London-based Art Advisor Jacqueline Nowikovsky shares her must-see museum shows if you’re in town for Frieze 2025, and delves into why these exhibitions are well worth the visit. Read ahead to learn more about immersive and impactful presentations at Serpentine South, Royal Academy of Arts, and The Courtauld.
Serpentine South Gallery
Peter Doig: “House of Music”
Kensington Gardens
Installation view of Peter Doig’s “House of Music,” Serpentine South, 10 October 2025 – 8 February 2026. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine South.
To enter Peter Doig’s “House of Music” is to step inside a painting that hums and serenades you, buzzes and whispers, and even its silence has its own melodic echo. Doig has transformed the Serpentine into a space not that allows you to slow down and listen, absorb and rest. The air is filled with colour and sound, a dreamlike tropical island amidst the hissing noises of a stressed city.
Doig has always painted the thresholds between worlds: culture and wilderness, memory and invention, Europe and the tropics. In “House of Music” a further blurred delineation is thrown into the mix: the senses you activate when you perceive a painted world. The show includes a set-up of restored vintage speakers, glorious wooden Klangfilm and Western Electric relics, through which the artist’s playlist provides the soundscape of the show. The rhythm of the music here becomes an extension of how Doig thinks and paints.
If, as myself, you have been a passionate follower of the artist, whom I deem amongst the most extraordinary of our times, the mood of this exhibition will strike you as bearing his unmistakable handwriting: dense yet translucent settings in which every surface seems to bloom and pull you in, the air feels charged with memory—but never shying away from a bold stroke, breaking free from known forms. You can sense the islands and forests that shaped his vision, the sounds of Trinidad, the hush of Canadian lakes. The show feels personal, even tender, a homecoming that invites the city to pause and listen.
“The show feels personal, even tender, a homecoming that invites the city to pause and listen,”
Doig’s imagery is filled with (dis)appearing presences: figures adrift on water or beaches, cabins pressed against jungles, musicians caught mid-motion, something buried from bygone times and a trace of myth beneath the paint. At the Serpentine the figure of a lion keeps emerging, both as symbol and apparition. A British emblem of force that is now softened and transformed into a creature of dreams, the old guardian spirit watching on, suggesting both strength and unease, reminding us how history lingers even in paradise. This tension of beauty and its shadow is the quiet constant of Doig’s art: lush but never innocent. Behind the radiance of color lies an awareness of fragility, of what cannot be tamed or owned. The lion, the lake, the music – each is a veil behind which something deeper pulses.
What makes “House of Music” so remarkable is the way these elements fuse into a complete atmosphere. The gallery feels like a single, continuous canvas: benches arranged like pauses in a melody, music looping gently, paintings glowing with the warmth of nocturnal lights. The visitor becomes part of the resonating and spellbinding composition. It’s a show that rewards stillness, facilitated by the Serpentine’s generous free admission. A luminous antidote to the city’s velocity, a gift that rewards you. The longer you stay, the richer it becomes.
What we love: In “House of Music,” Peter Doig turns the Serpentine into a quietly mesmerizing space where sound, color, and memory flow together, inviting visitors to slow down and truly take it in.
Peter Doig: “House of Music” at Serpentine South Gallery
October 10, 2025 – February 8, 2026
Royal Academy of Arts
Kerry James Marshall: “The Histories”
Piccadilly
Kerry James Marshall,
“Better Homes, Better Gardens,” 1994; Acrylic and collage on canvas. 254 x 360.7 cm. Denver Art Museum. © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
The Royal Academy’s brilliant survey of Kerry James Marshall’s work reveals an artist who has spent four decades reshaping the canon of art history from within, rescuing it from its exclusions through a command of composition, color and historic consciousness that transforms the narratives of Western painting. If there is one show you find time to see during Frieze—this should be it!
Marshall’s bold and resplendent painterly universe inserts the Black figure as a long-omitted protagonist. Interrogating the construction of racial stereotypes with an enormously empathetic intuition for the role of the figure both as individual and archetype, he brings characters and moments to life that are forcefully striking and confident. They have grace and power in everything they do—whether they simply enjoy themselves or are caught in a daily routine.
“Marshall’s bold and resplendent painterly universe inserts the Black figure as a long-omitted protagonist,”
Marshall’s practice is grounded in an unflinching engagement with art history—from Giotto to Géricault, Manet to Seurat. But he enriches and fuses it with the African diasporic memory, spiritual and religious traditions, practices of defiance and connection to a lost root. He so elegantly weaves these worlds together, coalescing two thus far so antithetical genealogies. His figures also defy the simplicity of what color should be, from his delightfully joyous handling of color to the way he brings blackness to life. Ivory, carbon, hints of blue—his tones are never flat or symbolic; they are brimming and infinitely nuanced, insisting on the complexity of Blackness itself and refusing to domesticate his subjects.
The show is grouped in cycles, from the time he settled in Chicago, chapters addressing the brutal history of the Middle Passage (the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean during which many captive Africans died before reaching the slave markets in America). In a series of portraits, Marshall resurrects rebels, poets, abolitionists, who might never have been painted in their lifetimes. These works act not as reconstructions but as meditations on visibility itself: who is deemed worthy of depiction and who has been omitted.
Vignettes translate the Rococo genre style and reverie into a contemporary context where romance and leisure are not as light-hearted as they may appear at first sight. Marshall refers to past and ongoing exploitation and oppression, but also compensates these with protest and resistance.
Scenes of barbershops, playgrounds and neighborhood rituals become a rich theatre of contemporary Black life elevated to the scale of epic painting. On huge un-stretched canvases, tacked to the ornate walls he asserts an immediacy that challenges the viewer, monumental and intimate at once.
The grand architecture of the Royal Academy lends itself here to a journey of wandering discovery, unfolding a new fascinating chapter with every new room. By showing these paintings on such a grand stage, Mark Godfrey the curator has created a setting in which they rise to the occasion and Kerry James Marshall´s celebration of Presence outgrows itself.
What we love: In “The Histories,” Kerry James Marshall reimagines what it means to see and be seen—turning the walls of the Royal Academy into a living archive where forgotten lives, everyday scenes, and epic beauty merge, expanding the very language of painting and who it has long chosen to remember.
Kerry James Marshall: “The Histories” at Royal Academy of Arts
September 20, 2025 – January 18, 2026
The Courtauld Gallery
Wayne Thiebaud: “American Still Life”
The Strand
Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021), “Three Machines,” 1963, oil on canvas, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025.
Long before everybody posted their morning coffee and croissant on Instagram, Wayne Thiebaud devoted himself to cakes, sweets and other commonplace objects of American life in a meaningful way that transcends the tropes of Pop-Art. Considering our everyday ephemeral pleasures a worthy subject of painterly contemplation, and he saw his work as continuation of the legacy of earlier still-life paintings by Chardin, Siméon, Cézanne or Morandi. Thiebaud elevated the pictures and flavors of childhood longings—hot dogs, lemon meringue pies and glossy cream cakes that might otherwise be overlooked or considered kitsch, turning them into profound observations.
This small but quintessential exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery is the first ever museum show of the artist’s work in the U.K., presenting not only his vibrant and lushly painted still-lives from diner meals and deli counters to gumball dispensers and pinball machines. They do encapsulate the essence of consumerism, depicting in vibrant colors how our desire is stimulated by these sweet promises. Yet they also reflect on the surreal beauty contained in everyday objects and the joy they might bring.
“They do encapsulate the essence of consumerism, depicting in vibrant colors how our desire is stimulated by these sweet promises,”
One of the greatest pleasures of walking into the two rooms dedicated to special exhibitions at the Courtauld is the access through the permanent collection—no matter how often you´ve stood in front of the iconic Manets, Cézanne or Modigliani, it is always a much-needed refresher to see how exquisite this world-class collection assembled by Samuel Courtauld is.
My personal favorite discovery in this small but quintessential Thiebaud show was Four Pinball Machines from 1962. These seemingly so simple engines of popular entertainment (and an at the time often banned gambling devices) are painted at ambitiously large scale, but more than just being a straightforward bright machine waiting to be played, Thiebaud depicted the square backglasses to echo works by his contemporary artists. Finding a Kenneth Noland Target and Frank Stella Concentric Square hidden amidst this juicy universe was an eye-opening personal highlight and a beautiful hint at the perpetual complimentary tension of reduction and opulence, the high and low, the everyday and the eternal.
Wayne Thiebaud: “American Still Life” at The Courtauld Gallery
October 10, 2025 – January 18, 2026
