Seven Top London Art Exhibitions For Spring 2023

The National Gallery, the two Tates, the Hayward and Royal Academy are just a few of the UK capital’s 857 public art galleries, most of which offer free admission. And that figure doesn’t even include the commercial galleries. If you went to an art gallery in London every day for two years you still wouldn’t have visited them all. Here is a small selection of some of the top shows in the capital right now.

1.Peter Doig, The Courtauld, Until 29 May

A major exhibition of new and recent works by Peter Doig, including paintings created since the artist’s move from Trinidad to London in 2021, is one of London’s must-see shows this spring. It is the first exhibition by a contemporary artist to take place at The Courtauld since it reopened in November 2021 following major renovations. Since relocating to London, Doig has been developing paintings started in Trinidad, New York and elsewhere, which have been worked up alongside completely fresh paintings, including a new London subject. The works produced for the exhibition at The Courtauld convey this particularly creative experience of transition, as Doig explores a rich variety of places, people, memories and ways of painting.

2.Vik Muniz, FOTOCUBISMO, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Until 26 May

A vibrant new show from internationally acclaimed Brazilian artist and photographer Vik Muniz features work from his most recent Surfaces series, which explores concepts of perception, reality and representation. Like all artists, he’s influenced by art history. And in this show he references the Cubist masters such as Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Georges Braque. He is well known for using a wide range of unconventional materials, including dust, sugar, chocolate, diamonds, caviar, toys, junk, scrap metal, dry pigment, vintage postcards, and magazine shreds. His works are a result of a hybrid technique of photographing handcrafted, three-dimensional elements which are reprocessed through photographic collages. Muniz’s newest works invite viewers to question and explore what lies beneath the surface.

3.Isaac Julien, What Freedom is to Me, Tate Britain, Until 20 August

This is the first major UK exhibition by one of today’s leading artists working in film and video today. The solo exhibition spans Isaac Julien’s work across forty years, including the large-scale, multi-screen installations he’s best known for. The show highlights the way his work breaks down barriers between different artistic disciplines, drawing from film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture. Seven films exploring desire, history and culture are presented here including Looking For Langston (1989), Ten Thousand Waves (2010) and Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022).

4.Lee Bul, Perdu, Thaddaeus Ropac, Until 13 May

Paintings from Korean artist Lee Bul’s Perdu series are presented for the first time in the UK, including new works created especially for the exhibition. Her debut solo presentation in the UK was her landmark retrospective Crashing at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2018. Conceived as single and multi-panel works, the gorgeous, mother-of-pearl and acrylic paintings here highlight the artist’s practice of blending traditional methods and materials with a futuristic aesthetic, exploring the notion of utopia and its imaginative potential to reveal its darker undertones. Born in 1964 to left-wing dissident parents under South Korea’s military dictatorship, she draws on her childhood experiences, as well as European and South Korean culture, to create works that resonate across time and history, warning of the dangers of humanity’s perpetual yearning for an ideal society.

5.After Impressionism, National Gallery, Until 13 August

A major new exhibition of 97 paintings and sculptures by artists such as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, Klimt, Käthe Kollwitz, Sonia Delaunay, Kandinsky and Mondrian opened this week at the National Gallery in London. It’s a thrilling show with 32% of the works from private collections, rarely or never seen, (including four from Van Gogh). Don’t miss the chance to see these pieces before they return to their private homes again.

6.Tomokazu Matsuyama, Episodes Far From Home, Almine Rech, Until 20 May

Japanese artist Tomokazu Matsuyama’s colorful paintings have many fascinating inspirations like floral prints by 19th century British designer William Morris or from an Edo Period kimono. A portrait inspired by a photograph of French fashion designer Christian Dior, also features a counterfeit Hermes scarf that the artist bought in New York’s garment district.

7.Matter as Actor, Lisson gallery, 3 May – 24 June

Allora & Calzadilla | Dana Awartani | Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen | D Harding | Irmel Kamp | Syowia Kyambi | Richard Long | Otobong Nkanga | Yelena Popova | Lucy Raven | Zhan Wang | Feifei Zhou

This group exhibition brings together works by 13 international artists who present mutable forms of matter – whether embodied as clay, rock, pigment, metal or organic substances – as active agents in the complex entanglements of humans and the more-than-human world. Richard Long has created a new temporary mural for the courtyard, Syowia Kyambi shows a sisal costume from a performance work, Fracture (i) (2011–16), woven using a traditional Kenyan method while Lucy Raven presents a series of silver-gelatin shadowgrams, recording the elemental pressures of air and raw materials from a number of explosive events.