August is when the art world’s movers and shakers decamp to yachts and the Balearics, leaving London’s museums and galleries in a summer lull. The big autumn openings are still a few weeks away, but before everyone swaps the Med for Frieze week there are plenty of reasons to stay in town. Several of the year’s hottest exhibitions are entering their final days, from blockbuster surveys to quieter discoveries. Here are the ones worth catching before they vanish.
David Hockney: A Year in Normandie
Serpentine North Gallery until August 23
David Hockney’s iPad pictures cannot be compared to the brilliance of his early paintings of turquoise swimming pools in Los Angeles, but there is something beguiling about the 90-metre-long frieze at the centre of this exhibition. Stitched together from 100 iPad paintings printed on to a single ribbon of paper, the epic work captures the changing seasons in Normandy and was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, which coincidentally goes on show at the British Museum on September 10. Hockney, who collaborated with the Serpentine on this presentation, died in June at 88. Due to a surge in public interest, opening times have been extended until 9pm on August 21 and 22.
Barbara Hepworth in Colour
Courtauld until September 6
Barbara Hepworth is usually associated with the cool, pale stone and polished wood of her abstract sculptures, but this illuminating show reveals an artist who had a far more nuanced relationship with colour. Deep blues, vivid reds, greens and yellows punctuate her carved forms and drawings where colour is deftly used to create the illusion of depth. Her move to St Ives in 1939 transformed these experiments: pale blue came to evoke the Cornish sky and sea, while taut red strings suggested the tension of wind, water and hills. Yet the roots of this palette predated Cornwall, in Hepworth’s encounters with Mondrian and European modernism.
A revealing rethink of a familiar artist.
Hurvin Anderson
Tate Britain until August 23
At first glance, Hurvin Anderson’s paintings look like celebrations of colour: lush greens, electric blues, purples and pinks conjure the tropical landscapes of Jamaica and Trinidad. But his retrospective also reveals something more complicated. Born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents, Anderson has spent three decades painting between Britain and the Caribbean. His pictures of the latter are repeatedly interrupted by fences, grilles and chicken wire, geometric devices that become visual and conceptual barriers. Darker, hazier paintings recall the Handsworth of his childhood — football in Handsworth Park, swimming pools and the makeshift barbershops that became social hubs for Caribbean immigrants. The result is a compelling examination of what it means to belong.
Summer Exhibition 2026
Royal Academy until August 23
Much like shopping in your local charity shop, you must be prepared to rummage through the dross to find the gems in the RA Summer Exhibition of 1,851 works. Several comedians are trying their hand at art: Joe Lycett pictures Cilla Black in a rather unflattering light, while Harry Hill has two bizarre paintings of burning cars. Even more bizarre (but strangely pleasing) is a video of a man doing David Bowie karaoke. At the more established end of the spectrum, there are hits and misses, too. Try to ignore Ugo Rondinone’s LED rainbow sculpture spelling “the song is you” in the courtyard and head straight for Frank Bowling’s multi-coloured offering instead. Interconnectedness is the theme, according to artist Ryan Gander, who has co-ordinated this year’s show, though that feels more like a challenge than manifesto.
Zurbarán
National Gallery until August 23
Francisco de Zurbarán’s first major UK exhibition brings together more than 40 works, from monumental altarpieces to exquisitely observed still lifes. Most powerful are the intense, mystical works of the Baroque Spanish master’s early Seville years. Take, for example, The Crucifixion (1627), in which Christ’s pale, muscular body emerges from near-total darkness, an image so illusional early viewers thought it a sculpture. The Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco (1629), which portrays a dream-like scene of a crucified man falling through space, is stranger still. A remarkably modern take on deep, if unnerving, spirituality.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life
Tate Modern until August 31
Few artists can do it like Emin, who has attained icon status. Early appliqué blankets, spidery prints and show-stoppingly candid videos about why she never became a mother are hung alongside archival material: family photographs and handwritten poetry, offering a no-holds-barred window on to the artist’s suffering, pain and joy. My Bed (1998) also makes an appearance, writ large in contemporary art history but surprisingly delicate in real life.
Cecily Brown: Picture Making
Serpentine South Gallery until September 6
Cecily Brown’s first major UK institutional show in more than 20 years is a homecoming of sorts. Based in New York since 1994, the London-born painter turns to memories of the English countryside and nearby Kensington Gardens for a new series of landscapes, where trees, water, animals and figures emerge and dissolve among her gestural brushstrokes. But nature here is never entirely benign. Woodland idylls tip into something darker and more unstable; beauty seems perpetually on the verge of unravelling. Brown’s landscapes may be fantastical, but their sense of a natural world in flux feels unnervingly familiar viewed during a summer of extreme heat and wildfires.
Project a Black Planet
Barbican until September 6
Pan-Africanism is the sprawling subject of this ambitious exhibition, which brings together more than 250 works from Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, North America and Europe, spanning a century. Paintings by El Anatsui, Claudette Johnson and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye sit alongside photography, film, posters, journals and archival material, tracing ideas of black identity, resistance, liberation and solidarity. It is a demanding show — its curatorial arguments can sometimes threaten to overwhelm the art — but there are moments of real power, particularly in Johnson’s charged self-portraits. Allow plenty of time: this is an exhibition to explore rather than skim.
