Group shows, major career retrospectives, intimate viewings and avant-garde performances – London is abuzz with art exhibitions. Plan your next visit with our handy, frequently updated guide to the city's best goings on. Heading across the pond? Here are the best New York art exhibitions to see this month.
London art exhibitions: what to see in July 2024
'Somnyama Ngonyama'
Tate Modern
Until 26 January 2025
Zanele Muholi, artist and visual activist, celebrates the lives of South Africa’s Black LGBTI communities in a series of arresting portraits that aim to offset the stigma around queer identity in African society. On showcase at Tate Modern, and also The Southern Guild in Los Angeles, Muholi considers their own form in portraits taken all around the world, each with intriguing aspects, from wearing crowns of clothesline pins, bed sheet cloaks or lipstick made from toothpaste and vaseline.
tate.org.uk
‘Deadweight’
Whitechapel
Until 15 September 2024
Winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2022-2024, Dominique White stages a new exhibition, ‘Deadweight’, at Whitechapel, featuring work that results from her six-month Italian residency completed as part of the award. The show – its title a reference to the measuring of the weight of ships’ contents, both people and cargo, as a single unit – sees the artist explore Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism and hydrarchy (the practice of gaining power over land using water). Artworks take inspiration from marine ephemera such as anchors, sails and rope, and include unwieldy, twisted forms in metal, some deliberately corroded in the sea by the artist.
Writer Bridget Downing
‘Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland’
Studio Voltaire
until 25 August 2024
Intertwining the playful hyperreality of both Beryl Cook (1926-2008) and Tom of Finland (1920-1991), curator Nicola Wright brings together their work in an exhibition which links together their consideration of class, gender and sexuality. Despite obvious differences between the two artists the UK’s Cook, with her larger-than-life women cavorting in often quintessentially British settings; and Tom of Finland (aka Touko Laaksonen), who lived in both Finland and the US, and his depictions of a queer masculinity – Studio Voltaire looks at both their work in unison and the impact it had on a wider audience.
studiovoltaire.org
'Solid Light'
Tate Modern
Until 27 April 2025
Anthony McCall, a trailblazer within experimental cinema and installation art, presents Solid Light at Tate Modern, an exhibition dedicated to the artists' immersive works. Using beams of light projected through thin mist, resulting in solid light forms, allows visitors to playfully interact. The exhibition will also feature film, photography and archive material.
‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’
Serpentine North
Until 1 September 2024
American artist and feminist icon, Judy Chicago, presents a major retrospective at Serpentine North, with an archive of unseen works including a manuscript penned by Chicago in the 1970s, and a deep-dive into her boat-rocking career that spearheaded the feminist art movement.
'The World To Me Was A Secret'
The Cosmic House
Until 20 December 2024
The Cosmic House was always intended as more than a home. A postmodern masterpiece, it was created by Charles and Maggie Jencks between 1978 and 1983 in London’s wealthy Holland Park. It functioned as a living space for the radical couple’s family and a hotbed for creative and architectural thought. Little within the house follows the rules of conventional design: the traditional staircase was replaced with a single spiral that is stamped with zodiac signs; everything from doorknobs to toilet flushes are present as unsettling doubles; and a lintel fireplace is painted to emulate polychromatic marble.
Writer: Emily Steer
'Beyond The Bassline'
The British Library
Until 26 August 2024
If you’re delving into half a millennia’s worth of cultural research, then you’re really going to need some help. And that’s how ‘Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music’ has become a major exhibition at The British Library in London. ‘At first, people kept asking, ‘Why is the library telling the story?’, admits exhibition curator and public historian Dr Aleema Gray. ‘Of course, it is a place of quiet, but the British Library has an incredible sound archive, too, and so that's where we started.'
Writer: Caragh McKay
'Fragile Beauty'
V&A
Until 5 January 2025
Avid photography fans Elton John and David Furnish have amassed a vast array of images over the years. Now, more than 300 rare prints from their collection are set to go on show at a new V&A retrospective divided into eight themes, from reportage and the male body to American photography and celebrity. Works from artists such as Cindy Sherman, Gillian Wearing and Diane Arbus are exhibited alongside fashion photography by the likes of Irving Penn, Horst P Horst and Herb Ritts. Highlights include intimate portraits of Marilyn Monroe, and Nan Goldin’s Thanksgiving series.
Writer: Hannah Silver
'Purple Hibiscus'
The Barbican Lakeside Terrace
Until 18 August 2024
Ibrahim Mahama’s monumental work ripples across the Barbican’s Lakeside Terrace. For Mahama, it is possibly his greatest collaborative work - and certainly his largest scale public commission - in the UK yet. Purple Hibiscus, named after Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 novel, encompasses around 2000 square metres of billowing panels of pink and purple fabric, woven and sewn in collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Tamale in Ghana. On the panels, around 100 batakaris have been embroidered - robes traditionally worn by both ordinary people as well as northern Ghanaian royals - which Mahama has been collecting over the years, without at first knowing for what purpose.
Writer: Hannah Silver
‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’
Tate Modern
Until 1 September 2024
‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ at Tate Modern is an exhibition that wants you to get involved, fittingly for an artist and activist who has long considered participation to be integral to her art. It’s the thread that runs throughout the show, her largest UK retrospective, tracing her multidisciplinary work from the 1950s to date in an immersive experience that’s faithful to the instructive core at the heart of Ono’s work.
Writer: Hannah Silver
