Top 5 London Art Exhibitions for Late July 2026

Tabish Khan, the @LondonArtCritic, selects five must-see shows across London. At Josh Lilley, Rachel Maclean's 'The Enchantment of Reason' satirizes AI through a Victorian lens, featuring a film where fairies learn speech by ingesting and vomiting words, alongside paintings and 3D-printed works. At Copperfield, Oscar Santillán's 'SOLARIS' uses sand from the Atacama Desert—home to powerful space telescopes—to craft a lens for imperfect photographs, and displays a motherboard and trainers subjected to years of decay as Anthropocene commentary. Oliver Beer's 'The Sky in the Cave' at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac translates resonant frequencies from Palaeolithic caves into paintings using red and black pigments, accompanied by a soundtrack. At Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, 'breakdown' presents Yvonne Mabs Francis's personal paintings documenting her mental health struggles, including visions of turning into a foetus and undergoing electroconvulsive therapy. Miya Ando's 'The Colors of the 72 Microseasons' at Sundaram Tagore captures sky color changes based on the Japanese 72-microseason calendar, disrupted by climate change, marking the gallery's first solo show in its new London space.