October is when London’s art world turns the volume all the way up. While Frieze London and Frieze Masters take over Regent’s Park, PAD London draws the more design-inclined to Berkeley Square, and suddenly there are more exhibitions, openings, and events than anyone could hope to get around. London’s galleries know they have an audience and plan their calendars accordingly, opening some of their biggest exhibitions of the year while everyone is in town.
There’s a lot going on. So here, Artsy highlights 10 gallery exhibitions to catch across London during Frieze week 2026.
California-born artist Jim Amaral has lived in Bogotá since 1957, developing a surrealist practice spanning drawing, sculpture, collage and, for a period, painting. “A Study of Five Decades” at LAMB’s Mayfair gallery brings together works on paper from the 1960s to the 2010s, tracing his fascination with the body, dreams, desire, and the subconscious.
Hands sprout from ears, lips appear in palms, and human anatomy merges with plants in Amaral’s strange, precisely drawn world. Among the earliest works on show are black-and-white drawings from the 1960s, made as Amaral became immersed in Jungian psychoanalysis and began looking to dreams and the subconscious for imagery. His 1970s works “Love Letters,” meanwhile, have roots in early correspondence exchanged with artist Olga de Amaral, now his wife of nearly 70 years (wonderfully, their romance began while dancing the tango as students in Michigan). Alongside the exhibition, LAMB makes its Frieze Masters debut with a Spotlight devoted to Amaral’s “Invisible Flowers” (1979–80), a series of botanical drawings in which flowers bloom with human reproductive organs.
