The 12 best art galleries in London

Larry Gagosian, who opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980, came to London in 2000, to Heddon Street, and in 2004 opened a vast hall on Britannia Street, near King’s Cross, with a Cy Twombly show; for nearly twenty years its museum-scale exhibitions of Richard Serra, Jeff Koons and Rachel Whiteread set the standard for the city, until it closed in 2023. Today Gagosian has two galleries in Mayfair: the largest, on Grosvenor Hill, opened in 2015 inside a Brutalist office building converted by Caruso St John, and a smaller one on Davies Street. The London artists on its list include Damien Hirst, Jenny Saville, Glenn Brown, Michael Craig-Martin, Edmund de Waal and Jadé Fadojutimi, with the estates of Francis Bacon and Howard Hodgkin.

Grosvenor Hill has This Is Still Not a Pipe through December 12: more than fifty works by Magritte, organized with the Fondation Magritte, set against more than forty artists who came after him. On Davies Street the American sculptor Cady Noland, who shows rarely, opens on October 12.

Iwan and Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser founded the gallery in Zurich in 1992. It came to London in 2003, to a former bank on Piccadilly designed by Edwin Lutyens, and in 2010 moved to 23 Savile Row, where Annabelle Selldorf made two large galleries, North and South, out of the ground floor among the tailors; the first show was Louise Bourgeois’s fabric works. Its English farm and gallery in Somerset, at Bruton, opened in 2014. The list is long and heavy with estates: Louise Bourgeois, Phyllida Barlow and Henry Moore, with Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, Mark Bradford, Martin Creed, Rashid Johnson, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist, Avery Singer, Henry Taylor and Thomas J Price.

The gallery is closed until October 10 and opens two shows on October 13 for Frieze week: Cindy Sherman’s new photographs, Fabric Matrons, and Lorna Simpson’s first show in the UK in eight years. Both run to December 23.

Jay Jopling opened White Cube in 1993 in a small square room on Duke Street, St James’s, with a rule that no artist would be shown there twice; seventy-five artists had their turn before it closed in 2001. It gave early solo shows to Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst and was, with Hoxton Square from 2000, the gallery of the Young British Artists. Mason’s Yard, in St James’s, followed in 2006, where Christian Marclay’s The Clock was first shown, and in 2011 the Bermondsey gallery, a 1970s warehouse south of the river converted into some 5,400 square meters, then the largest commercial gallery in Europe. The list now reaches far beyond the YBAs: Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Theaster Gates, Julie Mehretu, Doris Salcedo, Christian Marclay, Danh Vo, Jeff Wall, Michael Armitage and Cerith Wyn Evans.

Bermondsey, open on Sundays too, has a survey of Gabriel Orozco, about two hundred works chosen by the art historian Briony Fer, through November 8. At Mason’s Yard, Firenze Lai’s first UK show opens on October 13.

David Zwirner opened in SoHo, New York, in 1993, and London was his first gallery in Europe: an eighteenth-century townhouse on Grafton Street, in Mayfair, renovated by Annabelle Selldorf, with nearly a thousand square meters over five floors, which opened in 2012 with Luc Tuymans. The British painters on the list give it a strong London accent, Bridget Riley and Rose Wylie, alongside Marlene Dumas, Gerhard Richter, Kerry James Marshall, Oscar Murillo, Lisa Yuskavage, Michaël Borremans, Neo Rauch and the estates of Josef Albers and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Two first London shows run to October 31: Louis Fratino’s Prose, new paintings by the New York painter, who joined the gallery this year, and, upstairs, Daichi Takagi’s Suchness. Prints from the Copenhagen workshop BORCH Editions follow on November 5.

Nicholas Logsdail opened Lisson Gallery on Bell Street, in Marylebone, in April 1967, when he was a student, and it has stayed in the same few streets ever since, in buildings designed by the architect Tony Fretton. Lisson gave Richard Long, Art & Language and Anish Kapoor their first shows, brought Minimal and Conceptual art, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, to London early, and in the 1980s was the home of New British Sculpture: Kapoor, Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon. Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramović, John Akomfrah, Ryan Gander, Shirazeh Houshiary, Lee Ufan, Otobong Nkanga, Laure Prouvost and Hiroshi Sugimoto are on its list now, and it has galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai.

At 27 Bell Street, Ha Chong-Hyun, one of the leading Korean painters of Dansaekhwa, has his first show with the gallery through November 7; at 67 Lisson Street, Carmen Herrera’s work from the last decade of her life runs to the same day.

Victoria Miro opened in 1985 in a small room on Cork Street and in 2000 moved to Islington, to a former Victorian furniture factory on Wharf Road; a second gallery was added beside it in 2006, the two joined by a garden on the water of the Regent’s Canal. It is the London gallery of Yayoi Kusama, whose shows here draw queues down the street, and of two Turner Prize winners, Chris Ofili, whose The Upper Room was first shown here, and Grayson Perry, with Paula Rego, Isaac Julien, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Do Ho Suh, Sarah Sze, Wangechi Mutu, Doug Aitken, Celia Paul and Chantal Joffe, and the estates of Alice Neel and Milton Avery.

Hernan Bas’s new paintings of shop assistants and stallholders, TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen), run to November 14, and Khalif Tahir Thompson’s first show with the gallery opens on October 8.

Thaddaeus Ropac opened in Salzburg in 1983 and came to London in 2017, to Ely House on Dover Street, built in 1772 by Sir Robert Taylor as the London house of the Bishops of Ely and restored by Annabelle Selldorf, five floors in all. It opened with Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Gilbert & George and Joseph Beuys, and that core is still its strength: Baselitz, Kiefer, Gilbert & George, Imi Knoebel and Wolfgang Laib, with Alex Katz, Ron Mueck, Erwin Wurm, Mandy El-Sayegh, Megan Rooney, Oliver Beer and the Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe foundations. Its other galleries are in Paris, Salzburg, Milan and Seoul.

The gallery is between shows until October 13, when it opens Baselitz’s The Heroes 1965–66, the first exhibition in the UK of the series that made his name, with loans from Tate and German museums. Through December 18.

Arne Glimcher founded Pace in Boston in 1960 and moved it to New York three years later. In London it began in 2011 on Lexington Street, spent nine years in the Royal Academy’s building on Burlington Gardens, and since 2021 has been on Hanover Square, in the former Blain|Southern gallery. The list is American and British modern art at its most established, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Barbara Hepworth and David Hockney, with James Turrell, Kiki Smith, Yoshitomo Nara, Adrian Ghenie, Alicja Kwade, Loie Hollowell, Torkwase Dyson, Maya Lin and Sam Gilliam, and younger British painters, Nigel Cooke, Pam Evelyn and William Monk.

Kylie Manning’s first London show, The Mudlarkers, opens on October 13, paintings with Thames silt and London clay worked into the pigment. Note the hours: Monday to Thursday, and Friday until 4, closed at the weekend.

Sadie Coles opened in April 1997 on Heddon Street with a show of John Currin, followed by Sarah Lucas, who has been with her ever since, and she gave Elizabeth Peyton, Urs Fischer and Laura Owens early London shows. Of the galleries that grew up with the YBAs it is the one that has stayed most like an artist’s gallery. It has three spaces: a former nightclub on Kingly Street, in Soho, since 2013; a room on Bury Street, in St James’s, since 2021; and, since a year ago, a six-story eighteenth-century townhouse at 17 Savile Row that was once the Burlington Fine Arts Club. Currin, Lucas, Fischer and Owens are still on the list, with Matthew Barney, Rudolf Stingel, Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon, Ugo Rondinone, Helen Marten, Arthur Jafa, Martine Syms, Monster Chetwynd, Andrea Zittel and Jordan Wolfson.

Savile Row has ten new paintings by Nicole Eisenman through November 21, while her sculpture Stack stands in the Royal Academy’s courtyard. Kingly Street has two new films by Martine Syms and Bury Street Catherine Murphy’s paintings, both to November 7.

Thomas Dane opened in April 2004 at 11 Duke Street, St James’s, with Steve McQueen, followed by Paul Pfeiffer’s first solo show in the UK, and added a second space at number 3 in 2011 and a gallery in Naples in 2018. It is a small list, kept close, of artists with museum careers: McQueen, Hurvin Anderson, Cecily Brown, Lynda Benglis, Anya Gallaccio, Michael Landy, Magdalene Odundo, Dana Schutz, Salman Toor, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, Anthea Hamilton, Caragh Thuring and Igshaan Adams, with the estate of Luigi Ghirri.

Both spaces are between shows until October 13, when they open with Glenn Ligon’s Prompts, his sixth show with the gallery, at number 11, and Paul Pfeiffer’s new video, Pasodoble, at number 3. Both run to December 19.

Maureen Paley was the first of the East End galleries. She opened Interim Art in April 1984 in her terraced house on Beck Road, in Hackney, a decade before the rest of the London art world moved east; in 1999 she moved to Herald Street, in Bethnal Green, and in 2004 gave the gallery her own name. Three of her artists have won the Turner Prize: Gillian Wearing in 1997, Wolfgang Tillmans in 2000 and Lawrence Abu Hamdan in 2019. Rebecca Warren, Jane and Louise Wilson, Liam Gillick, Hannah Starkey, James Welling, Michael Krebber, Kaye Donachie and Oscar Tuazon are with her too, with the estate of Peter Hujar. The gallery is now in two places, a space on Three Colts Lane and, since a year ago, Tillmans’s former studio at 4 Herald Street.

Rebecca Warren opens There Will Be Another You across both on October 9, new sculpture in bronze and clay, through December 12. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday, up a flight of stairs: ring the bell.

Jane Hamlyn opened Frith Street Gallery in 1989 in a Georgian townhouse at 60 Frith Street, off Soho Square, at first to show drawings and works on paper, and in 2007 opened a purpose-built gallery on Golden Square, a few streets west. Its artists were Turner Prize nominees four years running, Callum Innes in 1995, Craigie Horsfield in 1996, Cornelia Parker in 1997 and Tacita Dean in 1998, and the list is still one of the most thoughtful in London: Dean, Parker, Marlene Dumas, Thomas Schütte, Fiona Banner, Dayanita Singh, Fiona Tan, Polly Apfelbaum, Juan Uslé, Dorothy Cross, Anna Barriball, Shilpa Gupta and Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, with the estate of Nancy Spero.

Colin Self’s Unseen, his first London retrospective since 1986, fills both floors through November 7, from the Pop paintings of nuclear bombers to 372 small works made since 2000. In Frieze week the gallery is open Monday to Saturday.