Venture Beyond Frieze: A Guide to London’s Must-See October Exhibitions

As Frieze Week (9-13 October 2024) kicks off, we’ve handpicked a selection of central London's best exhibitions. Marvel at architectural feats and forms, and discover the best in contemporary painting with a trail that covers Mayfair, Marylebone, Bloomsbury, and Piccadilly. These shows span a range of disciplines and eras, all focusing on sculpture and material, whether in a design context or pushing the boundaries of the painted surface. Available on our website or app, let our selections surprise and inspire you.

Rena Papaspyrou: Images Through Matter at The Hellenic Centre

Images Through Matter at The Hellenic Centre marks the London debut of Rena Papaspyrou, one of Greece’s foremost post-war artists. Since the 1960s, Papaspyrou has drawn inspiration from the architecture of her Athens neighbourhood, using found materials like bricks, tiles, mosaics, and sections of old walls. She enhances the natural cracks, dents, and marks with pencil and paint to create evocative images, sculptures, and installations. Images Through Matter showcases Papaspyrou’s unique approach, featuring over 20 representative works spanning from the 1970s to the present.

Zaha Hadid: Paper Museums at Zaha Hadid Foundation

Zaha Hadid: Paper Museums showcases paper reliefs from its collection and their significance to Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA). The exhibition offers a rare insight into how paper reliefs were important to the design and presentation strategies for three of Zaha’s key museum designs. Shown together, these projects represent a period from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, when ZHA began realising Zaha’s architectural vision and unveiling the development of her radical ideas revolving around site and space. Free to visit.

Chris Rivers: Universal at Pontone Gallery

Pontone Gallery showcases a new exhibition by British painter Chris Rivers. Universal consists of a suite of sixteen paintings depicting the elements and the signs of the zodiac. The artist presents us with his compendium of the cosmos, each image a whirlpool of sumptuous colour, fluid gesture, and corporeal paint. Rivers’ immersive and beautiful sequence of paintings assimilates the constellations and their essential constituents. His is a creative process that pulls apart and reassembles, modifies and transmits with the stroke of a brush to explore the artist’s signature themes of transformation and transcendence. Last chance to catch!

Davide Balliano at Cardi Gallery

An exhibition of new paintings by Turin-born, New York-based artist Davide Balliano, marking his second solo exhibition with Cardi Gallery and his first major presentation in London. Operating in a liminal dimension between painting and sculpture, Balliano’s richly textured canvases are grounded in material exploration. In his latest series, the artist applies layers of gesso and plaster, chalky media usually associated with architecture and sculpture, and subsequently strips them from the surface, revealing unforeseen details through a gradual process of excavation. This subtractive action invites elements of chance into Balliano’s otherwise highly controlled practice, enacting a tension between the formal order of the composition and the unpredictable effects of time and erosion.

Difficult Sites: Architecture Against the Odds at RIBA

Difficult Sites: Architecture Against the Odds explores some remarkable feats of architectural achievement in the face of tricky and uncompromising sites and locations across Britain. Featuring works by some of history’s most renowned architects, including Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Neave Brown, and Lord Norman Foster, alongside leading contemporary practices such as Tonkin Liu, Knox Bhavan, and Carmody Groarke, this free exhibition showcases a spectrum of complex, unusual, and dynamic builds undertaken from 1900 to the present. Free admission.

Art for All, Online Fundraising Auction at Mall Galleries

Mall Galleries, home of the Federation of British Artists (FBA), is hosting Art For All, an online fundraising auction offering outstanding, small-scale figurative art at incredibly affordable prices. The auction is anonymous, meaning you have the chance to bid on leading, established artists, securing work at a fraction of its normal cost. Bidding opens online from Monday 7 October to Sunday 13 October 2024, and all profits will go towards the mission of the FBA, a visual arts charity founded to empower figurative artists through a not-for-profit programme of exhibitions and events, prizes and awards.

Art For All 2024. Courtesy Mall Galleries

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