This autumn London’s National Portrait Gallery invites contemporary artists to respond to historical portraiture, whose century old collection dates back to the Tudor era, in Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture. Newly commissioned works by Helen Cammock, Giana De Dier, Mary Evans, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Ravelle Pillay, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Soheila Sokhanvari and Charmaine Watkiss are displayed throughout the building to reclaim untold narratives and connect past and present histories. Presented in a range of media their works place contemporary art at the heart of the Gallery to challenge the roots of portraiture and rethink its potential for today and for the future.

The Royal Academy of Arts presents The Histories, the largest survey of Kerry James Marshall's work in the United Kingdom and Europe to date. Elevating the presence of Black figures in paintings Marshall builds upon the Western tradition of history painting incorporating references which span art history, civil rights, comics, science fiction, his own memories and more to celebrate everyday life. Organised thematically, the exhibition features 70 works, including a new series of paintings made especially for the show and his commemorative sculpture Wake which evolves each time it is exhibited.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery is the largest major museum exhibition in the UK dedicated to one of the world’s foremost contemporary painters. Ordered chronologically, the show brings together 45 works from charcoal drawings to large-scale oil paintings of the human form, that question the historical notions of female beauty. Beginning with the monumental nudes that launched Saville to acclaim in 1992, to new works on display for the first time, the exhibition will trace the development of her practice and explore her connection to art history.

The Serpentine Gallery's exhibition 'Thoughts in the Roots' is the most comprehensive survey of Giuseppe Penone’s practice in a major London institution to date. Featuring installations, sculptures and works on paper from 1969 to the present, the show explores the breadth of materials Penone has embraced throughout his career and his investigation of the poetic relationship between humans and nature. Situated both in the galleries and outside in Kensington Gardens, the presentation is both powerful and delicate, focusing on nature’s hidden structures, rhythms, and gestures.

Jenny Saville’s first solo exhibition in Austria – Gaze – provides a retrospective insight into the development of her artistic career over the last twenty years, including new works. For over three decades, Saville has explored the centuries-old tradition of representing the human body. Drawing inspiration from the annals of art history – from Old Masters such as Leonardo and Raphael through to Egon Schiele, Picasso, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud – hers is a painterly practice defined by physicality, carnality and the interplay between new and old media.

'Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church' offers a first-hand description of the design and construction of Breuer's church at St. John's Abbey, written by Father Hilary Thimmesh, a monk and a member of the original building committee. This meeting-by-meeting account of the process, enhanced by shrewd observation and gentle wit, conveys the complexities faced by both the architect and the client and demonstrates how courage and faith all played a part in realising what became of one of the most important churches of the 20th century. The recent film The Brutalist, is inspired by this excellent book.

Brady Corbet’s epic film The Brutalist follows a fictional 20th century Bauhaus-trained architect, László Tóth, who flees Holocaust-torn Europe for America. The film is a tour de four addressing the human drive to pull meaning out of tragedy and horror - touching on how America’s wave of mid century immigrants remade the nation in their image and in turn it remade their own identities, alongside the uneasy pact between integrity and sponsorship that every artist must navigate for themselves.

Skarstedt London presents 'On Ugliness: Medieval and Contemporary', with artworks spanning the twelfth century to the present day to examine the evolution of the grotesque as a universal theme. Four medieval stone heads serve as a touchstone for the show that also features works by George Condo, Nicole Eisenman, Martin Kippenberger, Barbara Kruger, Pablo Picasso, and Thomas Schütte. The works on display simultaneously delight and disgust, highlighting the power of the grotesque to defy artistic conventions through exaggeration, fragmentation, and metamorphosis.