The Courtauld Gallery presents the first ever museum exhibition in the UK devoted to Wayne Thiebaud. Bringing together a remarkable selection of his vibrant, lushly painted still lifes, the show highlights the quintessentially post-war American subjects for which Thiebaud is best known—from diner food and deli counters to gumball machines and pinball tables. Thiebaud regarded the everyday objects of American life as vital subjects for contemporary art. He saw his work as carrying forward the radical legacy of earlier still-life painters such as Chardin, Manet, and Cézanne, transforming hot dogs, lemon meringue pies, and glossy cream cakes into the material of profound and distinctly modern painting.

Picasso’s War by Hugh Eakin recounts how competing ambitions, wartime urgency, and Picasso’s talent shifted the centre of the art world from Paris to New York. Picasso’s dramatic rise in the United States—from relative dismissal in 1939 to national fascination a year later—traced back to John Quinn, a maverick collector whose unrealised vision for a Picasso museum was revived by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s pioneering first director. Their mission faced scepticism, Picasso’s reluctance, and the political turmoil of Europe as Hitler targeted modern art and its Jewish dealers. Their efforts culminated in the landmark exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, which introduced Picasso to America, secured MoMA’s cultural standing, and safeguarded many modern masterpieces from Nazi destruction—reshaping American taste and the global art world.

The Musée Picasso–Paris exhibition 'Philip Guston: The Irony of History' traces the artist’s trajectory from his Nixon Drawings to his final canvases, highlighting the expressive and political power of a practice that oscillates between grotesque caricature and disquieting darkness. Guston’s defiant late paintings — among the most searing works of the 20th century — mark his radical shift in the late 1960s from abstraction to an unsettling figuration. Through this transformation, he confronted the moral decay of postwar America in a tragi-comic mode that fused comic-strip imagery with painterly gravitas. His hooded Klansmen, both chilling and absurd, stand as biting indictments of racism and violence in the United States, while his drawings reveal an equally raw outlet for anger and reflection.  

Fondation Louis Vuitton is showing an exceptional Gerhard Richter retrospective — unmatched both in scale and in chronological scope — featuring 275 works spanning from 1962 to 2024. The exhibition includes oil paintings, glass and steel sculptures, pencil and ink drawings, watercolours, and overpainted photographs, offering a comprehensive view of over six decades. Presented in chronological order, each section spans approximately a decade and traces the evolution of a singular pictorial vision — one shaped by both rupture and continuity — from his early photo-based paintings to his final abstractions.

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.