11pm, 2026
Cece Philips
Public Gallery
Mountain dog, 2026
Joana Galego
Soho Revue
October is when London’s art world turns the volume all the way up. While Frieze London and Frieze Masters take over Regent’s Park, PAD London draws the more design-inclined to Berkeley Square, and suddenly there are more exhibitions, openings, and events than anyone could hope to get around. London’s galleries know they have an audience and plan their calendars accordingly, opening some of their biggest exhibitions of the year while everyone is in town.
This year, there is plenty to pull you away from the fair tents. Goodman Gallery hosts the global premiere of a new stop-motion film by William Kentridge, one of South Africa’s most celebrated living artists, while Nicola Turner sends a mass of wool and horsehair up the Georgian façade of Annely Juda Fine Art. Soho Revue welcomes Portuguese painter Joana Galego back to Greek Street. And across town in East London, NEVEN presents sculptures made from discarded shoes by Adam Lewis Jacob.
There’s a lot going on. So here, Artsy highlights 10 gallery exhibitions to catch across London during Frieze week 2026.
William Kentridge
“A Nicely Built City”
Goodman Gallery
Through Nov.7
A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction), 2026
William Kentridge
Goodman Gallery
William Kentridge could just be South Africa’s greatest living artist. Back in 1993, Goodman Gallery gave his debut stop-motion animation a platform in his first exhibition with the Johannesburg-based gallery. That film became the first in Drawings for Projection (1989–present), his series of stop-motion films. More than 30 years on, Kentridge is now on film number 12, with A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction) (2026), premiering at Goodman’s London space. Across the series, Kentridge has traced the changing face of Johannesburg, and South Africa more broadly, from the final years of apartheid through the decades that followed.
Made over nine months in Kentridge’s Johannesburg studio, the new film begins with the 2023 methane explosion beneath Bree Street, which tore open a section of the city center. Kentridge’s stop-motion process sees charcoal drawings repeatedly photographed, erased, and redrawn, leaving ghostly traces of earlier images as Johannesburg shifts before our eyes. The film is joined by new sculptures, and editioned works on paper, alongside workshop footage from Kentridge’s debut at opera house Glyndebourne earlier this year, where he directed a production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo.
Lucy Dodd
“The good, the true and the beautiful”
Sprüth Magers
Through Oct.24
Moss moon, 2026
Lucy Dodd
Sprüth Magers
New York–born artist Lucy Dodd makes large abstract paintings built from loose washes, stains, splashes, and pools of color, often using unconventional pigments in place of traditional paint. Her latest body of work was born out of her recent move from upstate New York to Scotland’s Moray Coast, where she began drawing the materials of her new surroundings directly into the paintings. For her exhibition at Sprüth Magers, for example, she’s used burnt peat washed down the Findhorn River after the 2025 Dava Moor wildfires. Other materials include local herbs, spirulina algae, cochineal made from crushed insects, copper ink, and powdered meteorite.
Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness and moon, provides a starting point for these new paintings, with Dodd connecting her to both her grandmother Diana and Diana, Princess of Wales. The goddess’s associations with the moon and the hunt carry into the works themselves: Dodd presents paintings in rounded and teardrop forms, which variously recall a lunar disc, a huntress’s target, an eye or a breast.
Khalif Tahir Thompson
“Send in the Clowns”
Victoria Miro
Through Nov.7
Arch Diner, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro
Brooklyn-born Khalif Tahir Thompson graduated from Yale with an MFA in painting and printmaking in 2024. Two years later, he makes his London solo debut with “Send in the Clowns” at Victoria Miro. Thompson’s large, densely worked paintings place figures in domestic and neighborhood scenes, layering earthy ochers, greens, and burgundies with patterned clothing and interiors, handmade paper and fabric, letters, and numbers.
The new works look back to the Black American aesthetics of the early 2000s and Thompson’s own Brooklyn childhood. Many begin with photographs from albums belonging to his grandmother Betty, which spent 16 years in storage after her death. Siblings and relatives appear alongside people Thompson cannot identify, though he doesn’t attempt to recreate the photographs exactly. He borrows people, poses, and details, then builds his own scenes around them. The characters that we see form what Thompson calls an “imagined experience.”
Nicola Turner
“I Tear Secrets From Your Yielding Flesh”
Annely Juda Fine Art
Through Nov.7
Transitional Object, 2026
Nicola Turner
Annely Juda Fine Art
Echo in the Memory, 2026
Nicola Turner
Annely Juda Fine Art
If you’ve been around Hanover Square recently, you may have noticed something dark and hairy crawling up and around the entrance of Annely Juda Fine Art. It belongs to U.K.-based artist Nicola Turner, whose first solo exhibition with the gallery spills from ground floor, through the entrance, and onto its Georgian façade in a mass of wool and horsehair.
Turner’s installations often respond to the histories of their surroundings, and here she has plenty to work with. The building once housed the Royal College of Chemistry, where William Henry Perkin discovered the first synthetic purple dye, and later the couturier Reville & Rossiter, which made royal gowns and writer Vita Sackville-West’s wedding dress. Turner picks up these histories by including dressmaking scissors, scientific instruments, and salvaged furniture, tangled among hand-sewn forms made from wool and horsehair reclaimed from old mattresses. Moving through the building like a wedding or funeral procession, the installation references secrecy, female shame, and the inherent memory of materials.
William Crozier
“Dance of the Living 1961-1974”
Flowers
Oct.14–Nov.14
Untitled (Figure), 1961
William Crozier
Flowers
Portumna, 1962
William Crozier
Flowers
Glasgow-born artist William Crozier emerged in London in the late 1950s with dark, unsettling landscapes, but by the following decade the human figure had taken over. Influenced by the existentialist ideas he encountered in Paris and his memories of World War II newsreels, Crozier began painting isolated figures and skeletons in landscapes that seem to share their anxiety.
This exhibition focuses on that pivotal period, bringing together paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s, including three early skeletal portraits and two large-scale drawings never previously exhibited. Crozier drew on medieval danses macabres and the prints of Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, while refusing to locate his landscapes in any particular place. Figures appear engulfed by streaks of vivid color, their surroundings as agitated as they are. By 1975, Crozier felt he had exhausted the subject and abandoned the figure altogether, returning to landscapes in which the viewer supplied the human presence.
Edmond Brooks-Beckman
“Persistent Undoing”
Cob
Oct.10–Nov.14
Estranged Passions, 2026
Edmond Brooks-Beckman
Cob
Edmond Brooks-Beckman’s paintings look as though they have been through a lot. Thick passages of oil paint are scored, gouged, and partially stripped back, revealing glimpses of what was there before. Born in London in 1987, Brooks-Beckman completed his MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023 and has developed a practice in which revising and reworking a painting is central to how it is made.
For “Persistent Undoing” at Cob, on Bloomsbury’s Lamb’s Conduit Street, Brooks-Beckman uses this process to explore how family histories and cultural memories are passed down, altered, or lost over time. Earlier layers remain buried within the paintings, while fragments of letters and symbols resurface without necessarily being legible. Brooks-Beckman describes himself as interested in “manipulation after the first event,” piling marks on top of one another before scooping sections away or cutting around them. Scratches, half-covered words, and patches of earlier color remain visible across the finished paintings.
Joana Galego
“Different Ways of Saying”
Soho Revue
Through Oct.31
They could have thorns, 2026
Joana Galego
Soho Revue
Joana Galego’s first solo show at Soho Revue in 2023 caught Artsy’s attention, landing the Portuguese painter on our “Artists on Our Radar” that same year. Now she returns to the Greek Street gallery, known for championing emerging artists, with “Different Ways of Saying.” Born in Cascais, Portugal, in 1994, Galego studied painting at the University of Lisbon before moving to London, where she studied at the Royal Drawing School in 2017. She now lives and works in South London.
Galego’s paintings begin with a mixture of observation, photographs, imagination and her own experiences. Figures emerge through loose drawing, washes of color, and layered compositions, with some passages carefully described and others barely there. A child peers from behind a bunch of flowers; hands reach towards golden leaves; elsewhere, a couple cradles a newborn. These intimate scenes are typical of Galego’s recurring interests in memory, isolation, connection and the difficulties of communicating with one another.
Jim Amaral
“A Study of Five Decades”
LAMB
Through Nov. 28
Per-se Nº 014, 2001
Jim Amaral
LAMB
Kaleidoscope: Bottom-up Dream, 2015
Jim Amaral
LAMB
California-born artist Jim Amaral has lived in Bogotá since 1957, developing a surrealist practice spanning drawing, sculpture, collage and, for a period, painting. “A Study of Five Decades” at LAMB’s Mayfair gallery brings together works on paper from the 1960s to the 2010s, tracing his fascination with the body, dreams, desire, and the subconscious.
Hands sprout from ears, lips appear in palms, and human anatomy merges with plants in Amaral’s strange, precisely drawn world. Among the earliest works on show are black-and-white drawings from the 1960s, made as Amaral became immersed in Jungian psychoanalysis and began looking to dreams and the subconscious for imagery. His 1970s works “Love Letters,” meanwhile, have roots in early correspondence exchanged with artist Olga de Amaral, now his wife of nearly 70 years (wonderfully, their romance began while dancing the tango as students in Michigan). Alongside the exhibition, LAMB makes its Frieze Masters debut with a Spotlight devoted to Amaral’s “Invisible Flowers” (1979–80), a series of botanical drawings in which flowers bloom with human reproductive organs.
Adam Lewis Jacob
“Short Vamps for Long Wear”
NEVEN
Through Oct. 24
If you’re looking for an East London option during Frieze Week, head to NEVEN, a young gallery focused on emerging artists whose practices engage with contemporary culture and urban life. There, Glasgow-based artist and filmmaker Adam Lewis Jacob is showing “Short Vamps for Long Wear,” a new body of sculptures made from worn and discarded shoes. A Glasgow School of Art MFA graduate, Jacob works across sculpture, moving image, and publishing, often cutting up and repurposing found material.
Most of the shoes for this show were picked up cheaply in markets and charity shops. Jacob rips, twists, and turns them inside out, bringing linings, labels, and other hidden parts to the surface. Storage and transit boxes from the Scottish-Italian restaurant beneath his Glasgow studio are repurposed as displays for the sculptures. The show fits into a wider concern in Jacob’s practice with transformation, circulation, and repair, and with how objects can be altered and put to use again.
Cece Philips
“All the corners that are left”
Public Gallery
Through Oct. 18
Three women, 2026
Cece Philips
Public Gallery
Lacquered Landscape, 2026
Cece Philips
Public Gallery
London-based painter Cece Philips is interested in what a home can reveal about the person who lives there. For her first exhibition with Public Gallery, she treats the house as a kind of portrait, placing women, particularly women of color, at the center of its private spaces. Across 12 paintings, interiors shift between deep shadow and pools of artificial light, following the changing light of a day and often lingering in the twilight hours.
Philips graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2023, by which point she had already had solo exhibitions with Peres Projects in Berlin and Post Gallery in Zürich. She has since participated in group exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth and GRIMM. Philips has long been interested in who gets to occupy and move through different spaces, as Artsy noted of her work in 2023: “The social dynamics that shroud the very real dangers faced by women of color walking alone at night cease to exist in her fantastical narratives.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/HsowUke
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