For our inaugural London (and Margate) round up, we’ve tapped Emily LaBarge, art critic and author of the acclaimed hybrid memoir Dog Days, published in the U.S. last May. In a brilliant workaround to the round-up writer’s (usually self-imposed, impossible) mandate to identify a through line, she’s sorted her abundant picks into the mysterious categories of queens, odalisques, and questioners. Read on to find out just what she means (and which shows you must see now that the art-fair hubbub has moved on). View LaBarge’s London picks and plan your route with our shared list from the See Saw app. —Johanna Fateman
THE QUEENS
Sturtevant
Raven Row | 56 Artillery Lane
Through December 20
God Bless America, or, I guess, tear it down (disclaimer: I’m Canadian). Rub it away, both conceptually and actually, like an erased drawing you can sell later as an original work, still, forever, bearing the faintest palimpsest (some things simply cannot be eradicated!) of its past. Efface its faces—politicians, celebrities, artists, renegades, vernacular material goods, precious art works—repeat them until they mean nothing (or everything), abrade them with technology, treat them like garbage, superfluous, or relics, absolute icons. The means and the mediums are endless in both “Eat the Outside to Light up the Inside,” an elegant and immaculately installed retrospective of the great, mononymous Sturtevant’s work at Raven Row (her first U.K. show since her death in 2014) and an exhibition of new work by Cady Noland at Gagosian’s Davies Street space.
Through the winding spaces of Raven Row (which occupies two joined Rococo-style, 18th-century Huguenot silk merchant shops in the historical weaving and textile area of Spitalfields), Sturtevant’s clever and precise use of replication as a mode of critique—as much as adoration, bravado, self-awareness, and artful humor—is preeminent. A Warhol Marilyn in bright greens, yellows, pinks; Rauschenberg’s famous targets; and American cartoon strips are presented as if to say, Look how meaningful and meaningless all this is, all this craft, this art, this history, all at once—you decide. Video projections swim and distort around corniced corners, rudimentary technological disorientations that remind, with simple clarity, that we can never apprehend an exact truth of something: all representations are mediated, even if just by our own eyes.
Cady Noland
Gagosian | 17–19 Davies Street
Through December 19
In stark black and white (and read all over), Cady Noland’s cropped tabloid and news images, some with fragments of text, are slickly reproduced, big and small, on honeycomb aluminum and propped against walls or pieces of freestanding Perspex, inside small maquettes, splayed on tables, or lying unceremoniously on the floor. Newsroom, crime scene, exhibition-in-progress, serial killer/stalker storage space, all of the above: Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra glint degraded versions of their own images and Patty Hearst, waist down, can be guessed by her famous machine-gun stance.
Wonderful to see work by these two appropriation-minded women artists from the U.S., working across generations (Sturtevant, who lived in Paris from the 1990s, was born in 1924; Noland was born in 1956), who have grappled with American pop culture, media, new technologies, and methods of display in often dark, frequently funny ways. (The only other person I’d add to this particular, idiosyncratic roster is Lutz Bacher, whose work the always excellent Raven Row showed in late 2023.)
Sophie Calle
Turner Contemporary | Rendezvous, Margate
Through January 24
Vive la France, or at least the youth whose growing protests about education, the cost of living, and wider contemporary politics have shuttered openings in Paris and drawn the ire and dismay (and sometimes, but rarely, sympathy) of collectors and gallerists heading to the capital’s Art Week for the next round of fairs and local vernissages—likely to meet, instead, street barricades, anti-ram barriers, looting, curfews, and les flics. But the enigmatic, anarchic French artist Sophie Calle is in England, at Turner Contemporary in Margate, for her first institutional show since 2009 at the Whitechapel Gallery. Works on show span 1986 to 2024, and as is typical of Calle’s work, many are text-heavy—her sly, funny, insouciant writing takes the form of fragments, essays, pithy parables and poems, borrowed speech.
Most special to see in Margate, at the gallery whose vast windows open onto the North Sea where it meets the Thames Estuary, is her multi-channel video installation Voir la Mer, 2011, which captures people’s reactions to their first time seeing the sea; and Turners, 1998-2013, which takes as its focus the theft of two paintings by J.M.W. Turner in 1994 while on loan from the Tate. (The Romantic painter is the gallery’s namesake and patron saint of Margate, where he spent much of his life capturing the tumult of the coast.) The work reproduces them photographically alongside a text composed of descriptions of the missing paintings offered by curators, guards, and gallery staff. “Completely crazy, extraordinary things,” one reads. “Unbelievably bold, single-minded, strongly emotive. The light one was bleeding colours.” Here, Calle’s piece hangs alongside an actual Turner, Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate (Study for ‘Rockets and Blue Lights’), a view seen roughly 186 years ago, from the very spot where we stand.
THE ODALISQUES
Nicole Eisenman
Sadie Coles HQ | 17 Savile Row
Through November 21
Okay, so they are not odalisques exactly, but there is something fantastic—something troubling, sweet, pained, funny, slumped, lumpen, time-traveling, truncated, violent, hopeful, painted, sculpted—about the body, singular and collective, absent and undeniably present, in a handful of exhibitions that criss-cross the city. In the French-born, U.S.-based artist Nicole Eisenman’s outstanding show of new works at Sadie Coles, bodies multiply and intersect, tumble and roll across a long horizontal of six joined canvases (The Orgy, 2026). Across other paintings, forms melt, become geometric abstractions, or stand—painted with breathtaking realism, trying to apprehend the cosmos, a thankless but seductive task. (Full disclosure: I know the paintings well because I wrote the exhibition text.)
Rosalind Nashashibi
GRIMM | 43a Duke Street
Through November 21
At the Dutch gallery GRIMM’s relatively new London space, “Gaza Apollo,” a show of 14 new canvases (all 2026) by British-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi takes as its starting point a series of photos of a bronze statue of Apollo that a Palestinian fisherman in Gaza pulled from the seabed. Seized by the authorities after the fisherman tried to sell it on eBay, its whereabouts are now unknown, but Nashashibi transforms the seafoam-patinated nude figure into a deity, a lover, a corpse. The artist’s facility with oil paint is visually seductive—a grove of dusky olive trees is at once precise and dissolving into a mauve sfumato; a nude girl lies on a couch reading, her body lit up with otherworldly purples as if the book itself is a source of light.
Rebecca Warren
Maureen Paley | 4 Herald Street & 60 Three Colts Lane
Through December 12
“I imagined this show as a retrospective being made by a slightly different version of me,” Rebecca Warren has said of her show “There Will Be Another You,” which takes place across both of Maureen Paley’s spaces. “Everything seems familiar but strange somehow, right but not quite right. Like there’s another version of you who’s doing it simultaneously.” Her characteristic women stand stolid in clay and bronze, painted and raw, on plinths and rickety platforms with wheels. The title work is recumbent, splashed with shiny licks of gold paint, wires in places of one forearm, a stick of lumber in place one leg. Stalker, 2010/26, bodacious and bulbous in high heels has no head or arms, but she strides purposefully, unstoppable. Let’s face it: having a body is confusing, hellish, lucky, liberating, weird.
Nicole Wermers
St. Chad’s | Opposite 43 Wicklow Street
Through November 28 (by appointment)
The Finnish artist Benjamin Orlow has repurposed the stocky, bricked outbuildings of an old Throat, Nose, and Ear Hospital in Kings Cross (currently inhabited by artists under one of London’s many live-in property guardian schemes) for monthly exhibitions. St. Chad’s, as it’s called, is one of the most ambitious and energetic independent spaces in London. For her show “A Cool and Dry Place,” Nicole Wermers has installed a single, tantalizing work: Domestic Tail is a 14 meter “cream brown spotted hand-sewn faux fur tail, polystyrene filling, thread, hose reel,” and that’s about all the information you’ll get. The tail, which issues from a rotary hose reel parked in the corner of the gallery, arcs across the floor (perennially painted a sort of unpleasant, shiny maroon hue) and around the room in gentle curves, eventually meandering out the door into the industrial courtyard beyond. The cat is out of the bag; she is not a domestic feline; no house cat; she wanders and who knows what tales she’ll come back with. (There are shades here of Sturtevant’s brilliant renderings of Krazy Kat, the gender fluid hero of the kooky comic strip that ran in the New York Evening Journal from 1913-44).
THE QUESTIONERS
Sung Tieu
Emalin | 4–8 Helmet Row
Through November 14
I had somehow imagined, on my way to see the Berlin-based Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu’s “How is your day?,” that the 14-channel video installation from which the show takes its title would involve some repetition of the question in absence of an answer. Perhaps I’ve become too accustomed to the ever-terrifying British greeting of “are you alright?”, which really just means “how’s it going,” and you’re not actually supposed to answer honestly or in any detail. Or maybe I was thinking of a passage in “The Hardest Thing,” an essay by Lynne Tillman recently collected in Paying Attention, a volume of her art writing from 1973 to the present, in which she casually asserts: “‘Is it art?’ and ‘What is art?’ are jokes.”
In Tieu’s piece, which is installed as a straight, wall-mounted line of CRT monitors (such satisfying objects), the standout of her exhibition at Emalin, the question instead hovers over the many moving images—hands washing dishes, a city street, a grocery store, political posters—captured by her mother, who was asked by Tieu to record her daily life with a pair of M%&$ (I’d rather not type the word) glasses. The result is Margaret Raspé meets Chantal Akerman, an alternately claustrophobic and mesmerizing document of a mother and daughter apart, of the impossibility of closing the distance, of how time passes, of how we can ask someone how their day was but if we weren’t there, we’ll always miss something.
Cecilia Vicuña
Whitechapel Gallery | 77–82 Whitechapel High Street
Through Febuary 14
More riddling questions trying to pin down the ineffable at the Whitechapel Gallery, where a video in Cecilia Vicuña’s exhibition, “Living Threads,” consists of her asking passersby in 1980s Bogotá, “What is poetry to you?” Inevitably, they have all kinds of responses, ranging from specific references to metaphysical musings, but somehow the question prompts, in each one, a smile and a far-off look in their eyes—as if just the thought of poetry, even if it is politically grounded, transports us momentarily from the here and now. (Brecht is name-checked, amongst others.) I thought of a concurrent show by another Latin American artist, Ana Mendieta, at Tate Modern, which features a rare audio piece from her time working as a grade schoolteacher. For it, she collaged together the answers her students offered when asked “what is a soul?” I don’t know if that’s harder or easier to answer, but the result is just as effective in reminding us that some art eschews the traditional material values of the gallery for something else, something impermanent, transient, ongoing, existential.
Pope.L
Modern Art | 8 Bennet Street
Through November 14
Pope.L’s “Selected Works 1978-2022” at Modern Art treats words in a similarly powerful, incantatory, confrontational, if distinctly more visible fashion. At the center of each of a series of brightly colored vinyl prints by the sui generis American artist reads “negro idea” followed by a random number: 501, 37, 666. Another work, Identity What We Lose To Real For, 2022, features chunky wooden block letters that spell various words, which can be picked out from a chaotic array of jumbled mutters. PITCHER, THEN, THING, EVERY, SAME are splattered here and there with bright licks of color, like a Dada salon takedown of Christopher Wool’s quippy one-liner paintings, or simply a repudiation of words themselves, or even the alphabet in general, as devices inadequate (like numbers), damning even, for naming things, places, most of all, people. In the gallery’s back room, a series of Pope.L’s videos are on loop, including his well-known work from 2001, in which the artist, clad in a Superman costume and with a skateboard attached to his back, crawls the asphalt of Manhattan from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx as people blithely pass him by, his red cape dancing in the breeze.
William Kentridge
Goodman Gallery | 26 Cork Street
Through November 7
Another line of red flickers through South African artist William Kentridge’s new stop-motion film at Goodman Gallery. A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction) takes its name from a West African proverb and has previously appeared as an aphorism in a series of etchings Kentridge made in 1995. Here, it appears on the cover of a notebook, across which itinerant red pencils dance and scrawl, the scene quickly shifting to take us to the streets of Johannesburg and then to the Modernist home of the fictional industrialist Soho Eckstein (one of the artist’s enduring protagonists), where a little black cat follows him like a shadow. It’s a moving and melancholic portrait of life in flux, urban disaster, a man aging, a question about how we live now, or anytime, and what art can make of living when it is so varied, holds so many lives that seem, but are not, incommensurate. Another question without answer, but not without purpose.
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Is LA Still a Painter’s Town? Juliana Halpert on the City’s Fall Gallery Openings
Five Nights on Elizabeth Street: Whitney Mallett’s Guide to the Fall Openings
Conceptualism’s Resurgence, a Growing Critics’ Table, and More Reflections on This Season in Art
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