Your London Art Guide for October: 5 Must-See Exhibitions

London enters October at full cultural speed, with a compelling mix of major institutional exhibitions, ambitious contemporary presentations, and emerging voices shaping the city’s art landscape. From Anish Kapoor’s immersive return to the Hayward Gallery to Ana Mendieta’s landmark presentation at Tate Modern, this month brings together artists exploring identity, memory, the body, and our relationship to the spaces around us. Alongside these major museum shows, a new generation of artists is making its mark across London’s galleries. Here are five exhibitions to have on your radar this October.

SUJIN LEE | SAATCHI YATES

At Saatchi Yates, Korean artist Sujin Lee presents Where We Once Stood, a new body of paintings created between 2025 and 2026 that turns inward, exploring what remains after an experience has passed. Lee’s familiar female figures appear alongside elements of nature—wind, snow, darkness and light—yet the paintings feel less like depictions of specific moments than fragments of memory. Her girls seem suspended between presence and disappearance, their searching gazes and loosened forms creating an atmosphere of quiet uncertainty.

The exhibition marks a further evolution of Lee’s distinctive visual language, where friendship, sisterhood, alienation and the natural world intersect. Rather than resolving these emotions, Lee leaves space for the viewer to project their own memories onto the work. In a market increasingly attentive to artists who build recognisable worlds through a deeply personal visual language, Where We Once Stood offers an intimate portrait of an artist moving toward greater psychological and

On view until 12 November 2026.

ANA MENDIETA | TATE MODERN

Few exhibitions in London this autumn carry the historical weight of Tate Modern’s major presentation of Ana Mendieta. Bringing together more than 120 works across photography, film, sculpture and painting, the exhibition offers an expansive view of a practice that fundamentally challenged the boundaries between body, landscape and identity. Best known for her Silueta Series, Mendieta repeatedly used her own body as a temporary imprint within nature, working with earth, fire, water and flowers to explore presence, absence, displacement and belonging.

What makes the exhibition particularly compelling is its attention to the breadth of Mendieta’s practice, bringing lesser-seen early paintings and later sculptural works into dialogue with the iconic earth-body pieces. More than four decades after her death, the exhibition demonstrates the continued relevance of an artist whose work transformed disappearance into a form of presence—and whose influence continues to reverberate across contemporary performance, photography and land art.

On view until 17 January 2026.

ANISH KAPOOR | HAYWARD GALLERY

Nearly three decades after his first major UK survey at the Hayward Gallery, Anish Kapoor returns with an exhibition that transforms the institution itself into part of the work. Spanning the gallery’s interior spaces and terraces, the exhibition brings together seminal works alongside recent sculptures and paintings, revisiting the themes that have defined Kapoor’s practice for more than four decades: the void, perception, colour, surface and the unstable relationship between matter and space.

From distorted stainless-steel mirrors to seemingly bottomless voids and works coated in Vantablack, Kapoor’s sculptures operate somewhere between physical object and optical illusion. The result is an exhibition that asks viewers to question not simply what they are looking at, but how they are looking. For an artist whose work has long occupied the intersection of monumental sculpture and philosophical enquiry, the Hayward provides an appropriately immersive stage.

On view until 18 October 2026.

MINNIE KERSTEN | GINNY ON FREDERICK

At Ginny on Frederick, Dutch artist Minne Kersten presents room temperature, her debut London solo exhibition, exploring the strange emotional residue held within domestic spaces. Furniture, objects and interiors become the protagonists of the exhibition, while the absence of people makes these familiar environments feel subtly uncanny. There is a sense that something has happened—or is about to—yet the narrative remains deliberately out of reach.

Central to the exhibition is Where I’m Calling From (2025), a looped film in which moths move through a still interior, landing on furniture, walls and floors. Their quiet movement introduces an almost ghostly presence, transforming an otherwise inert room into a space charged with memory. Kersten’s work sits within a growing contemporary interest in the psychological potential of the everyday, asking how objects can retain traces of lives that are no longer visible.

On view until 17 October 2026.

HARRY HUGO LITTLE | SETERAH

At SETAREH London, Harry Hugo Little makes his solo debut with The Sleepwalker, a deeply personal exhibition shaped by grief, memory and mortality. Painted following the death of the artist’s brother, the works move through shadowed figures, candles, skulls, snakes and scenes of heightened physical tension, creating a world where beauty and danger exist almost uneasily alongside one another.

Little’s paintings draw on the visual language of the Old Masters, particularly the theatrical lighting and dramatic compositions of Baroque painting, while placing contemporary figures and symbols into these charged environments. Painted on wooden panels, the works oscillate between violence and vulnerability, mourning and renewal. Yet beneath the darkness is a sense of transformation: flowers bloom and wilt, snakes shed their skins, and the artist’s recurring imagery suggests that grief itself can become part of a larger cycle of regeneration.

On view until 10 October 2026.