10 Unmissable Shows During Frieze Week London

Tate Modern: ‘Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit’

‘He was the best, a bit like Jesus I’ve been thinking.’ So reflected John Baldessari on his former student, the late Mike Kelley, after his passing in 2012. One of the most admired and influential artists of his generation, Kelley’s work spanned installation, video, performance and sui generis works like More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987) – a profoundly moving tapestry of second-hand soft toys and blankets. Including landmark works like The Poltergeist (1979), Sublevel (1998) and Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000–11) – for which Kelley restaged activities based only on snapshots from school yearbooks – the survey is conceived around a script from Kelley’s archive for a piece about a ghost who disappears. With themes of role play, absence and aftermaths, this promises to be a hauntingly beautiful experience. MM

On view from 3 October to 9 March 2025

Hayward Gallery: ‘Haegue Yang: Leap Year’

Stacks of Choco Pies; intricately layered hanji paper; skins of tinkling bells; jumbles of household lights and cables; and Venetian blinds arranged as aerial architecture: the richly varied oeuvre of Haegue Yang is formed of proudly heterogenous elements. What unites it is a singular sensibility that connects the sensual with social and political experience. Featuring new commissions, this exhibition is a chance to consider the breadth of almost two decades of work: excitingly, it will include a reimagining of the artist’s 2006 debut, ‘Sadong 30’, for which she presented works in a disused dwelling in the Seoul suburbs. MM

On view from 9 October to 5 January 2025

South London Gallery: ‘Nairy Baghramian: Jumbled Alphabet’

Fifteen years after her last exhibition at a London institution – 2009’s ‘Butcher, Barber, Angler & Others’, a powerful statement and a quietly pivotal moment in her career, the Iran-born, Berlin-based Nairy Baghramian returns to the capital, presenting works from the ‘Misfits’ (2021–ongoing) series: sensuously textured sculptures inspired by self-assembly toys (think giant Mr Potato Heads fashioned by Constantin Brâncuși), which celebrate the beauty and strangeness of the dysfunctional. Continuing the dialogic seam in Baghramian’s practice, several pieces made in exchange with other artists also feature – as well as a large drawing work, which children visiting the exhibition will realize, reflecting the South London Gallery’s emphasis on engaging a range of communities. MM

On view until 12 January 2025

Serpentine Galleries: ‘Lauren Halsey: emajendat’

A proud daughter of South Central Los Angeles, Lauren Halsey has created in her sculptures, installations and environments a unique aesthetic that channels the deep-rooted community and culture of her hometown. Sampling and remixing images and words like a DJ, Halsey combines disparate vocabularies – spanning funk music, afrofuturism and ancient Egypt – into works that speak to complex intellectual histories and the lived reality of the contemporary Black experience. For her first UK exhibition, she develops the epic architectural forms seen in her recent commissions for the Met’s Roof Garden and Venice Biennale, and responds to the Serpentine’s location to create what the institution calls ‘an immersive funk garden’. MM

On view from 11 October to 2 March 2025

Barbican Art Gallery: ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998’

This is a show of firsts: the first exhibition anywhere in the world dedicated to the art of this transformative period of Indian history, and the first exhibition at the Barbican with Shanay Jhaveri, who joined as Head of Visual Arts in 2022, as chief curator. Realised during a period of intense socio-economic and cultural change – between Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency and the Pokhran-II nuclear tests – works range from Sunil Gupta’s photographic record of the precariousness of gay public identity in New Delhi to Sheela Gowda’s sculptures, embedded in the labour of rural women, while Nilima Sheikh (featured in Studio at Frieze Masters) merges thangka paintings, Mughal miniatures and Piero della Francesca into her own painterly language. MM

On view from 5 October to 5 January 2025

The Wallace Collection: ‘Ranjit Singh: Sikh, Warrior, King’

By any criteria, Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) was a remarkable man. A warlord, he established the Sikh Empire in the Punjab after decades of anarchic Afghan incursions, thereby creating a golden age of political stability, commerce, military power and artistic creativity. This wide-ranging show features 100 works across art, jewellery, weaponry and armour, plus personal artefacts belonging to Singh, members of his court and his 30 wives. A complementary counterpoint to the British Museum’s ‘Silk Roads’ exhibition (until 23 February 2025), too. CW 

On view until 20 October

The Courtauld Gallery: ‘Monet and London. Views of the Thames’

It’s quite hard to picture Claude Monet, the master of dappled sunlight and prismatic colour, in Charing Cross. But the artist stayed at the Savoy Hotel three times between 1899 and 1901, painting Waterloo Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and the Thames. His paintings show the gloomy, smog-shrouded river of popular imagination and Sherlock Holmes adaptations in a new light – glittering and alive, a radiant thread through the city. But although Monet (whose work is on show with Wildenstein & Co. at Frieze Masters) displayed these paintings in Paris, he never got to show them in London as he wanted, and this is the first time they are the subject of a UK exhibition. CW

On view until 19 January 2025

The National Gallery: ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’

After several immersive Vincent van Gogh ‘experiences’ in London, a proper show feels long overdue. This National Gallery exhibition celebrates the institution’s 200th birthday – and the centenary of its acquisition of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Van Gogh’s Chair (both 1888) in 1924 – with some of the artist’s most celebrated works from the final two years of his life. (Loans from private and public collections include The Yellow House, 1888, and The Bedroom, 1889). It’s a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these works in the flesh – as opposed to on tote bags and fridge magnets – and to remind yourself what an extraordinary user of paint Van Gogh is. The show also features some of the artist’s quietly intense drawings, which are among the most immediate and troubling works he ever produced. CW

On view until 19 January 2025

Royal Academy of Arts: ‘In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930’

A century ago, Ukraine was in turmoil. Plus ça change. In the chaotic aftermath of WWI, the country’s artists drove their own path through modernism, an experiment that had real political and cultural meaning against a backdrop of independence and eventual annexation by the Soviet Union. This is the most comprehensive UK exhibition to date about modern art in Ukraine, with 65 works from the likes of Sonia Delaunay, Alexandra Exter, El Lissitzky and Kazymyr Malevich (who appears at Frieze Masters this year with Annely Juda Fine Art). Though these artists take very different approaches, what links them is their passion to forge new identities: as individuals and as Ukrainians. CW

On view until 13 October

National Portrait Gallery: ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’

Just two years after ‘Man and Beast’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, London gets another major Francis Bacon exhibition, a testament to the perennial pulling power of this giant of 20th-century art. Portraiture lies at the heart of Bacon’s oeuvre: distilled from art history, random news photographs and the brutal reality of his often violent and toxic relationships with friends and lovers, his pictures of human beings transcend representation. This exhibition presents 55 works from the 1950s onwards. If Bacon’s sitters sometimes look like they have been turned inside-out, it’s because – emotionally, anyway – they have. The portraits by this eternal outsider – queer, self-taught, alcoholic and sometimes excoriatingly unpleasant – show what art can say about being alive (and about being dead). CW

On view from 10 October to 19 January 2025

This article originally appeared in Frieze Week London magazine 2024 with the title ‘On View’.

Further Information

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.

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^{Main Image: Gieve Patel, Two Men with Handcart, 1979. © Gieve Patel and Barbican}