From Van Gogh to Le Va, Rego to the Renaissance: the best exhibitions for autumn 2024

Art

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers

Taking us from euphoria to despair, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers promises to be spectacular. Including works rarely on public display and focusing on the turbulent two years the artist spent in Arles and in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, the National Gallery’s first exhibition on Van Gogh includes more than 50 works. AS
• National Gallery, London, 14 September to 19 January

Why Do We Take Drugs?

Take a six-month trip in this series of interlinked exhibitions, which will explore drug cultures around the world. In one show, Power Plants, there will be a Japanese tea ceremony. In another, Heroin Falls, photographs by Graham MacIndoe depicting his years as an addict. The exciting ceramicist Lindsey Mendick has created an elaborate work called Hot Mess, drawing on her relationship with booze and antidepressants, while a show about psychedelics will include a VR ayahuasca trip. With cocaine use in the UK at record highs, this show could not be more timely. AN
• Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, 14 September to 27 April

Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas

Dumas is a painter’s painter. Loss and mourning, life and ancient myth are entwined in the Amsterdam-based artist’s first major show in the UK since her 2015 Tate retrospective. Gods, humans and spectres emerge from flurries and pours of paint in a brave, compelling art that is always as raw and frank as it is sophisticated. AS
• Frith Street Gallery, London , 20 September to 16 November

Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place

As well as highlights from the text-based paintings he’s been producing since the late 1980s and a large-scale neon from 2021, Ligon offers a new take on the Fitzwilliam’s wonderful permanent collection. Using references as diverse as James Baldwin, Jean Genet and Richard Pryor to reflect on his identity as a gay African American, Ligon also juxtaposes his own works with Degas, Frank Auerbach’s drypoints, annotated medieval manuscripts and Chinese copies of Wedgwood ceramics. AS
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge , 20 September to 2 March

Turner prize 2024

Our complex modern world is seen from four new perspectives using radically varied artistic media in the latest instalment of this now almost venerable competition. Roma experience, the history of the Philippines, Blackness and Sikh identity are among the themes. Delaine Le Bas, Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Jasleen Kaur are the competing artists. JJ
• Tate Britain, London, 25 September to 16 February

Silk Roads

East and west were once regarded by historians – and ideologists – as separate worlds, but the histories of Europe and Asia are linked by the trading networks that brought Chinese silk to ancient Rome and Greek art to Afghanistan. This exhibition celebrates these “Silk Roads” and the wondrous cultural exchanges they created. JJ
• British Museum, London, 26 September to 23 February

Uncanny Visions: Rego and Goya

Paula Rego’s twisted fairytales and family nightmares ought to make a powerful pairing with Goya’s visions of the surreal and cruel. Goya depicted the psychological turmoil of Spain in the age of Napoleon. Rego’s macabre imagination was shaped by Portugal’s dictatorship. They share a tormented, gleeful appetite for the dark. JJ
• Holburne Museum, Bath, 27 September to 5 January

Nairy Baghramian: Jumbled Alphabet

Shapes yawn and droop, clamp and collide; they snag and they fold and they nestle in uneasy alliances. Often exhibiting errant behaviour, Baghramian’s highly crafted sculptures are both resolutely abstract and full of life. One group of her works, Misfits, is inspired by children’s building blocks, while others are made in collaboration with other artists. AS
• South London Gallery, 27 September to 12 January

Monet and London: Views of the Thames

Cosmic visions of a foggy river lit by solar fire with ghostly reflections of parliament – not even Turner painted the Thames as ravishingly as this French tourist from his hotel room at the Savoy. Now Monet’s London masterpieces are gathered close to where he created them. Should be sublime. JJ
• Courtauld Gallery, London, 27 September to 19 January

Anya Gallaccio: Preserve

Time, transience and transformation are at the heart of Anya Gallaccio’s art. She has resurrected fallen trees and used flowers, ice, wine and chocolate in works spanning more than three decades. As well as restaging earlier works, her project for Turner Contemporary includes a specially designed apple orchard near Faversham and new works with chalk, the bedrock of the Kent landscape and its coastal reefs. AS
• Turner Contemporary, Margate, 28 September to 12 January

Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation/ Lygia Clark: The I and the You

In a double whammy for the Whitechapel, these paired exhibitions revel in artistic entanglement across time and space. Black British artist Sonia Boyce meets hugely influential late Brazilian painter Lygia Clark (1920-88), whose early geometric abstractions gave way to works that could be held and manipulated by the viewer, and whose focus was on an awareness of the body and the psyche. While Clark’s show surveys her entire career, Boyce’s An Awkward Relation focuses on rarely seen works from the 1990s involving the use of human and synthetic hair, touch and manipulation, as well as a seven-channel 2017 audio-visual work involving performance and interaction with the audience. Formal and human relationships, artistic influence, parallels and difference are the themes weaving these fascinating, concurrent exhibitions together. AS
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2 October to 12 January

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit

Mike Kelley’s sudden, shocking death in 2012 ended a career as troubled as it was inventive. His work included recreating Superman’s home world, playing in bands and filming dramas that always pushed things too far. Video and sculpture, soft toys and banners, childhood trauma and twisted adult scenes replay in his oddly magnificent, sometimes frightening art. AS
• Tate Modern, London, 2 October to 9 March

Barbara Walker: Being Here

Whether drawing on paper or directly on to walls, Barbara Walker has spent years exploring the way Black lives are recorded and erased, whether through art history or official documentation. Last year she was nominated for the Turner prize for Burden of Proof, in which those on the receiving end of the Windrush scandal were drawn, and their identity papers superimposed on to them. An earlier series was inspired by the anguish of her youngest son being stopped and searched by the police. This exhibition features pictures from across her career, as well as new work made in response to the Whitworth’s collection of wallpaper and drawings. AN
• Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, 4 October to 26 January

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998

Modern India’s democracy went through big changes between Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency in the mid-1970s and the nation’s emergence as a nuclear power at the end of the 20th century. The individualism and subversiveness of its art in this era brings that history bursting to life. JJ
• Barbican Art Gallery, London, 5 October to 5 January

Mire Lee

If you have ever longed to see the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall swarming with gothic shadows and decaying, disturbing tangles of organic matter, you may be in luck. This Seoul-born, Amsterdam-based artist makes atmospheric installations that suggest entropy and the perverse. On this colossal scale, her poetic ruins should be hypnotic. JJ
• Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London, 9 October to 16 March

Francis Bacon: Human Presence

You wouldn’t necessarily want to be portrayed by Bacon, your face (on canvas) pummelled into a slab of raw flesh, then reconfigured after photographs of wounds. Yet people paid him for this and he portrayed friends and lovers with the same unforgiving genius. The godless god of modern British art. JJ
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 10 October to 19 January

Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour

The physical world is a mystery to be explored in Bell’s pioneering modern art. The Bloomsbury group to which she belonged were among the first people in Britain to see and appreciate French modernists such as Cézanne and Picasso. Bell is inspired by them to see the majesty of small things. JJ
• MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 19 October to 23 February

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Not only was Mirga-Tas the first Romany artist ever to represent their nation state (in this case Poland) at the Venice biennale in 2022, but her pavilion wowed everyone who saw it with its enormous, tactile, sensual cloth collages made from stitched-together vintage clothing, tablecloths or curtains, depicting people from her local community in a way that defied and rebuked stereotypes. This, her first major museum show in the UK, promises to be both eye-opening and heartwarming. AN
• Tate St Ives, 19 October to 5 January

Barry Le Va: In a State of Flux

Barry Le Va was a pioneer of 1970s “scatter art”. Delicate and alarming, seemingly chaotic yet meticulously mapped-out, Le Va’s fan-blown chalk, shattered glass, coloured felt, ball bearings and mahogany beams both entrance viewers and keep them at bay. Le Va (1941-2021) is little known in Britain but his influence persists. AS
• Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 26 October to 2 February

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael

Florence, 1504. Leonardo is working on the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo has just finished David. Let’s get them to compete! Their rival battle paintings commissioned by the government lead to a war of drawings while young Raphael watches and learns. A stunning clash of geniuses, a bloody Florentine steak of a show. JJ
• Royal Academy, London, 9 November to 16 February

Design

Cover Me Softly

From cover versions, to running for cover, to covering your back, to literal covers to keep the rain out, this wide-ranging exhibition will explore the idea of covers in all their many forms. Taking place in the historic garrison in the Romanian city of Timișoara, the biennial will include a diverse cast of architects, designers, musicians, artists, activists, photographers and writers. OW
• Beta 2024 Biennial, Timișoara, Romania, from 13 September until 27 October

Future Observatory: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe

Fashion is said to be the second most polluting industry after oil and gas, responsible for more emissions than international flights and maritime shipping combined. This exhibition will showcase the latest work to tackle the industry’s carbon footprint, from material innovations to production techniques and digital IDs, featuring designs by Stella McCartney, Ponda, Ahluwalia, Salomon, Ranra, Phoebe English and Vivobarefoot. OW
• Design Museum, London, from 14 September until August 2025

Concrete Dreams

This exhibition, immersive installation and series of events will explore the bold postwar aspirations to transform Newcastle into the “Brasília of the North”. Exhibits range from a six-metre-long model of the city from the 1960s, imagining Newcastle’s future, to the original architectural model of Owen Luder’s now demolished brutalist Trinity Square car park in Gateshead, alongside maps, drawings, photographs and films. OW
• The Farrell Centre, Newcastle, 19 September to June 2025

Looks Delicious!

Across Japan, bowls of fake noodles glisten in restaurant windows, next to platters of fake sushi – mouthwatering tableaux designed to entice diners inside. The history and culture of shokuhin sampuru , or food samples, will come to London this autumn, in a dazzling exhibition of models of Japan’s regional dishes, from Okinawa’s bitter melon stir-fry to Hokkaido’s succulent seafood. OW
• Japan House, London, 2 October to 16 February

Lost Gardens of London

Did you know that one of London’s most celebrated botanical gardens now lies beneath the platforms of Waterloo station? Or that Southwark once had a zoo? This exhibition will shine a light on some of the thousands of gardens that have vanished from the capital, from princely pleasure grounds to productive allotments and eccentric private menageries, painting a tantalising picture of a lost landscape. OW
• Garden Museum, London, 23 October to 2 March