London Gallery Weekend returns for its sixth edition from June 5th to 7th, bringing together more than 120 galleries across the city for a packed weekend of openings, performances, talks, and events. Since launching in 2021, the initiative has become a key moment in the international art calendar, offering a citywide snapshot of London’s gallery ecosystem: from blue-chip Mayfair spaces to younger programs in Fitzrovia and the East End.
What feels particularly striking this year is the atmosphere running through many of the strongest exhibitions. Across different media, artists are engaging with themes of instability, mythology, memory, and transformation. Visitors will encounter immersive environments and materially rich works that resist the speed and slickness of digital culture in favor of slower, more embodied forms of looking.
At Sprüth Magers, for example, Anne Imhof stages a theatrical realm of cinematic unease, crisscrossed by site-specific crowd-control barriers and populated with large-scale “Wave” paintings, a four-channel film, and intensely rendered drawings. At Lisson Gallery, meanwhile, Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska’s collaborative installation “Zanzibar” layers abstract paintings with an eight-channel sound composition that encourages simultaneous looking and listening. Elsewhere, Christo’s groundbreaking exhibition at Gagosian centers on the first-ever realization of Air Package on a Ceiling, a monumental suspended installation conceived in 1968 but never previously produced.
Below, Artsy selects the 10 can’t-miss shows of London Gallery Weekend.
Christo and Jeanne Claude
“Air”
Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill
Through Aug. 21
Together with Jeanne-Claude, Christo transformed the possibilities of public art through monumental temporary interventions that wrapped buildings, coastlines, bridges, and parks in fabric, rope, and industrial materials. From Wrapped Coast (1968–69) in Sydney to The Gates (2005) in New York and the posthumously realized L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (2021) in Paris, the duo’s projects reimagined familiar environments as sites of collective wonder and perceptual disorientation. Yet “Air” at Gagosian turns away from spectacle and toward the conceptual origins of their practice, foregrounding intimate early works alongside the first-ever realization of Air Package on a Ceiling, conceived in 1968 but never previously produced.
Organized around the invisible yet essential presence of air, the exhibition centers on the vast suspended artwork, an internally illuminated polyethylene form that hovers just above visitors’ heads. Wrapped objects and archival materials trace the evolution of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s language of concealment, while Wrapped Automobile—Volvo, Model PV-544 (1981), shown publicly for the first time in three decades, transforms a sentimental everyday object into something theatrical, tender, and strangely unknowable.
Shao Fan
“Refrain / 复沓”
White Cube, Mason’s Yard
Through June 27
Rabbit Portrait 1025, 2025
Shao Fan
White Cube
Beijing-based artist Shao Fan has long occupied a singular position within contemporary Chinese art, creating meditative works that bridge centuries of visual culture. Though his work is held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, “Refrain / 复沓” marks his first exhibition in the U.K.
The exhibition centers on meticulously rendered large- and small-scale ink-on-rice-paper paintings, each depicting a singular central subject such as a rabbit, apple, cabbage, or other organic form. Imbued with cultural memory and spiritual reflection, these highly detailed monochromatic depictions are informed by Song dynasty painting traditions. The subjects within appear ghostly, like apparitions, memories, or impressions rather than solid objects or beings.
Particularly striking are the recurring depictions of apples in works such as Fruit 2125 (2025), which subtly collapse Eastern and Western art histories, invoking Dutch still-life painting alongside the sensual organicism of Georgia O’Keeffe. Elsewhere, spectral rabbits recall Albrecht Dürer’s Young Hare (1502), while Chinese Cabbage 1425 (2025) transforms an everyday vegetable into an object of quiet contemplation.
Anne Imhof
“Citizen”
Sprüth Magers
June 5–Aug. 1
Over the past decade, Anne Imhof has become one of the defining artists of her generation, creating immersive works that collapse the boundaries between performance, painting, music, sculpture, and film. Since winning the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for Faust (2017), Imhof has become synonymous with performances that create atmospheres of alienation and desire. In her works, bodies drift through vast architectural environments, suspended between intimacy and detachment, exhaustion and spectacle. “Citizen,” her latest exhibition at Sprüth Magers, extends ideas explored in her recent projects “DOOM: House of Hope” and “Fun ist ein Stahlbad” at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal (both 2025).
Anchored by monumental new “Wave” paintings, the exhibition combines sculpture, film, drawing, and installation in a meditation on embodiment and surveillance. Site-specific crowd-control barriers slice through the gallery space, while a four-channel film and weighty bronze reliefs heighten the atmosphere of disquiet. A monumental diptych depicting a human head pushes Imhof’s figurative language into new territory, filtering references to the medieval danse macabre through the visual language of contemporary subcultures and digital spectatorship.
“You’re only happy when you can see something die!”
NEVEN
Through July 18
Mine Fire, 2022
Oliver Elphick
NEVEN
East London gallery NEVEN has quickly established itself as one of the city’s most compelling young spaces, championing emerging and cult figures whose practices orbit subculture, performance, fashion, and queer histories. Curated by artist Leo Costelloe, “You’re only happy when you can see something die!” brings together works by Greer Lankton, J.C. McCormack, Ki Yoong, Oliver Elphick, and Tiina Vanhatupa in an exhibition steeped in theatricality, artifice, and decay. Taking its title from a line spoken by Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits (1961), the show creates a kind of melancholic fever dream populated by dolls, beauty queens, artificial flowers, and cinematic afterimages.
The exhibition evokes the unstable boundary between animate and inanimate objects. In particular, many of the works trace how identities and desires become staged, mythologized, and preserved through images and objects.
Particularly poignant are photographs by Greer Lankton, the legendary East Village artist whose handmade dolls navigated glamour, grotesquery, and transfeminine self-fashioning in 1980s New York. Nearby, J.C. McCormack’s uncanny installation of plastic-wrapped silk flowers and Venetian blinds transforms domestic decoration into something ghostly and emotionally sealed-off, while Finnish doll artist Tiina Vanhatupa’s meticulously customized Blythe dolls hover between fetish object and sculptural portrait. Elsewhere, Ki Yoong’s miniature portrait of Monroe condenses one of the most endlessly reproduced faces of the twentieth century into an image of startling intimacy, and Oliver Elphick’s drawing of beauty queens dancing in a burning Arctic coal mine collapses camp spectacle into ecological apocalypse. Across the exhibition, images and objects appear suspended in states of preservation and performance—beautiful, uncanny, and already half-dead.
Roni Horn
“Seizure of Hope”
Hauser & Wirth
Through Aug. 1
For nearly four decades, Roni Horn has produced work preoccupied with instability: of language, perception, identity, and form. “Seizure of Hope,” her first solo exhibition in London in a decade, brings together a new body of drawings alongside one of her luminous cast-glass sculptures.
At the center of the exhibition is a single repeated phrase: “I am paralyzed with hope.” Borrowed from a performance by comedian Maria Bamford, the words are obsessively handwritten and rewritten across more than 45 works on paper, accumulating into dense fields of text that feel simultaneously diaristic and universal. Rendered in wax crayon, the letters blur as though submerged underwater, echoing Horn’s longstanding fascination with water as both material and metaphor. Nearby, the cast-glass sculpture Untitled (“What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?”) (2022) shifts subtly according to light and weather, hovering between solidity and dissolution.
Shaniqwa Jarvis
“Only Love Will Break Your Heart”
Public Gallery
Through June 7
again and again and again., 2026
Shaniqwa Jarvis
Public Gallery
only love can break your heart, 2026
Shaniqwa Jarvis
Public Gallery
Flowers bloom, bruise, wilt, and reappear throughout Shaniqwa Jarvis’s first U.K. solo exhibition. Here, the artist uses photography less as a tool for documentation than as a fragile container for memory and bodily presence. Across 15 new works at Public Gallery, Jarvis pushes against the slickness and instant legibility typically associated with photographic images, layering acrylic washes, mirrored surfaces, silk, and blurred textures that force viewers to look at them more closely.
Purple gerbera daisies drift in and out of focus behind net-like veils; ruby dahlias bleed into marguerites as though seasons are collapsing into one another. Elsewhere, mirrored surfaces produce shifting double exposures that fold viewers directly into the works themselves.
Downstairs, an installation reconstructing fragments of the artist’s childhood bedroom combines archival footage and voice recordings reflecting on ambition, labor, and artistic survival in New York. Jarvis’s photographs insist on creating a physical encounter, resisting our daily passive consumption of images.
Paola Pivi
“A girl loved pearls so much she left engineering, strung them off the wall, and made art”
MASSIMODECARLO
Through June 6
Untitled (pearls), 2008
Paola Pivi
MASSIMODECARLO
Senza titolo (perle), 2005
Paola Pivi
MASSIMODECARLO
Few artists working today embrace absurdity, transformation, and spectacle with as much conviction as Paola Pivi. Since the late 1990s, the Italian-born, Alaska-based artist has built an unmistakable practice out of impossible gestures and disorienting material encounters: upside-down fighter jets, rotating airplanes, polar bears covered in brightly colored feathers, and immersive sculptural environments that push familiar objects toward states of surreal excess. Her latest exhibition at MASSIMODECARLO, however, turns toward one of the most persistent threads running through her work: pearls.
The first exhibition dedicated entirely to Pivi’s pearl series, this presentation brings together works spanning nearly three decades. Constructed from thousands of individual plastic and plexiglass pearls suspended on strings and densely layered across canvas, the works hover somewhere between painting, sculpture, and textile. Some compositions recall the chromatic geometry of Josef Albers, while others appear almost biological or coral-like, shaped as much by gravity and chance as by control.
The exhibition also includes Stop By (2021), a large-scale carpet made from recycled ocean plastics featuring the image of a monumental ladder—an ongoing motif in Pivi’s practice.
Wang Pei
“Sertraline”
Workplace
Through July 4
A shoulder disappearing into darkness, the back of a neck above a crisp cotton collar, lips caught just before speech: throughout Wang Pei’s quietly unsettling paintings, emotion is registered through fragments, surfaces, and withheld gestures rather than direct expression.
Borrowing its title from the widely prescribed antidepressant, “Sertraline” considers what happens to feeling in a culture increasingly shaped by emotional management and psychological self-regulation.
Working between figuration and cinematic abstraction, Wang constructs his paintings through layered scraping, overpainting, and delicate modulation. In La chair (2026), an extreme close-up of a face appears doubled and unstable, as though caught across multiple moments simultaneously. Elsewhere, silk fabrics and carefully composed postures suggest attempts at containment that never fully succeed. The exhibition’s rhythm feels almost filmic, with recurring textures and bodily fragments operating like visual echoes across unstable spaces and interrupted timelines.
Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska
“Zanzibar”
Lisson Gallery, 67 Lisson Street
June 4–Aug. 22
Sound drifts through the space before the paintings fully come into view: fragments of Taraab music, snippets of opera, radio broadcasts, and remembered voices weave around a suite of suspended canvases by Lubaina Himid. Created in 1999 and revisited here through a new sonic collaboration with her partner Magda Stawarska, “Zanzibar” transforms Lisson Gallery into an immersive landscape of memory, displacement, and return.
Unlike the narrative figurative paintings for which Himid is best known (that are currently on view in the British Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale), the nine diptychs that comprise “Zanzibar” are strikingly abstract. These are floating geometric forms, zigzagging patterns, translucent washes, and tessellated boxes that evoke fragments of architecture, textiles, fishing nets, and ocean crossings.
The works draw on Himid’s memories of Zanzibar, where she was born in 1954, alongside reflections on migration and familial loss. Stawarska’s layered eight-channel sound composition guides viewers through overlapping temporalities and geographies, creating an installation suspended between personal recollection and collective history.
Serena Korda
“The Golem Rises”
Cooke Latham Gallery
June 5–July 3
Am I a Monster, 2026
Serena Korda
Cooke Latham Gallery
Motherhood, folklore, and feminist world-building collide in Serena Korda’s new exhibition at Cooke Latham. Working primarily in clay, Korda has built a practice that embraces the decorative and domestic histories of ceramics while channeling darker undercurrents drawn from pagan ritual, medieval symbolism, and speculative fiction. “The Golem Rises” continues this mythology-heavy approach through a body of work that reframes motherhood not as passive nurture, but as something unruly, protective, and politically charged.
At the center of the exhibition is a sprawling ceramic frieze inspired by the legend of the Golem, the clay figure from Jewish folklore brought to life as both protector and potential threat. Korda entwines this story with the medieval figure of the woodwose—a wild humanoid traditionally cast as monstrous or uncivilized. Across the gallery, ceramic lamps shaped like primal maternal figures flash the word “Mother” in Morse code, oscillating between beacon, warning signal, and absurdist joke. The medium of clay fits with Korda’s themes: unstable, bodily, and alive with transformative possibility.
