Ahead of Basel, London Gallery Weekend Put a Defiant, Energized City Scene on Display

October and June are probably the two best moments to assess the state of the London art market. Frieze holds the prime October slot, but the rapidly expanding London Gallery Weekend (LGW), alongside this year’s major June auction season—headlined by major consignments such as the $200+ million Lewis Collection at Sotheby’s and the £15 million Zabludowicz Collection at Christie’s—offers more than enough ground for a meaningful test.

Held just as the art world began its seasonal descent toward Basel, LGW offered a free city-wide program of tours, talks, performances, parties and events, creating new ways for audiences to discover exhibitions across the U.K. capital while helping map and navigate its increasingly spread-out gallery geography. Its 2026 edition brought together more than 120 galleries, including several exhibitors with new or expanded spaces, reflecting the city’s rapidly evolving gallery landscape. “What we have done is create a unifying date where more than half of the galleries are opening specifically to align with it. They are starting to see it very much as a moment in which they face not just the market but also the institutional world,” Jeremy Epstein, LGW co-director and co-founder of Edel Assanti, told Observer.

The weekend unfolded against the backdrop of Pace’s announcement that it would shrink both its staff and artist roster. Recent closures, including Tiwani Contemporary just a few weeks earlier and Stephen Friedman Gallery some months before that, were also still quite visible on Cork Street, where real estate fills up more slowly than in New York, a much easier landscape from which to disappear without much noise. Pace was still opening its show of Kanjiro Okazaki, though it remains unclear whether the Japanese artist will enter a roster now reduced to 50 artists.

Yet there is also a counter-narrative of expansion, particularly with established London galleries strategically investing in and focusing on their own such as Sadie Coles opening a new space last year (its highly anticipated show of rising star Yu Nishimura was postponed to the following week), as well as newcomers arriving in the city, including Singapore gallery Sundaram Tagore, which opened a space in Pall Mall in May.

The lineup of shows opening or activating with special events and performances during LGW was remarkably strong and, for the most part, more ambitious than commercially safe. Across galleries and price tiers, there was generous space given to sculpture, installation and multilayered, multimedia presentations.

Mayfair, Fitzrovia and Cork Street at full volume

During this LGW, there were plenty of shows, special events and activations drawing people into galleries. It might have been the sunny weather, but from the openings across Mayfair and Fitzrovia on Thursday through to the weekend events, London was buzzing with energy. Anne Imhof’s barricades and subversive, elegiac bas-relief iconography attracted a steady flow of visitors across Sprüth Magers’ four-floor building, culminating in a climax on the top floor featuring a multichannel video of her memorable performance at the Armory.

Also very busy were the openings of Steve Sheree’s dreamy portraits at David Zwirner and the two expansive shows by Oliver Beer and Mandy El-Sayegh at Thaddaeus Ropac. Further down, Modern Art opened a show of Terry Winters’ psychedelic abstractions of micro and macrocosmic systems, connecting cellular structures, cosmic systems and abstract networks. The crowds also filled Duke Street, Gathering in mass in front of both Thomas Dane Gallery and GRIMM’s new space —a renovated former antiques shop, described as a “natural progression,” consolidating its position in London, where it has been active since 2022. While the show, “The Fountain Overflows,” reflected the gallery’s painting-heavy program, it also featured already institutionalized artists, such as Benjamin Orlow, who is currently representing the Nordic countries in Venice. At the opening, we learned from its director, Sebastiaan Bradsen, that the gallery is now also preparing to open a new space in Amsterdam, while maintaining its solid position in the U.S. with its Tribeca gallery serving as a bridge between European artists and the American market.

Thomas Dane Gallery’s opening of Caragh Thuring was highly attended. Her works in the £20,000-£60,000 range are in high demand, particularly among British collectors, the gallery confirmed, with several discussions in progress as they prioritize different institutional possibilities before finalizing acquisitions. Edel Assanti, another pillar of the London gallery scene, recently expanded with a more intimate second space in St. James’s, where it opened a show by Dane Lewis. His raw, richly layered works unfold in a graffiti-like stream of consciousness, moving between life and death, assimilation and the claiming of individual expression, war and joy, creation and destruction, gardens of Eden and visions of hell.

Close by, Josh Lilley opened “The Enchantment of Reason,” an installation-heavy, whimsical yet sharply revealing show by Scottish artist Rachel Maclean. Leaping across art history, from Rococo excess to the high Victorian fairy mania that accompanied the first Industrial Revolution, Maclean draws a pointed parallel with A.I., another technological threshold producing its own forms of collective hallucination. Here, the fairy becomes both a naïve and unstable figure: charming, sloppy, seductive and increasingly manufactured, shaped through image-to-image generation, video and the idiosyncrasies of technology. The video is a full collaboration with A.I., embracing the medium precisely while its bugs, distortions and uncanny failures allow creative experimentation and reimagination.

Not far away, Alice Amati, one of the sharper young voices in London’s gallery scene, was opening Rafael Topowski’s “Dust,” a solo show by the Lisbon-based Polish artist that proved once again the gallery’s commitment to championing emerging and early-career voices, often at decisive early moments. Topowski’s works carry the residue of memory, architecture and erosion, holding the image somewhere between apparition and accumulation. Like vestiges of blurred visions or memories, the works seem to turn the atmosphere itself into sensorial material.

Still on Cork Street, Goodman Gallery presented Ravelle Pillay’s London debut, “Revisitation,” following the South African artist’s recent relocation to the city. In these haunting, ghostly presences, Pillay bridges geographical timelines and archival fragments, revisiting histories of identity, colonialism, displacement and erasure. Close by, Waddington Custot was revisiting its longstanding relationship with Jean Dubuffet through a focused presentation of the artist’s more electrically colorful works from the final decade. Having hosted the artist’s original U.K. debut and staged around 40 exhibitions dedicated to his work, the gallery included several pieces that had first been shown in London decades ago. Prices ranged from £300,000 to £2.5 million, reflecting the artist’s remarkable market growth over the past few years.

Meanwhile, Alison Jacques is presenting the work of British Surrealist Eileen Agar, highlighting her unique style and vision within the movement. Born in Argentina, Agar’s work retains a distinctly tropical sensibility, visible in her vivid palette and organic forms. Like other women surrealists, Agar is receiving new critical attention, having also been included in the extensive show for the movement’s 100th anniversary at the Centre Pompidou just before its closure. The exhibition marked the gallery’s first show since it announced its representation of the estate. Next door, Nahmad Contemporary offered a concise but elegant dialogue between Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Though their visual languages were markedly different, the two artists were close friends, each pursuing distinct approaches to modernism.

Still in Mayfair, an absolute highlight this season is also Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s ambitious Thomas Houseago exhibition, “That Secret Mirror,” a cabinet of curiosities spanning thousands of years of sculptural history. Cycladic figures, rare Celtic artifacts, medieval alchemical vessels and works by modernist artists ranging from Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein to Postwar names such as Louise Bourgeois and Lucio Fontana enter into conversation with Houseago’s own sculptures. Conceived as a personal archaeology of influences, the exhibition reflects the artist’s belief that contemporary violence stems in part from historical amnesia, he said. We were lucky to visit just as he was taking installation shots, then to embark on a long, inspiring conversation about the show, the approach and its timely broader relevance at this moment of civilization. Most of the works, his own as well as those of ancestors from different places and times, ultimately present archetypal and totemic forms as vehicles for processing collective trauma and universal human emotions.

A similar dialogue with the atemporal and universal dimension of our experience within a longer history and broader universe opened on the ground floor of Thaddaeus Ropac’s London gallery, where Oliver Beer’s exhibition translates sound and frequency into painting through a body of works inspired by the acoustics of the Lascaux caves. Long interested in the intersections of music and visual art, Beer uses speakers concealed beneath canvases to direct vibrations through liquid pigments, producing abstract compositions physically shaped by sound. The entire show emerged from research into the caves’ resonant chambers, where concentrations of prehistoric paintings often coincide with unusual acoustic and echo phenomena that reveal the ritualistic and more spiritual origins of art, as well as its primordial energetic and emotional connection to the natural surroundings and its forces. Incorporating pigments directly from the earth, as in cave art, the resulting works progress from more abyssal to more ethereal abstractions, becoming portals in time and space that suggest a shared imaginative origin for image-making, language and music while exploring the possibility of painting as a repository for inherited sounds.

Upstairs, a new, similarly ambitious exhibition by Palestinian-born and London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh examines the conceptual and cultural clash between the visual languages of luxury, consumer culture and political memory through layered canvases that accumulate found dissonances between contemporary news and advertising. Tiffany-blue surfaces, perfume references and newspaper images of war and political debates are paired with reconstructed displays that evoke the seductive mechanisms of branding while exposing the power structures embedded within it. Throughout the exhibition, El-Sayegh stitches together fragments from both conflict and luxury pleasure; the artist embraces painting as a medium capable of resisting collective dissociation and preserving what dominant contemporary narratives attempt to obscure or sedate.

Not far away, Robilant’s first show in the newly reconfigured gallery had just opened the previous week. Expanding from old masters to contemporary art following the separation from Voena, its partner for the past 22 years, the newly independent gallery is now led by Edmondo di Robilant, who brings decades of relationships, wisdom and expertise, alongside his son Michele, who brings what he hopes will be a fresh perspective. The gallery aims to be uniquely positioned to identify artists who can withstand the test of time. Its inaugural show, “Nor here, Nor there,” already sets the tone and the level for a more globally minded and hybrid program.

Here, a good artsy lunch break can be found at Hauser & Wirth’s Farm Shop, which brings the quality of its Somerset countryside farms to Mayfair in its soil-to-table bistro.

To the north is the new collaboration between the young Palmer Gallery and the established Lisson Gallery, with live events over the weekend, aimed to bring people to the unsung Lisson Grove art district. Opened just two years ago, Palmer is already advancing an ambitious program from within its beautifully redesigned former industrial building. The warm, organic feel of its wood stairs and interior structures resonated almost like an echo chamber with the practice of Carolina Aguirre, the promising London-based Chilean artist born in 1990. Her paintings and video works are defined by an elegiac sensibility, exploring cycles of decay and regeneration through imagery of dead trees, insects and geological transformation. Her process embraces those natural cycles almost symbiotically, using crushed shells, shellac and sumi ink to create fragments while also bringing her own body into the making of landscapes that oscillate between abstraction and ritual, mortality and renewal. That existential reflection becomes the center of her attention-grabbing video, where Aguirre imagines a spontaneous, poetic dialogue with death that evokes near-death experiences: “I am here / I am matter, my past present and future must pass,” she repeats, before moving through a mantra-like insistence on the present, and being present in that moment.

Close by, Lisson Gallery is showing for the first time works by ceramic pioneer Ken Price in London, while a parallel presentation by British Pavilion artist Lubaina Himid reintroduces her body of work inspired by visits to Zanzibar, combining painting, suspended elements and a sound composition by Magda Stawarska: an immersive environment that explores storytelling, oral traditions and everyday life.

While walking between these galleries, don’t miss Mandy El-Sayegh’s mural, This is a Sign: Notes on Assembly, commissioned by The Showroom, an organization that has been a pioneer of socially-engaged contemporary art, which, for over four decades, has been commissioning and producing new work.

Not far away, on Porchester Place, another of the newest additions to London’s gallery landscape, Matt Carey-Williams, is presenting “Pity This Busy Monster,” a group show that examines the mutable figure of the “creature” as a metaphor for unstable identities, inner worlds and shifting forms of selfhood. Works move fluidly between abstraction and figuration, mythology and psychology, suggesting contemporary subjectivity as perpetually in flux, demonstrating the gallery’s mission to promote young talent from the many respected graduate programs in the U.K.

Returning to the central area before the night’s openings, another must-see is Gagosian’s tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, presenting one of their most ambitious unrealized projects. Conceived in 1968 for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia but never executed due to technical limitations, Air Package on a Ceiling was finally realized according to the artists’ original plans. Suspended dramatically within the gallery, the monumental illuminated form transforms the space into an immersive environment, while archival materials trace the evolution of the project and the artists’ broader investigations into wrapping, containment and the visualization of invisible forces.

A few streets down, Hauser & Wirth’s double power show this June spans centuries. One gallery is dedicated to Francis Picabia’s relentless stylistic reinventions between 1902 and 1951, tracing his movement through Impressionism, abstraction, Dada and figuration. Nearby, in the other gallery, Roni Horn presents a series of works on paper built around the phrase “I am paralyzed with hope,” gradually dissolving language into abstraction and living poetry. Sensitive to shifts in light and environment and completed with one of her high-demand pools, the installation extends Horn’s longstanding interest in perception, presence, and the idea of sculpture as a living encounter.

Just around the corner, Pilar Corrias had just opened a new show of Hayv Kahraman on Wednesday night, in which she continues her exploration of embodied memory and diasporic identity through a new body of both symbolically and psychologically charged works that employ fluid imagery as a metaphor for transformation, inheritance and interior states of being. Similarly spiritually attuned is the elegant dialogue staged by Luxembourg + Co. with works by Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian and Brice Marden, illuminating unexpected affinities across generations of abstraction and revealing shared formal concerns around line, rhythm and spatial organization.

On the more experimental side, Gathering is also worth checking out this June, a solo presentation by already institutionalized artist, DJ and producer Christelle Oyiri, who recently showed at Tate Modern, and whose work fluidly moves through music, underground and mainstream culture, the subconscious and technology as mutually distorting forces. As the exhibition text puts it, “Bodies and technology each diffracting through the other, their own frantic symbols. In her distinctive remix practice and language, body abstractions and extractions meet the hardcore environment of clubs, as music and vibration become tools for a more spontaneous journey exploring both physical and psychological experience, turning sound into a way of tracing how bodies absorb, process and transform cultural pressure. Oyiri asks: ‘In a hyperconnected society, where the image is perpetually staged and corrected, how do the virtual and the material come together in the quest for the ideal body?’”

For refreshments, a safe choice for art lovers remained, as always, Sketch. Across its three-Michelin-starred Lecture Room & Library, the Gallery gastro-brasserie, the enchanted-forest Glade, the neo-90s Parlor and the East Bar, restaurateur Mourad Mazouz has turned the venue into a sequence of immersive art-and-design rooms. The Gallery remains its most famous art-world calling card, having opened in 2014 with 239 original Damien Hirst works from his The Secret Life of Shadows series, though over the past 20 years, Sketch has hosted works by artists including Chris Levine, Ron Arad, Carsten Nicolai, Jonas Mekas, Tracey Emin, Martin Creed, David Shrigley and Yinka Shonibare.

East and South London’s younger pulse

In East and South London, younger, emerging spaces mounted some of the city’s most daring presentations. One of them, not far from Tate Modern on the South Bank, is Copperfield, which presented Ecuadorian artist Oscar Santillán, who is also representing his country in this year’s inaugural Venice pavilion. The show draws inspiration from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, attempting to give visible presence to untamable and ungraspable phenomena beyond human perception. Through photographs, sculptures and installations, Santillán explores the agency of landscapes, technologies and materials, challenging conventional distinctions between nature and machine. Particularly striking were sculptural works derived from electronic waste and mining processes, which transform industrial remnants into evocative aerial landscapes while reflecting on geological time and scales of existence beyond human comprehension. In another work, he applies a time accelerator, further compressing the already unstable relationship between material, perception and duration.

Meanwhile, another program worth following in London’s East End is the one at Public Gallery, one of the most interesting emerging voices in London, which has already come a long way since launching in 2020, co-founded by Alex Harrison and Harry Dougall after earlier project-based exhibitions in Hackney. This June, the gallery is showcasing the work of L.A.-based photographer Shaniqwa Jarvis, whose practice explores the relationship between physical and digital images, reflections and remediation. Upstairs, a video unfolds like a stream of consciousness on our relationship with society and reality, between constriction, imagination and hallucination. In the gallery’s second space just next door, Russell Perkins presents a huge LED screen work exploring forms of American patriotism through footage of political celebrations from the 1970s to today, counterpointed by audio of wind moving through a tree outside his house. The exhibition moves across different registers of sensoriality as one proceeds through the gallery space: a perfume lingers in the corridor before leading upstairs to a sound piece linked to coded scripts and compositions, abstract in its language, as in the optimization and maximization of human production.

Just around the corner, Union Pacific was showing Georgia May Travers Cooks’s nostalgic paintings, contextualized by a rural, fairy-tale-like narrative, emphasized by a country-home framework built by the gallery director himself, turning the entrance into a porch overlooking whimsical but unsettling picnic scenes. Cute and sentimental at first glance, all her images carry something sinister and spectral beneath their sweetness, making them all the more intriguing, both psychologically and semiotically, culminating downstairs in swans floating through blood-colored water.

Also worth visiting is Pareidolia, a new foundation launched around the idea of seeing through chaos and collecting as a collective practice. Founded in Belgrade by a hybrid mix of dealers, curators and collectors, the foundation focuses on minimal Baltic and Eastern European practices. Titled “INCORPOREUS VOL.1,” the show was centered around the notion of immateriality, something explored by more conceptual practices in the Postwar period but returning as a particularly timely theme in an age when everything seems to be becoming immaterial. Functioning as a historical anchor is a seminal conceptual work by Joseph Kosuth, “Any Five and a Half Foot Square Sheet of Glass to Lean Against Any Wall,” shown alongside works by contemporary artists, including the touching farewell letter by Danh Vō, written in French by his father, a calligrapher, without knowing French, from the original of a French monk. Also on view is a photograph by Steve McQueen paired with a very minimal yet poetic work by Tomo Campbell. The show was hosted by ZÉRUÌ, another experimental, curatorially oriented new London-based space worth checking, which, over the past five years, has built a name for its highly curated, rigorous program, focused on artists based in Europe but with an international outlook toward ephemeral aesthetics.

Back in Central London, TINA is a worthwhile new gallery near Oxford Circus, located on the first floor, with a program led by three curators and focused on the intersection of language and art. Opening on Friday was a show by Glasgow-based artist Katie Shannon, who explores screenprint not as a simple reappropriation but through its longer political history as a medium of distribution, community-building and circulation. Her practice is shaped by Glasgow’s psychological atmosphere and the accumulated pressures of her labor in the night economy: the entire show moves between inertia and containment, exploring the compression and depression driven by gentrification. In the other room, restricted bodies appear through wrapped and banded beds, evoking people slammed into impossible living conditions and the profit structures that make those conditions possible. The result is a sharp recognition of the contemporary condition. “London Gallery Weekend has been fantastic for fostering connections with UK regional museums, international institutions, and press, with a couple of sales also in the pipeline as a result,” wrote Hana Noorali in an email, following up on our encounter after the weekend.

Yet most of the younger spaces in central London are forced onto first floors, given the budget-conscious strategies they still need to apply: DES BAINS had a very minimal installation on language and storytelling by Neapolitan artist Carmela de Falco, while another new entry in the gallery weekend, Pale Horse, presented the work of Marijn van Kreij, whose appropriated materials and dry irony seem to predate the meme logic of contemporary culture while probing broader social and behavioral uncertainties.

Meanwhile, opening that night before the highly anticipated Serpentine LGW gathering was Sundaram Tagore Gallery’s second show since opening its London space last May, in an Edwardian-style landmark building designed in 1902 at 27 Pall Mall in St. James’s. With locations in New York and Singapore, the gallery’s founder has longstanding ties to London, where he spent countless hours in the British Museum Library as a graduate student at Oxford in the 1990s, and where his Indian-born father, Subho Tagore (1912-1985), an important painter and founder of the Calcutta Group, honed his craft at what was then St. Martin’s School of Art in the 1930s. Sundaram Tagore still believes London is the perfect international center to promote Southeast Asian art, given the variety of its communities, he told Observer. “London felt like the right place and the right moment for us because the city continues to function as one of the world’s great cultural crossroads. Few places bring together such an international mix of artists, collectors, curators, academics, and entrepreneurs, all engaged in a constant exchange of ideas. For a gallery whose mission has always centered on cross-cultural dialogue, London was a very natural evolution.” Opening now was also deliberate: even amid political and economic uncertainty, Tagore believes culture matters most during periods of fragmentation and instability. “Art creates conversation, empathy, and connection across borders in ways few other things can. I hope it reminds us that more unites us than divides us. London felt uniquely positioned to bring those worlds together in a single space.”

This is also the reason for the India focus at Cork Street no. 9, where Mumbai gallery Project 88 and New Delhi powerhouse Vadehra Gallery are hosting pop-up shows this month. As Jeremy Epstein noted, London remains one of the few cities where such specialized gallery projects can be commercially meaningful. “London’s diversity allows galleries with specific focuses to find both community and opportunity.”

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