What is actually hanging in London right now

There is no shortage of exhibitions in London. There is a shortage of weekends — which is why the only useful way to read a top-ten list is by closing date, not by star rating.

Here is the current critics’ ten, sorted by how long you have left.

Closing first

NIGO: From Japan with Love at the Design Museum, Kensington, closes 4 October. The first London retrospective for the man behind Bape and Human Made and Kenzo’s creative director since 2021: 700 objects, 600 of them from his own archive — records, toys, magazines, music videos and a great deal of clothing, from the 1980s on. It is also the clearest explanation anyone has staged of where «scarcity by design» came from.

Anish Kapoor at the Hayward, South Bank, closes 18 October. His second solo show there — the last was in 1998 — with the greatest hits and some monumental new work. The voids are the reason to go: sculptures painted in a black that absorbs 99.965% of visible light, which is the record for the darkest manmade substance, and which your eyes simply refuse to read as a surface.

Musquiqui Chihying: A Life of Navigation, also South Bank, closes 18 October, and it is free. Four works by the Taiwanese artist and filmmaker on how people navigate high-stress city life. Small, funny, and the best value on this list by a distance.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the V&A closes 8 November. The first British exhibition on Elsa Schiaparelli, with Dalí, Man Ray and Leonor Fini hung alongside the clothes, dresses worn by Ariana Grande and Dua Lipa, and the lobster telephone.

The winter shows

Frida: The Making of an Icon at Tate Modern runs to 3 January 2027, and it has already sold more advance tickets than any exhibition in Tate’s 128-year history. The strongest part is the beginning: 23 paintings and 11 works on paper by Kahlo, with the photographs she sat for, her jewellery and Indigenous Mexican clothing from her wardrobe. The later rooms are about the phenomenon rather than the painter, which is a fair subject but a different one.

Ana Mendieta at Tate Modern runs to 17 January 2027 — her first major UK gallery exhibition, spanning performance, sculpture, land art, photography and video, with many pieces never shown in this country. The Siluetas series is what people come out talking about.

The one that closes this week

Tracey Emin: A Second Life at Tate Modern is the only five-star show on the list and it closes 31 August. If you are reading this on the day, that is the decision made for you.

What we would put first

If there is one afternoon: Chihying at the Hayward, because it is free, then Kapoor upstairs in the same building. Two shows, one address, one ticket between them.

If there is one ticket: Schiaparelli. Frida will be the busier show and the better-known name, but the V&A has assembled something that does not exist anywhere else and dismantles it in November.