London Art Week: Five Shows on Our Radar

October brings the art world to London, but some of the month’s most rewarding encounters happen beyond the major fairs. Across the city, museums and galleries offer plenty of reasons to make room in the diary: Renoir’s crowded dance floors, the Mediterranean light that changed modern painting, and Salman Toor’s intimate scenes of contemporary life. Add Magritte’s enduring capacity to unsettle and Carmen Herrera’s exacting abstractions, and you have five exhibitions worth seeking out across London this autumn.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Bougival, 1883 (detail). Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Renoir and Love, National Gallery
3 October 2026–31 January 2027

Start with a dance. Renoir’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette travels from the Musée d’Orsay for its first exhibition in the UK, bringing the bustle of a Montmartre afternoon to Trafalgar Square. It is the centrepiece of a show that looks at love in its broadest sense: flirtation, friendship, family and the pleasure of being together.

Gathering 40 paintings from the 1860s to the 1880s, the exhibition follows Renoir through the years when he helped shape Impressionism. Across restaurant tables, gardens and dance halls, the smallest gestures carry the scene: a glance exchanged, a body leaning closer, a conversation unfolding at the edge of a crowd.

Henri Matisse, The Bay of Nice, 1918. Oil on canvas. Courtesy Musée Matisse, Nice.

Painting the French Riviera, Royal Academy of Arts
2 October 2026–31 January 2027

A little southern light goes a long way in October. At the Royal Academy, Painting the French Riviera explores how the Mediterranean coast became a place of artistic reinvention, drawing painters away from northern cities towards a different intensity of light and colour.

With artists including Cézanne, Monet, Matisse, Picasso and Yves Klein, the exhibition follows a century of experimentation, from the nineteenth century into the postwar years. Paintings sit alongside sculpture, travel posters and film, broadening the story from an artists’ refuge to the Riviera’s emergence as a destination synonymous with glamour. A good stop for anyone whose interest in the Côte d’Azur extends beyond the summer itinerary.

Salman Toor, The Bar on East 13th, 2019. Oil on panel. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine.

Salman Toor: Someone Like You, The Courtauld
2 October 2026–10 January 2027

A New York bar might seem an unlikely place to find an echo of Manet, but Salman Toor’s The Bar on East 13th offers exactly that. His reworking of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère makes The Courtauld, home to Manet’s celebrated painting, a compelling setting for his first solo museum exhibition in Europe.

The Lahore-born, New York-based artist draws on memories of queer and immigrant life to paint fictional scenes charged with affection, humour and uncertainty. Across 19 paintings, friends gather and figures find themselves alone, capturing both the ease of belonging and the vulnerability of being visible. Make time for the accompanying drawings, which reveal another side of his assured storytelling.

René Magritte, La Lampe philosophique (The Philosopher’s Lamp), 1936. Oil on canvas.

This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte, Gagosian
24 September–12 December 2026

Magritte’s familiar objects have lost none of their ability to make the world feel strange. At Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery, apples, pipes, bowler hats and cloud-filled skies become the starting point for an exhibition about how his ideas continue to circulate through contemporary art.

Organised with the Fondation Magritte, the show brings paintings, works on paper and sculpture from across his career into dialogue with more than forty artists, with many works made specifically for the exhibition. Among the Magrittes is The Dominion of Light, where a bright daytime sky hangs above a street absorbed in darkness. It is a quietly disorienting encounter, and a reminder of how much uncertainty he could introduce into an apparently ordinary scene.

Carmen Herrera, installation view of Carmen Herrera: The Paris Years, 1949–1953, Lisson Gallery, London

Carmen Herrera: Pulse, Pause, Repeat, Lisson Gallery
24 September–7 November 2026

Amid the bustle of Frieze week, Carmen Herrera offers a reason to slow down. Lisson’s Pulse, Pause, Repeat brings together drawings, paintings and sculpture from the final decade of the Cuban-born artist’s life, distilling her lifelong enquiry into line, form and colour.

Curated by Marie Perennès, the exhibition reveals the continued invention of an artist whose recognition arrived after decades of experimentation. Precise edges and bold contrasts give each composition its tension, rewarding the time spent looking closely. It is a fitting final stop, and a reminder to leave room for discovery between appointments.

Members can explore the app for our pick of exhibitions and upcoming events in London during Frieze and beyond. For those yet to join us, discover our memberships and find your way into a richer art-filled life, from museum visits to conversations with artists and cultural experiences throughout the year.