London Art Guide October 2025
- Eleni Doulgeraki
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
As the leaves turn and the city shifts into autumn’s golden light, London once again takes its place at the centre of the global art world. October and November are the most dynamic months in the capital’s cultural calendar, when international fairs, major museum exhibitions, and intimate artist-run events overlap to create a landscape that is both exhilarating and overwhelming. From the blue-chip spectacle of Frieze in Regent’s Park and the vibrant showcase of African and diaspora art at 1-54 Somerset House, to experimental projects tucked into East London studios, the city hums with possibilities for collectors, critics, and curious visitors alike.
This guide maps out the essential art fairs and exhibitions in London for autumn 2025 — highlighting where to see the most talked-about shows, discover emerging voices, and experience the breadth of creativity that keeps London at the forefront of contemporary art. Whether you’re a seasoned fair-goer, a first-time buyer, or simply in search of inspiration, here’s your insider’s route through London’s art season this October and November.
To walk into El Anatsui’s Go Back and Pick is to feel weight, both material and metaphorical. Known for his shimmering “textile” sculptures in upcycled metal, here Anatsui returns to a more grounded vocabulary—wood. But don’t mistake “wood” for soft: these are dense, modular panels that fold and shift like fabric, evoking drapery, relief, lineage. You’ll find yourself circling them, watching light play across surface edges, feeling the tension between fluid form and solid matter. The title whispers: return, choose, glean—inviting you to pick your pathway through memory, material, and metamorphosis.
Gilbert & George: 21ST CENTURY PICTURES — Hayward Gallery / Southbank Centre -7 October 2025 – 11 January 2026
& George: 21ST CENTURY PICTURES
Gilbert & George never do anything quietly. 21ST CENTURY PICTURES sweeps you into their bold visual universe—huge, often raucous canvases combining found imagery, signage, personal ephemera. Walking the galleries, you can feel the pulse of media, politics, bodies, symbols melding and combusting. Their newer Screw Pictures push this even further: taking hardware, twigs, quotidian detritus and letting them remap their life into image. You’ll step back and sense: this is art throttled with intention, a place where Bruno & George speak truth in color and material, and you can’t help but lean in, ears open, feeling the volume of their visual shout.
The world of Edward Burra at Tate Britain is one you want to step inside—not simply observe. His cityscapes, night scenes, and war-era drawings hum with restless energy. Here, the gilded edges of cabaret life brush against shadows of alienation. And in parallel, Ithell Colquhoun’s esoteric, dream-landscapes cast a spectral counterpoint. Together, their works converse: Burra with his vibrant, often gritty urban pulse; Colquhoun with her subterranean, mystical undercurrents. In the gallery, you sense a dialogue between surfaces seen and worlds beyond, and you become a witness to that tension.
Entering Surprise Bouquet, you immediately feel the pull of cycles: bloom, decay, repeat. Nour el Saleh leads you through a terrain of symbolic bouquets embroidered on fabric, painted over hospital gowns, floating in and out of form. You might pause at one piece, drawn by a wilted petal that feels almost alive in its stillness. She doesn’t offer resolution—she offers you a space to dwell in flux, to sense how memory swivels between vitality and erosion. It’s a show that will slow your breath, recalibrate your sense of time, and leave your vision humming in afterimage.
The Land Sings Back is less a static exhibition than an invitation—to listen, resist, remember. Across drawings, installations, moving-image work, the chosen artists restore drawing as a voice for land, for ecology, for collective memory. You move from room to room sensing the land’s reclamation: roots, waterways, bodies of water, maps. The work insists that drawing is not just line on paper—it is trace, it is gesture, it is echo of what was and what could be. Here you are not a spectator but a witness, invited to sit in the hum of something far larger than yourself.
Imagine stepping into a hush: pale light, soft echoes of footsteps. That’s the threshold of Notes Lie Long. Rachel Lancaster invites you to float between seeing and not-seeing. Her paintings feel like fragments of a half-remembered movie — a close-up of fabric, a cropped gesture, a face just beyond clarity. Using delicate layers of glaze, Lancaster teases memory into presence and erasure, so that each canvas pulses with the quiet tension of something on the verge of disappearance. You don’t just look. You lean in, trying to catch what lingers.
Walking into Goudal’s And Yet It Still Moves, you can feel gravity shift. Her work, poised between geology, memory and illusion, draws you into landscapes that are never quite fixed. You might find yourself questioning: is that crevice a photo, a projection, or a sculpture? Goudal teases the seams between media, challenging you to linger in uncertainty. Over the course of the exhibition, time stretches—the stillness is porous; the landscapes feel like living organisms. The show lingers in your mind as you step back into the world, sensing tectonics in your own rhythm.
At Hot Sheet’s Where the Wind Takes Us, Daniel Arteaga paints like he’s chasing a breeze — each gesture responding to what appears before it, unfolding in real time. His new abstractions feel alive, layered with intuition and memory. At their centre, Arteaga recalls the handmade kites of his childhood in Cali, Colombia — not as nostalgic tokens, but as living metaphors of freedom, drift and return. You can almost feel them lift from the canvas. There’s a pulse of colour and texture that draws you close, and the more you look, the more it moves. This is painting that breathes — a conversation between material, memory and motion, beautifully untethered, exactly as the title promises.
London Art Fairs
Each October, Regent’s Park transforms into the beating heart of the global art world. Frieze London gathers the most exciting contemporary voices—from blue-chip icons to daring newcomers—under one sprawling canopy of ideas. This year’s edition hums with energy and reinvention, its curated sections and outdoor sculpture trail blurring the line between fair and exhibition. It’s less a marketplace than a pulse—an exhilarating reminder of art’s capacity to shape how we see and feel the world.
Here’s a fair that feels like breathing in crisp air: the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair (WCPF) returns in its landmark 10th edition, and this time it’s more than just looking — it’s about imprint, about process. At Woolwich Works — The Fireworks Factory — you get to see live printmaking, stand among walls of inked impressions, risk your fingers in rich textures, and encounter both emerging voices and established names. Whether you’re after an affordable work you can take away that day, or something more ambitious, there’s a rhythm to the fair: the pulse of paper, the hum of press, the dialogue between material and imagination. It’s a space to discover what print can do when it’s treated as both craft and conceptual statement.
If you want a fair that pulses with international energy and shifts your perception, FOCUS Art Fair London at Saatchi is one not to miss. From 16-19 October, you’ll walk into a world of ambition, with artists from Asia of all generations showing work that challenges, seduces, makes you think. What I love about this fair is its curated chaos — installations, new media, painting, sculpture, all leaning into each other, sometimes bumping elbows. It’s not rarefied: it’s alive. You leave with your eyes expanded, maybe your heart a little heavier, certainly stirred.
Step into The Other Art Fair and you’re stepping into a festival more than just an art fair. It’s electric: over 175 independent artists, murals and pop-ups around corners, evenings lit by DJs, food stalls, performance, workshops. There’s joy in the unexpected: something off-beat, something raw, something glittery. You wander past works that make you pause, then past ones that make you smile or gasp. The Truman Brewery becomes a playground of art and energy, where buying feels like participation, and the art feels like it's breathing. If you go, don’t just walk the aisles — linger, talk to the artist stalls, soak in the sound.
There’s something warm and welcoming about the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea. When you arrive, there’s a hum: families, first-time buyers, artists, collectors both seasoned and curious. Thousands of original works, many starting from just a hundred pounds. It's where discovering feels possible. Aside from the art, there’s Art After Dark, Family Mornings, workshops, a Graduate Showcase, and installations that make it feel like the fair is alive at every hour. You come perhaps to find one piece, and leave having had an afternoon (or evening) full of surprise. Affordable doesn’t mean small ambition here—it means possibility.
This autumn, London becomes more than a backdrop for art — it is an active participant in the cultural dialogue. The grandeur of international fairs, the energy of emerging voices, and the intimacy of artist-led projects together create a portrait of a city that refuses to stand still. October and November invite us not only to see art but to experience the networks, ideas, and emotions that shape it. Whether you follow the well-trodden paths of the major institutions or lose yourself in the unexpected corners of East and South London, you will encounter a season that reflects the breadth, ambition, and vitality of contemporary art today.
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