The 12 best gallery shows in London in October 2026

The largest gallery show in London this autumn: about two hundred sculptures, paintings, photographs, assemblages and works on paper by Gabriel Orozco, new and old, some never shown in the UK, selected by the art historian Briony Fer, who curated his survey at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City last year. Her thread is the circle, which Orozco has used since the early 1990s to organize time and space, from the game boards and orbiting forms of his paintings to La DS (Cornaline), a Citroën cut lengthways and narrowed, The Weight of the Sun, Visible Labor and a chess set he made in Kyoto last year.

It marks twenty years since his first exhibition with White Cube, at Mason’s Yard in 2006. Through November 8 in the Bermondsey warehouse, open on Sundays.

More than fifty paintings and works on paper by René Magritte, lent by museums and collectors and organized with the Fondation Magritte: the bowler hats, the pipe that is not a pipe, the night streets under daylight skies. Around them hang works by more than forty artists who have learned from him, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, George Condo, Robert Gober, Sarah Lucas, David Hammons, Mona Hatoum, Dana Schutz and Vija Celmins among them, some made for the occasion.

It opens ninety years after the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, where Magritte was first shown in London. Free, at Grosvenor Hill in Mayfair, through December 12.

The first showing anywhere of the twelfth film in William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection, the series of charcoal animations he began in Johannesburg in 1989, each made by drawing, erasing and redrawing a few sheets of paper and filming every change. A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction) took nine months in his studio, and its title is a West African proverb. The drawings it was filmed from are shown as if on the studio wall, beside six figure sculptures made with the costume designer Greta Goiris.

Kentridge calls it a return to basics, charcoal and film, after years of opera. A Pepper’s Ghost installation from his production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at Glyndebourne this summer is here too. On Cork Street through November 7.

In 1965 and 1966, at twenty-seven, Georg Baselitz painted a series of large, ragged figures, partisans, shepherds and painters in torn uniforms standing in burnt land, at a moment when Pop, Minimalism and abstraction made painting the human figure look out of date. The Heroes, about sixty paintings in all, are the works that made his name, and this is the first exhibition in the UK given to them alone, with loans from Tate, the Berlinische Galerie, the Museum Frieder Burda and the artist’s family: Ein moderner Maler, Mit roter Fahne and Der Halbierte among them.

The catalogue has an essay by Max Hollein of the Metropolitan Museum. At Ely House on Dover Street from October 13 to December 18.

The first showing of Cindy Sherman’s new series, Fabric Matrons. As ever she is her own model, here swathed and draped in fabric, some of it and the jewelry from Chanel’s archives, as she was in her Chanel landscapes of 2010–12; the subject is identity as something built up, layer on layer, over a lifetime, and the anxiety of being looked at.

Hauser & Wirth’s other gallery on Savile Row opens the same evening with Lorna Simpson’s Previous & Ongoing, her first show in the UK in eight years: new paintings and collages made from news photographs, many from the archive of Ebony magazine. Both from October 13 to December 23; the gallery is closed until October 10.

Ten new oil paintings, all made this year, by the painter who has spent three decades turning the crowded figure painting into something funny, tender and political at once. Some run across several canvases, and the titles say what is in them: Orgy, Togetherers, The Waiter, Me and G under the J, and a portrait of her cat, Edie.

Edie turns up again in Stack, Eisenman’s bronze, aluminum and oak sculpture more than eight meters tall in the Royal Academy’s courtyard, a self-portrait as a pile of things carried, with Phyllida Barlow wearing a vase on her head. The paintings are on Savile Row until November 21, the sculpture on Piccadilly until February 5.

Glenn Ligon’s sixth exhibition with Thomas Dane sets new paintings and works on paper against older ones, so that each prompts or reworks another. The America paintings of this year are made from the templates for his neon works of the word; Black Panther Coloring Book #2 draws in oil stick over drawings Akinsanya Kambon made for the Panthers in 1968; Redacted #15 builds a surface out of the typed Xs with which a text by James Baldwin was struck out. The subject, as in his work since the 1980s, is what is erased from the record, and who.

From October 13 to December 19 at 11 Duke Street, St James’s. At number 3, Paul Pfeiffer shows Pasodoble, a new video filmed on a bull-breeding farm near Seville and in a bullring in Bilbao.

Louis Fratino’s first show in London and his first with David Zwirner, who began to represent him this year. The New York painter paints men at home, in bed, at the table, in the sauna, from life and memory, and sets them in deliberate collision with older painting: one canvas of this year is after Corot, and the largest, Jasmine, is three meters wide.

Upstairs, in Suchness, the Japanese painter Daichi Takagi has his first UK show: stones, leaves and tree trunks, rain and night skies emerging from black grounds. Both on Grafton Street through October 31.

Ha Chong-Hyun, born in 1935, is one of the leading painters of Dansaekhwa, the Korean monochrome painting of the 1970s, and this is his first exhibition with Lisson and his first in London since 2020: six decades, from geometric works of the late 1960s to the Conjunction paintings he began in the early 1970s, made by pushing thick oil paint through the back of coarse hemp cloth so that it oozes out on the front, and the Post-Conjunction works since. His retrospective opened at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco this autumn.

Lisson’s other building, on Lisson Street, has Carmen Herrera’s last decade, the paintings, drawings and sculpture she made before her death at 106. Both through November 7; a talk on Ha is at Bell Street on October 13 at 11 am, by reservation.

Colin Self was born in Norwich in 1941, during the bombing, and in the 1960s he was the Pop artist who painted the bomb: Leopardskin Nuclear Bomber No. 2 and Guard Dog on a Missile Base No. 1, both now in Tate’s collection, are here, with hot dogs, fallout shelters and the Cold War’s other furniture. This retrospective, curated by the writer Ian Collins, covers seven decades on two floors, and is his first in London since the ICA’s in 1986.

Its center is 365: A journey in that direction, 372 small works made since 2000 and shown together for the first time. In Golden Square, Soho, through November 7; open Monday to Saturday in Frieze week.

The first of these to close, on October 17. Three photographers of 1980s London, making work in the years of the AIDS crisis and of Section 28, the 1988 law that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality: Sunil Gupta’s “Pretended” Family Relationships, which takes its title from the law, Tessa Boffin’s Angelic Rebels: Lesbians and Safer Sex, of 1989, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s staged portraits of the Black male body.

All three used photography, publishing and the founding of institutions as a form of activism. At Hales, on Bethnal Green Road in Shoreditch, while Gupta’s retrospective is at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.