Things to do in London today

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.   

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.   

In 1971, Yorkshireman Roger Hargreaves was having dinner with his eight-year-old son when he asked ‘what does a tickle look like?’. That was the question that led Hargreaves to invent Mr. Tickle, the very first character in his now iconic Mr. Men and Little Miss comic series. Fifty-five years later there are more than 90 characters, from Mr. Snooty and Mr. Topsy-Turvy to Little Miss Chatterbox and Little Miss Scary.  To pay tribute to them all and, in particular, to birthday boy Mr Tickle, Battersea Power Station is hosting a Mr. Men Little Miss takeover. There’ll be workshops in which kids can create wooden characters or door plaques to take home, interactive storytelling sessions and a trail along which you can find hidden characters and unlock free gifts. Tickle himself may even make an appearance. 

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...

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.  

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.

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 a whole decade since Pokémon GO came onto the scene and quickly had millions upon millions of people absolutely obsessed, hunting their local parks, shopping centres and high streets for digital creatures. Today it’s estimated that, altogether, users (or ‘trainers’ as the app calls them) have trawled over 100 billion kilometres while playing the game - that’s roughly 334 round trips between the earth and the sun.  Now, Pokémon GO is gearing up to celebrate it’s tenth birthday in venues across the world. In London, the celebrations are being held at Boxpark Shoreditch. Across two weekends, there’ll be exclusive Pokémon GO experiences, in-game rewards, free coffee and prize draws, including the chance to win trips to Japan and tickets to Pokémon GO Fest 2027. 

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. 

He may be 53, but Carlos Acosta isn’t hanging up his ballet shoes yet. The legendary Cuban dancer is taking to the Royal Opera House stage this August for a limited run of Myths & Modern Masters, where he’ll be joined by dancers from Birmingham Royal Ballet and Acosta Danza. Acosta will perform the lead in Christopher Bruce's Rolling Stones-inspired romp Rooster. He’ll also perform José Limón’s 1949 masteripiece inspired by Othello, The Moor’s Pavane, for the first time, and reunite on stage with Acosta Danza in the acclaimed Nutcracker in Havana Suite. 

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...

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...

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...

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...

If you’ve recently found yourself on the Piccadilly Line during evening rush hour, you may have noticed fellow passengers sporting feather boas, bowler hats and other attempts at Belle Époque attire. They’re on the way to the latest immersive dining experience from The Lost Estate, creators of popular festive show The Great Christmas Feast.  The immersive specialists’ new production is set in 1890s Paris, specifically Le Chat Noir, the legendary Montmartre nightclub that birthed cabaret as we understand it. Stepping into a nondescript warehouse round the corner from West Kensington tube station, guests find themselves transported to a sumptuous, low-lit cabaret bar.  A lot of care has been taken over the design, which is replete with Art Nouveau touches, from Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s iconic feline prints adorning the walls and swirly Paris Métro-esque patterns decorating the banquette seating. The attention to detail extends all the way to the authentic 1890s adverts in the programme. There’s a lot more to like about Chat Noir! The show is based around the nightclub’s grand reopening following refurbishments that made it one of the first venues in Paris to boast electric lighting. The plot is well-researched, deftly bringing together a diverse range of Belle Époque references and characters. There’s music from the club’s sometime resident pianist, the composer Erik Satie and regular visitor Claude Debussy. Performers include celebrated illusionist Joseph Bautier,...

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.

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.

The Royal Academy’s first Summer Exhibition opened in 1769. That was the same year that Captain James Cook began his first voyage to the Pacific. In other words, this open-submission exhibition has been around for a very long time. This year, British sculptor Ryan Gander is at the helm, working under the broad curatorial theme of ‘Interconnectness’. Which is just as well, given there are nearly 2,000 works that he’s chosen to fill the galleries of the London institution. The result is that there really is something here for everyone. Paintings, sculptures, paintings of sculptures, and sculptures of paintings, such as Mark Alexander’s Mother and Child rendered in quartz sand. There are woodcuts of birds by Tom Hammick, and etchings camping under a starry sky by Heidrun Rathgeb. Some prints revel in solitude like the beautiful work of Lene Bladbjerg, while others, such as Karen Keogh’s views of a French village, are rendered with a level of detail that rivals a photograph – not that this exhibition is short of those either. Elsewhere, Paul Tecklenberg transforms discarded nitrous oxide canisters into a basketball hoop, while Joseph Grigely has constructed a leaning tower of wine-bottle capsules, almost ten metres high, from the foil found around the necks of bottles. It is the sort of exhibition where almost any material, subject, or idea can find a place.  Those looking for some art world bigwigs will find paintings by Frank Bowling, Gary Humes, Anselm Kiefer, and a...

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...