An Art Lover’s Guide to London’s Best Art Exhibitions 2026

The heatwave is making life in London unbearable. The sun is unrelenting, and the air conditioning inadequate. And still, London is putting on an extraordinary show for art lovers this summer. David Hockney’s panorama of the seasons, Schiaparelli’s surrealist couture, Tate Modern’s investigation of Frida Kahlo’s iconic status, Anish Kapoor’s engulfing voids and Kulpreet Singh’s scorched-field reckoning offer five different ways of seeing and feeling. Hockney imparts joy; Kahlo turns pain into portraiture; Kapoor draws you inward; Singh leaves you agitated and outraged; and Schiaparelli offers wit, fantasy, and the exhilaration of the surreal.

David Hockney

At Serpentine North, David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting brings his 90-metre panorama to London for the first time, with five portraits and five still lifes. Hockney died in June, aged 88, and the exhibition has inevitably become an accidental farewell.

Slowly poached by the heat outside, you step into the darkened gallery and enter Hockney’s world of four seasons. It’s like being inside Peppa Pig’s world, and I mean that in a good way. Every season is turned up: the frosty trees, the early shoots of spring, the bright reds and yellows that move into summer, thick and green. Autumn strips the trees before winter lays claim once again.

The iPad images, about 100 of them, have been blown up, printed, and backlit. But it is not simple. Hockney’s world is beautiful because he looks at it with everything he has. A tree is never just a tree; it has its own personality, as do the stacks of hay and grass. The adjoining portraits and still lifes bring us closer to his private world, but it is the great loop of seasons you return to before leaving in better spirits than you walked in.

Exhibition ends 23 August 2026

Frida Kahlo

The Making of an Icon at Tate Modern examines how her art, marriage, suffering, sexuality, and individualism combined to create the cultural phenomenon she is today. Works by artists influenced by Kahlo far outnumber her own, but 30 works, 16 from private collections, are hardly negligible. I have seen fewer at the V&A’s Making Her Self Up and at Casa Azul in Mexico City.

The early rooms are the strongest, with paintings, drawings, photographs, Tehuana dresses, a painted plaster corset, and works by Diego Rivera. It is hard to separate Frida’s art from her trauma; you catch glimpses of the major events of her life through her work. Her relationship with Rivera is captured in a brief film shot at Casa Azul, their tenderness unmistakable in every touch.

Look out for The Accident; the young Kahlo of Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress; Dos Mujeres; and the magnificent Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. Most fascinating is the eighteenth-century Peres Maldonado Ex-voto, whose unsparing depiction of a woman undergoing breast surgery reveals a source for Kahlo’s visual language. In the later rooms, however, the artist recedes and Frida the icon takes over, with far too much space given to Fridamania.

Exhibition ends 3 January 2027

Elsa Schiaparelli

Fashion Becomes Art at the V&A: it becomes clear that Elsa Schiaparelli wasn’t only a designer but an artist whose medium was fashion. The exhibition follows her from 1920s Paris to the house’s blockbuster revival under Daniel Roseberry.

As a child, Elsa planted flower seeds in her nose and mouth, hoping to become beautiful. That eccentricity carried into her designs, but they were never just a trick, a joke, or a wink. Her clothes were beautiful, powerful, dramatic, and deeply feminine. She was an active participant in Surrealism: Dalí’s Lobster Telephone, followed by her lobster dress, worn by Wallis Simpson. Picasso was so struck by Schiaparelli’s designs on Nusch Éluard that he painted her immediately in 1937.

Today, Daniel Roseberry not only carries her legacy forward but also elevates it. His work has extraordinary craft, theatricality and beauty, proving that Schiaparelli’s legacy lies not only in Surrealism but in her conviction that fashion should delight and astonish. Look out for the Schiaparelli-Cocteau evening coat, the Skeleton Dress, Dua Lipa’s skeleton dress, the keyhole motif gown and Scorpion Sister.

Exhibition ends 8 November 2026

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor’s landmark exhibition at Hayward is like falling down a black hole along the Milky Way. You begin beneath All of Nothing, a colossal red PVC inflatable that almost fills the entrance gallery, edging around it, diminished by its mass.

The next room contains Kapoor’s void works. Some are actual cavities; others are three-dimensional forms coated in Vantablack, a nanoparticle that absorbs almost all visible light and makes solid objects appear flat. You circle them, lean forward, and look from different angles, trying to work out where sculpture ends and that infinite darkness begins. Kapoor calls these works investigations into “the space of the object”; elsewhere, he has observed that “perhaps the darkest black is the black we carry within ourselves”.

On the terraces, polished-steel sculptures stretch, shrink, and invert the skyline and the viewer. The most staggering work, however, is Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto, a vast red-and-black mountain suspended upside down from the ceiling. It feels geological, mystical, and threatening. Upstairs, Ha Makom spreads across the gallery as a deep-crimson landscape, powdery from a distance like gulal or mountains of sindoor, with a dark opening resembling a cave, tomb or doorway. Its Hebrew title means “the place” and is also used as a name for God. There is a sense of eternity in that room, and standing in front of that work is a meditative experience.

The exhibition ends with paintings and sculptures that make you flinch. Resembling exposed flesh, organs and entrails encased inside transparent butcher bags, they’re intentionally macabre and confront our familiarity with violence. Kapoor begins with the cosmic void and ends inside the body, leaving you caught between what the eye sees and what the mind can bear.

Exhibition ends 18 October 2026

Kulpreet Singh

Running alongside Kapoor’s cosmic spectacle at the Hayward is Kulpreet Singh’s quieter but more politically urgent Indelible Black Marks about crop burning. In an eight-minute film, Singh and fellow farmers race through burning fields in Punjab, dragging white canvases that absorb flame, soot and stubble ash. The scorched paintings are not representations of damaged land but its actual residue.

Against the sounds of machinery, traffic, sirens, and explosions, Singh links stubble burning to the Green Revolution, monoculture, and an agricultural system that leaves farmers little time or money to clear their fields differently. The black marks become evidence and accusation: scars made by fire, policy, greed, and neglect.

Exhibition ends 2 August 2026