There are 11 exhibitions on in London worth the trip. I checked the dates, the venues and the opening hours one by one, on the museums’ own pages.
Last checked: 17 October 2026
28 March to 15 November 2026
The first UK exhibition devoted to Elsa Schiaparelli, with over two hundred pieces spanning the 1920s to the house today under Daniel Roseberry. Worth it less for the clothes than for how it treats fashion as a Surrealist project, jewellery displayed as sculpture.
25 June 2026 to 3 January 2027
Not a psychological portrait: the show traces how Frida Kahlo became a global icon. Her thirty paintings sit alongside over two hundred works by predecessors and artists she influenced. A curatorial angle more than a biographical one.
2 October 2026 to 10 January 2027
Salman Toor’s first solo museum show in Europe: nineteen paintings of queer and immigrant lives caught between two cultures. The key work, The Bar on East 13th of 2019, answers Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which hangs in the Courtauld’s own collection.
14 July 2026 to 17 January 2027
The first in-depth show of Ana Mendieta in the UK for more than ten years, with newly restored films and many works never seen in Britain. At its centre is the Silueta Series, body outlines made with fire, water and flowers and kept only in photographs and film.
1 October 2026 to 31 January 2027
Two thousand years of Korean art and culture in the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery, with works from the collection of Lee Kun-hee, the former Samsung chairman. The British Museum stages it as Korean culture enjoys a moment of worldwide fame.
3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027
Forty paintings from the 1860s to the 1880s on love and friendship, with the Musée d’Orsay’s Bal au Moulin de la Galette shown in the UK for the first time. On Friday evenings, from 23 October to 15 January, you pay what you wish.
2 October 2026 to 31 January 2027
More than a hundred and sixty works, from the 1870s to the 1960s, show how the Riviera became a laboratory for Monet, Matisse, Picasso and Klein. Travel posters and film are part of the show too.
9 October 2026 to 7 February 2027
Around two hundred and fifty portraits made over five years tell more than half a century of British queer activism and culture: the sitters include Ian McKellen, Tilda Swinton, David Hockney and Jimmy Somerville. Check prices and times on the gallery’s site.
8 October 2026 to 14 February 2027
Curated by Edward Enninful, former editor of British Vogue, it covers the decade when British art, fashion and photography merged: Juergen Teller, Corinne Day, Steve McQueen, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas beside clothes by Westwood and Alexander McQueen.
8 June 2026 to 3 May 2027
Seven decades of kinetic work: light sculptures, mirrored surfaces, rooms that only activate once you step inside. Le Parc, co-founder of the GRAV group in 1960, wanted art to be a collective experience. He died in 2026, making this also his last major retrospective.
10 September 2026 to 11 July 2027
The Bayeux Tapestry is back in England for the first time in centuries, in Room 30. Entry is by booking only, in forty-minute slots: tickets up to 31 December are sold out, and those for January to March go on sale from 21 October.
5 exhibitions that have not opened yet, but whose dates are already announced.
7 November 2026 to 9 May 2027
More than two hundred objects trace one city from 330 to 1922, Byzantine then Ottoman capital, from its Roman refounding to the coffee houses and bathhouses of daily life. They range from the ivory Veroli Casket to Osman Hamdi Bey’s Ladies Taking a Walk.
12 November 2026 to 11 April 2027
More than three hundred works on the fifty-year partnership of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, from portraits to painted furniture and ceramics. At its centre is their studio, moved from Charleston, their Sussex home. One room contains explicit content.
21 November 2026 to 11 April 2027
All nine of Jan van Eyck’s known painted portraits brought together for the first time, half of his surviving work. The sitters are not kings or aristocrats but merchants, craftsmen and the painter’s relatives. The ticket includes the audio guide.
21 November 2026 to 14 March 2027
In 1938 Peggy Guggenheim opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery on Cork Street, round the corner from the Royal Academy. The show reunites works from her twenty-plus London exhibitions, from Kandinsky’s first UK solo show to Hepworth, Moore and Dalí.
24 November 2026 to 7 March 2027
Nan Goldin’s first UK institutional show since 2002 premieres You Never Did Anything Wrong, Part II, a film about animals and extinction. Her photographs are upstairs, and Memory Lost, on her own history of addiction, is also on show.
It is always these 9, and I check them one by one. When a venue has nothing on I say so, with the date I checked: it is something you would otherwise have to look up museum by museum.
Dates and prices change, and this page may not reflect the latest updates: before you travel, always check the museum’s own page, linked under each exhibition, which is the most reliable source.