension has been so swift, that, I must admit, I approached 1536’s West End transfer with slight scepticism. Could it really live up to all that the hype? The answer, thankfully, is: yes, and then some. Co-produced with Robbie’s production company Lucky Chap, 1536 is an astonishing production. Director Lyndsey Turner has crafted a heady, sensory experience, one that is jolted forward by faultless performances from the female leads. The 110-minute one-act run time might raise eyebrows, yet the show never loses pace, and refuses to overcook things either. 1536 is a once-in-a-blue-moon theatrical experience. I laughed. I cried. I probably could have screamed too. The year, it’ll come as no surprise to hear, is 1536, where three women in their early twenties sit in a field in rural Essex. With so little going on in their lives, the girls are scandalised by the goss Jane (Liv Hill) has heard from London: that King Henry VIII has had his second wife Anne Boleyn arrested. The practical Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) wonders aloud if Henry...

The rumours are true: two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon has touched down in London to play icon of the silver screen – and the transatlantic gay community – Judy Garland. If you’re a fan, you’ve probably seen Monsoon impersonate Garland before – on Drag Race or, if you’re lucky, at one of her live cabaret shows. But this is a different thing entirely, because End of the Rainbow is a proper two-act play (by Peter Quilter). There’s zero audience interaction, but a handful of songs breaking up what is in fact the pretty depressing story of Garland’s demise.  Before we get onto the Jinkx Monsoon of it all, a bit of context on Garland herself. She is, of course, best known for playing Dorothy in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. But by the time of Quilter’s play, which is set months before Garland’s early death in 1969 from an accidental drug overdose, there was scarcely any trace of the girl with pig tails and ruby red shoes left. By her mid forties, Garland was broke, in debt, and not unlike the late Amy Winehouse, attracting huge audiences to a London residency she was sometimes too drunk or high to perform.  It’s this unglamorous final chapter of her life Quilter’s play – which scooped up Olivier Award nominations when it premiered on the West End in 2010, and was adapted into the Renée Zellweger-starring film Judy – focuses on. It’s set, for the most part, backstage. Here, Judy is in the company of husband number five Mickey (Jacob Dudman) – a first-rate dickhead who...

This hugely enjoyable new Sherlock Holmes adventure from playwright Joel Horwood gives you all you could possibly want from The Great Detective: the catchphrases, the wild connect-the-dots genius, the Victoriana, the post-Cumberbatch notion that the guy is a bit of an autistic weirdo but cranked up to 10 and given a flamboyant drug habit. It’s also directed marvellously by Sean Holmes, who turns in a meaty, satisfying romp that has plenty of enjoyably weird grit in its wheels. The point that may conceivably prove controversial is that it’s very much a post-colonial story, with Horwood fascinated by the status of Victorian London as the seat of the Empire, and how it exercised power around the world. It’s a subject the British can get pretty weird about – but rather than agit prop raving, Horwood offers a sense of how strange the connection between a foggy London and a wider world dominated by it is. He is intrigued with the idea of Imperial power – as exemplified by Holmes’ brother Mycroft (Patrick Warner) – as a confidence trick rather than an exertion of military force. It might offend the sort of person who won’t allow any critique of Britain’s past, but I think it’s neat to see a story that offers insight into what it was like living in London at the zenith of Victorian power, long before the nation’s ‘plucky underdog’ makeover. As the story begins, Joshua James’s youthful, eccentric Holmes and Jyuddah Jaymes’ affable Afghan war vet Watson have recently made their...

Michelle Terry, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, takes on one of theatre’s great female roles in Anna Jordan’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s coruscating condemnation of the soul-destroying endlessness of warfare, directed by Globe associate artist Elle While. Brecht wrote Mother Courage in 1939, as fascism overtook Europe, but deliberately set it several hundred years earlier, during the Thirty Years War – intending the distance to provide a kind of allegorical universality. Jordan’s version goes further, never naming the conflict, only identifying sides by differing colours. ‘Grids’ replace countries. References to drones give it modernity, but it’s clearly meant to be anywhere and everywhere. It’s an approach that enables us to map its grimly picaresque story of a mother trying to keep her children alive, while seeking also to profiteer from the ruthless supply-and-demand of war, on to any conflict. The sweary, grubby dialogue has a carelessly cynical authenticity. However, while the relentless repetition of opportunity, gain and loss is key, the lack of specificity in Jordan’s translation highlights its heavily episodic nature. This makes an anchoring central performance – one that gives us a toehold during the play’s grim carousel of events – particularly important. Thankfully, Terry is astonishingly good as Mother Courage. She’s bawdy, broken and ferocious, with a physicality always halfway between entreaty and attack. While she’s more sympathetic than...

The Barbican scored a walloping post-pandemic hit with its revival of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes – which ran in 2021 and 2022 – and another one with his Kiss Me, Kate in 2024. For its 2026 summer musical slot it turns to another giddy Porter classic in the form of the stage adaptation of 1956’s High Society. As ever with Porter, the plot is almost entirely irrelevant but it revolves around a fancy Rhode Island society wedding that descends into chaos for various reasons.  Helen George from Call the Midwife stars as socialite Tracy Lord, with Felicity Kendall – who was also in Anything Goes – starring as her mum and Freddie Fox making his musical theatre debut as tabloid reporter Mike Connors. The production is directed by Rachel Kavanaugh and choreographed by Anthony Van Laast.

Since Philip Larkin called Barbara Pym the ‘most underrated writer of the twentieth century’, a quiet cult of appreciation has grown up around her novels. She is the wry chronicler of understated lives: clergymen and spinsters or, here in Quartet in Autumn, four ageing co-workers facing a precarious retirement. Pym is a writer's writer, so it is a delight to find her work adapted so sensitively for the stage by Booker Prize-winning author Samatha Harvey and directed by Dominic Dromgoole (a very good writer in his own right), in a production which is completely attuned to the subtle, cutting rhythms of the source prose. Harvey does an outstanding job of dramatising a novel in which little happens and even less is said. The indirect music of Pym's narrative voice, which drifts in and out of Edwin, Letty, Norman and Marcia's thoughts, is transposed beautifully into argument and dialogue, creating memorable parts for four very good actors. The comedy is in the sharp observation of apparently trivial details: the way that uptight Marcia and bantering Norman tussle over their ‘family-sized tin of coffee’, a shared resource that sweet-natured Letty and church-going Edwin, being tea drinkers, are excluded from. The tragedy is that the four ageing singletons have worked together for years, don't really have anybody else, but can't quite connect. They strive for human sympathy; there are frequent near-misses. When the women retire, they struggle to keep in touch. This intimate...

Krapp’s Last Tape is one of those formally groundbreaking, emotionally devastating Samuel Beckett plays that is nonetheless so locked into being staged the same way every time – thanks to notoriously rigid Beckett estate – that it can be tricky to comment on a new production. Even if it is one that’s directed by, stars and is designed by Gary Oldman, his first stage performance since the mid-’80s.  Don’t panic: I will comment on it. But it is unfortunately a lot easier to pass judgement on Godot’s To-Do List, the new 20-minute minute short by 19-year-old Leo Simpe-Asante that is paired with Oldman's performance (a nod to the fact KLT itself debuted at the Royal Court in 1957 as a ‘curtain raiser’ for Beckett’s Endgame). Godot’s To-Do List is a lively and irreverent response to Waiting for Godot. It’s also not vey Beckettian. Or good. Nobody needs me to go off on a young writer at length. But to be brief, the set up sees Godot (Shakeel Haakim) detained in a room where a disembodied voice demands he complete a series of trivial tasks before he is allowed to go and meet his friends (anyone who knows Godot will be aware who they are). It just about works as a rejoinder thematically, although Aneesha Srivivasan’s production entirely ducks even an allusion to the fact Beckett’s Godot is clearly meant to be God. But structurally, tonally etc it has not a thing to say to Beckett, and it’s hard to fathom any particular reason for this pairing beyond ‘nice opportunity for a young...

You probably want to know about Sadie Sink. But first we must talk about the sure-to-be-divisive device in auteur director Robert Icke’s take on Romeo & Juliet.  It has what one might call Sliding Doors scenes, wherein we see pivotal moments play out differently to Shakespeare’s plot, before a blinding flash of light resets the scene and we see the story take its inexorable turn for the tragic.  At best they’re an effective way of countering the fact that the bleak end of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy is only arrived at by a series of mind-boggling coincidences and mishaps. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello… those guys were probably always going to die. The starcross’d lovers – nope, you can easily imagine a world where things worked out better for them, and in acknowledging this Icke elevates the plot’s sillier moments. However, these interventions are extraneous (it’s obviously not how the play is going to be performed in future) and he overplays his hand in a final scene that teeters on the mawkish. It would have made for a more elegant production if he’d left it be, but auteurs are gonna auteur. Sadie Sink then. The Stranger Things star is good. She’s very good. And indeed, one of the reasons the parallel universe stuff feels extraneous is that Icke’s cast is so spectacular that having a fiddly conceit gets in the way of them.  The party scene, in which Sink’s gawky Juliet and Noah Jupe’s puppyish Romeo set eyes on each other for the first time, is electric. Rather than go...

Once again you can expect to see remarkable feats of astrophotography at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition. It’s a chance to see magical views of both our own night sky and of galaxies far, far away. The winning spacey visions come from dozens of professional and amateur snappers in various categories including ‘Planets, Comets and Asteroids’, ‘Stars and Nebulae’, ‘Galaxies’ and ‘Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year’ for under-16s. Soar down to Greenwich to see the winners from 2025's competition on display. 

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.

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...

If you were to type Michaelina Wautier into the web, the results wouldn’t amount to much. You’d learn she was a painter living and working in Brussels. That she died in 1689 at the age of 75 (pretty good going, given 17th-century Europe’s fondness for endemic infections). And that, since then, she has been largely forgotten. For much of the intervening time, few art historians believed that paintings bearing her signature could possibly have been made by a woman, instead attributing them to her brother or other male artists.  Her altarpiece-sized religious paintings were assumed to be too ambitious for a woman, while nudes posed another problem: how was she meant to accurately paint the human body – let alone the male nude – when the academies that taught such things barred her from entering? You begin to see why Wautier’s authorship was doubted for so long. And yet she did it all: flowers and still lifes, portraits and large-scale history paintings. Twenty-five of them are now on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, in the first UK exhibition devoted to the artist. Her works are shown alongside those of better-known contemporaries - Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers the Younger - as well paintings by her older brother, Charles Wautier, who she is thought to have shared a studio with. Like someone laying out every qualification in a job interview, she throws everything she can into the canvas You only have to stand in front of Wautier’s flower paintings to see why she...

A stroll through Tracey Emin: A Second Life is an evocative experience. Positioned as a 40-year retrospective through the pioneering artist’s vast and varied repertoire, the show lays bare Emin’s life through her distinct and often unsettling art, from career highs – such as the iconic, Turner Prize-nominated ‘My Bed’, which is every bit as shocking and moving today as it was in 1998 – to stark personal lows in work depicting her experiences with sexual violence, abortion and recent life-threatening illness. As you can imagine, with such subject matter, it is not always a comfortable experience for the artist and the viewer alike. However, Emin’s flair for dark comedy adds moments of levity throughout. The second room of the exhibition features a large-scale projection of a work on video entitled ‘Why I Never Became A Dancer’. It begins with the artist recalling an incident in her youth when she entered a local dance competition only to run off stage mid-performance when a group of men with whom she’d previously had sexual encounters chanted ‘slag’ at her until she could no longer even hear the music. The film ends with a sequence of Emin dancing, totally uninhibited, to the disco classic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ by Sylvester, and the work is dedicated to each of her aggressors, calling them out by name. It is the perfect encapsulation of both Emin’s defiant approach to life and her ability to turn traumatic experiences into mesmerising art. Longform video is an...

This renowned annual photography exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum for its 61st edition, showcasing the very best entries of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. On display are images of the most extraordinary species on the planet captured by professional and amateur photographers. This year’s entries are TBA right now, but the winners are reliably spectacular – pictured is last year’s champion Shane Gross, whose mesmirising underwater shot of western toad tadpoles involved snorkelled for hours in a lake on Vancouver Island, making sure not to disturb fine layers of silt and algae at the bottom. Don’t miss what is always a highlight in the NHM’s calendar.

In 2022 66-year-old Veronica Ryan was the oldest artist to ever win the Turner Prize. Four years later Whitechapel Gallery is staging one of the biggest presentations of her work to date. Known for her prize-winning exhibition at Spike Island in Bristol, Ryan has also created comissions dedicated to the Windrush generation, which included giant marble and bronze sculptures of fruit.  Through more than 100 works, Multiple Conversations will span Ryan’s multifaceted practice which includes work with sculpture, textiles and on paper. As well as displaying her most recent creations, the exhibit will include rediscovered works from the 1980s – large-scale sculptures made from plaster and beaten lead, as well as vivid drawings.

Donald Locke shows don’t come around often. But like proverbial buses, you wait for ages, and then three arrive at once, in the form of this touring exhibition moving from Birmingham to Bristol and now Camden Art Centre in London.  It’s not the first time the late Guyanese-British artist has shown here, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. Back in 1970, Locke exhibited ceramics under the pseudonym Issorosano Ite. He arrived in the UK from Guyana in his mid-twenties to study ceramics in Bath and Edinburgh, even though painting was his initial obsession. ‘With the arrogance of youth, I was going to be the greatest painter in the world,’ he said of his early ambition. Well, he did both, yet what he made doesn’t sit neatly within a single camp. Rather, his practices – spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics – would morph into one another. While the forms may appear a little abstract, the thinking behind them is not Take ‘Trophies of Empire’ (1972–74), one of his most iconic works and included in Resistant Forms. An open cabinet of 27 pigeonholes houses dark, cylindrical ceramic forms (bullets, we come to understand) cradled within trophy cups, spurs, and leather cuffs, sourced by Locke from Portobello Market. It’s not the last you’ll see of them. Look at the large, wild, black paintings next door, made a decade or two later while he was living in Phoenix and Atlanta. You’ll spot Queen Victoria, the Warhol-like revolver—now look again: those ‘trophies’ reappear...

Artist Sian Fan’s new multidisciplinary installation at Somerset House explores how magic and mysticism manifests in our consumer-driven world. From TikTok tarot readings, to Pokémon cards, Chinese fortune knots and video game talismans, Fan’s references range from pop culture to the historical. She draws on the myths, folklore, and storytelling traditions found in contemporary gaming and popular culture, Fan highlights how spirituality persists in these ultra-modern spaces. 

Three emerging US artists – Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory – explore ideas of class, inheritance and assumed values, framed by their experiences of coming of age in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Through different mediums – moving image, photography and painting and assemblage – each artist examines what it means to enter adulthood in an era of financial collapse, incorporating themes of wealth inequity, art as an asset class, and what commodity culture looks like today.