Things to do in London today

London Month Of The Dead’s annual programme returns this spooky season to get you in the mood for Halloween with a programme of more than 60 fascinatingly macabre events investigating our city’s relationship with death. The line-up offers a plethora of ghostly tours that will take you around crypts, cemeteries, undertakers, execution sites and other eerie locations across the city, alongside talks exploring everything from Victorian child bereavement to anthropodermic leather. Highlights of this year’s programme also include a bat skeleton mounting workshop, a magic shadow show in West Norwood Cemetery, a five hour immersive forensics workshop, a screening of eerie classic The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari with live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne, and creepy Halloween festival A Danse Macabre. It doesn’t get more gothic than that! Check out the full programme here. 

Bloomsbury has got a formidable reputation for artsy goings on, with bohemian artists and writers making it their stamping ground a century ago. But this neighbourhood's relationship with creativity isn’t just in the past – it’s right here in the present too, as is more than evident with the Bloomsbury Festival, a haven of music, theatre, talks, walks and much more. The festival celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2026, with a month-long edition featuring 150+ events at more than 40 venues around WC1, under the theme of ‘Create and Celebrate’.  Keen to learn more about the area? There’ll be a variety of fascinating walking tours throughout the month, including a Trailblazers of Bloomsbury tour (Fri Oct 2), a behind-the-scenes tour of Cockpit Studios (Fri Oct 2), a Dickens-themed musical walk (Sat Oct 3), a Bloomsbury bookshop crawl (Wed Oct 7) and a poetry-focused walk featuring the works of William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Yeats, Rimbaud and the Romantics (Fri Oct 9). You can even put your newfound knowledge to good use at a Bloomsbury-themed quiz night (Sun Oct 4).  With the 200th birthday of UCL coinciding with this year’s edition, there’s plenty going on across its sprawling Bloomsbury campus, including ‘Two Centuries Here’, an exhibition exploring the legacy of London’s oldest university. There’s a slew of performing arts events too, including a one-night-only stop at City Lit for fringe theatre hit PATIENT:SOLDIER (Sun Oct 11).  And the festival concludes with some...

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...

K-pop, K-beauty, the films of Bong Joon Ho; for the past few years, South Korea has been having a main character moment. The Korean Wave (or hallyu) has already been the subject of a major V&A exhibition in recent years, and is no doubt the inspiration for the British Museum’s new show all about the peninsula. Spanning 2,000 years, from the Bronze Age to the 2010s, Korea is the first major exhibition on Korea’s art and history at the British Museum in over 40 years. Mainly focusing on art and crafts, Korea documents the development of ideas from 300BC up to today. It begins with the golden age of Buddhism during the Goryeo Dynasty (918 – 1392 AD) and takes us right up to the present day, via the Neo-Confucian ideals of the Joseon period (1392 – 1910), and the Korean War in the 1950s. Of course, there are many stunning objects to be seen here, including more than a few treasures not usually seen outside of South Korea. Much of the display comes from the collection of Lee Kun-Hee, the late chairman of Samsung (also the exhibition’s corporate partner). Other bits are loaned from the National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.  The olden days stuff is classic British Museum fodder, with many a beautiful ceramic, chonky piece of jewellery and stunning silk painting on display. An enormous and intricate bronze temple bell from 900 AD bulges with carvings of dragons and plants. Orb-like moon jars are mesmeric in their simplicity, their...

Your landlord might disagree, but there really is no excuse for boring white walls. Pick up original work from local artists to brighten up your bedroom for as little as £100 at this accessible alternative to (the many) stuffier and more expensive fairs on the London art circuit. Over 150 independent artists will be exhibiting work at the annual event at the Truman Brewery, presented by Saatchi Art. There’ll also be immersive installations, performances, creative workshops, DJs and a fully stocked bar to entertain you. Tunes will be supplied by notorious Ibiza club night Manumission and London based collective Club Lune Bleue. Think of it as art served with a side of party.

The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most extraordinary examples of medieval craft that we can still see today. It’s 70 metres of cloth that has been intricately hand-stitched with dyed wool yarn to recreate the infamous Battle of Hastings and experts reckon it took a team of skilled embroiders anything from several months to a few years. So, don’t expect to be able to recreate it at the British Museum’s Bayeux-focused medieval making evening. However, you can expect to pick lots of new crafty knowledge. There’ll be workshops to help you with knitted or crocheted pieces you’re already working on, a chance to create your own extravagent medieval inspired headwear, an opportunity to add embroidery to add to collaborative textile collage inspired by the tapestry’s trees and, when you’re all crafted out, a medieval pub quiz with the Weird Medieval Guys. 

At Between the Bridges, you'll find a campy spin on Oktoberfest tradition, hosted by drag queen Miss Leigh Ding. Over four weekends of boozy fun, you’ll be entertained by either the tweed-clad ten-piece brass crew Old Dirty Brasstards or high-energy brass band Atomic Brass, blasting out covers of 00s pop hits and 80s classics. There’ll be more music from DJs on the decks. Meanwhile, the kitchen and bar will be pumping out the goods to line your stomach with. Every ticket comes with a free stein. We’re talking two-pint steins of delicious beer and street food so good it’ll make you say, ‘Hell ja!’

A giant tent is once again springing up on Clapham Common this autumn, ready for locals to get their fill of Bavarian fun. Oktoberfest On The Common is a big operation, with nine sessions packed with live oompah music, DJs, crowd games and a huge Oktoberfest dancefloor. And it's not as sedentary as most beer festivals; guests can take on fairground rides, axe throwing, keg tapping, photo booths and traditional games including hammerschlagen.  The food’s also levelled up this year, with a Bavarian feast on offer featuring everything from bratwurst sausages in brioche buns with sauerkraut and mustard to Bratkartoffeln, pretzels, schnitzel and frikadellen pork burgers. Vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options will also be available.

Turn picking your pumpkin into a whole seasonal extravaganza at Berkshire's Wasing Estate, which has laid on plenty of fun add ons to the main event. Cast your wish at a wishing well, explore a mysterious witches apothecary, and spot woodland creatures at this whimsical October spectacular. There's also a dining tent on offer, serving up locally grown delights including, naturally, pumpkin soup.

Soho beer palace Albert’s Schloss is going all out for Oktoberfest this year, serving Bavarian-themed revelries to central London crowds. The Alpine-themed beer hall and ‘cook haus’ is offering three weeks’ worth of festivities, including a traditional keg tapping ceremony, a sausage-eating contest, oompah brass band performances, a best Lederhosen competition, loads of games and all the usual daily performances from the resident Haus band. It also promises to be one of the only places outside Munich where you can try all six Oktoberfest beers. Entry is free; just turn up and get ready to fröhlich. On Saturday’s the place will also host an Oktoberfest Kabaret Bottomless Brünchen, with 90 minutes of bottomless prosecco, mimosas, bier, Bloody Marys, spritz cocktails, and a ‘cook haus’ dish for £60pp. Between 12:30pm and 3:30pm.

The first major West End revival of Edward Albee’s classic play in a decade has a cast to die for, as Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson play the iconically awful George and Martha, an acidic middle aged couple who invite George’s young colleague Nick and his wife Honey over for a bizarre evening of weird and problematic game playing. And @sohoplace is a wonderfully intimate venue to watch the horrors unfold. The catch is that the show is heavily sold out, though at time of writing there were a decent number of more expensive tickets available across the run. The great Marianne Elliott will direct a cast that’s rounded out by Josh Dylan as Nick, and Phoebe Horn as Honey.

The Cherry Orchard is, of course, one of Chekhov’s great plays, and follows an aiing aristocratic family as they contemplate the end of their beloved country estate and the sale of its beloved orchard. It was last seen in London a couple of years back in an absolutely bonkers production at the Donmar. Expect something less eccentric but powerfully poignant from the great director Ian Rickson, who turned in a fine Uncle Vanya on the cusp of the pandemic. This production will reunite him with Kristin Scott Thomas, who almost 20 years ago starred in his Royal Court production of The Seagull. She’ll play big hearted but finanically irresponsible aristocract Lyubov Ranevskaya, with Stephen Mangan co-starring as awkward noveux riche interloper Lopakhin.

We all love a plot twist but New York theatremaker Andy Sandberg’s play Affluenza feels like a cautionary story about what happens when you twist too hard. Well actually maybe ‘plot twist’ isn’t right: it’s more that writer-director Sandberg is obsessed with the idea of bamboozling us, with each new scene in his play determinedly defying expectations and eliciting a bigger WTF than the last. This isn’t inherently a good thing. Especially if your expectation was that you were going to see Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp in the lead role of Dylan, an American teenager who kills two people in a drink driving incident and whose parents agree to the outlandish defence that he was simply too cocooned by privileged to understand the gravity of his actions. And to be fair Schnapp does play Dylan, who is based on real-life Texan teen Ethan Couch. But it’s a supporting role – in the first scene he wanders briefly through his parents’ posh living room while they talk to the very expensive New York lawyer they’ve flown out. Then there’s one set in his bedroom. And that’s kind of it for this version of Dylan. It’s odd: you have to think that having a not-too–big role may have been what tempted Schnapp into making his stage debut. But he’s perfectly good here and could clearly have handled more. Affluenza then abruptly leaps ahead to after the trial, where Dylan successfully escaped with a slap on the wrist. It certainly subverts our expectation of a courtroom drama with a juicy role...

Richard E Grant’s delightfully wayward career has taken in plenty of theatre, but none of it’s been in London for a very long time (his last appearance here was in 2005 with Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged). A treat, then, to finally see the great thesp give the people what they want: playing a bonkers posh person in Noël Coward’s ultimately bonkers posh person comedy, Hay Fever. He’ll star opposite big name US star Christine Baranski – in her UK stage debut – playing dysfunctional older couple David and Judith Bliss, parents to Sorel and Simon. One evening, all four Blisses invite a guest over without telling any of the others – calamity ensues. Other casting is TBA but keep an eye on the whole ensemble: it’s one of Coward’ spurely funniest plays, and last major West End production in 2012 offered a big break to Phobe Waller-Bridge as Sorel. Emily Burns directs.

Almost a century on and I think we can be adult about the fact that 20th century American playwright Clifford Odets was never in the same league as the older Eugene O’Neill, or the younger Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller (who both clearly owed him a debt). Golden Boy, from 1937, is a fine play but clunkier than any of those writers at their best, with rougher-drawn characters and a somewhat on-the-nose consideration of art versus violence as embodied by protagonist Joe Bonaparte, a sensitive Italian-American violinist who throws himself into the world of boxing, with ultimately tragic results.  But it’s boring to quibble about the flaws of a worthwhile revival: not every US play from the middle of the last century can be A View from the Bridge. Though elements of Sam Yates’ stylish take will doubtless prove to be divisive, I thought it was great, a crack cast meeting a bold vision that seeks to do more than just squeeze Golden Boy into standard naturalist tragedy shapes. The story opens with Tom, a down-on-his-luck boxer manager in ‘30s New York. He’s played by Daniel Mays with a not entirely dissimilar note to his Nathan Detroit in the Bridge Theatre's recent Guys & Dolls: all comic bluster and goggling eyes. Like Nathan, he even has a girlfriend he won’t marry, although Hayley Squires' Lorna is a more intense character, and the chief impediment to their wedded bliss is that Tom already has a wife.  Business is bad, but then step into the ring – first metaphorically,...

Is getting a drink with an ex always a bad idea? If the aim to create the chaos and drama befitting a side-splitting one-act play, well: you might be onto something. Debuting in London after runs in New York and Los Angeles, Douglas Lyons’ Table 17 is dependent on people making bad, often unjustifiable, choices. Decisions are made and details revealed that elicit audible boos from the audience, some of whom sit on cabaret tables and have been actively encouraged in the pre-show to talk backand let rip. It’s all part of the fun.  Directed by Tony-winner Zhailon Levingston (he of Broadway’s acclaimed CATS The Jellicle Ball), Table 17 is unafraid to conjure these big emotions – and big sounds – from its crowd. Constantly wrongfooting the audience, the show flips from laugh-out-loud hilarity to genuine tragedy in minutes, changing costumes and switching timelines at equal pace. It’s a stylish and exhilarating theatrical experience, jolted forward by three powerful, emotive performances. The characters might be car crashes, but you won’t want to look away from a production this slick. The former couple in question are the confident Jada (Marisha Wallace) and kinda corny mechanic-cum-music-producer Dallas (the West End’s original Alexander Hamilton, Jamael Westman). We meet both individually, delivering respective monologues as they get ready for their date (or not-date?). The pair primp and preen, as Jada switches one bandage dress for another and Dallas opts for the corduroy...

Thelma & Louise songwriter Neko Case interviewed: ‘the way we deal with sexual violence has gotten much worse’ This musical version of Thelma & Louise has many things going for it, notably some thrilling songs from alt-country legend Neko Case, a great cast led by Amy Lennox and Rachel Turner, and some sparking dialogue from Callie Khouri, screenwriter of the classic 1991 Ridley Scott feminist road movie.  It doesn’t quite work though, in large part because it doesn’t make a convincing argument for why this story needs this treatment. Not to say there shouldn’t be a Thelma & Louise musical. But I think Khouri and co could have done more with the medium than offer up the exact plot of Thelma & Louise (the film) with songs bolted on. It’s still decent and on the whole the more we’re left alone with just the leads, the better it is: Tucker is very good as the sensible one with the traumatic past (Louise); Amy Lennox is borderline sensational as the married one who loosens up, hits the bottle and gets laid on the road (Louise). And it gets extra good during the wilder, more concert-like sections at the start of each half, when it threatens to break into something quite formally different. But for the most part we get the film’s linear road-movie plot, slowed down and gummed up by the deployment of the ensemble in every scene. That and the frequent need to cut away to the relatively superfluous figure of Hal (Trevor Dion), the kind-hearted homicide detective who comes on board...

TOWIE meets Blasted by way of the Iliad in this breezily provocative fourth play from rising star playwright Ava Pickett. Bloodsport is both fresh but also pleasingly of a piece with Pickett’s other work, insofar as like her previous plays – even breakthrough Tudor smash 1536 – it’s set in Essex. In fact it’s not even her first play set in a slightly vulgar Essex living room (although the decor here is a lot whiter than in her very funny adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma). Bloodsport takes place in the aftermath of a Trojan War of sorts, although there’s no Greece or Troy but rather some kind of civil unrest that’s gripped the UK. Smartly, Pickett never defines precisely what this is or exactly what has happened: it may have been a gang war, it may have been closer to the recent nationalist protests (it’s clear the Trojan equivalents were deemed to be ‘foreign’ on some level), it may have been a full-scale civil war. When Gerard Monaco’s terrifyingly toxic Agamemnon-proxy Mario comes back into the home he shares with his wife Cee (Laura Aikman), he talks about ‘New England’, as if the country has been remade wholesale. He’s joined by his malleable younger brother Marcus (Jay Taylor, in the Menelaus role) and a traumatised, blood-spattered Helen (Michelle Dockery), shivering in her nightwear, who everyone seems to be trying to ignore.  After an awkward homecoming defined by Mario’s triumphal belligerence, all signs - including the intro from Ethan Moorhouse’s poetic...

A baker, a witch and a boy with a cow walk into the woods. It sounds like the set-up to a dodgy Christmas cracker joke, but plenty of Londoners already know how this one ends, given Jordan Fein’s lavish revival of Sondheim’s subversive fairytale musical Into the Woods spent last year packing out the Bridge and hoovering up Oliviers. Now it’s crossed the river to the Noël Coward with a mostly new cast, and it’s every bit as good.  Sondheim and book writer James Lapine throw Cinderella, Jack, Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood into the same forest as a childless baker and his wife, and then ask what happens after ‘happily ever after.’ It’s the show’s first West End run since 1991, and if your only previous encounter with it is Meryl Streep and James Corden on Disney+, you’re in for a much stranger night.  Kate Fleetwood is back as the Witch and she owns every inch of stage. She first appears looking thoroughly fed up, like the cynical aunt you only see at Christmas who’s had beef with your parents for decades. She stands on the kitchen table barking orders at the Baker and his Wife, then sprawls across the counter to finish the job, lounging as if she’s on a sunbed while they scurry about beneath her. The Baker and his Wife are petrified, but Fleetwood keeps slipping in moments where she’s a bit ridiculous, even a bit sad, and those are what makes her more memorable than a panto baddie.  John Dagleish and Laura Pitt-Pulford are new as the Baker and his Wife, and they’re a...

Kimberly Akimbo has the sort of outlandish premise that makes you wonder if it’s going to be another entry in the annals of ‘mad things that only Americans are interested in’. But any  musical that wins five Tony awards and tempts the legendary Maria Friedman out of unofficial retirement is probably going to be alright, isn’t it? Well yes. In David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation of his own, more obscure 2001 play, Friedman stars as Kimberly LeVaco, a 15-year-old New Jersey schoolgirl who suffers from an unnamed condition which makes her age at four times the usual speed. This is obviously not a real thing that could really happen (or not in such a neat way). But this inverted suburban Benjamin Button allows itself the one wild metaphysical flourish and plays it with a beautifully straight bat. And of course, it’s a metaphor. Kimberly laconically notes early on that not many kids with the condition live beyond the age of 16. It could have been a musical about a teen with cancer or other more tangible terminal condition. But making it weird stops it feeling like a mawkish weepie about a dying girl and opens it up – Kimberly’s condition feels as much a metaphor for the transience of childhood and the fleetingness of life in general than a story to view literally. It’s also a rare gift of a role to a sixtysomething actor and – like Victoria Clark, who won a Tony for the Broadway production - Friedman absolutely seizes it in Michael Longhurst’s UK premiere. She is sensational as...

Got a pesky neighbour who keeps pinching your parking spot? Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying’s father knew the feeling. In car-clogged Taipei, he came up with an ingenious solution: an inflatable decoy of his Toyota Corolla E100. Whenever he drove off in the morning, he’d leave the blow-up Corolla in its place. When he returned later from work, he’d deflate the decoy, roll it up, stow it in the boot and reclaim his space. He might have to fight for his spot for the next six weeks, though, as his trusty decoy is currently parked at the Hayward Gallery as part of his son’s exhibition, A Life of Navigation. It’s one of four works exploring the strange and ingenious ways we navigate our busy, high-stress urban lives. Working across installation, video, photography and sculptural objects, and often incorporating performance, Chihying approaches those pressures with a sense of humour. Another (literal) aisle Chihying explores in this urban obstacle course is the supermarket. ‘The Jog’ (2014), a two-channel video, sees Chihying don his running gear and jog against the checkout conveyor belt as if it were a treadmill, while an unimpressed cashier looks on. It’s an entertaining take on the endless cycles of consumerism and the repetitive grind of city life. On a more immediate level, all the stretching and athleisure makes it a silent, considerably less sexed-up version of Eric Prydz’s ‘Call on Me’ music video. It’s an entertaining take on the repetitive grind of city life...

There’s a painting that hangs in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that Freddy Mercury used to drag his Queen bandmates to see time and again. It’s a fantastical scene from Romeo and Juliet alive with fairies and mythical creatures, including the legendary fairy Queen Mab, who rushes through the night planting dreams in people’s heads. Mercury was so captivated by it that he wrote and named a song after it: ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’. The painting is the work of the often overlooked Victorian artist named Richard Dadd. The Royal Academy has reunited it with dozens of his other works in Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, the first major exhibition devoted to the artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886. The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques (named the ‘Clique’). Formed by a group of fellow students, its members drew inspiration from Shakespeare and Byron, dressing one another as literary and historical figures to practise their painting. Several of these...

In a massive coup for the British Museum and for London as a whole, the Bayeux Tapestry is on display in Britain for the first time in 900 years. The 70-metre-long artwork is an intricately embroidered depiction of the 1066 Battle of Hastings, in which William the Conquerer took the English throne, and it’s coming to the British Museum. Although it’s believed to have been embroidered in Canterbury, the tapestry has resided in Bayeux, Normandy for the past nine centuries. Despite numerous attempts from Brits to borrow the masterpiece over the past century, it is finally on show on British soil for the first time, nearly 1000 years after it was made. You absolutely don’t want to miss an exhibition which feels like the most significant thing British Museum has done in our lifetimes. Read our full review of the exhibition here.

2026 is, according to the Chinese zodiac, the Year of the Fire Horse. In 19th-century London, however, there were real-life fire horses galloping through the city, hauling fire engines and firefighters to burning buildings. Peckham Road Fire Station opened in 1867 to accommodate them, and is the earliest surviving purpose-built fire station in London. Since 2014, though, it has been South London Gallery’s second site (following a 73-year stint as a sausage factory), and for the next few months, it and the gallery’s main building across the road are home to a series of twisted architectural works by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska. The building’s past feels relevant to the exhibition: Sosnowska has made a career probing how architecture shapes us, outlives its purpose and bears witness to a changing city. The Weight of Matter, her first solo show at a London institution in more than 20 years, brings together 14 years of her work across the SLG’s two sites. Her fascination with cities in flux stems from her own experience. Coming of age as Poland’s communist regime collapsed in 1989, Sosnowska watched Warsaw transform as one political and economic order gave way to another. That upheaval became raw material for her sculpture. Steel, concrete, rebar, staircases, handrails and gates – the functional stuff of modernist architecture – are bent, buckled and twisted into strange new forms. In the old engine room, a contorted heap of black steel sprawls across the floor At the Fire...

Once again, Regent’s Park will be taken over by sculptures this autumn to coincide with the Frieze art fair coming to London. While tickets to the fair can cost up to £250 and are usually reserved for the collectors, dealers and creators of the art world, Frieze Sculpture is totally free to visit and gives a chance to the proles to get a peak at some contemporary artworks in the open air. Fatoş Üstek will curate the exhibition for the fourth year in a row. This year, instead of viewing the sculptures in isolation, the display is curated as a web of interconnected objects, linked together with materials, stories and communities. Highlights will include Angel Otero’s threshold-like doorway descending beneath the grass, and Tarini Sethi’s intricate stainless-steel screens depicting utopian scenes. 

Serpentine North will host a major solo exhibition by Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar. The New Delhi-based artist is best known for his body of lyrical films, which move between documentary, travelogue and visual essay while exploring the legacies of decolonisation on the Indian subcontinent, incorporating the themes of violence, power, labour, indigenous rights, memory and censorship.  

A woman pushes a shopping trolley across a cracked, weed-strewn car park beneath an apocalyptic sky. In the distance, a crater has ripped through the tarmac, while in the foreground of the painting, four thuggish military types are crammed into a car. They’re helmeted, masked and donning wraparound shades. Menace tips into farce as their gun-laden belts sag to expose piggy pink builder’s bums. Welcome to the United States, 2026.  This is Parking Lot of Violent Forces and Depressive Positions, one of ten new works in Nicole Eisenman’s latest show at Sadie Coles HQ on Savile Row. The French-born American artist has spent decades turning the mess of contemporary life into cartoon tragicomedy. Eisenman emerged as an artist in New York in the early 1990s, amid the AIDS epidemic and culture wars, and by the late 2000s her work had shifted from the introspective towards the explicitly political: war, recession, protest, climate crisis and the increasingly rancorous state of American public life. This is Eisenman at her most viciously effective. Those sinister goons in the carpark aren’t explicitly identified as ICE agents, but the fistful of zip ties one of them holds suggests as much. It wouldn’t be unfamiliar territory: following Trump’s election in 2016, Eisenman began making paintings about the American right, part of a political commentary that stretches back through the Iraq War and George W Bush’s re-election and, more recently, includes the protests following the murder...

Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery will be filled with apples, hats, pipes and clouds this autumn as it hosts a free exhibition on Belgian surrealist René Magritte. A first major London exhibition of Magritte’s subverside artwork in more than 30 years, it will feature works on paper, sculptures and photography from Magritte’s four-decade-long career, many of which have been loaned by museums and private collectors. These include ‘La Lampe Philosophique (The Philosopher’s Lamp)’, made shortly before the International Surrealist Exhibition that took place in London in 1936, and last displayed in a landmark Magritte exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 20 years ago. Gagosian’s exhibtiion will also explore Magritte’s legacy via works created specifically for the exhibition by several contemporary artists, including painters Harold Ancart, Allison Katz and Dana Schutz. 

Right, this one is good. But it’s not easy. Then again, I don’t think any of Jenkin van Zyl’s films – or performances, or sculptures, for that matter – are meant to be. The worlds he creates aren’t easy to make sense of, and they’re not places you’d want to live in. They’re grotesque, chaotic, and filled with technologies, rituals and systems that seem to have taken on lives of their own.  His latest creation, Enclosure, has taken over a wing of Somerset House, and comprises of a film and narrative installation that spills out from the screen and into the surrounding rooms, filling them with the signage, photographs and general detritus of a fictional universe. In this world, people known as ‘Donors’ can have replicas of themselves made, called ‘Cherubs’, grown from a single tooth. Stay with me. These doubles were once the basis of a strange kind of tourism where visitors could temporarily inhabit somebody else’s life (‘a little holiday inside someone extraordinary’), as one of the facility’s workers (dressed in a pink milkmaid outfit) puts it. The installation's narrative focuses on Mercy, a former starlet who lent her likeness to the programme, and appears to have been something of a Cherub sensation. ‘Never before has a Cherub attracted such attention’ reads one peeling poster bearing five stars. But by the time Mercy returns to the facility, the good times are over. The place is decaying, the programme has become obsolete, and Mercy is there to terminate her contract –...

New-York based artist Autumn Knight constructs installations and performances inspired by her background in theatre and psychology. In I Can’t Complain, her first major presentation in the UK, she explores the act of complaining and the ways in which it can be cathartic, frustrating and politically empowering. At the centre of the show is an audio installation that collates coversations about everyday irritations, exposing how minor things like food quality can be indicative of deeper inequalities. On select days (October 1,12 and 15), Knight will be in the space for solo performances that delve further into the concept of complaining, asking questions about who gets to complain? And how are those complaints received?