Things to do in London today

Keen to see some live music this summer but disinclined to fork out hundreds on London festival tickets? King’s Cross’s Summer Sounds festival is the perfect solution. Coal Drops Yard is once again becoming the ultimate alfresco hangout this August for its free outdoor gig series. Visitors can catch an eclectic programme of gigs encompassing everything from classical and folk music to jazz and indie rock over the eleven day festival. Highlights this year include chaotic Americana-indie band Little Grandad (Aug 14); a showcase marking 35 years of jazz development charity Tomorrow’s Warriors featuring Mercury Prize-nominated vocalist ESKA (Aug 16); a cross-cultural performance of South Asian and Middle Eastern sounds blending the rubab, oud, qanun, cello, tabla, guitar and voice (Aug 17); an evening of beatboxing and DJ sets run by Queer Britain and Sounds Queer (Aug 19) and a session with the English Folk Dance and Song Society (Aug 21).  You don’t even need to book; simply show up from 6.30pm-8.30pm (or 1pm-6pm on Sundays). 

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.

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...

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.   

There are few more striking spots to catch a movie than the iconic surrounds of the Barbican Sculpture Court. As usual, the City of London’s temple of the arts has an inventively curated line-up in store for the final week of August. On the year’s line-up is a kaleidoscopic array of films and filmmaking styles, ranging from Spike Lee concert docs to Denis Villeneuve science fiction, via the French New Wave and the best of Iranian cinema. Standard tickets are £20 (£18 concessions and £10 for under-18s) and there’s street food to feast on while you sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

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;...

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.

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...

While the Science Museum remains one of London’s quintessential free days out, there’s an ever-growing list of paying bolt-ons for those who are happy to spend a little (or a lot), from the glorious hands on experiments of the WonderLab to the retro videogames mecca of Power Up to a very decent science afternoon tea featuring petri dish jellies and test tubes filled with sweets. Joining them is Smithsonian Starstruck, a galactic VR experience from America’s prestigious Smithsonian Institution, in which the 360 digital imaginings of some of space’s most stunning and surreal vistas are rooted in hard astronomy, and not the fanciful slop that creeps into several nominally educational London VR experiences I could name.  It's basically a guide to all the mad shit in our galaxy, with a reassuring-voiced American man taking us on a virtual journey around various observatories and space telescopes, and the wild celestial phenomena they can nominally see. We watch the dawn of the universe. We visit an uninhabitable planet strewn with diamonds. We stand before the event horizon of a black hole. It is all, undeniably, pretty visually stunning: from a looming gigantic sun on another world to the bizarre spectacle of light being dragged into a physics-defying gravity well, this is spectacular (albeit, to be clear, often an interpretation of what these things might look like given available data). You’ll also learn a decent amount about the phenomena depicted without feeling...

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

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...

This review is from September 2024. Abigail’s Party transfers to the West End in August 2025 with the same cast, except Lauren Patel replaces Ashna Rabheru. Mike Leigh’s genius satire on ‘70s social climbing can feel like one of those plays where there’s not much you can do with it beyond faithfully channelling the iconic original production (which was famously televised in 1977).  But Nadia Fall’s final show as Theatre Royal Stratford East artistic director (she’s off to run the Young Vic) manages to find a couple of clever new angles on ‘Abigail’s Party’ while playing to its long established strengths. Most obviously, Tamzin Outhwaite is superb casting as Beverly, the nightmarish hostess of a suburban dinner party on the ‘London side of Essex’. Leigh famously devises his work with his original casts, and Alison Steadman’s original portrayal of Beverly is timeless. But her version and others I’ve seen since tend to portray Beverly as a creature of pure instinct, her grim hostess-with-the-mostess routine, acid putdowns of her husband Laurence (Kevin Bishop) and inappropriate flirting with her neighbour Tony (Omar Malik) feeling like something she couldn’t not do, and is on some level barely aware of (perhaps part of the reason the play’s detractors accuse it of punching down at the aspirational British working class). Outhwaite, on the other hand, is wickedly calculating, a middle aged mean girl who deftly manipulates her hapless guests as a means of making herself feel...

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...

What a treat for London to get two major Cate Blanchett stage performances two years on the trot. A major stage force long before her screen career took off, Blanchett famously co-ran the Sydney Theatre Company with her husband Andrew Upton for five years, and has taken plenty of work to New York, but her London appearances tend to have been confined to avant-garde projects that were difficult to get tickets to: see her previous National Theatre turn in 2019’s weirdy When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other. But with last year’s The Seagull at the Barbican the double Academy Award winner – and now Sussex resident – signalled that she was ready for still artsy but relatively more mainstream work on bigger stages, and that continues with Electra/Persona. Running on the Lyttelton stage over late summer, it’s directed and adapted by fellow Aussie Benedict Andrews and is indeed a mash-up of Ancient Greek classic Electra and Ingmar Bergman’s more recent 1966 masterpiece Persona. Exactly how all this will work is TBC, although it would seem from the synopis that a performance of Electra replaces the film images that traditionally rupture the world of the two female leads in Persona. Blanchett will be joined by her Tár co-star Nina Hoss and young Black Doves star Ella Lily Hyland. It’s not yet clear who is playing who although doomed princess Electra and Persona’s leads Elisabet and Alma offers three obviously leads (though it may not be as simple as all that).

The Truth opens with a classic farce set-up: a rumpled bed from which the rumpled head of Stephen Mangan's Michel emerges, looking roguishly pleased with itself, next to the equally rumpled but less satisfied head of Alice (Sarah Hadland) who is, we soon discover, Michel's best friend's wife. Over the course of 90 tightly-plotted minutes, it becomes enjoyably clear that neither Michel, Alice nor their cuckolded spouses Paul and Laurence, would know what the truth was if it came and bit them on the bottom.  There is plenty to laugh at and to like about Lindsay Posner's production, which was a hit in 2016 at the Menier Chocolate Factory and is now revived, with extra star power, for the West End. It's a concise evening of polished, satisfyingly light entertainment, with a strong cast, an early finish time, and fairly reasonable ticket prices. Mangan fans won't be disappointed, his performance is more than worth the entry fee. He is fantastically enjoyable as Michel, bringing irresistible hangdog charm and ageing himbo vibes to the character who believes he is successfully deceiving everyone around him. His epic tantrum on discovering that he is the more deceived is hilarious: utterly hypocritical, and heartfelt. Michel's arc is the driving force of the story and when Mangan commits to his outrage, it lifts the comedy to the next level and really makes it grip. A comic ensemble often finds a deeper groove during a show's run. On opening night, it stopped just short of being...

There're worse ways to spend a summer afternoon than drinking something cold beneath the trees at Thomas' College, Richmond, while watching a succession of Shakespeare’s characters flirt, bicker and generally make a mess of love. But Tom Littler's brace of shows – a co-production between the Orange Tree Theatre and Guildford Shakespeare Company – have more ambitious designs than pairing two crowd-pleasing romantic comedies. Although it’s fine to just watch one of them, Littler stitches Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing into one continuous romantic saga spanning the years around the Second World War. Characters cross from one play into the next, identities merge, and events in the first become emotional backstory for the second – a neat solution to Much Ado's insinuated backstory and Love's Labour's Lost's abrupt ending. Littler smooths the join between the two so seamlessly it's nearly impossible to spot. Into this he threads contemporary asides and crowd work, which land as some of the evening's biggest laughs. Love's Labour's Lost begins in summer 1939. The Prince of Navarre (Owen Oakeshott) and his scholarly mates have sworn off women for study and self-improvement, a resolve that lasts about five minutes past the arrival of the Princess of France, Leonata (Sarah Gobran), and her attendants. Their rhetoric grows increasingly ridiculous while the women watch on, considerably less impressed than the men would like. Sarah Gobran's Leonata and Phoebe Pryce's...

If it hasn’t necessarily always been entirely clear why Matthew Warchus decided to reconfigure the Old Vic to an in-the-round set up for his final year in charge of the theatre (some sort of bucket list thing?) it does all pay off with this fine revival of an early Alan Ayckbourn classic. By the now venerable playwright’s standards, 1969’s How the Other Half Loves is relatively low concept, ie unlike many of his later plays, it’s not about robots. It is, however, explicitly written to be performed in-the-round (ie the stage is in the middle of the theatre), with a single central set standing in for the homes of couples Frank and Fiona Foster and also Teresa and Bob Phillips. Moreover, time is telescoped and chopped up, so that two very different dinner parties that happen on consecutive nights at the two different homes are spliced together into one amusingly unpredictable whole. Roger Allam’s Frank is a classic naive Ayckbourn protagonist, a well meaning, breathtakingly unperceptive director at a local firm who is absentminded to the point you probably couldn’t write a character like this now without audiences assuming he has dementia.  One thing he’s not absentminded about is his wedding anniversary, which he remembered, unlike his wife Fiona (Dorothy Atkinson), who – sick of Frank’s lack of attentiveness – was out boffing neighbour Bob (Rowan Polonski), who she has been having an affair with.  Not that the terminally amiable Frank really has any suspicions. But as the...

Death Note: The Musical is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's classic mid-’00s Death Note manga, which concerns Light Yagami, a Tokyo high school student who (via a capricious death spirit) comes into possession of a book that kills anyone whose name is written in it. Frank Wildhorn, Jack Murphy and Ivan Menchell's adaptation is largely drawn from the first half of the series and simplifies the story in various ways. But it’s doesn't take any major liberties, other than the fact they’re all singing now. This is potentially good news for fans of the series, of which there are clearly a lot: I caught the show the Monday after press night and it was rammed, with a noticeably large number of boy tweens in attendance (the age advice is 12-plus and I’m not sure I’d let my boy tweens watch it but let he who casts the first stone etc). If you’re not a pre-existing fan of the series you may well – like me! – spend the whole time with your jaw on the ground wondering why the hell this is all happening and why the characters are all like this.  It was always going to be an unconventional musical, but the retention of the bizarre, generally sociopathic, undoubtedly manga-accurate behaviour of almost every major character feels like a missed opportunity to do something more interesting and tragic with this story. I would have liked more liberties, please. A gleefully bombastic, tightly drilled, visually impressive rock musical ...

This review is from 2022 and the original, Ralph Spall-starring London run for Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation. The production returns in 2026 with a new cast headed by Richard Coyle as Atticus Finch. Meet Atticus Finch: centrist dad. Aaron Sorkin’s smash Broadway stage version of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ makes a fair few tweaks to Harper Lee’s 1960 literary masterpiece.  Most predictably, there’s the ‘West Wing’ mastermind’s trademark sparkling dialogue. Yes, he remains faithful to the idea that we’re in ’30s Alabama, but his polished wit is very much present and correct, most especially in the goofily pinging three-way narration provided by his child characters: plucky Scout (Gwyneth Keyworth), chippy Jem (Harry Redding) and dorky Dill (David Moorst). The narrative structure has been tinkered with: the climactic trial scene is now parcelled up into chunks throughout the play rather than included as a single sweeping sequence.  The plot, however, is essentially unchanged. By far Sorkin’s most significant intervention via Bartlett Sher’s production is to pointedly reimagine the play’s white lawyer hero Atticus Finch. Rafe Spall’s interpretation of the role steers well clear of Gregory Peck’s immortal screen version and, to a large extent, the book. Peck’s Finch was famously sonorous-voiced and saintly. In both book and film, Finch was explicitly seen through the adoring eyes of his daughter Scout. Here, with his chipmunk Alabama twang, Spall simply *sounds* less like a wise...

London’s spectacular free Greenwich + Docklands International Festival is back for 2026, taking place over three weeks at the end of the summer as the skies darken and its huge outdoor shows look particularly impressive at night.  Celebrating its 31st edition in 2026, the festival will kick off with 360 (Aug 21, General Gordon Square, Woolwich), a huge outdoor electronic dance work.  This will be followed by the return of the beloved Greenwich Fair (Aug 23 and 24), which combines family friendly games and activities throughout Greenwich with spectacular acrobatic works, largely in Greenwich Park. Meet My By the Fountain (Romford Market, Aug 28 and 29) will be a stunning son-et-luminaire bringing Romford’s ‘lost’ Liberty Fountain back to life, and in probably the most ‘wow’ show of the festival Argentina’s Efectos Especiales (pictured, Aug 29 and 30, Greenwich Peninsular) will seek to thrust you into an actual action movie. There will be dancing throughout the period, including the return of the Dancing City sub festival (Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Sep 5) and it’ll wrap up with (In)visible Dancing (General Gordon Square, Woolwich, Sep 6) and exhilarating 90-minute flashmob in the heart of Woolwich.  

This spring, French Vietnamese artist Nhu Xuan Hua will take over both of Autograph Gallery's main spaces with newly commissioned work at the intersection of art and fashion photography. She'll draw on her Vietnamese parentage, reimagining her family photographs to explore the fragility of memory, and what's lost between generations.

Another London summer beckons: clouds clearing, days lengthening, an imaginative structure being erected in Kensington Gardens. Mexican architecture firm LANZA atelier has been chosen to design this 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, which features a ‘crinkle-crankle’ wall. Traditional structures seen in English architecture from the 18th century, these wavy partitions temper climate, create shelter, and are ideal for growing fruit. And fittingly, they’re also known as serpentine walls.  The prestigious architectural commission celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026, with a landmark series of talks programmed in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the charitable organisation founded by the late Iraqi-British architect, who designed the inaugural Pavilion 25 years ago. The programme kicks off with an Architects’ Talk hosted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, with a series of Family Days featuring hands-on workshops, creative activities and performances for all ages scheduled throughout the summer. Check out the Serpentine’s website for further details in due course.   

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.

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...

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...