Exhibitions in London this month (October 2026)

October is London's busiest month. The National Gallery opens Renoir and Love, Tate Modern hands the Turbine Hall to Tarek Atoui, and the Bayeux Tapestry is in England for the first time since it was made, at the British Museum. Kapoor's voids leave the Hayward on the 18th; a week later the clocks go back and London supplies its own.

National Gallery · Opens 3 October

Renoir and Love

A show built entirely around how Renoir painted intimacy: couples, dancers, families at leisure. Better first-date material than anything on Hinge.

British Museum · Until 11 July 2027

The Bayeux Tapestry

Seventy metres of eleventh-century embroidery, lent by Normandy and shown in Britain for the first time since it was made.

Tate Britain · Opens 8 October

The 90s: Art and Fashion

Edward Enninful hangs the Britpop decade's art beside the clothes made in the same studios and clubs: Hirst and Lucas next to McQueen and Westwood, with Teller's photographs. If you were there, yes, it's officially history.

Tate Modern · Opens 13 October

Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui

Atoui builds his own instruments and works in sound rather than objects, so his Turbine Hall commission is something you hear before you see it.

Natural History Museum · Opens 16 October

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

The winning images from the competition, 100 new photographs from polar landscapes to tropical rainforests, printed large and lit in a darkened gallery.

Hayward Gallery · Closes 18 October

Anish Kapoor

Kapoor's mirrored voids and raw pigment in the Hayward's brutalist rooms, where the concrete does as much work as the sculpture.

Courtauld Gallery · Opens 2 October

Salman Toor: Someone Like You

Nineteen paintings of young South Asian men among friends and lovers, in Toor's first European solo museum show. The Bar on East 13th moves Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère to New York; the Manet hangs a few rooms away.

Barbican Centre · Opens 8 October

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing

Almost everything is white and square, which is the point: Ryman painted on steel, fibreglass, Plexiglas and coffee-filter paper to see what the same white did on each. Over 60 works that make 'just white' sound like an insult.

National Portrait Gallery · Opens 9 October

Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends

Tim Walker, the fashion photographer of giant props and painted backdrops, casts Britain's LGBTQ+ trailblazers as fairies and figures from legend. One sitter poses as a flower fairy, blue blooms at his feet and a bee beside him.

Serpentine Gallery · Opens 8 October

Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing

The paintings are thermochromic, so their colour shifts with the room's heat and light, while bronze bells ring in ever-changing sequences, what English bell-ringers call change ringing. Justin Caguiat's first major UK show, free in Kensington Gardens.