Top September London Shows: Tracey Emin, Anthony McCall, and More

It’s a busy time in London’s art world, with seemingly every contemporary gallery putting on not-to-be-missed presentations this fall. To help sift through the noise, we’ve curated a selection of our favorite exhibitions on view this month, featuring long-established cultural titans like Tracey Emin and Anthony McCall and new-guard voices alike.

Anthony McCall: “Raised Voices”

Sprüth Magers

September 13-December 21, 2024
7A Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EJ

Anthony McCall, renowned for the cosmic solid light sculptures he has been creating since 1973, has reached a new peak in his career. The British-born New York artist debuts a new solid light work alongside a series of drawings in “Raised Voices,” his newest exhibition at Sprüth Magers, coinciding with two other major solo exhibitions at Tate Modern (until April 27, 2025) and Guggenheim Bilbao (until October 11, 2024). “Raised Voices” centers on a large-scale immersive installation of the same name, with beams of light creating sculptural forms as they are projected within a cloud of mist. The exhibition also features an eerie, unnerving soundtrack by David Grubb, a longtime collaborator of McCall; it is the first time one of the artist’s light works has been accompanied by sound since the 1970s.

What we love: The titular solid light sculpture Raised Voices (2020) comprises digital projection, sound, and haze, making for a truly immersive and atmospheric viewing experience.

Gary Hume: “Mirrors and other creatures”

Sprüth Magers

September 13-October 19, 2024
7A Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EJ

Also on display at Sprüth Magers is “Mirrors and other creatures,” a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings on canvas and aluminum panels by Gary Hume that grapple with the ineffable weight of nature. Hume’s works depict swans with elongated, tangled necks and clusters of flowers on the brink of death, ephemeral beauty suffused with tragedy at every turn. Hume has described his process as “looking while making,” revealing a sensitivity to the natural world and an ongoing investment in the study of the world around us.

What we love: “Mirrors and other creatures” runs concurrently with two other solo exhibitions of Hume’s work: “THIS WAY / THAT WAY, Gary Hume: paintings from the ’90s” at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert and “Gary Hume: A Selection of Prints From 1994–2022” at Lyndsey Ingram. The three galleries are within a five-minute walking radius.

“Embodied Forms: Painting Now”

Thaddaeus Ropac

September 2-28, 2024
Ely House, 37 Dover St, London W1S 4NJ

“Embodied Forms: Painting Now” presents a series of new works by international artists Carolina Aguirre, Dean Fox, Olga Grotova, Michael Ho, Effie Wanyi Li, YaYa Yajie Liang, and Eva Helene Pade, united in their interrogation of the body. Across a diverse range of material, stylistic, and conceptual approaches, these artists tackle everything from corporeality to kinship. The Danish artist Eva Helene Pade contributes three paintings of the female nude, reimagined as a mythological entity shrouded in mystery. Effie Wanyi Li offers another highlight with her shadowy, atmospheric paintings: bruised palettes and fluid brushstrokes suggest the forms of internal organs, invoking psychological and emotional impulses.

What we love: Carolina Aguirre’s Muddy murmur (2024) uses sumi ink, charcoal, shellac ink, and natural pigment, coalescing to suggest moody, dark smudges. Olga Grotova’s Swaddle (2024) features hematite scrawls across dimly lit photograms, creating large swaths of clay-red.

Yayoi Kusama: “Every Day I Pray for Love”

Victoria Miro

September 25-November 2, 2024
16 Wharf Rd, London N1 7RW

“Every Day I Pray for Love” marks Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama’s fourteenth solo exhibition with Victoria Miro, introducing a new Infinity Mirror Room alongside a new series of paintings. Kusama’s paintings continue her ongoing study of line and form, evoking both microscopic and macroscopic universes through cell-like shapes in vibrant shades. The exhibition also features new sculptures, which will be on view in the gallery and on the canalside terrace.

What we love: Yayoi Kusama’s iconic fluid shapes and patterns are as saturated as ever in her new paintings, yielding a psychedelic viewing experience.

Yu Hong: “Islands of the Mind”

Lisson Gallery

September 27-November 2, 2024
27 Bell St, London NW1 5BY

For her first solo exhibition in London, Yu Hong unveils a selection of large-scale acrylic paintings which depict a wide-ranging array of psychological landscapes. In Island of Love (2023), the seemingly blissful and romantic depiction of two figures intimately entwined in each other’s arms is disrupted by the violent waves around them. Island of Expectation (2024) is similarly foreboding: we see a young woman with her back to the viewer, staring out at a rocky, turbulent sea. Informed by Hong’s experience living in both Beijing and New York, “Islands of the Mind” ruminates heavily on the shifting, precarious state of both places the artist calls home.

What we love: Night Walk (2023) is a monumental three-panel work which references Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Blind Leading the Blind (1568), depicting a line of adults crossing a burning volcanic landscape in a biblical, otherworldly scene. Island of Survival (2024) is similarly dramatic in its portrayal of figures wrestling and writhing amidst a rocky, tumultuous ocean.

Tracey Emin: “I followed you to the end”

White Cube Bermondsey

September 19-November 10, 2024
144-152, Bermondsey St, London SE1 3TQ

Spanning the entirety of White Cube Bermondsey, “I followed you to the end” is Tracey Emin’s most personal exhibition to date. The contemporary artist has long grappled with notions of love and mortality in her work, but her newest works draw from her diagnosis of aggressive bladder cancer in 2020 and the subsequent surgery she underwent to remove the affected organ. A new short film, displayed in the gallery’s auditorium and filmed by Emin herself, reveals in vivid detail the stoma she now lives with: a pulsing, vibrant orifice that echoes throughout her new paintings.

Other works are similarly weighty. In the diptych My Dead Body – A Trace of Life (2024), the female subject lies supine, her pelvis thrust upward; the adjacent canvas avows, “I don’t want to have sex because my body feels dead.” There is also a massive, commanding bronze sculpture in the center of the gallery, eerily depicting the lower half of a figure with sprawled legs—either suggesting invitation or subjugation.

What we love: Autographic markers are tactfully woven throughout “I followed you to the end.” Small-scale paintings of Emin’s cats hang on the gallery walls, and The Bridge (2024) symbolically connects the artist’s hometowns of Margate and London. Combined with Emin’s short film about her stoma, the exhibition is marked by a sense of profound intimacy.