Top 10 art exhibitions in London

In a 1978 American football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots, Jack Tatum tackled Darryl Stingley so hard it left him paralysed from the neck down. It was an act of ferocious brutality that was captured on camera and replayed, reanalysed, rewatched a billion times over.

Alvaro Barrington is letting you in. He’s opening his arms, opening the doors to his childhood home, opening the windows into his memories. 

Loss unfolds slowly. It’s not in the moment or the immediate aftermath that grief leaves its deepest mark on you; as American photographer Nan Goldin’s installation in a central London church proves, loss spreads its pain out over years, decades.

In a dizzying cacophony of notes and tones, The Vinyl Factory is loudly announcing that it’s back to its best. In a warren of concrete bunkers deep beneath the strand, the masters of high end immersive AV art have pulled together some big hits. ‘Reverb’ is a celebration of speakers, drums, beats, songs and noises, of the links between music and art.

Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy taste. Luckily, Sir Elton John would probably know his art from his elbow even if he hadn’t become one of the world’s biggest, richest megastars. For decades now, he has been building a world class collection of photography with his partner David Furnish. It’s been shown all over the world, even at the Tate in 2017, and now it’s the V&A’s turn. 

Turns out, not only does Harmony Korine make difficult obtuse films, he makes difficult obtuse paintings too.

There was a lot of love in the last years of Michelangelo Buonarotti’s life. Already hugely successful, the Renaissance master dedicated his final decades to loving his god, his family, his friends, and serving his pope. The proof of that love is all over the walls of this intimate little visual biography of the final years of his life, filled with his drawings and letters and paintings by his followers. 

The arrow has only just pierced her heart, but the blood has already drained from Ursula’s fragile body. She is pallid, ashen, aghast at the mortal wound in her chest. All around her mouths are agape in shock, men grasp to hold her up, a hand tries – too late – to stop the arrow. This miserable, chaotic, sombre depiction of feverish violence is the last painting of one of history’s most important artists, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Hajime Sorayama dares to ask the questions everyone is too afraid to know the answers to, like: ‘what if there was a sexy robot at the Hindenburg Disaster’ and ‘what if Marilyn Monroe was a sexy robot?’ and ‘what if mermaids were sexy robots?’ and ‘what if Joan of Arc was a sexy robot, but with a genital piercing?’ You’ve always wanted to know, admit it, and now the answers are all right here.

Danica Lundy paints like she’s omniscient, like she can see in multiple dimensions. Her images are full of everything. She takes you inside someone’s chest, through electrical fittings, sends you traversing through the guts of machines and bodies. Time, space, density, memory, love, lust, all can be burst open in her grubby psychedelia.