London Gallery Weekend 2026: our critics pick their top shows – The Art Newspaper

For London Gallery Weekend’s sixth edition, its organisers are keen to present a gallery ecosystem in constant evolution. It is perhaps inevitable after a period in which the art market has experienced a prolonged downturn that notable closures—like Stephen Friedman Gallery’s earlier this year—gain more attention than expansions and openings. But there is much to suggest that London’s scene is in rude health, and those behind the weekend aim to show this off to a wider range of visitors than might ordinarily attend—including, they hope, a new generation of collectors.

More than 120 galleries are part of this year’s festival and more than 80 will host a public event to coincide with it. Aside from the sheer range of shows, among the big developments since last year are the expanded galleries of linchpins of the London scene like Sadie Coles and Modern Art in the West End and Maureen Paley in the East, and a host of newcomers, including Sundaram Tagore Gallery, which only opened its London space in May 2026, and Pale Horse, which is not yet a year old.

Below, our critics pick their highlights across the city.

West and Central
picked by Ben Luke

Freya Tewelde: Geometry of Elsewhere

Gallery 1957, 1 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, London, SW7 5EW

5 June-25 July

New paintings by Tewelde, who was born in Asmara, Eritrea, grew up in Saudi Arabia and now lives in London. Memory has always been crucial to her work, with figures in the series Roots of Resonance: The Baobab Tree (2022-23) looming out of a dreamlike painterly haze as if through recollection. In this new body of work, Tewelde has moved further into abstraction; while she continues to explore the themes of belonging and what she calls “in-betweenness” common to earlier series, she translates her memories into pure feeling, hoping to build enveloping paintings “that can be entered rather than read”, she says.

Savannah Harris: Gloria’s

Harlesden High Street, 57 High Street, Harlesden, London, NW10 4NJ

5 June-26 July

Visitors to Harlesden High Street may be shocked that the gallery appears to have been supplanted by a coffee shop, Gloria’s, which resembles a well-known upmarket café chain. But this is part of Savannah Harris’s project, in which visitors can see several artists’ work in painting and ceramics while enjoying their flat whites. Clearly identifiable are Harris’s colourful abstractions, full of organic forms and geological strata, and incorporating sand as a reference to her Caribbean background as well as to her investigation of deep time. But other works are by unnamed “outsider artists”. Harris is asking searching questions: what purpose does art have in urban social space, and how much does name recognition—hers versus those outsider artists—matter in establishing value?

Ravelle Pillay: Revisitations

Goodman Gallery, 26 Cork Street, London, W1S 3ND

4 June-16 July

Pillay’s paintings begin with found images, including historic family photographs and those from official archives, relating her personal South African Indian and British heritage. The works that form Revisitations have an added poignancy since they relate to her father’s death at the end of last year. She transforms her source photographs through a poetic painterly language so that, in her words, they become “portmanteaus”, a linguistic blend of the original image and the uncertain elements conjured through paint: subjective feeling, personal and collective memory and, now, grief. Pillay uses her medium’s capacities to embody the complexities and ambiguities of archives and historical images not just as seen and analysed but as felt: through thin layers, erasure and staining, they have a haunting presence.

Candace Hill-Montgomery: A Bare Woman Mutters Nothing…

Hollybush Gardens, 1–2 Warner Yard, London, EC1R 5EY

5 June-18 July

Now in her eighties, Candace Hill-Montgomery is enjoying deserved if long overdue attention: she is showing in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 in New York until August and, here, presents her first exhibition with Hollybush Gardens. It is something of a mini retrospective, with works from the 1970s, a period in which Hill-Montgomery had a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem and showed at Artists Space in New York, right up to new pieces. Among the highlights are her double-exposed photographs in which she layered images of abundant produce in Brooklyn grocery stores with pictures of her own works, and her weaves: textile pieces made on hand-made looms that make reference to a wealth of social, political, artistic and pop-cultural moments and people.

Rachel Maclean: The Enchantment of Reason

Josh Lilley, 40-46 Riding House Street, London, W1W 7EX

5 June-1 August

For many years Rachel Maclean has been fascinated by the seething abyss beneath the shiny surface of technological developments, realising her films, VR experiences, paintings and sculptures in a sickly confectionary-coloured palette, and with an intensity of action and imagery, that overloads the viewer to the point of queasiness. She has trained her satirical eye on artificial intelligence for some time, and here, as well as paintings, shows her film They’ve Got Your Eyes (2026), also currently on view at FACT in Liverpool, which equivocates insufferable 21st-century tech bros with the visionaries of the Victorian industrial age. Typically, while questioning AI and the culture around it, Maclean uses its technologies to make the work, laying bare the contradictions inherent in our navigation of the digital landscape.

Terry Winters: Along the River

Modern Art, 8 Bennet Street, London, SW1A 1RP

5 June-11 July

These eight new paintings by the US artist reflect his ongoing fascination with the natural world through the medium of abstraction. The pictures, each titled with a single word—among them, Field, Scope and Area—relate to an earlier body of work called the Point Cloud Pictures, referring to a form of 3D modelling but immediately evocative of natural forms. The clouds of shapes we see in Winters’s compositions conjure everything from constellations to murmurations to bacterial mutations, while remaining resolutely in the realms of abstract shape, colour and tone. As befits a group of works born of a singular response to the natural world, the exhibition’s title was inspired by a quote from Paul Cezanne: “Here, along the river, the motifs multiply.”

Keith Piper: Red Flags

Niru Ratnam, 71-73 Great Portland Street, London, W1W 7LP

5 June-25 July

A cluster of works from across Piper’s career, including pieces made in the crucial 1980s period in which he was a founding member of the BLK Art Group. Since that time, Piper’s work has remained remarkably consistent in using a range of media, including digital technologies, to explore systemic racism and narratives of Blackness amid wider social conditions. The exhibition’s title relates to his most recent works, where he makes reference to Operation Raise the Colours, a recent campaign where the display of English and British flags, purportedly representing patriotism, thinly masks growing far-right xenophobia in the UK.

Hayv Kahraman: What cannot be said will be wept

Pilar Corrias, 51 Conduit Street, London, W1S 2YT

5 June-5 September

Kahraman’s latest body of work explores both her background as a Kurdish-Iraqi refugee in Europe and ultimately the US, and a recent acute trauma—losing her home in Altadena to the Los Angeles wildfires in early 2025. As always, the paintings are inhabited by figures that act in part as self-portraits, pictured in an space that is both sparely contemporary yet evocative of numerous historic traditions. The effect is heightened by her exquisite use of her medium; here, in sequences of delicate marbling and staining. Displacement has always been at the heart of her work, and it increasingly extends beyond Kahraman’s autobiography to a deeper human dislocation from the natural world amid a climate catastrophe. “In a burning world,” the artist writes in an extended text on the exhibition, “I turn to water: to seas, to rivers, to tears.”

Anne Imhof: Citizen

Sprüth Magers, 7a Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EJ

5 June-1 August

Anne Imhof’s performance practice, in which her groups of collaborators perform across multiple modes from song to contemporary dance to skateboarding, is so distinctive in the way that it embeds the audience into the fabric of the work that it has overshadowed some of the wider aspects of her work. Her gallery exhibitions reflect her output in the round, involving sculptural environments and pieces in more conventional media including painting. Among the works on view here is the eponymous Citizen, a four-channel film relating to DOOM: House of Hope (2025), Imhof’s multi-part work for the Park Avenue Armory in New York, and a group of Wave paintings, vast pieces informed by digital images of turbulent seas. The paintings unavoidably conjure the spirit of earlier German traditions, from Caspar David Friedrich’s Romanticism to the photo-paintings of Gerhard Richter.

Caragh Thuring

Thomas Dane Gallery, 3 & 11 Duke Street, St James’s, London, SW1Y 6BN

5 June-19 September

One of Caragh Thuring’s most enduring capacities is for surprise. Her layered paintings can use multiple languages, painterly modes and forms of expression within one canvas, happily bringing together bedfellows one would never ordinarily connect. Her latest canvases are typical in their scope, with cartoonish forms brought into close relation with images from art history and expansive patterns, each piece at once singular and yet coherent within the wider group. These pictures achieve a rare balance, being both arresting and endlessly absorbing. Also on show at Thomas Dane is Out and About: Prunella Clough paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, a significant gathering of the late work of the lyrical British painter, curated by the former director of Camden Art Centre, Jenni Lomax (5 June-25 July).

East and South
Picked by Louisa Buck

Gabriele Beveridge: Never Ends

Seventeen, 270-276 Kingsland Road, Entrance on Acton Mews, London, E8 4DG

22 May-27 June

Gabriele Beveridge highlights the inextricable intertwining of the ecological with the industrial in sculpture that combines organic bodily forms with industrial processes. One of these latest works in hand blown glass resembles a giant teardrop hitched to a metal spine, another a column of fleshy pink orbs while others take the form of balloons that slump and spill over skeletal metal structures. Chemical reactions and extreme heat also play a part in creating a series of aluminium panel pieces, anodised to a sheen through an electrochemical process before being bathed in sulphuric acid and dripped with dyes resulting in branchlike vegetal patterns that, despite their artificial origins, conjure up natural connotations of milk duct anatomy, river networks, and mycelium.

Alvaro Barrington: 92-01 ‘In Livin Color’

Emalin, 4–8 Helmet Row, London, EC1V 3QJ

6 June-15 August

In this new body of work Barrington explores the impact of the crack cocaine epidemic on the US Black community during the 1980s and 90s. Four unique environments – each representing one of the four seasons – examine the rich cultural responses that emerged from this era and ways in which the Black community dealt with this condition through fashion, music, and other art forms. The year 1992 has become a nostalgic baseline for Barrington, referencing 1990s New York and Caribbean hip-hop, fashion, and pop culture. It also represents the end of the iconic NBC sitcom A Different World – the title also given to the ongoing series of hand-stitched postcards that Barrington has been making since his MoMA PS1 show in 2017- a number of which are included in this show. Other new yarn and concrete-based paintings continue Barrington’s distinctive material vocabulary explored in key projects such as his Tate Britain Duveens Commission in 2024, and his continuing participation in the Notting Hill Carnival. Emalin Clerk’s House is showing Hungry for Trash, a solo exhibition of new works by American artist Kembra Pfahler.

Delaine Le Bas: Leap

Maureen Paley, 4 Herald Street, London, E2 6JT

4 June-25 July

Centre stage in the gallery’s first exhibition of Delaine Le Bas is the Goddess, a sculptural figure fashioned from handmade elements and found objects as well as vintage textiles which the artist, who grew up in a Romani family and whose multimedia work interrogates identity, representation and cultural misunderstanding, describes as “a call to action in the times we now find ourselves.” Also on show is a new series of Murano glass works, created in collaboration with Studio Berengo in Venice which draws on imagery associated with witches and folkloric outsider figures as part of Le Bas’s broader and ongoing interest in difference, individuality and the power of transformation.

Ally Fallon: At the still point of the turning world

Hales Gallery, 7 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA

4 June-17 July

Last year’s winner of the prestigious John Moores painting prize and the youngest ever artist to scoop this prestigious award, Ally Fallon here continues his exploration into the process of painting, in works that combine both structure and spontaneity and build on the legacy of English Abstraction . Repetitive labour-intensive rendering of densely patterned floors drawn both from his immediate surroundings and wider travels, acts both to ground the work in a recognisable world while also freeing up the subconscious, allowing atmosphere and unexpected gestures to emerge. The show’s title is taken from a line in T.S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, a meditation on temporal existence where consciousness resides in the ‘still point’ of the present; and Fallon’s paintings similarly engage with time as an abstract and elastic condition .

Unyimeabasi Udoh: No Vehicles

Alma Pearl, Unit T, Reliance Wharf, 2-10 Hertford Road, Main entrance on Kingsland Towpath, Regent’s Canal, London, N1 5ET

21 May-4 July

New work by this London–based Nigerian American artist whose wall-based sculptures engage with the materiality of language, image and sign. Meticulously fabricated from materials such as aluminium and retroreflective glass that are more commonly associated with road infrastructure, their low contrast surfaces are activated by changing light and the perspective of viewers, variously shifting in appearance from luminous to opaque and sometimes the seemingly void. These are accompanied by a group of screenprints titled Diversions which are based on photographs of advertising billboards and hoardings captured in London across the past year. There’s also a site-specific installation which maps the gallery in silver masking tape.

Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia: The Altering of Innocence and Experience

William Hine, 311 Camberwell New Road, London, SE5 0TF

5 June-25 July

Central to this exhibition of new work by Glasgow-based Onwochei-Garcia is an installation of large-scale, suspended collages that combine individual works into dangling immersive structures. Here layered compositions rendered in watercolour and pastel on Japanese washi paper depict allegorical scenes that draw on literature, myth and folklore, intertwining historical research with fictional references. These range across Homeric myths to William Blake’s illustrated poems (which give the show its title) and Goya’s Caprichos etchings. All combine to form complex and unstable tableaux inhabited by dreamlike fantastical figures and environments. These large but fragile works are also interspersed with smaller paintings made from milk-based casein applied to pieces of marble.

Heft: Melissa Joseph; A Thin Place: Max Bainbridge

Sim Smith, 6 Camberwell Passage, London, SE5 0AX

6 June-18 July

New York-based Melissa Joseph’s first large-scale exhibition in the UK consists of large felted works made from fleece and elements from the landscape which have been created in response to research following sheep across Scotland. Drawing on her Indian-American upbringing Joseph highlights a resonant parallel between animal instinct and human migration by noting how ewes pass down vital spatial knowledge to their lambs. She then uses this phenomenon as a lens to explore how human displacement disrupts cultural, emotional, and epigenetic memory. In the gallery’s second solo show, British sculptor Max Bainbridge’s carved wooden works  assume the role of bodily analogues to explore the thin and porous boundary between humans and nature.

Dominic Watson: Vinegar and Piss

The Sunday Painter, 117-119 South Lambeth Road, London, SW8 1XA
27 May-11 July

Dominic Watson presents a large-scale sculptural installation centred around a galleon constructed from reclaimed wooden children’s playhouses. Visitors can enterthis fantastical structure which stands as a portrait of contemporary England: a nation adrift, run aground, and in decline. The crew are fragmented figurative sculptures made from clay, wax, polystyrene, and papier-mâché who have descended into chaos and madness. Even the female figurehead is being sucked dry by breast pumps feeding perpetually voracious mouths protruding from the ship’s sides .The expression ‘full of piss and vinegar’ used to describe youthful energy and combative spirit – but here it is reversed to describe a sour, sad and not at all Merrie England, now sustained only by nostalgia and small minded nastiness.

Serena Korda: The Golem Rises

Cooke Latham, 41 Parkgate Road, London, SW11 4NP

5 June-3 July

In the allegorical ceramic frieze that forms the heart of this show, Serena Korda reimagines the Jewish folkloric story of the Golem’s creation to explore the transformative power of motherhood and the elemental energy of creation. By conjuring a mythic city of women and merging it with the enduring mythic power of the Golem, Korda reframes motherhood as a site of radical power, imagination and survival and celebrates maternal creation as elemental and political. But at the same time, by using the language of domesticity – the frieze is made from ceramic tiles and two domestically scaled ceramic lamps take the form of strong primal mother figures – Korda also acknowledges the enduring and stifling societal pressure to narrow, contain, and domesticate the self.

This and That: Francesca Anfossi, Gabriele Beveridge, Jane Bustin, Alan Charlton, Rose Davey, Iain Hales and Gary Woodley

Sid Motion Gallery, 24a Penarth Centre, Hatcham Road, London, SE15 1TR

5 June-10 July

Co-curated with artist Rose Davey, who also contributes by painting a table made by Gary Woodley, this seven artist mixed show proposes that nothing stands alone and that every object, colour and idea can only be understood in relation to another. As well as Woodley’s table and Francesca Anfossi’s stools, both of which only make sense when sat at, Alan Charlton’s diptych demonstrates the impact of combined painted and unpainted canvas, while Davey’s paintings investigate the effect of one colour upon another. Works by Gabriele Beveridge, Jane Bustin and Iain Hales further demonstrate how meaning emerges from and depends on the contrasts, spaces and relationships between forms.

• London Gallery Weekend, various venues, 5-7 June
• The Art Newspaper is a media partner of London Gallery Weekend