September might not be everyone’s favourite month—summer holidays wrap up, work kicks back in, and the weather starts cooling down. But if you're looking for something to shake off those post-holiday blues, we’ve put together a list of the art shows—both newly opened and upcoming— we’re most excited about.
HAMILTONS
Mayfair I 4 September to 9 November
Nobuyoshi Araki is recognised internationally for his prolific output and the erotic content of his photographs, which blur the line between art and pornography. He is most well-known for photographs of women bound according to the ancestral rules of Kinbaku – the Japanese art of bondage – a practice dating back to the 15th century. His interest in important Japanese cultural practices is also reflected in his use of traditional sumi ink.
Araki’s inspiration for these expressive ink drawings derives from his regular jaunts in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district at a bar named Hanaguruma. The artist spent many nights at Hanaguruma, where he would sketch portraits, photograph and drink into the late hours. The tiny bar, which closed its doors in 2015, consisted of a simple counter and two seats, and was frequented by an array of visual artists and performers from Nan Goldin, Robert Frank to Bjork and Lady Gaga. Those who visited were encouraged to make their mark on the walls with signatures, drawings, and Polaroids.
MASSIMO DE CARLO
Mayfair I 4 September to 2 October
McGurn’s Strawberry juxtaposes irony with sharp observation, challenging the constraints of traditional fine art. The exhibition combines a sun-bleached, nostalgic palette with the seductive overtones of 80s sexploitation cinema. McGurn’s interest in sensuality as an approach to painting, is clear in the title Strawberry irreverently cute and sexy, this reading is ultimately superficial. As the artist says, “everything is strawberry flavour, it’s the sweetener”, medicine, vapes, condoms, ice cream, ectos, lip gloss.
On 18 September at 6:30 PM, the gallery will host a conversation between France-Lise McGurn and New Contemporaries Director and curator, Kiera Blakey.
ALICE AMATI
Fitzrovia I 6 September to 5 October
In What Have You Done With Her?, Agbo Godeau searches for a “missing history” by exploring little-known films featuring women who share a mixed race heritage. Though she purposefully does not offer any answers to the topics she sets out to investigate, through her paintings, she allows herself to consider her place in the world while also encouraging viewers to think about how they see themselves and the people around them, taking into account the sort of stories that may have informed those opinions.
1014 GALLERY
Dalston I 5 September to 3 October (by appointment)
Palm* Photo Prize is a biennial submission based exhibition for a new generation of photographers. Its aim is to support, elevate and showcase the best of the new wave of image-makers. The prize continues to support photographers both emerging and established and to encourage conversations on human engagement, artistic development, community and their representation through the printed image.
ARCADIA MISSA
Marylebone I 7 September to 27 October
Using everyday materials like steel, plastic, and objects found in most households, Jesse Darling, winner of the Turner Prize 2023, fosters connections between individual existence and collective humanity. The works on display reflect on alternative histories and the speculative present, always playing between the familiar and the strange. The medium is always the message, and these objects speak on a register we all recognise, somewhere between the tool and the relic and the commodity fetish.
MIMOSA HOUSE
Holborn I 12 September to 26 October
Unfolding over five chapters, transfeminisms, brings to light a multiplicity of urgent, pressing and ongoing issues faced by women, queer and trans people across the globe. It outlines strategies of resistance through propositions of collective action, care and radical imagination, in order to generate a more equitable future. Care and Kinship celebrates community, collective ritual, and ancestors. Artists work across various media including felt and weaving, film and sound, language and acts of collective making. Drawing on the sacred interconnectedness, the exhibition features acts of resilience, spirituality, and healing.
SEVENTEEN GALLERY
Haggerston I 12 September to 26 October
Romanian-born, Budapest-based artist Botond Keresztesi creates uncanny realities through his paintings, which transport the viewers into a twisted, airbrushed utopia influenced by avant-garde movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism. This series of works uses the transformation of pigment into image to raise beguiling questions about our bodies, what might be possible with them and how we might adapt either through ingenuity or magic.
GUTS GALLERY
Hackney I 13 September to 13 October
Mouths froth and hands grab in Lydia Pettit and Olivia Sterling’s ‘Bitches in Heat’, a raucous, untamed exploration of desire on the margins. Pettit, inspired by Paula Rego’s iconic dog women, crawls across the floor in one sweeping canvas, with sharp, talon-like nails and bared teeth. Sterling depicts a pair of legs playfully dangling through the ceiling above directions for the ladies’ room, as a hand passes a retro cocktail from the corner of the canvas. Their appetites, symbolised through Sterling’s use of food and Pettit’s feral self-portraits, are at times unapologetically animalistic, challenging the limited contemporary cliches of who is desired – and how. Inspirations verge from the ominous shadows of ‘The Evil Dead’ to the bawdy humour of Beryl Cook and Otto Dix’s muscular, feline reclining woman.
SPRUTH MAGERS
Mayfair I 12 September to 21 December
Sprüth Magers presents an exhibition by Anthony McCall featuring the UK premiere of a new solid light work alongside a number of works on paper that give an insight into McCall’s working processes. At the centre of the exhibition is Raised Voices (2020) a large-scale immersive installation comprised of digital projection, sound and haze. McCall’s ‘solid light works’ occupy a space between cinema, sculpture and drawing, with beams of light creating sculptural forms as they are projected through mist within the space. The viewer becomes an active participant in the work, dissected by an undulating light that slowly shifts and changes.
This show coincides with McCall’s show at Tate Modern on until 27 April 2025.
STUDIO VOLTAIRE
Clapham I 18 September to 15 December
This major new exhibition by Lap-See Lam (b. 1990) is the first-ever institutional exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK. The commission develops from Lap-See Lam's presentation for the Nordic Pavilion at the 60th Biennale di Venezia, 2024. The artist’s work to date has traced her own family history and intergenerational experiences via the kitschy and decadent decor of Chinese restaurants in Western Europe. Lam’s grandparents established the ‘Bamboo Garden’ restaurant upon their arrival from Hong Kong in the 1970s, and her practice considers notions of belonging by examining the cultural and communal fabric of the Cantonese diaspora. Relating to a transnational sea journey, the artist’s new series of works explores separation, displacement, and collective memory across oceans.
SHADOW-BAN
SHOWSTUDIO GALLERY
Belgravia I 19 September to 15 November
Bringing together a collection of artists united in challenging the suppression of illicit and taboo subjects by mainstream platforms, this exhibition invites the public to reassess how their own morality
is shaped by societal pressures. SHADOW-BAN reconsiders the nature of what makes an artwork 'obscene' and the moral judgments which led us here.
The show is running alongside the annual Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival.
WHITE CUBE BERMONDSEY
Bermondsey I 19 September to 10 November
Spanning the entirety of the Bermondsey gallery’s spaces, the presentation features new paintings and a monumental bronze sculpture by Emin. With soul-searching candour, she probes the construct of the self but also the very impulse to create. Unfiltered, irreverent, raw, she draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief in works that are disarmingly and unashamedly emotional. "The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at", she has remarked.
INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Trafalgar Square I 25 September to 15 December
Working from her background in choreography and a studied interest in the role of objects and technology in our lives, Jeong uses her body and animatronic figures built from DIY parts to parse the uncanny relationships between people and machines. Jeong’s installation offers a proposal for the active life of sculpture in a public institution. The artist will perform in-person with her figural machines multiple times during the run of the exhibition, reimagining and shifting the installation. Jeong’s work shares a valuable history with performative and interactive sculpture since the 1960s, while being firmly rooted in the present and a specific context of technology in late-stage capitalism, which the artist approaches from the perspective afforded by an adolescence spent in Seoul during the steep rise in consumerism in South Korea.
Artist's performance will take place on the following dates:
NEVEN
Bethnal Green I 26 September to 26 October
Hongxi Li explores human behaviour and societal structures through sculpture and performance, focusing on the confluence of corporate influence, power dynamics, and emotional discomfort. Her work compounds capitalist critique with humour—manifested through instances of inefficiency, repetition and failure —to examine the experience of individuality within broader social and economic systems. This inquiry is fuelled by her dual perspective as an East Asian woman living in the West, her Chinese identity and migrant experience both contributing to an interest in “in-betweenness.” Across metalwork, ceramics, casting and upholstery, Li’s sculptural works blend industrial techniques with contemporary minimalism in objects that resemble everyday, mass-produced consumer items, inviting viewers to reassess the familiar and consider how design has historically reflected societal change.
As a prelude to the gallery show, NEVEN presents an offsite performance of Li’s ‘Sandcastle’, 2024, at The Stage Shoreditch on Saturday 21 September. The 30-minute performance explores themes of land possession and urbanisation through Jolene, Li’s fictional persona.
UNIT LONDON
Mayfair I 28 September to 8 December
Bobbi Essers’ paintings depict the intensity and intimacy of her personal relationships, as she finds inspiration for her larger-than-life works from the deep friendships she has developed with those closest to her. Drawing from candid, spontaneous photographs of her friends, often late at night and therefore using a strong flash, she captures these illuminated moments where her subjects are suddenly and candidly revealed.
Motivated to protect the anonymity of her friends, she constructs interchangeable and overlapping compositions from her source images, allowing for multiple references and emotions to be expressed simultaneously on the same canvas.