One loan nobody thought would happen, and two artists who take their time.
The Bayeux Tapestry, 1070s (detail). Musée de la Tapisserie, Bayeux · Public domain
Exhibition
The Bayeux Tapestry
British Museum
Why goProbably the only time you will see it in London.
The 70-metre embroidery has left Normandy for the first time in more than nine centuries, while its museum in Bayeux is renovated. The British Museum lays it flat, in one continuous case, so that you walk the whole length of the Norman Conquest: the oath, the comet, the ships, the arrow, and the margins full of animals, fables and naked men nobody mentions at school. It shows the conquest from the conquerors' side, and it has never looked so close to home.
Dates10 Sep 2026 – 11 Jul 2027BookingTimed tickets; 2026 sold out, next release 21 OctoberWhereRoom 30
Public art
Tschabalala Self, Lady in Blue
Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square
Why goA woman takes her place among the generals.
The American painter Tschabalala Self makes figures from cut and sewn fabric and paint, collaged into bodies that are confident, unhurried and very much looking back at you. Her Lady in Blue stands on the Fourth Plinth among the admirals and kings of Trafalgar Square: an ordinary woman, at monumental scale, in a square built to celebrate empire. It costs nothing and you will pass it anyway. Stop.
DatesFrom 10 Sep 2026, until 2028PriceFree
Serpentine North · CC BY 2.0
Exhibition
Amar Kanwar
Serpentine North
Why goFilms that ask for an hour and repay it.
The Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar makes slow, layered installations about violence, ecology and justice, especially in the forests and mining lands of eastern India. His films ask you to sit down and stay: images, voice and silence build up into something closer to testimony than documentary. The Serpentine North, a former gunpowder store in Kensington Gardens, is a good place to give him the hour he needs.
Two painters who looked closely: a woman Manet took seriously, and Delacroix at the zoo.
Eva Gonzalès, A Box at the Théâtre des Italiens, c. 1874 · Public domain
Exhibition
Eva Gonzalès, A Free-Spirited Artist
Petit Palais
Why goManet's only pupil, at last on her own terms.
The only pupil Manet ever accepted into his studio finally has her first retrospective: about a hundred paintings, pastels and prints by Eva Gonzalès, who died in 1883 at 34, days after her teacher. Her sister Jeanne, her favourite model, is everywhere; so are theatre boxes, quiet interiors and Normandy beaches. Works by Morisot, Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond place her among her peers. Read our Curator's Highlight before you go.
Dates15 Sep 2026 – 24 Jan 2027Price€14HoursClosed Mon · late Fri and Sat
Eugène Delacroix, Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother, 1830. Musée du Louvre · Public domain
Exhibition
Delacroix, Horses and Other Animals
Musée national Eugène Delacroix
Why goRomanticism's wildest painter, in his quietest house.
Delacroix drew at the Jardin des Plantes with his friend the sculptor Barye, watching lions and tigers dismember their dinner, and the animals ran through his painting for the rest of his life: rearing horses, sleeping cats, tigers rolling in the dust. The exhibition is in his last apartment and studio, on the little Place de Furstenberg, which is reason enough to go.
Dates12 Sep 2026 – 18 Apr 2027Where6 rue de Furstenberg, 6th arr.HoursClosed Tue
Why goThe editor of American images, at full length.
The largest survey yet of Arthur Jafa, the filmmaker and cinematographer whose montage Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) remains one of the defining artworks of the decade. Jafa cuts together found footage, music videos, sermons and news into sequences about Black life in America that are joyful, unbearable and impossible to look away from. It opens the autumn in the New Museum's expanded building on the Bowery.
Dates24 Sep 2026 – early Jan 2027WhereBowery
Bard Graduate Center Gallery · CC BY 4.0
Exhibition
Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film
Bard Graduate Center Gallery
Why goHow silent cinema dressed the modern woman.
Before sound, Hollywood spoke through clothes. This exhibition looks at how costume, couture and fan magazines built the first film stars, and how the women who wore those clothes, and often designed them, shaped what modern femininity looked like. Small, scholarly and full of things you have not seen, in a townhouse gallery on the Upper West Side.
Dates18 Sep 2026 – 3 Jan 2027WhereWest 86th Street
Frieze week is the excuse. The museums are the reason to stay.
Leeum Museum of Art · CC BY-SA 2.0
Exhibition
Koo Jeong A, OUSSSMOS
Leeum Museum of Art
Why goAn artist of almost nothing, given a whole museum.
Koo Jeong A works with almost nothing: dust, smells, magnets, light, a pencil line on a wall. Leeum gives her the largest solo show of her career in Korea, spreading from its contemporary galleries into the lobby and into the permanent rooms of traditional Korean art. Scent and magnetism change how the building feels. Go slowly, and expect to doubt what you are seeing.
Dates5 Sep – 27 Dec 2026WhereHannam
MMCA Seoul · CC BY 4.0
Exhibition
Do Ho Suh
MMCA Seoul
Why goThe houses he carried with him, home at last.
Do Ho Suh is best known for his life-size houses made of translucent fabric: the rooms and corridors he has lived in, from Seoul to New York to London, sewn so precisely that you can see the light switches. This major retrospective brings him back to the city where he was born, with early works, the key projects and new pieces. A show about home, in the city that taught him what one is.
DatesFrom 28 Aug 2026WhereSamcheong
Exhibition
Sol LeWitt, Open Structure
Amorepacific Museum of Art
Why goRules as beauty, in a building made of rules.
Sol LeWitt's open cubes and wall drawings are instructions as much as objects: anyone can build them, and they still look like nobody else's. In David Chipperfield's calm headquarters, the rules of Conceptual art meet one of the most rule-bound buildings in Seoul. A cool, precise counterweight to fair week.
Dates1 Sep 2026 – 28 Feb 2027WhereYongsan
COEX · Public domain
Fair
Frieze Seoul and KiafEnded
COEX, Gangnam
Why goFair week is when Seoul puts on its best shows.
More than 125 galleries from 30 countries, most from Asia and the Pacific, with Kiaf next door on the same ticket. This year's new Spotlight section is devoted to underrecognised 20th-century artists. Do the fair in a morning; spend the rest of the week in the city's museums and galleries, which open their best shows for the occasion.
The Biennale's last months, and the shows around it that will outlast the crowds.
This Photo was taken by Wolfgang Moroder. Feel free to use · CC BY-SA 3.0
Biennale
Biennale Arte 2026: In Minor Keys
Giardini, Arsenale and across the city
Why goThe last Biennale shaped by one of the great curators of our time.
The exhibition the late Koyo Kouoh conceived before her death in 2025, carried through by her team: a Biennale in a lower voice, more interested in repair, care and listening than in spectacle. September and October are the best months to see it, after the summer heat and before the closing crush. Give the Arsenale a full day and save the national pavilions in the palazzi for another.
Until22 Nov 2026TipTwo days, at least
Didier Descouens · CC BY-SA 4.0
Exhibition
Michael Armitage, The Promise of Change
Palazzo Grassi
Why goThe most important painter at the Biennale isn't in the Biennale.
The Kenyan painter Michael Armitage paints on lubugo, a Ugandan bark cloth whose seams and holes he keeps, and his large scenes of East African politics, myth and daily life borrow from Goya, Gauguin and Titian without ever sounding borrowed. More than 150 works fill the palazzo, the most complete view of him yet. It stays open after the Biennale closes.
Until10 Jan 2027WhereSan Marco
One thing, anywhere
Now Off-Piste
This wasn't part of our plan, but you should know about it.
Gwangju
Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall and venues across the city · CC BY-SA 4.0
Biennale
Gwangju Biennale: You Must Change Your Life
Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall and venues across the city
Why goThe serious biennial of fair week.
Asia's oldest contemporary biennial, founded in 1995 in the city of the 1980 democratic uprising. This edition is directed by the Singaporean artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen, whose own work unpicks the histories of modern Asia. Gwangju is under two hours from Seoul by KTX, which makes it the easiest detour of Frieze week and, often, the most thoughtful exhibition of the season in Asia.
Dates5 Sep – 15 Nov 2026Getting thereKTX from Seoul, under 2 hours
