‘Kerry James Marshall: The Histories’ | Royal Academy | 20 September 2025 – 18 January 2026
More than 70 works (including a monumental 1995 commission from Chicago Public Library that has never been loaned before) plot the career of one of contemporary art’s most acclaimed painters. Born amid the racial segregation of Alabama in the 1950s and growing up in Watts, Los Angeles, Marshall has been on the front line of the Black experience in the USA for 70 years. While his work has reflected popular culture – including Black beauty advertising, comic strips and science fiction – he has also remained committed to subverting a Western tradition of history painting, with the resulting tension between subject and medium seen in series such as the ‘Garden Project’ (1994–95), which evokes both renaissance visions of Eden and soothing public murals to critique the grim realities of Chicago’s Black housing projects, many of which optimistically have ‘garden’ in their name. Above all, Marshall’s work celebrates the Black figure and its many meanings as integral to a visual history of the United States, and this major London show – the largest ever organised outside the US – is unmissable.
‘Egypt: Influencing British Design 1775–2025’ | Sir John Soane’s Museum | 8 October 2025 – 19 January 2026
Since Europeans first encountered ancient Egyptian culture in the eighteenth century, its “otherness” has exerted a profound and sometimes troubling influence on artists and designers. One of those most captivated was London architect Sir John Soane, whose Lincoln’s Inn Fields home is the location for this exhibition. Soane’s house, partly constructed around the stone sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I, is itself a testament to how powerfully Egyptomania gripped Britain, and this show explores how pyramids, hieroglyphics and mummies have become part of our collective experience in the last 250 years. From Wedgwood ceramics to Liberty fabrics, and all sorts of industrial and domestic design, the exhibition includes historic designs by Robert Adam and Owen Jones and prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, while a new work by Cairo-born artist Sara Sallam, responding to Soane’s sarcophagus, brings the story into the present.
‘Nigerian Modernism’ | Tate Modern | 9 October 2025 – 11 May 2026
With this major survey at Tate Modern, led by curator Osei Bonsu, West African art and its influence will be a big topic in London this coming autumn. Nigeria was finally freed from British colonial rule on 1 October 1960. The following decade saw the new country struggling to forge its cultural identity amid political upheaval and eventual civil war. It also saw the crystallization of a cosmopolitan modernism that spanned Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos, Enugu, London, Munich and Paris, associated with Nigerian and West African artists including El Anatsui, Uzo Egonu, Ben Enwonwu and Ladi Kwali, who fused African and European techniques and sensibilities. Some of these artists – such as Egonu and Enwonwu – left Nigeria and studied in Europe; others – such as Kwali – had their indigenous practice championed under British rule. This exhibition offers the chance to explore this rich diversity of experience and creative origins in the work of more than 50 artists across paintings, sculpture and textiles.
Yto Barrada, ‘South’ | South London Gallery | 26 September 2025 – 11 January 2026
Recently announced as France’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale, French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada’s profoundly interdisiplinary work worries away at boundaries between countries, cultures, eras, and ideas of reality and fiction. With her background in history and political science, Barrada’s work has treated subjects as various as the Strait of Gibraltar (‘A Life Full of Holes’, 1998–2004), the fossil and mineral trade (‘Faux Guide’, 2015), state-sponsored cultural programmes (Tree Identification for Beginners, 2018), tourism, and children’s playthings. She also founded Cinémathèque de Tanger in 2006, North Africa’s first and only repertory cinema and archive, and ‘The Mothership’, a garden overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar that grows plants for dye and acts as an artists’ and writers’ retreat. A theme that runs through all Barrada’s work is the physical, cultural, personal and memory spaces left in the wake of colonialism and it will be fascinating to see her practice transplanted to south-east London.
‘Mona Hatoum & Giacometti’ | Barbican Art Gallery | 3 September 2025 – 11 January 2026
The second of the three-part series ‘Encounters: Giacometti’, organised in partnership with the Fondation, this sees the Swiss artist’s work in dialogue with that of London-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. Hatoum will be presenting pre-existing and new works alongside her own selection of Giacometti’s sculptures, with a focus on the motif of the cage that their practices share. Of the three artist pairings in the series – Huma Bhaba opened this summer, and Lynda Benglis will follow in the Winter – Hatoum is arguably the most intriguing and emotive, given her preoccupation with systems of control, human displacement, incarceration and de-personalization. If Giacometti’s human figures often seem at the point of erasure, Hatoum’s installations invite the viewer to try and understand what place they could possibly offer a person, and how that might by extension apply to many other constructs in life. Staged in a new gallery in the Barbican complex, flooded with natural light and specially opened for the series by Head of Visual Arts Shanay Jhaveri, this promises to be a compelling and moving encounter.
Credit: https://www.frieze.com/
