Things to do in London today

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;...

Can you believe we're somehow on the fifth instalment of beloved movie series Toy Story? Well, if you're a superfan (or a clued up kid) you'll probably already be well on top of this development. So take your love of Woody, Buzz and the gang to the next level with a trip to this free pop-up at Westfield. Head to Westfield London in White City from 10th-21st June and you'll find that its Atrium space is taken over by all things Toy Story 5. There'll be a free (and snappily named) Toy Story inspired Frozen Yoghurt Smoothie Refreshment to sample, plus lots of games and interactive experiences to try, including high-speed reaction games, a dance machine, photo opportunities, and a dive into the archives.  Then, once the summer holidays kick off, there'll be a more kid-centric pop-up called Bonnie's Playtime. Bonnie can't remember where she's hidden her toys, and kids are invited to track them down, on a fun digital rescue mission. Head to The Disney Store and you'll also find Toy Story 5-themed area The Ranch, with crafts and products to sample and play. 

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...

Munch your way through dishes from the great and the good of the capital’s restaurant scene at this sprawling culinary festival in the picturesque surroundings of central London’s Regent’s Park. New Syrian brunch joint Aram, hyped Dalston gastropub The Prince Arthur and masters of Pan-Pacific cuisine Los Mochis are among the restaurants peddling plates and appearing at the event for the first time this year. If you’re not in a food coma by the end, there’ll also be kitchen masterclasses, chef talks and tastings to get involved with. Our advice? Have some Rennies on hand. 

June is a very pleasant month for exploring London, with the city's buildings looking their loveliest framed by green leaves and (theoretically, at least) summer sunshine. Take a look beyond the surface with London Festival of Architecture and you'll discover the planners, designers, and ideas that have shaped our streets. This year's theme is 'Belonging', which means there's a focus on community, and how we care for the spaces we live in.  There are over 400 events on the line-up for 2026, including guided walks, exhibitions, talks, installations and performances. For the first time, The London Centre in Guildhall will act as the festival's central hub, hosting talks and performances, a Lego challenge (Sat June 20), and a TfL bus display exhibition.  Venture further afield and you'll find an exhibition of bird houses at the Design Museum, a look at the role of pubs in communities at The Royal George, Deptford, a walking tour from the Migration Museum, an outdoor exhibition on the Festival of Britain at South Bank, and a participatory event shaping the future of Haggerston Baths. Most events are free, but book your spot in advance to guarantee a place.

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...

In April this year a Yung Lean music video went viral. Depicting schoolboys in Leeds, the excellent video shows the rapper as a menacing bully, cigarette dangling from his mouth, as he flushes heads down toilets, gets high in classrooms and rides through corridors on wheely tables. It also features some mesmerising choreography by Damien Jalet. Now this video is on display as part of a film exhibition at 180 Studios.  Created by Gener8ion, a creative duo comprising film director Romain Gavras and producer Surkin (real name Benoit Heitz), Visions of 2034 is promoting an audiovisual album, Love & Tears, made by the pair. It’s also a way for Gavras to show off several of his highly acclaimed music videos, created for the likes of MIA, Jamie xx, Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis and 070 Shake.  So what is the exhibition about? Imagine that it is the year 2034. Gavras and Surkin have created a series of short films (or are they music videos?) that postulate all the terrible things that will be happening in the world: Athens is uninhabitable thanks to toxic algae blooms; volcanoes are erupting; schoolboys are getting high on lithium from 6G antennas and bullying each other from within an inch of their lives.   Gavras and Surkin appear to have predicted the future In some of these films Gavras and Surkin appear to have predicted the future. In videos shot in 2010, 2018 and 2019, respectively, ICE-style raids round up redheads for social cleansing; an AI-type machine creates a...

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...

The sign from the London Astoria, the sound monitor from the Haçienda and the hefty metal doors from The End are just some of the relics you can see at the V&A’s new display that shines a light on some of the UK’s closed-down music venues. Compiled from an open call-out, the museum has curated a free exhibition that spotlights 50 former independent venues through more than 150 objects, including photographs, band merch, clothing, flyers and posters.   You don’t have to be an ageing rocker or former clubber to get something out of this display, as there’s something for all ages. People who came of age at any time between the ‘70s and the 2010s might be hit with a Proustian rush when confronted with a collage of gig tickets from the Rainbow Theatre (a pass for Blondie was just £2.50), or noughties flyers from Plastic People. And nostalgia-loving Gen Zs will get to see what living through indie sleaze was really like – there are spotlights on the ‘toilet circuit’ (the network of small, grubby venues where up-and-coming bands would cut their teeth), amazing, sweaty photos from indie discos at Madame Jojo’s, and oral histories explain that in the pre-smartphone era, you would just turn up at the party and hope your mates were there. What a concept! Nostalgia-loving Gen Zs will see what living through indie sleaze was really like. But the most winning aspect of Lost Music Venues is the fabulous immersive design by Misty Buckley. Buckley’s recreation of a grassroots venue will...

This review is from the original 2016 Menier Chocolate Factory run of The Truth. Lindsay Posner’s production is revived for a 2026 West End transfer starring Stephen Mangan, Ardal O’Hanlon, Sarah Hadland and Janie Dee. A new review will follow. This is the third play by the dazzling young French playwright Florian Zeller (‘The Father’, ‘The Mother’) to be staged in London in less than two years – and the third to be translated by British writer Christopher Hampton. It’s a zippy, witty farce about ever-shifting layers of infidelity as experienced by two middle-aged Parisian couples. The play’s laughs are as sharp as Lindsay Posner’s ruthlessly swift and snappy production (90 minutes, no interval). Its comedy is playful but also barbed: one of the characters even asks, ‘I want to know what kind of play we’re in. Is it a comedy? Or a tragedy?’We enter on a classic adultery set-up: Alice (Frances O’Connor, sleekly guarded) and Michel (Alexander Hanson, endearingly pompous), both well-turned-out professionals, are pulling up their pants mid-afternoon in a hotel room. It turns out that Michel is good friends with Alice’s husband, Paul (Robert Portal), and in turn Paul and Alice know Michel’s wife, Laurence (Tanya Franks). They’re urban sophisticates doing the dirty with a surface elan, and they're all intricately connected, just as in Harold Pinter’s landmark 1970s adultery drama ‘Betrayal’, a comparison that feels even more fitting when, as here, the play is performed in...

Last year, top Brit director Patrick Marber helmed a Broadway production of David Mamet’s classic ’80s parable of raging capitalism and toxic masculinity Glengarry Glen Ross. Nothing unusual about that, and Kieran Culkin as hotshot real estate salesman Ricky Roma and Bob Odenkirk as his yesterday’s man colleague Shelly Levene was pretty standard casting. Intriguingly, however, Marber stated that he’d like his production to have an all female second cast. This did not happen, whether because Marber simply couldn’t get it together in terms of casting and producers or because on reflection a gender switch would simply reconfigure the play too much to seamlessly take play during a single run. But clearly this Old Vic revival comes out of said idea. Marber aside, it’s a different creative team to the Broadway production: it more or less has to be as the 2026 Old Vic season is being staged in te round, so the New York sets and staging are no use here. But it is an entirely female cast, with Indira Varma (pictured) as Levene and Rosa Salazar as Roma (first names aren’t given and will presumably change), with the cast rounded out by Mercedes Bahleda, Nancy Crane, Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Florence Odumosu and Niky Wardley.  It goes without saying that women can have a different energy in the workplace to men and than indeed the point of the gender swap is surely to explore that. Clearly this isn’t quite what Mamet intended (he’s been surprisingly open minded about allowing it) but...

This glossy Frank Sinatra bio-musical may have had its original try out run in Birmingham last year, but Sinatra the Musical follows the increasingly common path of a big new American show working its kinks through in the more forgiving UK before chancing Broadway. Directed and choregraphed by Broadway big name Kathleen Marshall, and with a book by Broadway big name Joe DiPietro (best known for the smash hit Memphis), it of course concerns arguably the most iconic American singer of the twentieth century: Ol’ Blue Eyes himself. As is the way with a lot of modern bio-musicals (Tina, MJ) it shows Sinatra not at a moment of triumph, but vulnerability and adversity. It’s set in 1942, and follows a 27-year-old Frank as his career seems to be on the rocks. Having left the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra where he made his name, his initial solo releases have flopped and his affair with rising Hollywood starlet Ava Gardner has tarnished his name. But a New Year’s Eve gig at the Paramount Theatre in New York is an opportunity to not only make a comeback, but to turn himself into the biggest name in showbiz. Joel Harper-Jackson will play Frank Sinatra, with Ana Villafañe as Ava Gardner and Phoebe Panaretos as Nancy Sinatra (Frank’s first wife).  Despite being set years before Sinatra’s biggest hits occurred, you can rest assured that they’re basically all included.

The last few years have seen some of the most celebrated theatrical blockbusters of the ’00s return to our stages with a whimper. That’s not to say that recent revivals of the likes of Art, God of Carnage or Copenhagen were bad – but they did not become raved-about, years-running theatrical phenomena a second time. Current productions of The Producers and Avenue Q are doing well enough in the West End, but neither embodies the zeitgeist the way they did 20 or so years ago. So here’s the National Theatre bringing back 2007’s blockbuster War Horse, a show that closed on the West End in 2016 but has lived on via endless tours and a Stephen Spielberg-directed screen adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s source text. Surely its moment in the spotlight was a combination of the novelty of its many, many puppets and Britain’s endless obsession with the First World War? Surely it’s dated? Actually it turns out War Horse is still incredible.  Number one, the puppets are astonishing. Made by the South African company Handspring, it’s not just that individual puppets are good, but that there are so damn many of them, from horses to birds to a tank. Their warm wooden frames look wonderful, and the standard of the puppetry and puppet direction (originally by Handspring’s Adrian Kohler, now by Matthew Forbes) is second to none. On this watch I was quietly blown away by a scene in which main horse Joey was just munching away on a nosebag in the background while the human characters were having...

  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...

Hollywood star Sandra Oh is a very good get indeed for the National Theatre, as she takes on the title role in NT boss Indhu Rubasingham’s revival of Moliére’s timeless comedy The Misanthrope. The adaptation is by the veteran playwright Martin Crimp, in a latest iteration of a version that first debuted in 1996. Previously the title charcter was Alceste, a male playwright who alienates himself from wider society after he starts to tell the truth about how corrupt and venal it all is – Damian Lewis took it on in the 2009 revival, opposite Kiera Knightley as rising starlet Jennifer. All we really know about Crimp’s latest update is that Oh will here play a novelist named Alice, with Paul Chahidi and Abigail Cruttenden co-starring opposite the Killing Eve star.

At the risk of stating the horribly obvious, recent events in the Middle East have given a grim new topicality to the Almeida’s adaptation of Babak Anvari’s 2016 horror film about a mother and daughter menaced by supernatural forces in wartorn 1980s Tehran. Then again, Nadia Latif’s production aspires to timelessness. While it tells an Iranian story with a cast of Iranian origin, the fact Carmen Nasr’s script is in English obviously puts a different spin on things than the Persian-language film. As does Ben Stones’ living room set, a tasteful middle class home that transcends obvious place, and even time: bar the tiny old style telly, there’s no tell that this is the ’80s.  And its timelessness gives it power, a dark universal parable about living under two shadows: war, and a totalitarian state. Leila Farzad’s Shideh is a frustrated wife, whose dream of becoming a doctor has foundered due to her blacklisting for leftwing activities during the Iranian Revolution. Now she stews at home with her daughter Dorsa, as enthusiastic about being a housewife as a tiger is about being caged.  And then there’s the war. Tehran is being bombed, and there’s talk of missiles soon too. But could there be something worse? Allegedly mute neighbourhood boy Mehdi has apparently whispered to Dorsa that vengeful djinn are abroad. When their building is hit by a missile, it seems like something has come in with it.  The djinn are a very good metaphor for the horror that intrudes on civilian life...

This deeply unsettling, nauseatingly intense debut play from Georgie Dettmer is 65 minutes and 52 scenes long, and I’m not sure I could take a whole lot more. The vignette-based style of drama is a tricky thing to carry off, and it’s generally only later-career writers (your Caryl Churchills, your Tony Kushners) who have scored any meaningful success with the form. And it’s perhaps not apparent for the first third or so that Dettmer’s play will actually cohere. Its cluster of storylines about the intersection of web-age voyeurism, female sexuality and male violence are compelling but there’s a nagging worry that it’s going to be tricky to pay all this stuff off at the end. And maybe Are You Watching? doesn’t quite tie everything up perfectly. But it does tie them up well. Moreover, it has an implacable momentum twinned with immaculately icy production from director Jess Edwards, in which every micro-scene is coldly delineated with the sound of a shutter, and in which the piteous cumulative impact of the horrors contained within outweighs the need for neat endings or a direct moral address. Amidst a barrage of scenes that run the gamut from a Hollywood star aghast at deepfakes to a frustrated mother being schooled by the police on what sort of information she should put out about her missing daughter, there’s a central plot of sorts. It concerns the horrifying case of Gisele Pelicot, the French woman whose husband drugged her and, over several years, invited dozens of men...

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...

High Society is, of course, a pure joy, the stage incarnation of a ludicrously frothy Golden Age Cole Porter musical that has a plot you could blow over with a feather, plus some of the greatest songs of the twentieth century. ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, ‘I Love Paris in the Springtime’, ‘Well Did You Evah’, ‘Let’s Misbehave’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ – the banger level is off the chart. But at the risk of being an old bore, my biggest problem with this new Barbican Cole Porter revival is that five years ago the Barbican did another Cole Porter revival that was simply much better. Admittedly, the 2021 production of Anything Goes – which was brought back the following year – really benefitted from London opening up from the pandemic before New York, meaning the show was stocked with stratospheric Broadway talent, notably director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall and world-class musical theatre star Sutton Foster. And this is, by comparison is… a really adequate production from Rachel Kavanaugh. The Brit director has gathered together a perfectly agreeable group of stage actors who nicely animate this story of a love pentagon between boozy good-time divorcee Tracy Lord (Helen George), her ex-husband Dexter Haven (Julian Ovendon), her fiancé George Kitteridge (David Seaton-Young), and undercover reporters Mike Connor (Freddie Fox) and Liz Imbrie (Carly Mercedes Dyer). In an unashamedly retro production, Ovendon is the standout as Dexter, charismatic in a way that’s...

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.

If you find a London greengrocer selling lemons and oranges as plump, waxy, and gorgeous as the ones in Francisco de Zurbarán’s still lifes on view at the National Gallery, do let me know. The Baroque master trained as a painter in Seville, the land of citrus, so he was well placed to get his eye in, but even so, this first UK exhibition makes a persuasive case that Zurbarán’s brush turned them into something approaching the divine. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he painted so few of them; only 10 still lifes are known today, and most of the examples in this exhibition are attributed to his son Juan.  Maybe he simply didn’t have the time. It was the beginning of the 17th century; gold was flowing into Seville from the Americas, the Catholic revival was in full swing, and Seville’s religious orders were trying to outdo one another with ever grander, more extravagantly decorated churches. Zurbarán’s earliest dated work, The Crucifixion (1627), promptly sent him shooting up the Baroque algorithm, and commissions soon came flooding in. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble The Spanish artist and writer Antonio Palomino once wrote that ‘everyone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.’ It’s the first painting you encounter in the exhibition, and 399 years on, you understand what Palomino meant. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble against the pitch-black background, while the white cloth around his waist...

The chances are, at some point, you have probably come across a print by Collier Campbell, the London-based textile studio founded in the 1960s by Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell. For 50 years, the sister design duo created bold, colourful, and brash hand-painted textile prints featuring everything from vivid still lifes to tropical scenes, pretty flowers, and folk figures. They collaborated with the likes of Terrance Conran, John Lewis, Marks and Spencer, and fashion houses Yves Saint Laurent, Jaeger and Liberty. They designed the carpet in the North Terminal at Gatwick Airport. To celebrate the work of these legendary British textile designers, the Fashion and Textile Museum has staged a small but dense exhibition dedicated to the printmaking sisters. Spanning the 60s to the present day, Paint! Pattern! Print! documents the exuberant creations of Sarah and Susan, from their early works, to employment at Liberty, to the forming of their own company. Original paintings of prints and fabric swatches are displayed alongside clothes, homeware and artefacts that inspired the designers, like a dainty Victorian blouse with incredible striped ribbon details.  If you’re someone who has mastered the art of dopamine dressing, this will be right up your alley Many of the fabrics look like the kind of thing your eccentric, arty auntie would wear. And I mean that as a compliment. These are not your grandmother's curtains, but textiles that deserve to be as well known as the William...

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.

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.   

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...

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...