9 Must-See London Gallery Exhibitions During Frieze Art Week
From Cindy Sherman’s newest portrait series inspired by the archives of Chanel to a pairing of works by René Magritte and contemporary artists influenced by his brand of Surrealism
With Frieze London and Frieze Masters opening this week, London’s vibrant art scene is bursting with exciting gallery exhibitions of both contemporary and modern art. From Cindy Sherman’s large-scale color photographs in the artist’s newest portrait series, inspired by the archives of Chanel, at Hauser & Wirth, and a pairing of works by modernist master René Magritte with works by contemporary artists influenced by his brand of Surrealism, to new abstract and figurative paintings and sculptures examining the absurdities of everyday life by Nicole Eisenman at Sadie Coles HQ and the Royal Academy, scroll through to catch our curated selection of not-to-be-missed exhibitions during London’s Frieze Art Week.
1. Cindy Sherman | Hauser & Wirth
Emerging in the late 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation, Cindy Sherman transformed photography by acting as model, director, makeup artist, and stylist to craft compelling fictional personas. Rather than pursuing traditional portraiture, the celebrated American artist develops photographic series that challenge media clichés, interrogate sexual stereotypes, and critique how mass culture constructs and presents identity.
Returning for her sixth solo exhibition and her first in London since joining the gallery in 2021, Sherman introduces large-scale photographic works from her new Fabric Matrons series, characterized by a visual language of intricately draped fabrics. She draws on Chanel’s archives, staging scenes of femininity and beauty while weaving the fashion house’s fabrics and jewelry into her colorful works. Sherman creates each protagonist intuitively, without a script, starting with fabric and wigs to explore personality, then completes the character with makeup to further define the figure’s image.
Through December 23
2. Sofía Bassi | Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
Sofía Bassi was an unconventional, self-taught Mexican Surrealist artist and writer known for her dreamlike landscapes, occult symbols, and alchemical imagery. A contemporary of acclaimed artists such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, Bassi, who died in 1998, began her artistic career later in life, starting to paint in 1964 at age 51. In 1968, Bassi’s life and artistic journey changed dramatically when she pleaded guilty to manslaughter in her son-in-law’s suspicious death. She was sentenced to five years in prison, during which she produced more than 250 paintings, becoming exceptionally prolific while incarcerated.
Throughout her career, Bassi developed a distinctive visual style featuring floating castles, hybrid creatures, and a cosmic egg motif that symbolizes fertility and transformation. Her first European solo exhibition, “Floating Between Earth and Sky,” presents important works from 1968 to 1970—including paintings, works on paper, an exceptionally painted ostrich egg, and a rare surreal altarpiece—signed ELC (En la Cárcel), meaning “in prison.” Serving as portals to memory, mythology, fear, desire, and the subconscious, her paintings reflect a fascination with esoteric knowledge and personal spiritual symbols, featuring flying spirits and castles in dreamscapes filled with swirling mountain ranges, deserts, and seas.
Through November 14
3. Timur Si-Qin | Albion Jeune
A New York-based artist known for creating a unique brand of environmental art that combines digital technology with ecological themes, Timur Si-Qin views the organic and digital worlds as a unified, interconnected ecosystem. Born in Berlin in 1984, his multicultural background—combining German, Mongolian-Chinese, and Native American roots—significantly shapes his perspective. Through advanced media, Si-Qin has developed a modern, technology-driven mysticism that reopens the sacredness of the natural world for the 21st century.
His highly focused exhibition “Pristine, Part I” showcases the first chapter of a series born of the artist’s ongoing exploration, observation, documentation, and other metabolizations of specific plant species in the Peruvian Amazon. These sculptures—composed of roots, trunks, leaves, and other natural forms—transform the essence of specific beings and sacred sites into new stainless-steel forms. Reflecting Si-Qin’s enduring focus on expressing a modern spirituality connected to nature, the engaging exhibition places the sacred within life itself and underscores the understanding that human existence is part of a much larger living world.
Through November 14
4. René Magritte | Gagosian
René Magritte was an internationally acclaimed Belgian artist and a leading figure in the Surrealist movement. Active from 1898 to 1967, Magritte gained fame for his clever, thought-provoking, and enigmatic images. Unlike peers such as Salvador Dalí, who depicted chaotic or dreamlike fantasy worlds, Magritte focused on ordinary objects in strange, impossible settings. His precise, flat, graphic style questioned perceptions of reality, language, and representation, and it greatly influenced pop, minimalist, and conceptual art.
Organized in collaboration with the Fondation Magritte, the exhibition “This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte” explores the artist’s legacy through key paintings, works on paper, and sculptures spanning his entire career. Featuring loans from museums and private collectors, the exhibition highlights some of his most recognizable themes, including green apples, bowler hats, pipes, and cloudy skies. These works are displayed alongside works by more than 40 artists—such as Alex Da Corte, Anna Weyant, John Currin, Issy Wood, Ed Ruscha, and Betye Saar—from various generations, with many produced specifically for the exhibition, while the eye-catching installation draws on the paradoxical, iconic elements of Magritte’s work.
Through December 12
5. Parker Ito | Rose Easton
Parker Ito, an American multidisciplinary artist and a prominent figure in the “post-internet” art movement, creates work that examines how the internet, digital networks, and shifting online identities continually reshape traditional physical objects. A fourth-generation Japanese American living and working in Los Angeles, Ito views his ongoing body of work as a chaotic network, with each exhibition constructed as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or a total work of art. He describes his core philosophy as “konceptualism”—a playful, meme-inspired twist on conceptual art.
Returning to the gallery for his second solo show, “Happiness is a Butterfly, Full Metal Bunny,” Ito presents new canvas works made from an offbeat mix of appropriated imagery and materials—blending physical painting with high-tech corruption to build his compositions. His painting, visions of the Pilgrim’s Printer Progress from this world, to that which is to come (RIP 11880 (color)), draws inspiration from Giorgione’s High Renaissance masterpiece, Warrior with Groom. Meanwhile, Ito’s Profile Pictures reflects the intense, dark mood and compositional style of Francis Bacon’s 1953 work, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Exhibited in immersive darkness, with spotlights on the artworks, alongside a video projection and a chandelier sculpture, the show creates a medieval ambiance for the modern age.
Through December 12
6. Nicole Eisenman | Sadie Coles HQ
A celebrated French-born American artist based in Brooklyn, Nicole Eisenman is widely recognized for revitalizing the Western figurative art tradition by employing the human form to address contemporary social and political issues. She works across various disciplines, combining dark humor, satire, and deep psychological stories to examine themes like queer identity, gender fluidity, intimacy, wealth inequalities, and the absurdities of everyday life. Her artworks often blend references from classical art history, such as the Renaissance and German Expressionism, with elements of pop culture, comic strips, and modern political symbols.
In her second exhibition with the gallery, new paintings of abstracted heads, a flesh-filled orgy, figures in rural landscapes, and amateur astronomers looking at the planets and stars appear alongside abstract sculptures with wiry forms. Eisenman seamlessly shifts between abstraction, figuration, daily scenes, and cosmic surrealism, blending richly textured oil paintings with art-historical references and witty, incisive observations on modern life. Nearby, there’s Stack, an impressive 26-foot-tall totem sculpture in the Royal Academy of Arts courtyard. It depicts an abstract self-portrait of an artist wearing Birkenstocks and balancing a cat, a wine barrel, and a potato, with a model of Phyllida Barlow at the top, symbolizing the art that nourishes and inspires Eisenman’s work.
Through November 21
7. Georg Baselitz | Thaddaeus Ropac
A pioneering German Neo-Expressionist painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Georg Baselitz is widely recognized as one of the most influential figures in post-World War II contemporary art for his distinctive approach to painting and displaying his subjects upside down. Born Hans-Georg Kern, he was raised in post-war East Germany, where the trauma and destruction deeply influenced his intense and confrontational artistic style. He rejected the stiff Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union and the cold abstraction favored in the West, instead revitalizing figurative art with bold brushstrokes, rough renderings, and richly textured compositions.
Before painting his inversion phase, he developed his Heroes series, which depicts fragile, disheveled warriors wandering through devastated, post-apocalyptic landscapes. These paintings, which powerfully reflect themes of national guilt, identity, and the psychological trauma rooted in Germany’s history, are the focus of the gallery’s exhibition, “The Heroes 1965–66.” Often regarded as a key milestone in his early career and a significant moment in post-war European art, this series introduced many visual motifs, ideas, and existential themes that would influence the artist’s subsequent work. The first UK exhibition dedicated solely to this collection, this once-in-a-lifetime presentation features loans from major institutions, including Tate, Berlinische Galerie, Museum Frieder Burda, and Museum Küppersmühle Duisburg, as well as the artist’s family holdings and private collections.
Through December 18
8. Hernan Bas | Victoria Miro
Hernan Bas is an acclaimed American figurative painter known for intricately detailed, narrative-driven works that reimagine classical painting genres through a gay lens. His work is admired for its vibrant, kaleidoscopic detail, rich historical references, and distinctive dark humor. His signature subjects often include young, brooding, and waif-like men or dandies. These figures are typically portrayed in moments of stillness, vulnerability, or intense introspection as they explore transitional phases such as youth, identity uncertainty, or desire.
His recent series highlights his narrative range, with Miami’s The Bass Museum of Art’s exhibition “The Conceptualists” depicting imagined artists pursuing absurd, highly specific hobbies, and his solo exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, “The Visitors,” examining contemporary mass tourism. Continuing in that playful, narrative style, “TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen)” offers scenes in retail settings where, as comedy, tragedy, and life demonstrate, minor characters assume leading dramatic roles. The title evokes moments bathed in a theatrical spotlight, with actors in the suburban commercial theater poised for an encounter, transporting us to stores, stands, and even the seaside.
Through November 14
9. Koak | Union Pacific
Koak is a San Francisco-based artist known for her distinct Neo-Pop and surrealistic figurative style that combines elements of abstraction and figuration. Her work draws structural inspiration from early X-Men comics and zines, featuring stylized proportions influenced by Japanese and European animation, while embracing the raw emotional honesty characteristic of European Expressionism. Many of her compositions feature shapes with double meanings, subtly transforming human forms into natural elements such as landscapes, plant life, or bodies of water.
Drawing on atmospheric conditions, art history, and current events, Koak presents paintings and works on paper featuring reclining nudes and prevailing winds in “Still Weather,” her second solo show with the gallery. California Landscape, November Dawn references Charles Burchfield’s 1926 watercolor of the same name, created as he chronicled industrialization’s effects on America, while The Reader reinterprets Antoine Wiertz’s 1853 painting—which depicts a nude woman reading by matchlight, with a coaxing hand pushing more books toward her—created during a Belgian panic over reading’s effect on women’s minds. These works, along with others, draw on historical moments to cleverly comment on contemporary environmental and social concerns.
Through November 7