Mayfair concentrates more blue-chip gallery power per square metre than any other postcode in Europe. Between Bond Street and Green Park, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, White Cube, and Pilar Corrias operate as the engine room of the international art market. As London’s art world wakes up in 2026, February – coming off the January sales cycle and ahead of the spring fair season – typically sees these galleries mounting some of their most ambitious shows. In 2026, three venues within a 10-minute walk of Green Park tube station are presenting work spanning postwar Japanese avant-garde, contemporary British embroidery, and American photographic history – all free to visit.
Gagosian, Davies Street: Nan Goldin – The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
13 January – 21 March 2026. Free admission.
Gagosian’s Davies Street space – 17–19 Davies Street, behind Claridge’s – has opened 2026 with the first UK presentation of Nan Goldin’s complete Ballad of Sexual Dependency series. All 126 photographs are on display, marking the 40th anniversary of the book’s original 1986 publication. The images, shot between 1973 and 1986, document Goldin’s immediate circle in downtown New York: lovers, drag performers, addicts, and friends in domestic interiors, bars, and on the street. Goldin has described the work as coming “out of relationships, not observation” – a distinction that, like Irving Penn’s Paris studio portraits, collapses the distance between photographer and subject.
The chromatic palette – sodium-lit bedrooms, flash-lit bathrooms, bruised purples of a nightclub – remains startling nearly four decades on. The cumulative effect of seeing 126 images in sequence reproduces the experience of Goldin’s original slide shows, first presented at the Boston Film/Video Foundation in 1979. The Davies Street gallery, at roughly 4,000 square feet, suits the work’s demand for proximity. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm. Nearest tube: Bond Street or Green Park.
Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row gallery – 23 Savile Row, in a converted 18th-century townhouse – has launched February with a double bill constituting the most focused presentation of the Gutai movement’s legacy in London since the Barbican’s 2018 survey. The two exhibitions run simultaneously across the North and South galleries, sharing a thematic thread: both artists left Japan for Paris in the 1960s and both rejected established modes of making.
**Takesada Matsutani: *Shifting Boundaries*** occupies the North Gallery. Matsutani (b. 1937, Ōsaka) is one of the last surviving members of the Gutai Art Association, the radical collective founded in 1954 by Jirō Yoshihara. His signature material is vinyl glue – poured, blown, and manipulated with fans and his own breath to create bulbous, organic forms. The exhibition ranges from The Magic Box (1988), shown in Europe for the first time, to new canvases from 2025. Matsutani turned 89 in January 2026 and maintains a daily studio practice in Paris, where he has lived since 1966. The show coincides with the 10th edition of the Prix Matsutani, an initiative from the SHŌEN endowment fund he co-founded with his wife Kate Van Houten.
**Tetsumi Kudo: *Microcosms*** runs in the South Gallery. Kudo (1935–1990) was a key figure in Tokyo’s anti-art movement before becoming associated with nouveau réalisme in France. His cages, cubes, and garden environments – assembled from found and hand-sculpted materials – address mass consumption, technology, and environmental degradation as a unified system he termed the “New Ecology.” This is Kudo’s first London exhibition in over a decade. The signature cage works, produced between 1966 and 1980, construct miniature worlds inside wire enclosures: plastic figures, synthetic plants, and painted surfaces coexist in compressed environments that implicate the viewer as both observer and inhabitant.
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm. Nearest tube: Piccadilly Circus or Green Park.
White Cube, Mason’s Yard: Jessica Rankin – in the air / a memory
28 January – 28 February 2026. Free admission.
White Cube’s Mason’s Yard space – the first free-standing structure built in St James’s for over 30 years when it opened in 2006 – is showing new work by Jessica Rankin. The exhibition combines gestural passages of paint with embroidered thread, a technique Rankin has developed to create a visual grammar operating between drawing, painting, and textile. The works address creation mythologies, drawing from the Babylonian Enūma Eliš and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Colliding spherical forms recur throughout, evoking what the gallery describes as “both cellular and cosmological scales of movement.” In When Sweet and Bitter Mingled Together (E.E.) (2025), the reference is to the dismembered body of Tiamat. The stitched lines traversing each composition function simultaneously as drawing marks and physical threads – a material duality mirroring the thematic tensions between creation and destruction.
Rankin studied at the Royal College of Art and the University of Brighton before relocating to New York. Her work is held in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Israel Museum. Mason’s Yard is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm. Free admission, no booking required. Nearest tube: Green Park.
Planning Your Visit
All three exhibitions are free and require no booking. Gallery hours are generally Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm. The concentrated geography of Mayfair makes gallery-hopping between Gagosian (Davies Street), Hauser & Wirth (Savile Row), and White Cube (Mason’s Yard) entirely walkable: all three fall within a 10-minute radius of Green Park tube station. February’s thinner crowds – compared to the October fair season, when Frieze transforms the neighbourhood into a six-day art-world marathon – allow for sustained engagement with individual works, a luxury that Mayfair’s intimate gallery spaces are designed to facilitate.
