When tens of thousands of people pour in to Frieze London and Frieze Masters, they will have their choice of about 300 galleries to visit, featuring exhibitors from all over the world.
But for anyone looking for art produced a little closer to home, outside of the fair, London’s museums and galleries are showcasing different flavors of British art and artists, reflecting a range of eras, styles and mediums. Here are some of the highlights.
Richard Dadd
A Victorian-era painter of Shakespearean fairies and other creatures, Richard Dadd is often most remembered for his tragic backstory: His promising early years as a student at the Royal Academy were soon derailed by mental illness, which led to him killing his father and spending the rest of his life in institutions. That included 20 years at the infamous London asylum known as Bedlam.
The exhibition “Beyond Bedlam” at the Royal Academy of Arts, running until Oct. 25, offers an overview of his work and legacy that goes beyond those last four-plus decades. The exhibition features more than 100 of his intricate oil paintings, watercolors and drawings of creatures from literature and myth.
It also includes work from the period he spent in hospitals, which resulted in some of his most celebrated paintings despite working “amidst the most revolting conversation and the most brutal behavior,” as one observer described.
While at Bedlam, he produced his most famous piece, “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke,” which he worked on from 1855 to 1864, and which later inspired a Queen song.
Anish Kapoor
Frieze London week coincides with the end of a major exhibition on Anish Kapoor, the internationally acclaimed British Indian artist, which features some of his renowned older works as well as newer ones. The exhibition is his first at the Hayward Gallery in the Southbank Centre in almost 30 years, and includes immersive installations that take up entire rooms.
One, “Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto” (2022), resembles a mountain hanging ominously from the ceiling, painted in black and red. Other paintings and sculptures provoke a bloodier, more visceral reaction that led The Guardian to write that the “gutsy, gore-splattered show is a divine blood bath.”
Kapoor is known for playing with the senses, using different materials to create optical illusions and distort reality. Among those at the Hayward Gallery are mysterious objects coated in Vantablack, a light-absorbing coating that’s the blackest-known substance in the world, and which he has exclusive rights to use in art. The exhibition runs until Oct. 18.
The Museums Special Section
Photography
Ian McKellen, Isaac Julien and Chappell Roan are just a few of the famous subjects in “Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends,” an exhibition of new work by the British fashion photographer on display at the National Portrait Gallery.
Walker’s elaborate sets, props and costumes create whimsical spectacles in his photos, and have made him a staple of the fashion world since the 1990s. For this exhibition, over five years, he took 250 portraits of members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, including activists, social workers, nightlife performers, as well as some famous artists, actors and musicians.
It was an attempt to document 50 years of gay history, while maintaining his signature fantastical style. The exhibition, which runs until Feb. 7, “is me finally placing myself in the queer realm with confidence and greeting all the other friends who live here,” Walker said in a news release for the show.
About a 30-minute walk south to Tate Britain is another photography exhibition, “Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography,” which looks at the history of photography as an artistic medium. It opens on Wednesday and runs until Feb. 21.
The Courtauld Gallery is showcasing the work of a lesser-known member of a widely known collective of early-20th century intellectuals, artists and writers: the Bloomsbury Group.
“Winifred Gill: A Bloomsbury Pioneer,” which runs from Wednesday to Jan. 20, will feature boldly colored still life paintings and prints by Gill, but also toy designs she contributed to the Omega Workshops, an enterprise formed by other Bloomsbury members for artists to produce graphic designs and decorative objects. She later became its business manager.
The gallery, in Somerset House right by the Thames, has a rich permanent collection as well. It includes Édouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” which a Times art critic recently called “the single greatest painting in London.”
The Churchill Era
Winston Churchill’s legacy tends to be up for debate these days, but one unsung facet of it is on display at the Wallace Collection: his paintings.
It’s the first major British retrospective of his art in over 65 years, a body of work that was heavily influenced by Claude Monet and tends to be dismissed outright.
But this exhibition is “about assessing him as a painter, which has not really been done before,” Xavier Bray, the museum’s director, told The Times in June.
The exhibition runs until Nov. 29.
The Wallace Collection’s permanent collection is worth a visit in its own right, with an impressive selection of Dutch masters and other paintings, sculpture and period furniture on display in a Georgian townhouse. It’s about a 20-minute walk from the southern edge of Regent’s Park, where Frieze is held.
Alternately, for another angle on Churchill-era art, the Imperial War Museum London is showcasing paintings, drawings and photographs of London during World War II.
“Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art,” which runs until Nov. 1, features paintings of landmarks like St Paul’s Cathedral alongside visions of the city’s destruction.
Much of the work was commissioned by the British government in 1939, which wanted artists to document the city during wartime.
Es Devlin
Es Devlin, an English artist and designer who The Times has said “reinvented modern spectacle,” has a big retrospective at the Design Museum until April 4. “Es Devlin: Other Worlds” looks at her three decades of sculpture, lighting and, most significantly, stage design, which has included plays like “The Lehman Trilogy,” tours for Beyoncé and Adele and events like the Super Bowl half time show and the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games.
An installation at the museum called the “30-Year Desk” was built specially for the exhibition as a way to showcase some of Devlin’s designs, which are meant to be seen on a much larger scale.
