Things to do in London today

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...

You might have heard of the Great Exhibition, an extravaganza of world riches and inventions that drew six million visitors to Hyde Park in 1851. Prince Albert used those funds to help develop the V&A, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall – pretty much every grand institution on Exhibition Road in Kensington – creating his ‘Albertopolis’. The 21st century’s answer to the Great Exhibition will return this summer, with many of London’s most esteemed museums coming together to mark the 175th anniversary of the original Great Exhibition. For one weekend in June Exhibition Road in South Ken will be closed to cars and come alive with fun interactive experiments, mind-bending technology, music, dance, art, live science shows and parades. The Natural History Museum, Science Museum, V&A, Royal Albert Hall, Royal Parks and Imperial College London are all taking part. Highlights this year include gingerbread and sand recreations of the original crystal palace, robot football, origami spacecraft, giant roaming Indian puppets and a session baking a brownie that mirrors the surface of Mars. Plus, it’s all free to attend.   

London is a famously green city – nearly half of its many square miles is parks, heaths and other open space. A lot of that open space, though, consists of private squares and gardens, most of which we never get to see, never mind hang out in. London Open Gardens Weekend is here to address that, prising the keys out of the capital’s secretive gatekeepers to fling open more than a hundred secret green spaces. The event exclusively reveals some of the city’s least-seen spaces: historical, traditional, contemporary and experimental, across all four corners (and the middle bit) of London. They include formal gated garden squares, rooftop terraces with commanding views of the city skyline, community allotments and wildlife havens. Weekend tickets are available, and guided tours, suggested walking routes and cycling tours taking in a selection of the gardens will also be on offer. There is a ballot entry system for some of the most popular gardens.  With Time Out offers you can now get two-for-one tickets to the event. 

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...

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...

Founded by local artists in 2025, Hackney Art Week is back, and this year it’s bigger than ever. Over 10 days, the extravaganza will host exhibitions, markets, workshops, performances, immersive installations, street parties and even an art treasure hunt, bringing together 60 artists and creatives at 50 venues across Dalston, Clapton, London Fields, De Beauvoir, Stoke Newington, Haggerston and Hackney Wick. Venues involved include Raleigh Chapel, Chats Palace, The Rose Lipman Building, St Augustine’s Tower, ESEACC at The Old Bath House, as well as pubs, bakeries, delis and other much-loved Hackney spots.  Look out for the Dalston Cultural Quarter Takeover (June 6-7), where workshops, artist open studios, a ceramics market and a street-level sound system will take over Arcola Street; The Sandwich Walk by Jeanne Gourlaouen - a surreal installation of shoe-slash-sandwich sculptures on Wilton Way; the Collagism™ Art Hunt where the streets around London Fields transformed into a living collage, and live music from composer Gabriel Prokofiev that will take over clubs, warehouses and everything in between. 

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...

Understand the history of HIV and the major global health challenge it still poses in the world today through stories of protest and care, photography, film and archival material in this new Wellcome Collection display. Across two rooms, Tenderness & Rage will explore the UK’s 1980-90s AIDS epidemic, contemporary experiences of HIV in the Global South and reveal how activist groups and volunteer-led organisations have supported and campaigned for those living with HIV. It will also spotlight the much-overlooked experience of women living with HIV in the UK and globally.

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...

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...

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...

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

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

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,...

This review is from 2024. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Going through the next 14 years blow-by-blow would be time-consuming, but in short thanks to what I can only describe as THEATRE MAGIC, Hadestown is now a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It played the National Theatre in 2018, on its way to becoming the most unusual Broadway smash of the modern era. And it’s finally come back to us. Now in a normcore West End theatre, its otherness feels considerably more pronounced than it did at the NT. The howling voodoo brass that accompanies opener ‘Road to Hell’ is like nothing else in Theatreland. Mitchell”s original songs are still there but have mutated and outgrown the original folk palette thanks to the efforts of arrangers Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose. Rachel Hauck’s set – which barely changes – is a New Orleans-style saloon bar, with the cast all dressed like sexy Dustbowl pilgrims. It’s virtually sung through. It is essentially a staged concert, but it’s done with such pulsing musical...

Though you can buy all of Michael Bond’s books in the gift shop, let’s be clear here: the Paddington Bear Experience has very little to do with the first 50 or so years of the marmalade-loving ursine’s existence. Rather, the lavish new central London immersive experience makes no bones about fact it’s a live extension of the world of the two (soon to be three) StudioCanal movies. Theoretically I suppose that’s a shame. Debuting in print in 1958, Paddington has a rich history and London’s first proper attraction dedicated to him doesn’t explore it at all. But who are we kidding here? The Paul King films are modern masterpieces, and Paddington would be left as a beloved but past-his-prime nostalgia character if it weren’t for them. He’d have his little statue at the station. But nothing like this. You don’t absolutely need to have seen the films, but there are countless callbacks to them in this gentle adventure, which essentially an immersive theatre show. As we begin by waiting at a small recreation of Paddington Station to board our train to Windsor Gardens, we’re serenaded by a pre-recorded version of the band from the films playing ‘London is the Place for Me’; when we make it to Windsor Gardens for this year’s Marmalade Day Festival, designer Rebecca Brower has faithfully recreated the entire downstairs of the Brown’s boho Notting Hill pad. And then of course there’s Paddington himself - constantly teased as just out of full sight, his prerecorded voice would seem to...

Even if you have literally never wanted to be part of the crew of a spaceship you’ll probably have a fun time at Parabolic Theatre’s Bridge Command, an immersive theatre show slash team-bonding exercise slash LARPer paradise that sees you and your fellow contestants take command of the, uh, bridge of a spaceship and undertake a variety of missions that run the gamut from diplomacy to warfare. Occupying the spot in the Vauxhall arches that formerly hosted renowned gay sauna Chariots, Bridge Command is not a slick, cutting-edge vision of the future, and presumably budgetary limitations are part of this. But that’s fine: it very much has its roots in a wobbly sets golden age of sci-fi, with the earlier iterations of Star Trek looming particularly large. After donning our military jumpsuits, we are ‘teleported’ into the depths of space and onto an Earth battleship that will form our base of operations. There is a background scenario here, wherein humans fled a polluted Earth, found a magic element in the depths of space, went back home to fix Earth, only a load of colonists stayed behind and set up new galactic dominions, and we’re out there looking for more of the magic element. It’s best not to think too hard about it, but at the same time the performers throw themselves into it with impressive conviction - I was particularly delighted when the person operating the teleporter earnestly fielded questions relating to my phobia of teleporters.  Following said teleportation...

'My mummy says I'm a miracle,' lisps a pampered mini-me at a purgatorial kiddies' birthday party at the outset of this delicious, treacly-dark family show. The obnoxious ma and pa of its titular, gifted, pint-sized heroine are not, of course, quite so doting. But 'Matilda' must be making its creators, playwright Dennis Kelly and comedian-songsmith Tim Minchin, a very pair of proud parents. Opening to rave reviews in Stratford-upon Avon before transferring to the West End in 2011 and snatching up Olivier Awards with all the alacrity of a sticky-fingered child in a sweetshop, Matthew Warchus's RSC production remains a treat. With hindsight, Kelly and Minchin's musical, born of the 1988 novel by that master of the splendidly grotesque Roald Dahl, is a little too long and, dramatically, a tad wayward. But like the curly-haired little girl in the famous nursery rhyme, when it is good, it is very, very good. And it's even better when it's horrid. The past few months have seen some cast changes, including, alas, the departure of Bertie Carvel's tremendous Miss Trunchbull, headmistress of the dread Crunchem Hall School, former Olympic hammer-thrower and a gorgon of monumental nastiness, complete with scarily Thatcher-esque tics of purse-lipped gentility and faux concern. David Leonard doesn't quite match the squirm-inducing, hair-raising detail of Carvel in the role, but his more butch, granite-faced version is fantastically horrible nonetheless. And if Paul Kaye as Matilda's...

This review is from 2019. The Flying Bath returns for 2026. Sometimes it seems like picturebook writer extraordinaire Julia Donaldson and her rotating cast of illustrator collaborators must provide the source material for about 50 percent of all kids’ theatre.And why not? She offers tight, kinetic rhymes, a relentless cavalcade of memorable characters and gently subversive twists on classic kids’ stories. Illustrated by David Roberts, ‘The Flying Bath’ is one of Donaldson's lesser-known books, and feels a splash familiar in the telling (there are echoes of the more famous ‘Zog and the Flying Doctors’).But there’s real invention in this theatrical telling, for ages two to five. Instead of being about a trio of bath toys – a turtle, a frog and a duck – who come to magical life and zip about in the titular tub solving water-based emergencies, Samantha Lane’s production casts the entire thing as imaginative bathtime play between a fractious brother and sister (Elliot Pritchard and Phoebe Hyder).Accepting that their three ‘main’ toys (designed by Emma Tompkins) are suspiciously large and look suspiciously non-waterproof, it smartly avoids obvious puppets. Instead, a whole world of H2O-centred fun is conjured from the items strewn around the colourful set, as oddball characters are created from flannels, sponges and, er, a novelty baboon bog brush.It’s a nice story that’s a better piece of theatre, a lovely tribute to the power of imaginative play, combined with relatable...

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...

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...

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.

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.   

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’. 

Delcy Morelos spent a month filling the Barbican’s Sculpture Court with earth and clay. Working by hand, the Colombian artist and her team layered more than ten tonnes of the stuff to create origo, a mammoth, multi-sensory installation stretching 24 metres wide and 12 metres high, named after the Latin word for ‘origin’.  For more than a decade, Morelos has asked viewers to rethink their relationship with soil; not just as the brown stuff shaken from boots or scrubbed from under our fingernails, but as the substance from which all life emerges and depends. Growing up in Tierralta, northern Colombia, Morelos is influenced by an Andean view that sees landscapes not as resources to be extracted, but deserving of care and protection.  And so here, in the Barbican’s circular courtyard, we earthlings are invited to burrow through Morelos’ ovular structure, weaving through one of six entrances before arriving in the belly of the beast. Inside, you are plunged into near-total darkness, feeling your way along softly curving corridors lined with compact, hair-like roots. And unlike the dank, musty odour one might expect from a mound of soil, Morelos’ beast smells unexpectedly good: infused with clove and cinnamon and softened by the cool scent of earth after rain.   Then you emerge into the centre of the installation: the doughnut’s hole, open to the elements and flooded with light. Here, meditative activities such as tai chi are planned to take place, beneath the Brutalist tower...