From Kerry James Marshall’s show at the Royal Academy and Eva Helene Pade’s London debut to new art fair Echo Soho discover this year’s unmissable exhibitions across London.
Gallery view of 'Kerry James Marshall: The Histories' at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (20 September 2025 - 18 January 2026), showing Untitled (Studio), 2014. Loan courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry
As Frieze London and Frieze Masters takes over Regent’s Park, PAD London pops up in Mayfair and 1.54 returns to Somerset House, a huge variety of arty delights are springing up all over the city, from museum shows to fledgling art fairs and new exhibitions.
Here are ten suggestions of what to see around town during Frieze week including; Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy of Arts; Eva Helene Pade at Thaddhaeus Ropac; Shifting Ground: Art by First Nations Women of Australia at The Arts Club; Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern; Don’t Look Back at Unit London; Post Human VII x Thames Carpets; The Ground Beneath: Material Memory and the Resilience of Hope at Messums London; Ectoplasm at The Gallery of Everything; Tracing Time featuring Jemma Powell and Leah Wood at Kensington Roof Gardens; and Echo Soho, a new women-centred art fair founded by India Rose James.
Fashion-loving art lovers might like to visit Paul Smith’s flagship store on Albermarle Street to combine a spot of retail therapy with Royal Academician David Remfry’s exhibition.
All this arty activity works up an appetite, which could be sated with dinner at Mount Street Restaurant, where a new menu of autumnal dishes takes inspiration from the extraordinary art works by Warhol, Alexander Calder, Lucien Freud and Matisse on the walls. The ‘Palette to Plate’ dishes will give art-lovers the ultimate fix in between the fair or new exhibition. Menu highlights include a Frieze week version of the restaurant’s signature dish–Lobster Pie for two, greens–a salute to Andy Warhol’s Lobster (1982) and Roasted pumpkin soup with black truffle rarebit inspired by Hans Emmenegger’s Turbankurbis.
Mount Street Restaurant Mount Street Restaurant
Here is a curated guide to Frieze Week highlights across London, from major museum retrospectives to daring new voices redefining the scene.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy of Arts
An unmissable exhibition of Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy of Arts–the largest to date outside of the US–features 70 works including his poignant Venice Biennale sculpture Wake, 2003, which greets visitors in the final galleries. Wake features a sailboat set on black Plexiglass, pulling a web of portrait medallions, which represent the descendants of the first 20 enslaved Africans who landed in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 to be sold at auction. Marshall mourns the trauma of slavery, while adding new portraits to the piece to celebrate achievements of contemporary African Americans in North America. Also featured is his commission from the City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library–Legler Regional Library, Knowledge and Wonder (1995)–which has never been loaned before.
Marshall’s powerful paintings celebrate black people and black culture, foregrounding the lives of Black Americans and reclaiming art history from a white lens. In one gallery he exhibits imagined portraits of historically significant Black figures including enslaved African American artist Scipio Moorhead and abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
The Histories demonstrates why Kerry James Marshall is one of the most important painters in the world. His bold paintings place the Black figure front and centre while referencing art history, civil rights, comic books, science fiction and afro-futurism.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly until 18th January 2026.
Gallery view of 'Kerry James Marshall: The Histories' at the Royal Academy of Arts, London © Lee Sharrock © Lee Sharrock
Eva Helene Pade Søgelys at Thaddhaeus Ropac London
Danish artist Eva Helene Pade is something of a star in Denmark, where she was the youngest artist to be invited to have a solo show at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, earlier this year. Her stellar talent merges echoes of Klimt and Munch with a distinctly contemporary voice and ability to create erotically charged canvases that tell intriguing narratives. Thaddhaeus Ropac presents Søgelys, Pade’s first solo exhibition in London, and her breathtaking new works evoke the decadence of Weimar Republic’s Kabaret and the feeling of being on the edge of danger that being in a crowd can induce. Pade’s women are liberated, visceral and vibrant.
“With my figurative painting, I create blurred lines or gaps that become the language for the things we can’t put into words. That’s what I envy so much about abstraction, it’s already working in a realm for which language does not exist.” Eva Helene Pade
Eva Helene Pade Søgelys is at Thaddhaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street from 14th October to 22nd November.
Don’t Look Back at Unit London
With the Oasis reunion tour and renaissance of nineties fashion, we are living through a moment of huge nostalgia for the nineties, an era of huge creative energy for London especially, when Tony Blair was in power, ‘Cool Britannia’ was the phrase coined for the effortless cool of London’s artists and musicians, and the YBAs were born. ‘Don’t Look Back’, named after the iconic Oasis track, is a new exhibition at Unit London that captures the zeitgeist of the raw creative drive of the 1990s and early 2000s. Curated by Beth Greenacre and Sigrid Kirk, the exhibition re-examines the ‘90s & Noughties through a contemporary lens – one that is more inclusive, diverse, and alive with possibility.
The exhibition features works by the now mature YBAs Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Richard Billingham, Mark Titchner and Gavin Turk that pushed the boundaries of visual art with wit and authenticity. Also featured are contemporary artists whose works embody the DIY or rebellious spirit of 90s artists, such as Bex Massey, Lakwena Maciver, Anna Perach and Abi Huxtable. Elaine Constantine’s Fuck Art Let’s Dance’ captures the ecstatic freedom of dancing in a club, recalling the pre-camera phone raves of the 90s.
Don’t Look Back is at Unit London, 3 Hanover Square until 26th October.
Post Human VII x Thames Carpets
Ten contemporary artists translate their vision into beautifully handwoven carpets in Post Human VII, a collaboration between CMJZ Arts with curator Tobias Ross-Southall and Thames Carpets at the new Cramer St Gallery in Marylebone Square.
Hayden Kays, Helen Beard, Sola Olulode, Saman & Sasan Oskouei, Tom Furse, James Massiah, Mays Al Moosawi, Michael McGrath and Tobias Ross-Southall feature in an exhibition at the new Cramer St gallery. This innovative visual dialogue between the ancient craft of weaving and the narrative of visual artists results in natural, handmade, luxury art collectibles.
Post Human VII recognises the historical importance of rugs and tapestries and the skill involved in making them, viewing that skill and cultural heritage with the lens of contemporary artists.
Curator Toby Ross-Southall comments: “In a divided world, this project affirms the power of art to unite. Transcending politics and borders and weaving communities together through a shared vision.”
Post Human VII is at Cramer St Gallery, Marylebone Square from 14th October to 9th November.
The Ground Beneath: Material Memory and the Resilience of Hope at Messums London
The Ground Beneath: Material Memory and the Resilience of Hope at Messums London features sculpture, installation, paiting and performance art by artists of Black and African diasporic heritage. Curated by Messums Associate Director Lisa Anderson, the featured artists Temitope Adebowale, Motunrayo Akinola, Sonia Elizabeth Barrett, Shirley Nette Williams, Irvin Pascal, Camille Provost, and Justin Randolph Thompson explore how ordinary materials can be repurposed into artworks full of emotional, cultural and political weight.
Highlights include Sonia Elizabeth Barrett’s Writing Desks, which were born out of the artist’s frustration with archival letters penned in the colonies. Barrett repurpose Victorian and Edwardian travelling desks as masks in order to create a space for contemporary performance in the place where the Empire was written.
“The first masks to be created for European colonisers were leather and wood combinations in the Niger Delta. They were already carrying leather and wood storytelling tools in these desks. As a Black sculptor on the other side of the colonial rupture, this space of possibility is what I can facilitate through sculpture here in Europe, beyond Colonial stories, facing forward.” Sonia Elizabeth Barrett.
The Ground Beneath: Material Memory and the Resilience of Hope is at Messums London, 28 Cork Street, until 19th October.
Sonia E. Barratt, Desk number 6, 2021, Lockable Antique Portable Travel Desk, Mahogany, with embossed leather inlay, wicker, ink and key. 100 x 60 x 60 cm DAMIAN GRIFFITHS