Must-see art exhibitions in London: Autumn 2024

September’s ended and the sounds of clinking Aperols and singing ice cream vans are starting to feel like a distant memory. The longer nights are creeping up on the Big Smoke faster than Banksy can spray another animal artwork on some inconspicuous infrastructure.

Whilst the imminent winter may bring a chill, it's not all doom and gloom. The art world is coming in HOT this October - its peak season - and this year does not disappoint.

I’m talking about the 50th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition prompting worldwide retrospectives, including Monet at The Courtauld. I’m talking about a once-in-a-century Van Gogh show at the National Gallery that’s been years in the making. Then there’s the Turner Prize, a Barbie Showcase, Francis Bacon is on again, and Tracy Emin opens her heart at White Cube. Frieze and Frieze Masters are currently readying to spring up in Regent’s Park. Oh yes, the art fairs are in town. Contemporary, classic, conceptual – it’s all a-coming.

So whether you want to run headfirst into a blockbuster show or duck into a smaller gallery, I’ve done the rounds this week so you know what to spend your pennies on.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery

Gathering 61 masterpieces simultaneously is no mean feat. Especially when you're fighting around the globe to exhibit rarely-seen loans, and especially, when the artist is Vincent Van Gogh.

The title Poets and Lovers encourages visitors to overlook the melancholy and madness of the Dutch artist's tragic life and enjoy his work, unimpeded by thoughts of bloodied ears.

Drawings and paintings fill the walls of the National Gallery with violent, impasto brush marks and expertly-placed colour. Scenes of the raggedy asylum garden in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence are hung alongside the dream-like ‘Yellow House’ in Arles. Each work deserves at least 10 minutes of your time, and probably more.

It's all there. Portraits of his few friends, the ‘Sunflowers’ displayed as a triptych, ‘Starry Night Over the Rhône’. It's almost overwhelming seeing so many masterpieces together, but you are quickly sobered and heartbroken at the artist's aching, symbolic self-portrait.

It's mesmerising, it's emotional, and it's well worth £24 for the ticket.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers is on from 14 September - 19 January 2025

Westminster, WC2N | nationalgallery.org.uk

David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (not smaller & further away) at Lightroom

Like his early adoption of the iPad, David Hockney has always embraced new technologies. His most recent show lands him straight in the immersive audiovisual art trend.

Lightbox is an uninterrupted underground space that feels as vast as Hockney's career. Four walls and floor are lit up by crisp projections, narrated by Hockney, that spoon-feed viewers through his massive expanse of work, as they lounge on a generous amount of movable floor seats.

It's a sensory spectacle that hurtles through polaroids of LA pool paintings, flicks through sketchbooks and projects his animated landscapes so that you become part of the forest floor. It's not cheap, at a whopping £29 a ticket, but the energy bill has got to be mega.

The animated postmodernist opera costume and set designs were my highlights and translated well with operatic accompaniment. It is a bit kitschy – often knowingly – but Hockney has curated some moments of magic, and it makes for a relaxing 50 minutes away from the bustle of Coal Drops Yard.

David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (not smaller & further away) is on until 6 October 2024

King’s Cross, N1C | lightroom.uk

Grayson Perry: A Vanity of Small Differences at Pitzhanger Manor

Grayson Perry is a master of satirically chronicling contemporary life. That’s why he won the prestigious Turner Prize. Like most of his work, his show at Pitzhanger Manor is stitched with wit and nostalgia as he tackles his usual subjects of class, gender and religion.

Six epic tapestries follow Perry’s contemporary rereading of William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, which follows a working-class boy climbing the societal ladder until he suffers ignominy and a gruesome death.

Perry’s pieces hang where Hogarth’s 18th-century original hung 200 years ago and as usual with Perry, every minor detail is considered. Clues and symbols are trailed and teased throughout. I spotted a Willam Morris wallpaper alongside a Cath Kidston bag, (a local W1 resident) paying homage to the gallery’s location in Ealing.

Think of it like a machine-crafted Where’s Wally with an edge. It’s colourful and dreamlike, but simultaneously sternly grounded by the weight of Britain’s sharpest social commenter and the £12 you have to pay to see it.

Grayson Perry: A Vanity of Small Differences is on until 8 December 2024

Ealing, W5 | pitzhanger.org.uk

Yoshida: Three Generations of Printmaking at Dulwich Picture Gallery

On hearing the subject of Japanese printmaking arise, many think of Hokusai and his wave or the illustrations of Kitagawa Utamaro. Well, Dulwich Picture Gallery are keen for another name to come to mind. That of Hiroshi Yoshida and the three generations of Yoshida printmakers he inspired.

Japanese woodcuts have influenced many Western artists, from Monet and the Impressionists to Tintin’s Hergé. Adversely, Hiroshi Yoshida was highly interested in the West and visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery back in 1900. His 124-year-old signature in the crumbling visitor’s book proudly opens the show.

For those Mount Fuji lovers, the landmark features no less than 10 times, only interrupted by a print of California’s El Capitan and various other European landscapes. Hiroshi’s wife, Fujio, is represented by her tightly-cropped floral works that feel reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe but without the genitalia innuendos.

Prints by the couple’s sons hint at abstract and pop art influences while the final room displays an immersive cherry blossom installation, made by Hiroshi’s 66-year-old granddaughter. The show is an ode to both the complexity of the woodcut process and the beauty of generational craftsmanship passed down into the modern age.

For £20 you can walk through Dulwich’s leafy streets into the gallery where Hiroshi, aged 23, once walked.

Yoshida: Three Generations of Printmaking is on until 3 November 2024

Dulwich, SE21 | dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

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