Eight Exhibitions Not to Miss During Frieze Week London

Mark your calendars and pack your umbrellas (just in case), because Frieze Week is around the corner. While the main action will take place from October 15 through 19 at Regent’s Park in London, there will be plenty to see off-Frieze across the city, with an incredible line-up of great art a cab or tube ride away. Spanning major blockbusters to gallery shows of work by emerging artists, these eight stunning exhibitions will remind you why London remains the cultural heartbeat of the U.K.

“Nigerian Modernism”

• Tate Modern
• October 8, 2025, through May 10, 2026

Presenting the history of mid-century Nigerian modern art for the first time in the U.K., “Nigerian Modernism” is bound to break new ground (conveniently, just in time for the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair running October 16-19). Set against the backdrop of Nigeria’s independence from British rule in 1960, the show displays more than 200 works by 50 artists across textile, painting, sculpture, paper and ceramics, including El Anatsui, Aina Onabolu, Ben Enwonwu and Uzo Egonu, just to cite a few. “Nigerian Modernism” retraces the beginnings and legacies of significant artist movements such as the New Sacred Art Movement, the Zaria Arts Society and the Oshogbo Art School. It provides fascinating insight into a slice of Global South art history, highlighting the influence of traditional motifs and forms on these vibrant Nigerian artists.

“Emily Kam Kngwarray“

• Tate Modern
• Through January 11, 2026

While at Tate Modern, don’t miss Europe’s first major solo exhibition of Emily Kam Kngwarray, one of the most outstanding 20th-century contemporary artists. The show is a late but welcome recognition of this Aboriginal artist hailing from the Anmatyerr community in Australia’s Northern Territory, a trend that mirrors her overall institutional success. She started painting in her late 70s, producing more than 3,000 works within a short time span. Her land and culture deeply influenced her art. Through her, Aboriginal art became contemporary and an international sensation. From early batik prints to large-scale abstract paintings, Kngwarray infused her work with Aboriginal beliefs such as the Dreaming, an “everywhen” notion of time that deeply resonates with Creation and ancestral spirits. Dots and lines are in perpetual movement; they undulate on her monumental canvases like furrows from Kngwarray’s agricultural fields.

“Kerry James Marshall: The Histories”

• The Royal Academy of Arts
• Through January 18, 2026

With 70 works on display, this will be Kerry James Marshall’s largest show outside the U.S. The exhibition will feature a first-time loan of Knowledge and Wonder (1995). The mural, produced for the Chicago Public Library, was withdrawn from hitting the auction block in 2018 following criticism, including from the artist. The mural represents a back-facing Black crowd admiring a tree of knowledge and various books. A ladder suggests the possibility of upward mobility through education. The London show includes many other paintings in which characters nap, daydream, dance, care, love. Kerry James Marshall, a master of contemporary Black portraiture, displays here his signature vignettes as tender, intimate and confident visual homages to Black culture.

“House of Music”

• Serpentine South Gallery
• October 10, 2025, through February 8, 2026

“House of Music” stages a multisensory presentation of Peter Doig’s works spanning canvas, music and film. The show will include new works as well as his famed atmospheric compositions, such as Fall in New York (Central Park), 2002-2012, in which a roller-skating character dances to an invisible tune, blending with the exhibition’s desire to dispel artistic boundaries. “Songs can be very visual. I’m interested in what they conjure, and I’ve tried over the years to make paintings that are imagistic and atmospheric in the way music can be,” Doig said in a statement. Sound activates both our memory and generosity. The show will conjure sounds in conversation with paintings the artist produced during his stay in Trinidad between 2002 and 2021, and they will also be in dialogue with other musicians and creatives.

“Cai Guo-Qiang: Gunpowder and Abstraction”

• White Cube Bermondsey
• Through November 9, 202

Some might remember Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosive gunpowder artwork at Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2003, a fire, light and sound performance drawing the shape of a mesmerizing monumental dragon. Guo-Qiang is back in London for a highly anticipated new solo show. In these new works, gunpowder remains the artist’s core material. But rather than deepening its corrosive and fiery attributes, Guo-Qiang explores its more sensitive side. Gunpowder is used as a dry pigment of old China—a medium to a visual poem. He adds dimensionality by using colored gunpowder this time, depicting botanical motifs of flowers such as delicate pink poppies. Fragility and violence coexist in this meditation on impermanence.

“Amirhossein Bayani – The Narrative of Minorities”

• Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery
• Through October 25, 2025

In this solo show, Iranian artist Amirhossein Bayani explores the depths of longing and the meaning of home. This is done through sensitive and textured landscapes on canvases shaped like a house. Painted with oil, the scenes carry the domestic, childlike feel of pencil strokes. Daytime and nighttime scenes alternate between lush forest and mountain (Mount Damavand, a symbol of enduring Iranian culture and pride). These Edenic landscapes convey sadness and foreboding. We spot empty boats, cold structures and a lonesome boy staring at the expanse before him. Though seeped in Bayani’s personal history and context, the work transcends both in awakening a loss within.

“From Horizon of the Matter, Rises the Vertical of the Soul”

• gallery rosenfeld
• Through October 24, 2025

Teodora Axente is a member of the Cluj School in the Transylvanian region of Romania, where young artists came together after the 1989 Revolution and the fall of communism. We see this ambition of rupture and upheaval in her works featuring uncanny scenes and characters emulating the painting styles of the Dutch Golden Age and Sienese early Renaissance with a Surrealist twist: an assortment of distress, opulence and instability conferring uncertainty and enchanting gloominess to these collages. Gilded religious figures meet creatures and devices. “From Horizon of the Matter, Rises the Vertical of the Soul” will present a new body of work prior to her first institutional solo show at Siena’s Santa Maria della Scala Museum—an exciting time for this emerging artist.

“Stan Douglas: Birth of a Nation and The Enemy of All Mankind”

• Victoria Miro
• Through November 1, 2025

D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation remains one of the most controversial American films produced—a technical prowess that fails to conceal outward anti-Black racism (blackface and all), misogyny and white supremacist narratives in a story set during and after the Civil War. Canadian artist Stan Douglas sets out to dismantle this problematic legacy in a five-channel video installation, premiered here for a European audience. Douglas reinterprets and alters scenes from the original film to denounce racist biases, fiction and fabrication, interrogating the role of cinema in amplifying prejudicial myths. The show also includes a photographic series that explores race and theatrical staging, engaging with an 18th-century comic opera, John Gay’s Polly, set in the Caribbean at the time of the transatlantic slave trade. In both works, Douglas dramatizes the question of who gets to tell these stories and transforms offensive entertainment into a powerful satire to flip power structures.