Frieze Week isn’t only about tents, galleries and trying to see far too much art in far too little time.
Some of the best exhibitions in London right now are in the museums — and they offer a very different rhythm to the fairs. Here are four we think are especially worth making time for.
Salman Toor: Someone Like You at The Courtauld
Toor’s paintings are full of energy, danger, humour, intimacy and a real love of life. Young queer South Asian men move through bars, museums, parties, bedrooms and border-control spaces, with friendship, desire, anxiety and belonging all tangled together. There’s joy here, but also vulnerability — and the whole show feels vividly alive. MORE
Robert Ryman: The Real Thing at the Barbican
At some point during Frieze Week, you stop needing more art and start needing somewhere to actually look at it.
The Barbican is almost perfect for Ryman. More than 60 works unfold through its concrete architecture with space, calm and very little visual noise. White paint becomes less about whiteness and more about surface, edge, gesture, light and the physical presence of painting itself. It’s a place to slow down. MORE
Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing at Serpentine South
Walking into Change Ringing feels like entering someone else’s world.
Bells ring in shifting sequences, heat-sensitive paintings change colour, exposed brick becomes part of the installation, and bread, wax, film and monumental canvases all connect through ritual, transformation and sound. There’s something spiritual about it without the exhibition ever becoming didactic. It’s one to experience rather than decode. MORE
Es Devlin: Other Worlds at the Design Museum
You don’t so much enter Other Worlds as get drawn into it.
The exhibition begins inside a recreation of Devlin’s studio, moves through models, drawings, archives and film, and ends with the vast rotating An Infinite Library. What could have been a retrospective becomes a journey through how Devlin builds worlds — from tiny maquettes to full-scale environments you eventually find yourself standing inside. MORE
Four very different shows, but all of them offer something the fairs often don’t: time, space and the chance to properly inhabit an exhibition.
