1. Robert Ryman: The Real Thing
Barbican Art Gallery | 8 October 2026 – 28 February 2027
Perhaps my most anticipated exhibition of the autumn. More than 60 works spanning almost six decades provide a rare opportunity to reconsider an artist too easily described as a painter of white paintings.
Ryman’s real subjects are painting itself — surface, support, scale, edge, light and the relationship between an object and the wall on which it hangs. These are works that demand to be experienced in person.
Why see it: This is the first significant UK examination of Ryman’s work in more than 30 years — and precisely the kind of exhibition that can change the way you look at an artist you thought you understood.
2. Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads
Whitechapel Gallery | 7 October 2026 – 14 February 2027
Vicuña’s first major UK institutional exhibition spans six decades of painting, textiles, photography, film, installation, poetry and performance.
Her extraordinary quipu works draw upon the ancient Andean system of knotted cords, bringing together material, memory, indigenous knowledge and political history. Her international recognition has grown enormously, but the work retains an intimacy and poetry that resists easy categorisation.
Why see it: Vicuña is an artist whose art-historical importance has become increasingly apparent. This exhibition should further consolidate her position in Britain.
3. Amar Kanwar
Serpentine North | 23 September 2026 – 31 January 2027
One of the most compelling moving-image artists working today, Kanwar operates somewhere between documentary, cinema and visual essay.
The exhibition includes the premiere of the seven-screen installation The Charcoal Man. His work addresses political violence, displacement, colonial histories and the legacy of Partition, but with an unusual visual lyricism.
Why see it: Kanwar is a reminder that some of the most significant contemporary practices sit beyond conventional painting and sculpture. Give this exhibition time.
4. Monika Sosnowska
South London Gallery | 11 September – 22 November 2026
Sosnowska takes the language of modernist architecture and quite literally bends it out of shape. Steel beams, staircases and structural forms appear folded, distorted or collapsed.
Behind their immediate physical presence is a deeper examination of architecture, history and memory, informed by the artist’s experience of Poland’s transition from Communism.
Why see it: Few contemporary artists have explored the relationship between architecture and sculpture with quite the same intelligence.
5. Ana Mendieta
Tate Modern | until 17 January 2027
Mendieta’s career lasted barely fifteen years, yet her influence has been extraordinary. Moving between performance, photography, film and sculpture, her work repeatedly explored the relationship between the female body and landscape.
The familiar Silueta works remain extraordinarily affecting, but a substantial exhibition allows us to understand a practice that extended well beyond the handful of images through which she is often remembered.
Why see it: Questions of migration, belonging, identity and our relationship with the natural world make Mendieta’s work feel remarkably contemporary.
6. Yuko Mohri: In Concert
Barbican, The Curve | 1 October 2026 – 24 January 2027
Mohri creates kinetic installations using everyday objects and unstable forces including magnetism, humidity, gravity, air, water and electricity.
Her site-responsive installation for the Curve combines light, sound and kinetic sculpture, allowing chance and the surrounding environment to become part of the work itself.
Why see it: The Curve is at its best when artists respond to its unusual architecture, and Mohri’s practice seems particularly suited to it.
7. Renoir and Love
The National Gallery | 3 October 2026 – 31 January 2027
It would be easy for a contemporary-art audience to overlook Renoir this autumn. I wouldn’t.
This major exhibition focuses on the remarkably productive period between the mid-1860s and mid-1880s, presenting paintings of friendship, attraction, conversation and leisure against the rapidly changing social world of modern Paris.
At its heart is the Musée d’Orsay’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette of 1876.
Why see it: Major international loans of this quality are increasingly difficult to assemble. Sometimes the opportunity to stand in front of exceptional paintings is reason enough.
8. The 90s: Art and Fashion
Tate Britain | 8 October 2026 – 14 February 2027
The 1990s are beginning to make the transition from living memory into cultural history.
Tate Britain explores a decade in which contemporary art, fashion, photography, music and magazines collided: the YBAs, radical British fashion and London’s renewed international cultural confidence developing in remarkably close proximity.
Why see it: What interests me is the moment when something we remember as contemporary culture begins to become art history — and how that changes the way we understand and collect it.
9. Liz Larner: A hard line to bend
Camden Art Centre | 11 September 2026 – 17 January 2027
Perhaps the discovery in my selection.
Larner is one of the most influential American sculptors of her generation, yet this is remarkably her first exhibition at a major UK institution. Working across ceramics, metal, wood and discarded plastics, her sculpture moves between the geometric and organic, solidity and instability.
Her relative lack of visibility in Britain makes this exhibition particularly worthwhile.
Why see it: Institutional exhibitions are often at their most valuable when they make us look properly at an artist we should perhaps have been paying closer attention to.
10. Van Eyck: The Portraits
The National Gallery | 21 November 2026 – 11 April 2027
My final choice arrives late in the autumn — and may ultimately prove the most extraordinary.
The National Gallery brings together Van Eyck’s surviving portraits from collections across Europe. Given how few paintings by the artist survive, the opportunity to see these works together is exceptional.
Six centuries later, the observational intensity of his painting — skin, hair, fabric, jewellery and light — remains astonishingly immediate.
Why see it: Some exhibitions can be recreated. Others depend upon international loans that may never be assembled in quite the same way again. This belongs firmly in the latter category.
If I could see only three…
Robert Ryman, Cecilia Vicuña and Van Eyck.
They could hardly be more different, yet all three demonstrate something I increasingly value when looking at art: the importance of slowing down.
Whether it is the almost imperceptible material differences in a Ryman painting, the accumulated histories held within Vicuña’s threads, or the extraordinary observation contained in a Van Eyck face, these are works that reward attention.