By Sara Bright
By Sara Bright
October in London operates according to its own distinct cultural rhythm. As the autumnal shift takes hold, the city’s artistic ecosystem shifts into its highest gear, galvanised by the annual arrival of Frieze London in Regent’s Park. However, to view October 2023 purely through the lens of a singular art fair would be a disservice to the sprawling, complex, and often contentious tapestry of exhibitions that defined the month. From long-delayed retrospectives navigating the fraught waters of American history to immersive meditations on ecology, gender, and the very concept of time itself, London offered a robust intellectual and visual banquet.
This was not merely a season of commerce, but one of profound curatorial ambition. The capital’s major institutions – Tate Modern, the Hayward Gallery, the Barbican, and the Serpentine – mounted shows that forced audiences to grapple with mortality, collective trauma, and the limits of aesthetic beauty. Meanwhile, the commercial sector saw a geographic realignment, with historic gallery districts revitalised.
What follows is an authoritative dissection of the nine pivotal exhibitions and events that shaped London’s art landscape in October 2023.
1. Frieze and Frieze Masters: The 20th Anniversary Spectacle
The 2023 edition of Frieze London marked a significant milestone: its 20th anniversary. Yet, the atmosphere inside the Regent’s Park tents was marked by a palpable tension between artistic expression and unapologetic commercialism. Over two decades, Frieze has evolved from an audacious disruptor into the ultimate establishment fixture, a transformation that did not go unnoticed by critics.
The critical consensus was sharply polarised. Writing for The Guardian, critic Jonathan Jones delivered a scathing indictment, describing the event as “a graveyard of creativity for tasteless one percenters.” He argued that the fair had “domesticated contemporary art and thus killed it.” Similarly, The Penitent Review observed a shift towards an overly sanitised environment, noting: “Now, it’s gridded and homogenous, like a new town city plan, with white square boxes everywhere… [it has become] a frictionless space of pure transaction.”
Yet, amidst the overwhelming scale and transactional focus, moments of genuine artistic resonance could still be found. While Damien Hirst’s garden paintings at the Gagosian stand were dismissed by Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton in The Cusp Magazine as “Chelsea Garden Show on steroids,” she also highlighted the relief of hearing “the harmonies of a gospel choir at Edel Assanti, a gallery which consistently shows brave and wide ranging work.” Frieze 2023 thus remained a microcosm of the global art market: simultaneously exhausting, exhilarating, deeply flawed, and entirely unmissable.
2. Philip Guston at Tate Modern: Confronting the Unspeakable
Perhaps no exhibition in recent memory arrived with as much accumulated baggage as the Philip Guston retrospective at Tate Modern. Originally scheduled to open earlier, the exhibition was subject to a highly publicised delay by its American partner institutions, who feared the public reaction to Guston’s inclusion of Ku Klux Klan figures in his later, cartoonish paintings. Tate Modern, however, held its nerve, presenting the work without apologies or over-sanitisation.
The resulting exhibition was nothing short of a triumph, widely hailed as the most important painting show of the year. The transition from Guston’s delicate, shimmering abstract expressionism of the 1950s to his meaty, grotesque, and politically charged figurative work of the late 1960s and 1970s was handled with masterful curatorial pacing.
Critics were unanimous in their praise. Laura Cumming of The Guardian called the exhibition “mordant, magnificent, unmissable,” praising Tate Modern for being “braver” than its American counterparts by trusting the audience to navigate the complexity of the imagery. Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph described Guston’s oeuvre as “timeless art that skewers evil with a savage intensity,” noting that the artist “does not set out to ingratiate – and the results are astonishing.” Ultimately, the exhibition served as a potent reminder of painting’s capacity to confront societal rot head-on.
3. Hiroshi Sugimoto at Hayward Gallery: The Camera as a Time Machine
In stark contrast to the visceral paint handling of Guston, the Hayward Gallery offered a masterclass in conceptual restraint with Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine. This magnificent retrospective, the largest ever dedicated to the Japanese photographer in the UK, transformed the brutalist concrete spaces of the Hayward into a sanctuary of meditative stillness.
Sugimoto’s practice is rooted in a profound philosophical inquiry into the nature of time and perception. “My camera is like a time machine,” Sugimoto has famously stated, a concept that underpinned the entire exhibition. From his luminous, long-exposure photographs of empty cinema screens to his eerie, hyper-detailed images of natural history dioramas, Sugimoto uses the photographic apparatus not to document reality, but to stretch it. “Usually photographers capture something,” he noted. “I use the camera to project my inner idea of reality.”
Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery and lead curator of the show, aptly described Sugimoto as a “poet of paradox” who “uses the camera as a tool for thinking.” The exhibition was universally lauded, with Books & Boots declaring that “for once all the superlatives like ‘landmark’ and ‘definitive’ are true,” cementing Sugimoto’s status as one of the most vital image-makers of the past half-century.
4. Avery Singer at Hauser & Wirth: The Trauma of ‘Free Fall’
If Sugimoto deals in the elasticity of time, Avery Singer’s Free Fall at Hauser & Wirth dealt with its sudden, violent rupture. The New York-based artist’s exhibition was a harrowing, technically dazzling meditation on the events of 9/11 and its lingering psychological fallout.
Singer, known for her complex process combining 3D modelling software, digital rendering, and airbrushed acrylics, pushed her medium to new conceptual limits. The gallery space itself was transformed into a simulacrum of the World Trade Center offices. Reviewing the show for Time Out, Eddy Frankel awarded it five stars, vividly describing the environment: “A faceless, grey corporate office; patterned carpet tiles, neon strip lights, shredded paper; suffocating, windowless, airless… The American artist’s immersive, trippy, beige installation is a meditation on tragedy and collective trauma, on one event which tore apart a country, and shattered Singer’s own youth.”
The paintings themselves, rendered in a ghostly, mechanised aesthetic, functioned as fragments of memory – distorted, overwhelming, and deeply unsettling. Free Fall was a stark reminder of the power of contemporary gallery installations to create fully encompassing emotional environments.
5. ‘RE/SISTERS’ at the Barbican: Ecology and Gender on the Frontline
At the Barbican Art Gallery, the ambitious group exhibition RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology sought to map the intersections between the exploitation of the natural environment and the systemic oppression of women. Featuring photography and film from 50 international women and gender-non-conforming artists, the show was a sprawling, occasionally overwhelming, but fundamentally necessary survey of eco-feminist art.
Curator Alona Pardo explicitly outlined the exhibition’s political framework: “This is really a show that is shining a light on the nefarious activities that go hand-in-hand with gender-based violence and nature-based violence. And how we begin to bring these two constituent struggles together as interlinked struggles.”
The critical response acknowledged the importance of the subject matter, even if the execution was debated. Sarah Kent of The Arts Desk praised it as “a show about the brave women who’ve been fighting to protect our planet,” while others felt the sheer volume of work obscured a sharp curatorial focus. Nevertheless, RE/SISTERS succeeded in demonstrating how Visual Arts can operate as a vital tool of resistance against capitalist and patriarchal extraction.
6. Georg Baselitz at the Serpentine: The Crooked Wood of Humanity
Georg Baselitz, long celebrated (and critiqued) for his strategy of painting figures upside down to disrupt narrative interpretation, brought a different kind of subversion to the Serpentine Gallery. Focusing on his monumental wooden sculptures created between 2011 and 2015, the exhibition revealed an artist wrestling with the physical weight of material and the frailty of the human form.
Hacked and gouged from massive trunks of timber using chainsaws and axes, the sculptures possessed a raw, primal energy. Baselitz himself articulated the philosophical underpinnings of this brutalist approach, drawing on Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked wood of humanity, nothing entirely straight can be built. It is only the approximation of this idea that nature imposes upon us.”
This sense of the “crooked wood” was palpable in the roughly hewn, often decaying forms that populated the gallery. The Financial Times aptly described the body of work as an “oxymoron of frailty,” highlighting how Baselitz managed to imbue massive, aggressive wooden structures with a profound sense of vulnerability and impending mortality.
7. UVA at 180 The Strand: The Architecture of Light
Moving away from the traditional mediums of paint and wood, UVA: Synchronicity at 180 The Strand offered a masterclass in experiential, technology-driven art. United Visual Artists, marking their 20th anniversary, took over the subterranean brutalist spaces of the building to present a series of kinetic, light-based installations.
The exhibition explored the human relationship with space, time, and data. Unlike the frictionless commerce of Frieze, the spectacle here was rooted in a genuine exploration of sensory limits. By manipulating light, sound, and architectural volumes, UVA created environments that were simultaneously disorienting and transcendent, proving that immersive art can possess rigorous intellectual depth alongside visual impact.
8. The Cult of Beauty at Wellcome Collection: Dissecting Aesthetics
The Wellcome Collection has consistently excelled at occupying the liminal space between medical history, sociology, and contemporary art. The Cult of Beauty was no exception. This meticulously researched exhibition interrogated the standards of physical attractiveness, dissecting how beauty has been historically weaponised to enforce racial, gendered, and class-based hierarchies.
By placing historical medical artifacts and anatomical drawings alongside contemporary artworks by figures such as Juno Calypso, the exhibition successfully destabilised the idea of beauty as an objective truth. It laid bare the scientific and pseudoscientific frameworks that have been used to construct aesthetic ideals, offering a sobering counterpoint to the often uncritical celebration of visual pleasure found elsewhere in the city.
9. The Cork Street Revival: A Gallery Migration
Beyond the walls of public institutions, October 2023 was defined by a significant geographic shift within the commercial gallery sector. Cork Street in Mayfair, historically the epicentre of the London art trade before losing ground to other districts, experienced a dramatic renaissance.
Major players undertook highly publicised relocations. Stephen Friedman Gallery expanded into a sweeping new complex, Alison Jacques unveiled a pristine new architectural space, and Tiwani Contemporary solidified the street’s diverse curatorial offering. Nearby on Conduit Street, Pilar Corrias opened a formidable new headquarters. This migration was not merely about real estate; it signaled a renewed confidence in London’s traditional gallery district. The inaugural exhibitions at these upgraded spaces were statements of intent, proving that despite the broader economic uncertainties facing the UK, the upper echelons of the art market remained intensely competitive and committed to physical, brick-and-mortar experiences.
The Legacy of October 2023
Looking back at the density of programming, it is clear that October 2023 was a month of deep reflection for the capital. While the art market continued its relentless churn in the tents of Regent’s Park, the city’s public galleries offered profound counter-narratives. From Philip Guston’s fearless moral inventory to Avery Singer’s technological processing of trauma, the art on display demanded rigorous engagement rather than passive consumption.
As the cultural calendar moves forward, the exhibitions of this month remain a benchmark for curatorial bravery and institutional ambition. For those looking ahead to future seasons, the precedent set here ensures that the capital will remain an essential destination. Be sure to explore our guide on what to expect from London in March 2024: The Top Art Fairs and Events to Visit to see how this artistic momentum continues to evolve.
