While the city empties out for the summer holidays, we know a few of you are sticking around. For those of us staying, we've put together a short list of things to do, because there's nothing quite like a drink in hand and a wander through the city's galleries in what appears to be a never ending summer.
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Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now
Photographer’s Gallery, until 27 September 2026

This landmark exhibition rewrites the story of Japanese photography through the eyes of women. Japanese Women Photographers spotlights the work of 27 groundbreaking artists, from the 1950s to today, whose perspectives have shaped how Japan sees itself, and how it is seen by the world.Spanning identity, pop culture, fashion and everyday life, the exhibition celebrates internationally renowned Japanese women photographers, alongside those who have long been overlooked. The result is a powerful rebalancing of a history too often told through a single, male-dominated lens.
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Chardchakaj Waikawee: Youth
Graces Mews, until 19 September 2026

Bringing together handprinted analogue photographs shot between 2008 and 2020, this solo exhibition offers an alternative archive of Bangkok, told through portraits of people living on the margins of the city's streets. Waikawee works with expired film and improvised cameras, letting cross-processing, scratches and chemical traces become part of the image rather than flaws to correct, the results are saturated, alive, and resistant to documentary convention. A series of collodion wet plate portraits of Buddhist monks sits alongside the colour work, offering a quiet counterpoint across more than a century of photographic technique. The result is a portrait of youth not as age but as attitude, resilience, reinvention and style, captured through relationships built over years or in the space of a single encounter.

Large scale prints on display were hand-printed by our neighbour, Soup Lab’s master printer Bryan.
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Tracey Emin “A Second Life”
Tate Modern, until 31 August 2026

This landmark exhibition traces forty years of Tracey Emin's groundbreaking practice, bringing together career-defining works alongside pieces never shown before. Across painting, video, textiles, neon, writing, sculpture and installation, Emin continues to push at the edges of what art can hold, using the female body as a vehicle for exploring passion, pain and healing.

Emin is one of the most important artists of her generation, catapulted into public consciousness in the 1990s with works like the Turner Prize-nominated My Bed — a piece that provoked as much debate as admiration and reshaped what audiences expected art to look like. Her refusal to separate the personal from the public, paired with a fierce commitment to unguarded self-expression, came to define a pivotal moment in British culture and in global art history.
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RA Summer Exhibition
Royal Academy, until 23 August
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The 258th edition of the world's oldest open-submission show, this year curated by Ryan Gander around the theme of interconnectedness. Over 1,500 works, a genuine mix of the established and the unknown, last chance before it closes this month. Drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, film and digital art sit side by side, made by members of the public, emerging artists and Royal Academicians alike.

This year's edition runs late on Fridays and Saturdays until 9pm with an in-gallery gin bar Thursday through Sunday, and DJ sets take over the galleries every Friday in July from 5pm. Much of the work on show is also for sale, a rare chance to take a piece of the story home with you.
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Anish Kapoor
Hayward Gallery, until 18 October
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Kapoor returns to the gallery where he had his first UK survey almost thirty years ago, filling the entire space, inside and out, with new and iconic works, from mirrored steel to his signature Vantablack pieces. Recent additions bring a rawer edge, with visceral paintings and sculptures that confront the fragility of human existence, alongside a pair of monumental red installations turning the space inside out.

Part of the Hayward's 75th anniversary programme, the show is curated by Ralph Rugoff, his final exhibition as Director after twenty years in the role.
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David Hockney
Serpentine North, until 23 August 2026
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David Hockney unveils a new body of work at Serpentine North: five still lifes and five portraits of those closest to him, including family and carers, all united by their frontal composition and a recurring gingham tablecloth. Here Hockney blurs abstract and figurative painting, working from his belief that any figurative image is abstract the moment it lands on a flat surface. Alongside it, a monumental printed mural in the garden brings a scene from A Year in Normandie to life, echoing the tree house from his own Normandy garden.

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Serpentine Pavilion 2026
Kensington Gardens, until 25 October 2026

This year's Serpentine Pavilion, 'a serpentine', comes from Mexico City studio LANZA atelier, founded by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo whose work centres everyday beauty and design's quiet role in how we interact with space. The pavilion takes its name and form from the English serpentine, or crinkle-crankle, wall, whose curve gives it stability with fewer bricks than a straight one and nods to the nearby Serpentine Lake's own gentle bend. Its north wall curves around the surrounding tree canopy, while a translucent roof rests on brick columns evoking a grove of trees, softening the line between inside and out. Brick was chosen deliberately, both as a nod to the English garden tradition and in conversation with the Serpentine South Gallery's own brick façade, originally built as a tea pavilion with the columns shifting the wall from solid to permeable as you move around it.