With hundreds of exhibitions and events vying for attention in London during Frieze week, Apollo’s editors pick out the shows they don’t want to miss
‘When I began making art, I didn’t see a divide between a poem, a film, a performance, a drawing,’ the American artist Joan Jonas told Apollo in 2018. Much of her art can be seen as what she calls a ‘coming together of different forms’. Currently on show at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery (until 1 November), Jonas’s ‘endless’ drawings – inspired by the anthropologist John Layard’s account of the geometric sand drawings made by Indigenous people in Malekula, Vanuatu – are a prime example of the way she blends different art forms: many of them were created as part of Jonas’s performances. This is the second show devoted solely to her works on paper, after an exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York in 2024: the work here dates from 1999–2019 and is shown alongside two videos of Jonas drawing alongside the Japanese artist Eiko Otake.
In the late 16th and 17th centuries, artists drawn to Rome began creating works characterised by dramatic lighting and colour. Their intensity was designed to evoke strong emotions in the viewer and breathe life into biblical and mythological scenes. In ‘Drama, Power and Seduction: Baroque Painting in Rome’, Lullo Pampoulides is presenting a selection of these Old Master paintings, ranging from striking portraits and landscapes to allegorical scenes (until 19 October). Highlights include Carlo Saraceni’s The Giant Orion (c. 1616–17), in which the Caravaggist casts the blinded son of Poseidon in deep shadow, and a solemn portrait of Saint Andrew by Pier Francesco Mola from c. 1650 that shows the martyr in front of the cross on which he was to be crucified.
There’s an absurdity to Hugh Hayden’s work that may delight at first glance – see his carved American flags where half-smoked cigarettes or rattlesnakes protrude where the stars should be – but at its core it confronts thorny themes of identity, belonging and the dissolution of the American Dream. The artist’s transformations of familiar objects such as dining tables, cast-iron skillets and children’s shoes feature in this solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery (until 1 November). At the centre of ‘Hughmanity’ is The Last Supper (2025), a dining table and chairs ablaze with polyurethane flames; also on display is The Good Samaritan (2025), a wooden lifeboat covered in the artist’s signature thorns, suggesting an escape or assistance just beyond reach.
Joan Jonas: Endless Drawings (Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, until 1 November)
Drama, Power and Seduction: Baroque Painting in Rome (Lullo Pampoulides, until 19 October)
Hugh Hayden: Hughmanity (Lisson Gallery, until 1 November)