Best London Shows this September: Marcus Cope, Paul McCartney, and More

In London this month, the most compelling exhibitions refuse easy narratives, staging art as a space of rupture and recalibration. An exhibition of Marcus Cope, presented by ARTUNER, dissolves memory into dreamlike unease. Han Bing at Ropac turns urban residue into painterly archaeology, while Victor Man at Zwirner sets apparitional figures against allegorical silence. Suzanne Song bends light at White Cube, Alex Da Corte lends pop imagery a melancholic weight at Sadie Coles, and Max Wechsler at NISO makes erasure luminous. Paul McCartney’s rediscovered photographs at Gagosian reveal the Beatles on the cusp of myth. Koak, Ding Shilun, and Cece Philips at Hauser & Wirth turn interiors into spaces where the familiar tilts toward the uncanny. This month, London’s art scene calls for attention, reflection, and presence.

Marcus Cope: “Come to Think of It”

Bomb Art Factory Foundation, ARTUNER

Marylebone

Marcus Cope revisits the fragile terrain of memory in “Come to Think of It”, where everyday details—a curtain, a corner of a room, the trace of a gesture—shift into dreamlike architectures holding equal measures of tenderness and unease. Working responsively, Cope allows images to emerge slowly, so that each canvas bears the weight of time, hesitation, and return. His paintings are not confessions but transformations, reimagining memory and opening it to new readings and possibilities: intimacy and estrangement coexist, presence shades into absence, and surfaces register both addition and erasure, thought as much as paint. Refusing easy resolution, the works compel slow looking, insisting on being lived with—images that acknowledge fracture yet continually return to the possibility of renewal, turning the complexity of memory into forms that feel at once personal and collective, fragile and enduring.

What we love: Cope’s paintings turn memory into material, yielding images that move between the intimate and the collective, the fragile and the everlasting.

Marcus Cope at Bomb Art Factory Foundation by ARTUNER, Marylebone
September 19 – 23, 2025

Han Bing: “Atlas”

Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House

Mayfair

Han Bing translates the city’s visual static—ripped posters, ad residue, the glitchy seams of public images—into a lucid poetics of interruption. Large canvases begin from a skeletal armature and accrete tissue-like layers of color, then submit to deliberate ruptures that refuse the seduction of recognizability. Domestic set-pieces split under faceted “punches”; elsewhere, paint is transferred directly onto newspaper so that accident becomes argument and the day’s headlines blur into chromatic weather. “Atlas” triangulates geography, anatomy, and emotion: a mapping of how images infiltrate us, how they erode, and how meaning coagulates in the gaps between. Titles gather pop culture and myth without closure, insisting on an open circuitry between looking and feeling.

What we love: Bing proves that painting can still cut through the noise of the city. Her ruptured surfaces don’t just record fragmentation—they dramatize the act of holding meaning together against collapse.

Han Bing at Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House
September 2 – October 4, 2025

Victor Man: “The Absence That We Are”

David Zwirner

Mayfair

Victor Man’s paintings arrive like nocturnes—compressed, allegorical, and resistant to paraphrase. Figures surface in chiaroscuro as if recalled rather than staged; self-portraits work as a witness, steadying the canvas against time’s drift. Echoing the elegiac tones of Rainer Maria Rilke—whose verse gives the exhibition its title—literature threads through the rooms as undertow, shadowing Man’s cycle of life and death. Across portraits of spectral women and revenant selves, color remains subdued yet charged, a sotto voce register in which the smallest inflection alters mood.  Narratives flicker, vanishing at the brink of naming. It is a show about thresholds—between history and illusion, likeness and apparition—where painting performs what language cannot comfortably hold.

What we love: Man shows that ambiguity is not a weakness but a power. In his hands, painting becomes a vessel for the unsayable—haunting, unresolvable, unforgettable.

Victor Man at David Zwirner
September 18 – October 31, 2025

Suzanne Song: “Interfold”

White Cube Mason’s Yard

Mayfair

Suzanne Song’s abstractions expand Minimalism’s grammar without inheriting its cool. Measured tapes and thin, layered washes generate torqued grids and pleated planes that appear to fold, hinge, and breathe. The argument is optical, but its consequence is emotional: tonal gradations act like weather systems, modulating depth and light until illusion becomes sensation. Works such as Check Fold I, Tesselle Fold, and Counter Fold move from austerity to resonance, testing how perception shifts with the slightest inflection of hue, angle, or spacing. Drawing on printmaking discipline and an East–West dialogue of perspective, Song treats structure as a carrier of meaning: a line is never merely a line but a vector of attention, a pulse. The result is painting as calibrated uncertainty—belief held in tension with sight.

What we love: Song reminds us that rigor and emotion need not be opposites. Her folds feel less like geometry and more like breath—painting at its most quietly human.

Suzanne Song at White Cube, Mason’s Yard
September 4 – October 3, 2025

Max Wechsler: “Poetics of Subtraction”

NISO

Fitzrovia

The work of Max Wechsler rests on the paradox of disappearance as a form of presence. Sent alone from Berlin to Paris after Kristallnacht, his fractured relation to language became the matrix of a practice that strips text of meaning until it survives as rhythm, grain, breath. From photocopied fragments of newspapers and manuals he built palimpsests where legibility falters but energy persists, glue brushed like a skin that catches light. Black fields flicker with signs that emerge and retreat; hand-sized works compress immensities; all hover on the threshold between legible and unsayable. At NISO, the curatorial play of scale—dark expanses, loosened mid-sized pulses, intimate fragments—unfolds as a poetics of attention, demanding slowness until silence itself becomes matter.

What we love: Wechsler turns erasure into presence, proving that what vanishes can still resonate—silence here does not withhold, it beats.

Max Wechsler at NISO
September 17 – November 1, 2025

Alex Da Corte: “Summer Song”

Sadie Coles HQ

St James’s

Da Corte’s trio of “Puffy Paintings” turns comic-book florals into upholstered apparitions—neoprene reliefs poised between billboard, bouquet, and vanitas. Their glossy stillness belies a kinetic subtext: flowers as emissaries of care, celebration, grief, and change. Art-historical ghosts—Matisse’s cutouts, Koons’s blooms, Oldenburg’s models—pass through, but the tone is unmistakably Da Corte’s: pop reanimated with tenderness and a sly melancholy for images that survive by reinventing their form. Serial presentation lets the works speak seasonally and structurally, each a scene cut from a storyboard that has slipped the frame into three dimensions.

What we love: Da Corte takes the clichés of pop culture and makes them pulse with mortality. His flowers are not decorative—they’re mirrors of how images, and we, cycle through bloom and decay.

Alex Da Corte at Sadie Coles HQ, Bury Street
August 6 – September 27, 2025

Paul McCartney: “Rearview Mirror: Liverpool–London–Paris”

Gagosian, Davies Street

Mayfair

Shot on a 35mm Pentax at the very dawn of Beatlemania, Paul McCartney’s photographs return not as memorabilia but as memory’s working proofs—unguarded, tactile, and steeped in the atmosphere of 1963–64. The contact sheets and single frames shown here pivot between public crescendo and private interval: backstage in London theatres, the charged calm before transatlantic liftoff, and a mirrored self-portrait in Jane Asher’s attic where Yesterday drifted into being. Remastered from negatives thought lost for decades and signed in a bespoke frame, the images are a time capsule that resists nostalgia; they are documentary and diary at once, a band’s ascent narrated from within. Gagosian’s presentation adds a collecting dimension without diluting the work’s candor, placing viewers at the hinge between legend and life lived on the run.

What we love: McCartney’s lens gives us the Beatles not as icons but as young men in flux. It’s history with a heartbeat—vulnerable, unguarded, and all the more powerful for it.

Paul McCartney at Gagosian, Davies Street
August 28 – October 4, 2025

James Owens: “Allus Do It Fer Thissen”

Pilar Corrias, 51 Conduit Street

Mayfair

Owens paints survival as a quiet dialect spoken between bodies and plants. Figures traverse thickets where vines trace shoulders, limbs echo branches, and shelters appear as propositions rather than refuge—tents, stages, shire-like houses stumbled upon like plot devices. The palette hums at the cusp of dusk; cinema’s atmospherics (Lynch, Hitchcock, Bergman) mingle with British modern lineages and a dash of Hilma af Klint’s unseen architectures. Scenes hold together by care as much as threat, suggesting that connection is situational, provisional, and nevertheless real. It is a world that does not sentimentalize nature so much as listen to it.

What we love: Owens’s paintings whisper rather than shout, yet linger like a dream. They show how fragile solidarities—between people, plants, and places—become acts of quiet resistance.

James Owens at Pilar Corrias, Conduit Street
July 9 – September 27, 2025

Koak, Ding Shilun, and Cece Philips: “Interior Motives”

Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row

Mayfair

Koak, Ding Shilun, and Cece Philips recast the interior as a site of projection and power, where architecture becomes psychology and décor a proxy for desire. Koak’s crisp, animated line frees female protagonists from inherited scripts, staging agency amid vases, soft furnishings, and windows that behave like thresholds. Ding retools manga and classical Chinese painting into speculative rooms where myth, history, and the absurdities of daily life collide, his avatars negotiating reality’s seams. Philips, a connoisseur of light, treats doorways and veils as devices of looking—composing scenes the viewer observes like a flâneuse, implicated yet outside. Produced with Union Pacific and Bernheim Gallery, the exhibition argues for interiors as mutable systems—frames that shape, shelter, and sometimes estrange us.

What we love: Koak’s liberated figures, Ding’s surreal avatars, and Philips’s luminous thresholds together reveal the interior as a site where private space becomes uncanny.

Koak, Ding Shilun, and Cece Philips at Hauser & Wirth London
August 22 – September 20, 2025