Things to do in London today

Is it art, or is it maths? It’s a question even MC Escher himself couldn’t answer about his own work. While the Dutch printmaker known for his infinite staircases, metamorphosing tessellations and paradoxical buildings was rejected by the art world, he was revered by mathematicians, and is now one of the most famous optical illusionists of all time.  The OG creator of images that make you go ‘Huh?’ is going under the microscope in London with a blockbuster exhibition celebrating his life and work this summer. Created by Italian company Arthemisia and the immersive peeps at Fever, MC Escher: The Exhibition has arrived at Somerset House as part of its world tour.  The family-friendly display is surprisingly big. With more than 150 artworks on show, it tells the story of Escher’s life and work in chronological order, before it gets to the biggies – the ones that have been wheeled out in maths classrooms for decades – towards the end. You’ll see the originals of ‘Waterfall’, where water appears to run upwards, ‘Ascending and Descending’, the looping staircase that goes up and down simultaneously, and ‘Belvedere’ depicting an impossible tower. And you’ll learn about the techniques and mathematics that make these illusions possible along the way.  The meticulous craft that went into his totally baffling work is evident. On a personal level, I can see why Escher was rebuffed by the art world. Many of his works seem like something from a bad acid trip: giant, bulbous ants;...

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

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...

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

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...

The Barbican is shining a spotlight on Pan-Africanism in contemporary art, cinema, music and performance in this summer-long creative series which will feature more than 30 events as well as an art exhibition running from June to early September.  The season will cover a range of geographies and cultures from within Pan-Africanism – coined in the early 1900s, the umbrella term encompasses political and philosophical movements advocating for self-determination, anti-colonial resistance and transnational solidarity among peoples of African descent. Legacies including Creole culture in Cape Verde, Black Rights in the USA, and Carribbean reggae and dub music will be explored, alongside much more.  Highlights from the season include the central exhibition, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica. Spanning thr 1920s to the present day, 300 works including paintings, installations, posters, journals and film will showcase Pan-African ideas from Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, North America and Europe. A film programme will bring together landmark films, rare archival works, and contemporary moving-image practices across 15 different sccreenings.  There will also be Carnival dance workshops, Carnival costume-making workshops, late-night parties and live music performances. 

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...

If streetwear is a religion, Nigo is one of its deities. The man behind A Bathing Ape (Bape, for short) is worshipped by hypebeasts the world over, not only for his pioneering approach to streetwear but also for his cultural footprint. Inextricably linked to hip hop – Nigo is besties with Pharell, and everyone from Biggie Smalls to Drake and Lil Wayne have donned his designs – the Japanese designer’s work is characterised by bold camo prints, Warholian pop-culture references and brash graphics.  For the first time, the man behind Bape and Human Made, and the creative director of Kenzo since 2021, has his own London retrospective. The Design Museum’s exhibition features 700 objects – 600 of which come from Nigo’s personal archive – including records, toys, magazines, music videos and a whole lotta clothes, spanning the ‘80s to the present day.  Nigo: From Japan With Love starts with a joyful recreation of the designer’s teenage bedroom – a dream of an ‘80s boudoir displaying Nigo’s own teenage relics: a lava lamp, a Kangol hat, stacks of hip hop records and his very first vintage piece – a shredded Levi’s type II denim jacket. It then moves through a selection of his most treasured objects, which range from Star Wars figurines to a Mr Peanut canvas jacket, and an absolutely amazing 1970s McDonald’s uniform from Hawaii, where the traditional flowers of the Hawaiian shirt are replaced by illustrations of burgers, fries and shakes. His obsession with Americana and vintage...

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...

With its abundance of big protests, buskers, pigeons and tourists, Trafalgar Square is famously one of the least chill bits of central London. But all that is about to change this summer with a new pop-up, designed to bring some of the plant-filled peacefulness of Cornwall's Lost Gardens of Heligan to Zone 1. Lost Oasis is the handiwork of leading landscape designers, who are transforming the space outside St Martin-in-the-Fields church into a plant filled dining, drinking and entertainment spot.  Ferns, palms and fragrant jasmine will surround eating spots manned by a rotating line-up of top chefs including Nathan Outlaw, Simon Stallard, Jordan Bailey, Emily Scott, Adam Handling MBE and Sally Abé.  On the entertainment side, there'll be screenings of FIFA World Cup, Wimbledon, Formula 1 British Grand Prix, alongside live music provided by Sofar Sounds and live comedy. In need of refreshment? There'll be drinks at the Mud Maid Bar, inspired by a famous Heligan sculpture, as well as the chance to pour your own pints of the appley stuff from the Cornish Orchard Cider Tree. Just check online before you turn up: Lost Oasis is only open to public walk-ins on days when there's not a special ticketed event. 

This review is from 2019, when Timothy Sheader’s Open Air Theatre production transferred to the Barbican. In summer 2026 it will be restaged at the London Palladium with pop star Sam Ryder in the title role, Tyron Huntley as Judas Iscariot, and the role of King Herod shared by Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Jun 20–Jul 11), Simon Russell Beale (Jul 13-25), Richard Armitage (Jul 27-Aug 1), Boy George (Aug 3-15) and Layton Williams (Aug 17–29) and Julian Clary (Aug 31-Sep 5). Following a break it will transfer to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, with Ryder confirmed to stay on. First seen in 2016 at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Timothy Sheader’s bombastic revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera arrives at the Barbican with superstar ratings, even if it’s lost some of its, well, superstar turns. It looks incredible: Tom Scutt’s set of rusty girders and a cross-shaped catwalk is moodily, then gloriously, lit by Lee Curran, especially a final, ascending beam of light behind the crucifixion. But the real touchstone is the show’s concert origins: characters swagger around the stage clutching microphones, or moon over acoustic guitars; later, electrical cords are the things they’re bound and hung by. But this staging also allows for rock-god excess, and it’s showered in gold and glitter. Herod is high-camp in a gold cape; Judas’s hands are dipped in silver for all to see, branded guilty by gilt.Drew McOnie’s edgy choreography turns the cast into a mob, whether united in juddering,...

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...

Sandra Oh makes a very decent UK stage debut as Alice, the misanthrope in question in Martin Crimp’s new adaptation of the classic Molière comedy. Avant-garde playwright and translator supreme Crimp has taken a few passes at The Misanthrope over the years, delivering versions in 1996, 2009, and now 2026. And it’s easy to see why. If the title character hates the modern world, then the modern world is always changing; there are always new things to get misanthropic about. A playwright in previous Crimp versions (and a jaded courtier in Molière), here Oh’s Alice is a revered novelist who grumpily shuns most of the fripperies of the modern world. ‘Misanthrope’ actually seems quite strong to describe Oh’s gruff but essentially likeable Alice, who is warm to her friends but whose interest in the bullshit that glues society together is close to zero.  As the play opens she’s berating her playwright BFF John (Paul Chahidi: bumbling, likeable) for having offered an enthusiastic greeting to a woman they passed on the stairs who it turns out he didn’t actually know; as the play progresses it becomes apparent that Alice’s dream is to live off grid and away from humanity with her troubled actor boyfriend Stefan (Tom Mison: fey, distracted). In a promising early development, Alice is approached by Esmee (Imogen Elliott: very funny), a posh girl feminist book influencer who insists on making Alice read the extremely bad first draft of her novel. Alice mercilessly dissects it, much to...

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

Although Sophie Swithinbank’s slippery thriller has nothing to do with that latter day lutenist, Sting and the Police would actually be a pretty apt name for her play. Starting as a kind of office odd couple comedy, Sting quickly brings in whispers of witchcraft, but then becomes a story of bent coppers in an inadequate justice system. Swirling all those elements together in her cauldron, Swithinbank creates a masterful, destabilising examination of domestic abuse that plays out like if A24 got their hands on an episode of Line of Duty.She sets out exactly what the play is going to be about right from the beginning: Adelle Leonce’s Ash arrives – maybe still drunk from a heavy night out – at her new job in an archive dedicated to women killed as witches. Her archivist boss Lily helpfully explains the signs that would have got women accused: death of livestock, sexual activity, death of infants, seizures; she tells us that she is appalled by the similarities between a justice system built on misogyny then, and its echoes now.And all of that is exactly what we get, especially when we meet Ash’s policeman partner Dom: a contemporary story of an abusive relationship, comparing now against then, and threaded through with those witchy signs and symbols. Like if A24 got their hands on an episode of Line of Duty. Adelle Leonce steals this with an unpindownable performance as Ash, full of oddness, her mood and intonation veering wildly from line to line, manic laughter one moment...

  Ava Pickett has had the career start every writer dreams of. Your debut play about Anne Boleyn (but not really about Anne Boleyn) becomes the hottest ticket in town at the Almeida Theatre and earns you two Olivier nominations. In the process, you gain the attention of it-girl star of the moment Margot Robbie, who declares you a generational talent. Oh, and you’re also writing a film about Joan of Arc with Baz Luhrmann. Because why not. Pickett’s ascension has been so swift, that, I must admit, I approached 1536’s West End transfer with slight scepticism. Could it really live up to all that the hype? The answer, thankfully, is: yes, and then some. Co-produced with Robbie’s production company Lucky Chap, 1536 is an astonishing production. Director Lyndsey Turner has crafted a heady, sensory experience, one that is jolted forward by faultless performances from the female leads. The 110-minute one-act run time might raise eyebrows, yet the show never loses pace, and refuses to overcook things either. 1536 is a once-in-a-blue-moon theatrical experience. I laughed. I cried. I probably could have screamed too. The year, it’ll come as no surprise to hear, is 1536, where three women in their early twenties sit in a field in rural Essex. With so little going on in their lives, the girls are scandalised by the goss Jane (Liv Hill) has heard from London: that King Henry VIII has had his second wife Anne Boleyn arrested. The practical Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) wonders aloud if Henry...

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

This review is from Southwark Playhouse in October 2025. Hot Mess returns for a summer 2026 run at The Other Palace While the millennia-old union between planet Earth and humanity might not be the first coupling that springs to mind when you think of unhealthy relationships, there’s no denying it is pretty toxic. The Earth gives! Humanity takes! The Earth had boundaries, and humanity violated ‘em – first digging up the ground to mine for coal and drill for oil, then jetting into space with a wandering eye, pushing the atmosphere to its limits in a bid to see what else was out there.   It’s safe to say we’ve put our hosting planet through the wringer physically, but what if we’ve left it feeling emotionally drained too? Could the climate crisis with its ruinous wild fires and unforgiving floods be a scorned Earth’s way of telling humanity to do one? It’s a theory! Or at least, it’s the premise of this pop musical romcom from Ellie Coote (book) and Jack Godfrey’s (music and lyrics), the duo who scored a hit last year with 42 Balloons. Earth and Humanity (aka Hu) are personified as a couple and under this guise, their entire, increasingly troubling partnership is explored. Over the course of one breathless hour of back-to-back songs, the big breakthroughs of our species are reframed as our rocking what could have been a peaceful, happy relationship.  It’s a kooky concept, but this two-hander holds up surprisingly well in a production which Coote also directs, largely thanks...

This review is from February 2026. Arcadia transfers to the West End in June 2026 with casting TBC. Arcadia is just another play you can stage in the same way that the sun is just another thing floating in the sky. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece is a work of burning, ravenous intelligence, and while almost universally acknowledged as his best work, I get why it’s not staged very often.  I think part of the reason is that the late, great Stoppard probably gatekeepered it from half-baked revivals. But it does definitely involve a lot of people talking about maths, and as much as anything else you really need to be able to pull together a cast who can make discussions about the statistical implications of a country estate’s 200 year-old gamekeeping logs really sing. It’s obviously not a play about gamekeeping logs. It’s a play about the unpredictability of humanity, how we’re defined by our transience, our sex drives, and our desire to understand. Carrie Cracknell’s revival is not an attempt to radically reconfigure Arcadia and I doubt anyone would be so foolish as to try – it’s an incredibly specific play. She and her team - notably designer Alex Eales - have however leaned nicely into the Old Vic’s current in-the-round configuration. A bit of furniture aside, they've forgone any attempt to make it look like the country estate on which the play is set, which we visit in the early 19th century and again in the present. Instead we’ve got a revolving circular stage and lights...

I suppose the first thing to say about Beetlejuice the Musical is that it’s not necessarily one for fans of the Tim Burton film. Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. A lazy criticism levelled at screen-to-stage adaptations is that they’re just works of formulaic transposition. But you only have to look at The Lion King – aka the highest-grossing musical in history – to see that’s blatantly not always the case. Aussie singer-songwriter Eddie Perfect’s all-singing take on the 1988 Burton classic is very definitely a retelling, taking most of the core elements of the supernatural comedy and positioning them together in a very different, very ’20s musical theatre way. And for the sizeable number of audience members who turn up to the Prince Edward Theatre in fancy dress, that is enough. Alex Timbers’ production was a big Broadway hit and has a cast recording that has clearly begat legions of London fans. Many of them, I’m sure, regard the musical and its songs as the key text and have never even seen the film. Alas, I am cursed with such knowledge, and despite my desire to be fair about the myriad alterations I can only really write this review from the POV of ‘grumpy old man who didn’t like how they changed things’. To put it another way, I loved Burton’s surreal vision of a preposterously bureaucratic afterlife, and was dismayed that the whole concept is here reduced to a virtual Easter egg. As much as anything, it just feels a bit unambitious not to tackle it. Ditto the...

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...

A stroll through Tracey Emin: A Second Life is an evocative experience. Positioned as a 40-year retrospective through the pioneering artist’s vast and varied repertoire, the show lays bare Emin’s life through her distinct and often unsettling art, from career highs – such as the iconic, Turner Prize-nominated ‘My Bed’, which is every bit as shocking and moving today as it was in 1998 – to stark personal lows in work depicting her experiences with sexual violence, abortion and recent life-threatening illness. As you can imagine, with such subject matter, it is not always a comfortable experience for the artist and the viewer alike. However, Emin’s flair for dark comedy adds moments of levity throughout. The second room of the exhibition features a large-scale projection of a work on video entitled ‘Why I Never Became A Dancer’. It begins with the artist recalling an incident in her youth when she entered a local dance competition only to run off stage mid-performance when a group of men with whom she’d previously had sexual encounters chanted ‘slag’ at her until she could no longer even hear the music. The film ends with a sequence of Emin dancing, totally uninhibited, to the disco classic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ by Sylvester, and the work is dedicated to each of her aggressors, calling them out by name. It is the perfect encapsulation of both Emin’s defiant approach to life and her ability to turn traumatic experiences into mesmerising art. Longform video is an...

This renowned annual photography exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum for its 61st edition, showcasing the very best entries of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. On display are images of the most extraordinary species on the planet captured by professional and amateur photographers. This year’s entries are TBA right now, but the winners are reliably spectacular – pictured is last year’s champion Shane Gross, whose mesmirising underwater shot of western toad tadpoles involved snorkelled for hours in a lake on Vancouver Island, making sure not to disturb fine layers of silt and algae at the bottom. Don’t miss what is always a highlight in the NHM’s calendar.

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

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

The Wellcome Collection’s big spring exhibition is a deep dive into perceptions of ageing. Expect the Euston Road institution’s typical blend of art, science and pop culture in the 120+ artworks and objects on display, which range from16th century woodcuts made by German printmaker Sebald Beham to Deborah Roberts’ contemporary collages exploring Black childhood. There’ll also be a spotlight on the Wellcome Trust-funded health research project Age of Wonder – one of the largest studies of adoloscence in the world – and an exploration of how societies can adapt to improve everyone’s experience of ageing.

Three emerging US artists – Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory – explore ideas of class, inheritance and assumed values, framed by their experiences of coming of age in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Through different mediums – moving image, photography and painting and assemblage – each artist examines what it means to enter adulthood in an era of financial collapse, incorporating themes of wealth inequity, art as an asset class, and what commodity culture looks like today.   

Donald Locke shows don’t come around often. But like proverbial buses, you wait for ages, and then three arrive at once, in the form of this touring exhibition moving from Birmingham to Bristol and now Camden Art Centre in London.  It’s not the first time the late Guyanese-British artist has shown here, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. Back in 1970, Locke exhibited ceramics under the pseudonym Issorosano Ite. He arrived in the UK from Guyana in his mid-twenties to study ceramics in Bath and Edinburgh, even though painting was his initial obsession. ‘With the arrogance of youth, I was going to be the greatest painter in the world,’ he said of his early ambition. Well, he did both, yet what he made doesn’t sit neatly within a single camp. Rather, his practices – spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics – would morph into one another. While the forms may appear a little abstract, the thinking behind them is not Take ‘Trophies of Empire’ (1972–74), one of his most iconic works and included in Resistant Forms. An open cabinet of 27 pigeonholes houses dark, cylindrical ceramic forms (bullets, we come to understand) cradled within trophy cups, spurs, and leather cuffs, sourced by Locke from Portobello Market. It’s not the last you’ll see of them. Look at the large, wild, black paintings next door, made a decade or two later while he was living in Phoenix and Atlanta. You’ll spot Queen Victoria, the Warhol-like revolver—now look again: those ‘trophies’ reappear...

Portraits are tricky things: can you ever really sift the individual from the image? And it gets even harder when the subject is one of the most recognisable faces of all time – a woman who was seemingly born to appear on camera. Since she died in 1962 – aged just 36, and already perhaps the most famous person on the planet – Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself. Marking what would have been her 100th birthday, the National Portrait Gallery grapples with that iconic status in a show that’s both beautiful and troubling. ‘Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait’ sets out its stall early, emphasising Monroe’s agency in shaping her image: not an artist’s muse, but an active collaborator. Exploited by Hollywood, coerced and abused by her husbands, at least Monroe could claw back some control over the way she was portrayed. She spent hours poring over contact sheets, and forbade some images from being published. (In one photo here, an out-take print from her very last photoshoot, the actor has scratched out her face with a hairpin.) Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself Deliberately light on biography, the show goes big on the star’s work with individual photographers: big names like Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, but also friends (Milton H Greene, Eve Arnold), lovers (André de Dienes) and collaborators...