20 BEST LONDON EXHIBITIONS THIS APRIL
The Capital's Top Art Shows this April 2024
April is showering us with amazing exhibitions, from immersive, cartoonish hospitals and otherworldly, robotic trifles to powerful shows about the journeys of displaced Ukrainian refugees.
There is also an eye-opening exploration of the power of textiles and a gaggle of shows to lure out your inner child, from LEGO art to the world’s first balloon museum, bursting with giant rabbits and psychedelic ball pits; a major show celebrating the force of cuteness; Tom Hanks taking us around space and a celebration of all things Disney.
So point your eyes at our 20 best London exhibitions this April and then take them there.
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Jason and the Adventure of 254
Artist Jason Wilsher-Mills presents his major (and FREE) solo exhibition, which transforms the gallery into a cartoonish hospital ward, full of surreal humour and kaleidoscopic colour, exploring his experience of becoming disabled as a child. The joyful show is perfect for all ages - you are invited to touch everything. Highlights include a giant installation of a figure in a hospital bed, Seb Coe with a TV for a head, huge calliper boots and penny arcade inspired dioramas.
Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd, London NW1 2BE. FREE. 21 March - 12 January 2025
Rong Bao is Me
Deliciously surreal artist, Rong Bao transforms everyday objects into playful, otherworldly and interactive artworks to laugh at the absurdity of life. Wonderfully bizarre sculptures resemble giant, robotic trifles or dancing, rainbow coloured burgers in feather headdresses and demand a smile. Other highlights include a Fragile box, perpetually being dropped from a conveyor belt. Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York's HQ, King's Rd, London SW3 4RY FREE. Until 12 May.
Polly Braden: Leaving Ukraine
Polly Braden has used her camera to document the lives of women, children and babies scattered across Europe since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. And this deeply moving exhibition uses photography and film to share their extraordinary journeys, from job interviews, first days at school, trips to buy wedding dresses and poignant family reunions. Following four central stories, we see teenagers grow into young adults and babies into toddlers.
Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square, London. £12.75. 21 and under go free. 15 March - 1 September
Andy Warhol: Beyond the Brand
This free, new exhibition is so big, it explodes across two of Halcyon Gallery’s sites. As well as Warhol's greatest hits - the iconic Campbell’s soup cans and portraits of legends like Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali - it looks beyond the Warhol brand, with rare and previously unseen works.
These include his Ads inspired by famous campaigns for brands like Apple and Chanel No. 5. There is also a lesser-known
Pelé portrait and his less familiar, Endangered Species collection.
The juggernaut of a show also houses an immersive space, celebrating the pioneering pop artist’s huge influence that went well beyond his 15 minutes of fame.
Andy Warhol: Beyond the Brand. Halcyon Gallery. 29 New Bond Street and 148 New Bond Street. Until 7 April. Free
Echoes of the Earth
This fascinating and beautiful exhibition sees Refik Anadol marry the aesthetics of machine intelligence, art, science and technology. In his first, major UK solo show, Anadol envelops viewers in immersive environments, using his pioneering experimentation with visual data of coral reefs and rainforests and showcasing the creative potential of AI. It includes a new installation, wrapping the gallery walls in AI generated images of flora, fungi and fauna from over 16 rainforest locations globally, as well as a sound and video experience, highlighting the vital role of coral reefs in the ocean ecosystem.
Serpentine North Gallery, W Carriage Dr, London W2 2AR. Until 7 April. Free.
Yoko Ono: Music for the Mind
Spanning more than seven decades and featuring over 200 artworks, this is the UK’s largest exhibition celebrating Ono’s groundbreaking, multidisciplinary career, from the mid-1950s to now – including her years in London where she met her future husband and longtime collaborator John Lennon.
It includes her Instruction Pieces, which you can interact with - shaking hands with a stranger through a hole; making a peace wish and tying it to a tree; drawing on a boat installation; completing tasks inside a black bag and playing chess with all-white pieces as well as her most famous pieces, like the banned Bottoms film and Cut Piece, where people were invited to cut off her clothing.
Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Until 1 September. £20 per adult. Free for under 12s.
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
Textiles are literally part of the fabric of our lives and each thread reveals stories about gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
This exhibition shines a light on this rarely explored subject, featuring 50 international artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles.
It features more than 100 artworks, from intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations.
Highlights include handstitched tapestries used to carry the memories of the deceased it touched; giant, deity-like macrame sculptures; a spatial installation exploring textiles’ use as an ancient form of communication and embroidered blankets, reflecting on an artist’s HIV diagnosis.
Barbican Centre, Silk St, Barbican, London EC2Y 8DS. Until 26 May
Immersive Lego Exhibition
Aptly opening on Brick Lane, The Art of Brick brings its Lego masterpieces to London, following tours of more than 100 cities in 24 countries.
The exhibition features artist Nathan Sawaya's Lego recreations of some of the world’s most famous artworks, from Michelangelo’s David to Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Among the wonders, visitors will also find a 6-metre-long reproduction of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton
Kids (and big kids) can also make their own masterpieces at the play and build area.
The Boiler House, 152 Brick Lane, London, E1 6RU. Until 9 June
Balloon Museum: EmotionAir
The world’s first inflatable art museum has opened in East London, after attracting two million visitors on its stops in Paris, Rome, Milan and Madrid.
The Balloon Museum launched with huge fanfare and giant queues for the EmotionAir exhibition, featuring works by 20 artists, in which air is a distinctive element.
Expect sound trapped in floating bubbles, giant pink rabbits, huge, otherworldly ball pits, psychedelic balls you can swing and monstrous weebles in a show you are invited to immerse yourselves in through play and touch.
1 Old Billingsgate Walk, London EC3R 6DX. Until 14 April. Tickets from £28.10 per person
The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks
Lightroom leapt inside David Hockney’s brain for his juggernaut retrospective and now turns its immersive technology to space, with added Tom Hanks.
The Apollo 13 star narrates the audio-visual experience, which offers a unique new perspective on humankind’s past and future voyages to the moon.
Telling the stories of the Apollo missions in intimate detail, The Moonwalkers also provides an insight into the impending return of crewed surface missions by going behind-the-scenes of the Artemis programme, including interviews between Hanks and Artemis astronauts.
If your own trip to the moon is looking unlikely, the immersive gallery promises the next best thing, with its tech-wizardry taking visitors on a voyage to our closest celestial neighbour.
Lightroom, 12, Lewis Cubitt Square, London N1C 4DY. Until 21 April 2023. Tickets from £25
Cute exhibition
A major new exhibition exploring the irresistible force of cuteness has opened at Somerset House, featuring a games arcade for all ages and celebrating the 50th anniversary of Hello Kitty.
The show brings together contemporary artworks and cultural phenomena from emojis to internet memes, video games to plushie toys, food to loveable robotic design, exploring how cuteness has take over the world.
Somerset House, Embankment Galleries, South Wing. Until 14 April. £18.50pp. Concessions from £11.
Direct from Graceland: Elvis
Elvis is in the building - not Graceland, but Arches London Bridge. This retrospective of the King of Rock is bulging with 400 artefacts from his Memphis home, charting his humble beginnings and meteoric rise to fame.
It includes his prized Ferrari Dino, gold-plated telephone, jazzy, Vegas era jumpsuits, Aviators and iconic gold lamé suit.
Super-fans can even opt for the White Glove Experience, to hold the gold microphone used in his 1969 Vegas shows, and his Gold International Belt.
It’s easier than a trip to Memphis and has been such a hit, they’ve extended it until 14 April.
Arches London Bridge, 8 Bermondsey St, London SE1 2ER. Until 14 April. Tickets from £19.90 pp
Women in Revolt!
Tate Britain’s major survey of feminist art by more than 100 women artists working in the UK is the first of its kind.
It explores how women used radical ideas and rebellious methods to make an invaluable contribution to British culture. Through their creative practices, women’s liberation was forged against the backdrop of extreme social, economic and political change. The show covers the women's liberation movement, domesticity, punk, the AIDS pandemic and visibility of Black and South Asian Women Artists. And currently, for every £1 a male artist makes, a female artist makes 10p, so the show couldn’t have come at a better time.
Women in Revolt! Art and activism in the UK 1970-1990 at Tate Britain. Until 7 April 2024, £17.
The Cult of Beauty
Wellcome’s fascinating new exhibition explores notions of beauty across time and cultures.
It investigates the myth of universal beauty, and what drives us to achieve it despite its evolving nature.
The show features more than 200 items, including historical objects, artworks, films and new commissions including an ancient Egyptian mirror and an AI-generated animation showing an endlessly morphing human figure that never repeats.
The Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd., London NW1 2BE. Until 28 April 2024
Wildlife Photographer of the Year
The 59th Wildlife Photographer of the Year tells the story of a planet under pressure. The show harnesses the power of photography to help the Natural History Museum advance scientific knowledge, spread awareness of important issues and nurture a global love for nature, via donations to the exhibition.
It features astonishing photographs selected from more than 50,000 entries, including a golden, tri-spine horseshoe crab (pictured above) snow leopards hunting in China and seals in Greece.
Natural History Museum, Cromwell Rd, South Kensington, London SW7 5BD. Until 30 June
The World’s Biggest Disney Exhibition
It all began with a mouse and now, nearly 101 years later, a major exhibition returns in London, inviting fans to experience the iconic characters, stories and experiences that touched the lives of audiences around the world. Disney100: The Exhibition arrives at London ExCel on 13 October, featuring 10 themed galleries bulging with more than 250 iconic props, costumes and treasures including the actual carousel horse that Dick Van Dyke rode in Mary Poppins, the glass slipper from Cinderella (2015), the Iron Man helmet from Avengers: Infinity War, original artwork from One Hundred and One Dalmatians and the red dress from the 2021 Cruella film. The 20,000 sq ft beast of a show has 14 interactive installations and themed galleries allowing you to dive into classics like Snow White and Encanto as well as the new additions to the Disney family, like Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel movies.
Disney100: The Exhibition. ExCeL London, Royal Victoria Dock, 1 Western Gateway, London E16 1XL. Tickets on sale now, starting from £16.50 off-peak for children.
V&A's Blockbuster DIVA Exhibition
Drop your mic, polish your sequins and sashay over to the V&A for DIVA, its latest, blockbuster exhibition. More than 250 personal items, including 60 outfits are on display from legends including Sir Elton John, Cher, Prince, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Jones. Many of these will be on show to the public for the first time. The new show celebrates the drive, power and creativity of some of the most iconic divas, past and present, and how they shaped popular culture. Highlights include celeb designer Bob Mackie’s creations for Cher, Tina Turner and Pink; the Oscar-winning, fringed black dress rocked by Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot and Sir Elton’s Louis XIV inspired 50th birthday look, complete with powdered wig and train. Fans can also admire the diamanté-studded wellies and couture, pink Julien MacDonald gown worn by Dame Shirley Bassey for her 2007 Glastonbury set.
Head here for more info. DIVA, V&A Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL. Until 30 April 2024. Tickets £20
Frameless
Immersive art experiences are beckoning us to leap into paintings all over the world, but Frameless is art immersion on steroids. Situated in Marble Arch, it is the largest, permanent multi-sensory experience in the UK. Boasting four, themed galleries - Beyond Reality, Colour In Motion, The World Around Us and The Art Of Abstraction - with some of the world’s greatest works of art exploding across the walls, floors and ceilings of a 30,000 sq ft space. You can step inside more than 43 masterpieces by 28 artists, including Kandinsky, Monet, Van Gogh, Klimt, Munch, Monet, Rembrandt, Dali and Cezanne with musical scores accompanying each brushstroke.
Frameless, Marble Arch, London W1H 7FD, UK
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms
The Instagram-friendly Infinity Mirror Rooms have no doubt saturated your social media pages for the past few months. But if you’re late to the party, the run has been extended until April to check out one of the most talked about shows of the past year.
The immersive installations of endless reflections include Kusama's Chandelier of Grief, a room which creates the illusion of a boundless universe ofrotating crystal chandeliers.
A small presentation of photographs and moving image – some on display for the first time – provide historical context for the global phenomenon that Kusama’s mirrored rooms have become today.
Tate Modern. Bankside, London SE1 9TG, UK. Until 28 April 2024.
