This autumn, there are many fantastic art exhibitions to explore outside of London. The 2026 Turner Prize exhibition will take place at MIMA in Middlesbrough. The MK Gallery in Milton Keynes is hosting the first major exhibition dedicated to the beloved British artist L.S. Lowry in over 13 years. Radical artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s work will be featured at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, while Mike Nelson will create a new site-specific installation at Modern Art Oxford. Check out Artlyt’s selection below for more details.
 Zak Ové, Invisible Men
Zak Ové: Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness
11 September 2026 – 10 September 2027
The SherborneÂ
An extraordinary assembly of imposing and identical figures by British Trinidadian artist, Zak Ové, will transform the historic gardens of The Sherborne this autumn.
Thirteen monumental figures – each over two metres high – The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness (2016) will create a powerful encounter for visitors to the historic Georgian house.
Exploring identity, visibility, resilience and the African diaspora, The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness creates a compelling conversation between contemporary art and The Sherborne’s historic setting.
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‘Platter; Playing Card’, Quentin Bell, private lender, photographed by Lee Robbins
Quentin Bell
19 September – 7 March 2027
Charleston in Firle
Charleston presents the first exhibition in almost thirty years dedicated to Quentin Bell (1910–1996), exploring his life and work as a potter, sculptor and illustrator. Quentin, the son of artist Vanessa Bell and art critic Clive Bell, is best known as the biographer of his aunt Virginia Woolf: this exhibition will reveal his originality as an artist in many media.
Bringing together over a hundred works – from Charleston’s collection alongside significant loans from public and private collections – the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter the full range of Bell’s career: from childhood invention to his mature works in ceramics, sculpture, painted objects and works on paper.
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Raqib Shaw, Compton Verney
Raqib Shaw: Night Sonnets
19 September 2026 – 21 February 2027
Compton Verney, Warwick
Compton Verney is showcasing “Night Sonnets,” a major exhibition that features new and recent works by artist Raqib Shaw. This exhibition includes eight paintings and a tapestry created between 2018 and 2026, with five of the paintings completed this year.
Since childhood, night has been Shaw’s preferred time for working, as it allows him the solitude and concentration essential for his painting process.
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MIMA
The Turner Prize 2026 &Â Turner on Tees
MIMA, Middlesbrough
26 September – 29 March 2027
The Turner Prize 2027, featuring shortlisted artists Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau and Tanoa Sasraku, is held at MIMA. Turner on Tees, a major series of exhibitions and creative programmes showcasing art and creativity across the Tees Valley, runs concurrently with the Turner Prize at venues across the region including Hartlepool Art Gallery, Redcar Palace, Darlington Library Gallery, ARC in Stockton-on-Tees, The Auxiliary and MIMA in Middlesbrough.
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Eric Ravilious, Rye Harbour 1938, The Ingram Collection
Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960Â
26 September 2026 – 21 February 2027
Southampton Art Gallery
In 2026, Southampton City Art Gallery will stage an extensive exhibition of over 100 works showcasing how British artists responded to the Modern Art revolution that swept across Europe and beyond.
It has been over a century since Roger Fry caused an art sensation in Britain with his 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. 23 years later Herbert Read’s seminal book Art Now reviewed how the mostly France-based avant garde artists had impacted the British art scene.
Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 continues this modern art story with a selection of paintings, sculpture and drawings, from over 100 artists, such as Paul Nash (1889-1946), Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), David Bomberg (1890-1957), Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Lucian Freud (1922-2011), demonstrating how that pivotal moment in art history led to some of the most exciting, daring and influential work ever to be produced on these shores.
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Andy Goldsworthy, Rockweed. Cold Water. Crabs. Compass Harbor, Mount Desert Island, Maine. 27 August 2023,
Edge: Where the Land Meets the Sea
26 September 2026 – 3 January 2027
Hastings Contemporary
Edge: Where the Land Meets the Sea is a major new exhibition at Hastings Contemporary exploring the fundamental connection between land and sea, and the vital role both play in sustaining life on our planet.
Bringing together art and ecological research, the exhibition explores the human impacts and processes that shape these environments, from biodiversity and regeneration to erosion, extraction and adaptation, revealing a powerful interdependency.
Through painting, photography, film, sculpture and installation, Edge invites visitors to explore these profound and often unseen connections, bringing together more than 40 works from artists including Wolfgang Tillmans, Cornelia Parker, Gillian Wearing, David Nash, Charmaine Watkiss, Maggi Hambling, Andy Goldsworthy, Duncan Grant, Aimée Parrott, Nancy Cadogan, Emma Tennant, Mike Perry, Cedric Morris, Tanoa Sasraku and Thérèse Oulton.
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Mike Nelson
Mike Nelson: Double Negative (The Clown)
3 October 2026 – 11 April 2027
Modern Art Oxford
Mike Nelson (b. 1967) returns to Modern Art Oxford this autumn with Double Negative (The Clown), a new exhibition and his first at the gallery since 2004’s Triple Bluff Canyon. Developed in response to that earlier moment, the exhibition reflects on the 22 years that have passed and the distance – personal, political and cultural – between then and now. Created on site, it brings together new and reworked elements to form an environment that unfolds across the gallery. As in much of Nelson’s work, ideas of travel, memory and displacement run throughout.
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Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975. Courtesy of Canadian Centre for Architecture, Gift of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/SODRAC.
Gordon Matta-Clark: Discrete Violations
10 October 2026 – 3 January 2027
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Discrete Violations, is a focused exhibition of work by Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), one of the most radical artists of the twentieth century, whose practice transformed the way we think about buildings, cities, and who architecture is really for.
Gordon Matta-Clark is best known for his building cuts: large-scale physical interventions into structures awaiting demolition, in which he carved through floors, walls, and ceilings to expose what lay hidden inside.
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Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1862). Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.
Pre-Raphaelites: Art and PoetryÂ
17 October 2026 – 13 February 2027.
Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle
An innovative newexhibition at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle will explore the connections between Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry for the first time.
Though they are synonymous with taking inspiration from medieval and early Renaissance visual art, the Pre-Raphaelites were also hugely influenced by literature, ranging from Dante Aligheri and Geoffrey Chaucer to John Keats and that giant of Victorian poetry, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Uniquely exploring these connections between Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry, this major exhibition will feature over 100 masterpiece paintings, drawings and objects by luminaries of the movement (founded in 1848) by artists such as William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes and the influential poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and poet and designer William Morris.
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Steve McQueen, Grenfell, 2019 (still). Courtesy the artist.
The Way We Live and Grenfell by Steve McQueen
24 October 2026-21 February 2027,
The Box Plymouth
As Plymouth embarks on this defining new chapter of regeneration, The Way We Live uses archival collections, sculpture, installation, painting, photography and film to explore ideas of home, housing and community and consider the wider debate about how we want to live in the future.
Curator Beth Hughes brings together work by leading contemporary artists including Do Ho Suh, Rachel Whiteread, Jasleen Kaur, Caroline Walker, Anne Tallentire, Hetain Patel, Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Gavin Turk, alongside new commissions by photographer Hannah Starkey and artist Jacqui Poncelet.
The Box also presents Steve McQueen’s film installation , Grenfell. The unflinching ‘critical exercise in remembrance’ will be screened in The Box’s St Luke’s gallery from 24 October 2026-24 January 2027.
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L.S. Lowry, Our Town (1943). Oil on canvas. Purchased from the artist, 1944. © Touchstones Rochdale, Rochd…
L S Lowry: The Theatre of Life
24 October 2026 – 28 February 2027
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
MK Gallery will present L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life, the first major exhibition dedicated to the beloved British artist Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887–1976) in over 13 years, the culmination of a yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. The exhibition brings together over 140 paintings and drawings.
While Lowry remains one of the most popular artists in Britain, works beyond his iconic industrial scenes remain comparatively unknown. L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life offers a rare overview of his career, bringing together lesser-known aspects of his practice, including pencil and charcoal studies from the antique and life, detailed urban drawings, and works in pastel and watercolour that reveal the breadth of his practice.
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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Glacier
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
24 October 2026 – 3 May 2027
Tate St Ives
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s, was one of the most innovative figures in British modernism and a key member of St Ives’s mid-century artistic community.
Bringing together over 170 paintings, drawings and rarely seen archival materials, this is the largest and most comprehensive survey of her work ever presented. It follows Barns-Graham’s eight-decade career, from early landscapes and studio interiors to the bold colour, rhythmic forms and sweeping gestures of her later work. See how she continually found new possibilities in abstraction.
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