Frieze Week Highlights: 2026 Insiders Guide
Frieze Week is one of the most anticipated moments in London’s art calendar, bringing together collectors, curators, and artists for a week of exhibitions, conversations, and discoveries across the city. Beyond the fair itself, the gallery programme offers a closer look at the ideas, practices, and emerging directions shaping contemporary art today. From established names to artists challenging traditional modes of expression, these are the exhibitions we’re paying attention to this week. Consider this your guide to the gallery shows worth stepping away from the fair for, and the artists worth getting to know.
SALMON TOOR | COURTAULD
The Courtauld presents Someone Like You, the first solo exhibition in Europe by Pakistani-born, New York-based artist Salman Toor. Bringing together 19 paintings made since 2019, the exhibition captures moments of friendship, intimacy, solitude, and alienation through Toor’s distinctive, dreamlike figurative style. His richly coloured scenes of contemporary urban life explore the complexities of belonging, particularly across cultural and queer identities, balancing tenderness and humour with a quiet sense of vulnerability. Moving between private encounters and the wider social world, Toor’s paintings offer an affecting reflection on the universal desire for connection.On view until 10 January 2027.JUSTIN CAGUIAT | SERPENTINE SOUTH GALLERY
At Serpentine South, Justin Caguiat’s Change Ringing brings together painting, sculpture, printmaking, sound, and film in an exhibition that responds to the gallery’s architecture and surroundings. Known for his atmospheric, layered compositions, Caguiat introduces heat-sensitive paintings that continually shift in colour and form in response to temperature and light, resisting any single, fixed interpretation. Bronze bells cast in the shapes of flowers and seeds extend this sense of transformation through sound, drawing on the traditions of English change ringing. The result is an immersive exploration of impermanence, spirituality, and the subtle relationships between the built environment and the natural world.On view until 10 January 2027.ISSY WOOD | NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
Known for her unsettling depictions of everyday objects and the psychological charge they carry, Issy Wood turns her attention inward in Self-Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Bringing together 12 works, the exhibition offers an unusually intimate encounter with an artist whose practice often explores desire, consumer culture, and the complexities of contemporary identity. Through tightly cropped compositions, muted palettes, and moments of deliberate distortion, Wood presents the self as something unstable, mediated, and at times deliberately obscured. Both confessional and elusive, these paintings challenge the conventions of portraiture, asking how much an image can reveal about the person behind it.On view until 28 February 2027.CECILIA VICUÑA | WHITECHAPEL GALLERY
Whitechapel Gallery presents Living Threads, the first major UK exhibition of Chilean artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña. Spanning six decades, the exhibition traces an interdisciplinary practice that moves between painting, textiles, photography, film, poetry, and installation. Often working with fragile, ephemeral materials, Vicuña draws on Indigenous Andean knowledge, ecological concerns, and histories of political displacement to consider what is lost, remembered, and preserved across generations. Her work treats art as both a form of cultural resistance and an act of collective care, bringing together questions of environmental destruction, human rights, and ancestral memory in a deeply interconnected vision of the world.On view until 14 February 2027.PHILIP EWE | TINA
At TINA, Philip Ewe’s To be, or not to be examines the uneasy relationship between speech, performance, and power. Drawing on Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy, Ewe brings together photographic works, theatrical objects, lighting, and live performance to question how public discourse is staged, witnessed, and controlled. References to Speakers’ Corner, London’s historic site of public debate, inform an installation that considers who gets to speak, who is watching, and how language changes when it becomes a spectacle. Moving between the theatrical and the everyday, Ewe invites viewers to consider how contemporary systems of surveillance and visibility shape the ways we communicate and understand one another.On view until 21 November 2026.TAREK ATOUI | TATE MODERN
Lebanese artist and composer Tarek Atoui transforms Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall into an immersive environment in which sound becomes something to see, touch, and physically experience. His new installation, HOLD, brings together experimental instruments, suspended structures, resonant materials, and live performance to explore the relationship between sound, architecture, and the body. Moving beyond the traditional boundaries of music and sculpture, Atoui creates an evolving sensory landscape that invites audiences to experience listening as an active, collective process. Both monumental and intimate, the installation challenges conventional ideas of musical performance while opening up new possibilities for how sound can connect people, spaces, and cultures.On view until 11 April 2027.CADY NOLAND | GAGOSIAN
At Gagosian’s Davies Street gallery, Cady Noland presents a new exhibition that continues her incisive examination of American culture, power, and collective identity. Working across sculpture, found imagery, and appropriated materials, Noland has long drawn attention to the contradictions embedded in consumerism, celebrity, violence, and political mythology. Her practice often exposes the uneasy relationship between individual freedom and the structures that shape public life, using familiar visual language to reveal darker social undercurrents. This London presentation offers an opportunity to encounter an artist whose work remains sharply attuned to the tensions and anxieties of contemporary culture.On view until 19 December 2026.