London Gallery Weekend returns with more than 120 participating galleries across the capital, making it one of the busiest and most rewarding weekends in the contemporary art calendar. From Anne Imhof’s haunting new paintings and films to Daniel Arsham’s fictional archaeology and Rachel Maclean’s AI-powered fairy tales, this year’s edition offers a remarkable snapshot of where contemporary art is heading.
Here are 6 exhibitions not to miss.
1. Anne Imhof: Citizen at Sprüth Magers
Anne Imhof continues her exploration of bodies, power and performance in Citizen, a major solo exhibition that expands ideas developed in her recent projects at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto. Anchored by new large-scale Wave paintings, the exhibition also includes film, sculpture, drawings and bronze reliefs.
A standout work is a monumental diptych depicting a human head rendered through dense accumulations of marks. Echoing the medieval danse macabre, the exhibition reflects on mortality, movement and the challenge of giving form to experiences that refuse to remain fixed. Imhof’s ability to translate the intensity of performance into static objects remains one of the defining strengths of her practice.
Anne Imhof: Citizen, 5th June – 1st August 2026, Sprüth Magers, London
2. Mehmet Ali Uysal: Skin at Pi Artworks
Launching Pi Artworks’ new Shoreditch space, Mehmet Ali Uysal’s Skin transforms architecture into something strangely bodily. Best known for his giant clothespin interventions, Uysal presents works that appear to pinch, peel and stretch gallery walls as if they were living skin.
At the centre of the exhibition is one of his most iconic gestures: an oversized clothespin seemingly lifting the gallery surface. Throughout the show, walls become vulnerable membranes rather than fixed structures, reminding us how easily our perception of space can be manipulated. Playful, elegant and immediately engaging, Skin is an ideal inauguration for Pi Artworks’ new East London home.
Mehmet Ali Uysal: Skin, 5th June – 4th July 2026, Pi Artworks, Shoreditch
3. Shao Fan: Refrain at White Cube Mason’s Yard
Few artists make quiet paintings as powerful as Shao Fan. In Refrain, his recurring rabbits once again take centre stage, appearing as mysterious, almost spiritual presences that seem to stare through time itself.
Working with traditional Chinese ink techniques, Shao transforms rabbits, cabbages, mushrooms and other seemingly ordinary subjects into meditations on consciousness, longevity and transformation. His paintings reward slow looking, revealing layers of labour, philosophy and emotion beneath their restrained surfaces. In a London art scene often dominated by spectacle, Refrain offers something increasingly rare: stillness.
Shao Fan: Refrain, 22nd May – 27th June 2026, White Cube Mason’s Yard
Read our interview with Shao Fan: HERE
4. Thomas Houseago: Death’s Sacred Mirror at Lévy Gorvy Dayan
Part exhibition, part cabinet of curiosities, Death’s Sacred Mirror places Thomas Houseago’s latest sculptures alongside an extraordinary selection of historical artefacts and works by artists ranging from Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys to Meret Oppenheim and Henri Matisse.
Taking its title from Aztec obsidian mirrors, the exhibition explores sculpture as a timeless language connecting cultures and civilisations across millennia. New works by Houseago sit in dialogue with Egyptian, Greek and Aztec objects, creating unexpected conversations about mortality, beauty and the enduring power of form.
Thomas Houseago: Death’s Sacred Mirror, 4th June – 19th September 2026, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London
5. Daniel Arsham: Time Fold at Perrotin
Daniel Arsham’s fascination with time, archaeology and cultural memory comes into sharp focus in Time Fold. Bringing together nearly two decades of work, the exhibition combines sculptures, paintings, archival drawings and new works that blur the boundaries between past, present and future.
Arsham’s eroded busts of Zeus and Pericles sit alongside crystallised cameras and weathered pop-cultural artefacts, all treated as if excavated from the same speculative future. Particularly fascinating are a group of early drawings from 2007–2010, exhibited publicly for the first time, which reveal just how fully formed Arsham’s ideas about fictional archaeology were from the beginning.
Daniel Arsham: Time Fold, 5th June – 8th August 2026, Perrotin London
6. Rachel Maclean: The Enchantment of Reason at Josh Lilley
Artificial intelligence meets Victorian fairy culture in Rachel Maclean’s brilliantly strange new exhibition. Drawing parallels between today’s AI boom and the fairy mania that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, Maclean creates an immersive world populated by machine-generated sprites, digital doubles and shape-shifting identities.
At its centre is They’ve Got Your Eyes, a new film following a tech entrepreneur whose attempts to create artificial fairies spiral into obsession and paranoia. Collaborating with an AI trained on her own image and artistic archive, Maclean explores questions of authorship, creativity and machine agency with her trademark blend of humour, unease and visual excess.
As debates around AI continue to reshape contemporary culture, few artists are addressing the subject with as much wit and complexity.
Rachel Maclean: The Enchantment of Reason, 5th June – 1st August 2026, Josh Lilley, London
