Our top 5 shows to see in London this February

As February unfolds, London's cultural scene blossoms with an array of captivating art exhibitions. From contemporary masterpieces to thought-provoking installations, these exhibitions promise to ignite your imagination and immerse you in the diverse and dynamic world of London's vibrant art scene.

This Gerhard Richter exhibition marks the gallery’s first presentation of Richter’s work in London since announcing his representation in December 2022, and follows the artist’s recent debut at David Zwirner in New York in spring of 2023.

This considered installation expands upon Richter’s sustained inquiry into the fixity of perception and reaffirms his unwavering commitment to the formal and conceptual possibilities of abstraction. Centrally featured are three of the artist’s celebrated abstract paintings, made in the years preceding his decision to move away from oil paint and turn toward drawing and installation with increasing dedication. An expansive group of new works on paper—some made with ink or pencil, others with a combination of the two—illuminates the newfound urgency and prominence that Richter has placed on method and technique in drawing.

Guston was a complex artist who took inspiration from the nightmarish world around him to create new and surprising imagery. This exhibition explores how his paintings bridged the personal and the political, the abstract and the figurative, the humorous and the tragic.

His early work included murals and paintings addressing racism in America and wars abroad. During the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s, Guston grew critical of abstraction, and began producing large-scale paintings that feature comic-like figures, some in white hoods representing evil and the everyday perpetrators of racism. These paintings and those that followed established Guston as one of the most influential painters of the late 20th century. This is the first major retrospective on the artist in the UK in nearly 20 years.

'Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.' at Serpentine South is Barbara Kruger’s first solo institutional show in London in over twenty years. This immersive three-channel video installation explores contemporary modes of creating and consuming content online. In the work, Kruger combines text, audio clips, and a barrage of found images and memes, ranging from blurred-out selfies to animated photos of cats.

The exhibition also features recent video reconfigurations – or, as the artist calls them, replays – of several of Kruger’s most iconic pieces from the 1980s, including Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987) and Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989). Over decades, Kruger has presented her work across various spaces and forms, including on buildings, billboards, hoardings, buses, and skate parks. For this exhibition, the artist has adapted works, which were recently presented at museums in the United States, to specific locations within Serpentine, both indoors and outdoors.

This exhibition marks the largest exhibition ever mounted in the 40+ year career of world-renowned photographic artist, Edward Burtynsky, who has dedicated his practice to bearing witness to the impact of human industry on the planet. Curated by Marc Mayer, former Director of the National Gallery of Canada and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the exhibition features 94 of Burtynsky’s large-format photographs as well as 13 high-resolution murals, and an augmented reality (AR) experience. A centerpiece of the exhibition is the immersive film presentation of In the Wake of Progress (2022). A never-before-seen element in this exhibition, referred to as the “Process Archive,” will also showcase Burtynsky’s navigation through each of the technological shifts in the photographic medium that have occurred over recent decades. The exhibition reveals Burtynsky’s lifelong observation of humanity’s incursion into the natural world and the environmental consequences of industrial processes.

During his early years as a young artist in post-war London, Frank Auerbach produced one of his most remarkable bodies of work: a series of large-scale portrait heads made in charcoal. Auerbach spent months on each drawing, working and reworking them during numerous sessions with his sitters. The marks of this prolonged and vigorous process of creation are evident in the finished drawings, which are richly textured and layered. Sometimes, he would even break through the paper and patch it up before carrying on. Auerbach’s heads emerge from the darkness of the charcoal as vital and alive, having come through a lengthy period of struggle – the image repeatedly created and destroyed. The character of the drawings speaks profoundly of their times as people were remaking their lives after the destructions and upending of war.

Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads will be the first time Auerbach’s extraordinary post-war drawings, made in the 1950s and early 1960s, have been brought together as a comprehensive group. They will be shown together with a selection of paintings he made of the same sitters; for him, painting and drawing have always been deeply entwined.