London Gallery Weekend begins today (5-7 June), and galleries all over the city open their doors with a specially curated programme of free events. Below, we present eight exhibitions that caught our eye from among the seemingly endless list of exciting art happenings taking place far and wide. 

TED LE SWER, COMRADES, SLEEP FASTER!, SOUP

Taking its name from a work by Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov, ridiculing the infamous propaganda slogan ‘Comrades, Work Faster!’, Ted Le Swer’s exhibition is also concerned with labour in myriad ways. In Comrades, Sleep Faster!, the London-based artist contemplates the labour, lore and function of dairy cattle, weather surveillance cameras and Disney’s Bambi, drawing fascinating parallels between these seemingly disparate subjects in intriguing and provocative ways.

FROM THE OTHER END OF THE HALLWAY, WORKPLACE

From the Other End of the Hallway is a group show curated around the idea of “charged encounters”. Featuring works by Jimmy DeSana, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Patti Smith, and more, the exhibition spans movements, decades and mediums to explore the alluring idea of heightened interactions. 

ANNE IMHOF, CITIZEN, SPRÜTH MAGERS

Enigmatic artist Anne Imhof mines performance, painting, sculpture, film, and more in her investigation into the profound isolation, anxieties, and consumer fetishes of the digital age. For this year’s London Gallery Weekend, the German-born artist has transformed the gallery space into an immersive dystopian underworld as she continues to examine bodies, surveillance, and control. At the show’s core are two new large-scale Wave paintings, alongside a four-channel film, site-specific sculptures, oil pastel drawings on canvas, and her latest bronze reliefs. It’s not straightforward to define what unites these seemingly disparate artworks made from such different materials, yet they somehow hang together and feel like they couldn’t have been made by anyone other than Anne Imhof.

SARA CWYNAR, BABY BLUE BENZO, THE APPROACH

Sara Cwynar’s latest exhibition examines the way photographic images and internet aesthetics contribute to the manufacture of consumer desire. Taking its name from the Sotheby’s 2022 auction in which a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR fetched €135 million, making it one of the most expensive cars ever sold, Baby Blue Benzo skewers the absurdity of late-stage capitalism and hyperinflation, contemplating the production of our exponentially increasing lust for luxury in a parade of images that mimic the overwhelm of 21st-century life. The Canadian-born, New York-based artist also draws parallels between the costly car and benzodiazepines, a medication prescribed for anxiety and sleep disorders – the body’s revolt when forced to endure the relentless, assembly-line nature of modern life.

GRAY WIELEBINSKI, BRING ME MEN, NICOLETTI

Dallas-born, London-based artist Gray Wielebinski’s exhibition Bring Me Men is a meditation on the production and performance of machismo and ideas of masculinity. In a series of intricately assembled sculptural objects, Wielebinski presents an array of masculine ephemera, the accumulation of which evokes locker rooms and teenage bedroom walls – sites of heightened intimacy. ‘Bring Me Men’ is the phrase once inscribed on the façade of the United States Air Force Academy, where the artist’s father undertook military training in the 1970s. It was removed in 2023 when it took on new and unsavoury connotations in the wake of a major sexual misconduct and harassment scandal at the Academy. Now, Wielebinski has reinstated these words above the gallery’s entrance, inviting us to contemplate the patriarchal regime. 

WANG PEI, SERTRALINE, WORKPLACE

While you’re at Workplace visiting From the Other End of the Hallway (above), make sure to check out this exhibition by Wang Pei. Named after a widely prescribed antidepressant, this latest body of work possesses a hazy quality that suggests the feeling of experience mediated through medication; neither bad nor good – just there, like a mist. In this dreamy series, he creates an uncanny sense of action severed from perception; a slight rupture between happening and meaning, a lag in comprehension.

KEMBRA PFAHLER, HUNGRY FOR TRASH, EMALIN (118½)

Often described as the “godmother of shock art”, Kembra Pfahler is a countercultural living legend. Spanning performance, film, music, drawing and sculpture, her distinct practice and unmistakable aesthetic are founded on a convention-defying, anti-naturalism and self-styled “beautalism” (the art of approaching beauty as a site of transformation and transgression and forming one’s own presentation of beauty from “brutal real-life circumstances, premised on the conviction that vanity is the enemy of interpretation”). Hungry For Trash, her latest exhibition at Emalin, brings together a selection of Pfahler-esque figures, drawings, assemblages and more.

PAUL P., THE FUGITIVE MARVELS OF SUNSET, MAUREEN PALEY

The Fugitive Marvels of Sunset brings together Paul P.’s radiant portraits, skyscapes and seascapes. Bats emerge from darkening clouds, laundry billows against a glorious blue sky and waves crash violently back into the sea from where they came. Meanwhile, the faces of his subjects, composed close-up, melt back into dusk or materialise in dawn light. Alongside the likes of Whistler, Sargent, Montesquiou and Proust, the artist continues to take inspiration from the pages of gay porn magazines produced in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s – decades bookended by the beginning of gay liberation to the onset of the Aids crisis.

London Gallery Weekend 2026 runs from 5–7 June.