London is a hotbed of cultural activity at the moment, with London Fashion week kicking off the autumn season of events, followed by a busy week for film with BFI Gala and London Film Festival, leading up to Frieze Week.

If you’re in the capital this autumn or winter, there are some major exhibitions to check out at London museums and institutions including the British Museum, Hayward Gallery, Kew Gardens, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts and The Fashion and Textile Museum.

My suggested exhibitions shine the spotlight on art-forms as varied as ceramics, fashion, jewellery, manuscripts, painting, portraiture and sculpture, exploring subjects as wide-ranging as the origins of the Silk Road to London’s 1980s fashion outlaws. Here are seven exhibitions to look out for.

SILK ROADS British Museum (Silk Roads, September 26, 2024 to February 23, 2025).

Think of the Silk Roads and it’s easy to conjure up a visual of Camels crossing a desert, exotic spices on display in a Bazaar, and turbaned traders bartering for silks and jewels. A major new exhibition at the British Museum sets out to present a far more intelligent examination of the Silk Roads’ history than the usual tropes. Much more than a simple trade route from East to west, the Silk Roads were an intricate web of networks that linked communities in Asia, Africa and Europe, from Japan to Ireland, from the Arctic to Madagascar, and spanned a rich period in history between AD 500-1000.

The British Museum worked with 29 national and international partners to present objects from many regions showing how the Silk Roads were early connectors of continents and cultures.

Highlights include objects from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan that have never been exhibited in the UK, a Buddha figurine found in Sweden, Tang Chinese ceramics, an AD 966 drawing of envoys with horse and camel from a cave in Buddhist centre Dunhuang, a 1533 map of the world from al-Idrisi’s ‘Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq’ (Pleasure of He who Longs to Cross the Horizons), and a set of seven Ivory chess pieces from Uzbekistan dated around AD 700, making it the oldest known chess set in existence.

Francis Bacon: Human Presence National Portrait Gallery (October 8 to 13, 2024)

The Master of macabre art and former louche Soho character Francis Bacon has a solo exhibition dedicated to him at the NPG in Trafalgar Square.

‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ will feature works from the 1950s onwards and include portraits of former lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer, self-portraits, and images of well-known contemporaries including Lucian Freud and Isabel Rawsthorne. ‘Human Presence’ explores Bacon’s love of portraiture and the way in which he pushed the boundaries of the genre.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers National Gallery (September 14, 2024 to January 19, 2025)

Despite a recent drama at the National Gallery’s blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition, when activists threw soup at an iconic ‘Sunflowers’ painting, the show must go on. Fortunately the canvas was protected by glass so no harm was done.

‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ is unmissable for lovers of the troubled yet talented post-impressionist, if you can get your hands on a ticket. Highlights include a version of the Sunflowers on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the first time, included in the National Gallery exhibition to recreate Van Gogh’s idea for a Sunflower Triptych.

Van Gogh’s poetic palette and textured canvases were partly inspired by poetry and literature. There is certainly much poetry in experiencing the evocative ‘Starry Night over the Rhône’ (1888), and mysterious ‘The Yellow House’ (1888). The exhibition focuses on an important two-year period in the South of France when he evolved his style and captured the life-affirming colours and textures of Arles and Saint-Rémy.

Haegue Yang: Leap Year Hayward Gallery (October 9, 2024 to January 5, 2024)

For those in search of a less representational, more conceptual exhibition, the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank is presenting ‘Haegue Yang: Leap Year’.

The first major UK survey of the multi-disciplinary Korean artist Haegue Yang will showcase her multi-faceted practice spanning collage, installation and sculpture. Covering a period of productivity from the early 2000s to the present day, the exhibition will present three major new commissions alongside Venetian blind installations and works from Yang’s ‘Light Sculptures’, ‘Sonic Sculptures’ and ‘The Intermediates’ series.

Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London The Fashion and Textile Museum (October 4, 2024 to March 9, 2025)

Legendary performance artist and designer Leigh Bowery opened the notorious nightclub Taboo in 1985, and Taboo’s legacy and Bowery’s influence on fashion and culture are at the heart of an exhibition at The Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, the home of another enduring 80s fashion icon-Zandra Rhodes.

‘Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s’ features a curated selection of garments and accessories from over thirty designers of the era including Leigh Bowery, as well as custom-made pieces on loan from private collections, and rare designs by Dean Bright, John Galliano and Stephen Linard.

The mantra of Taboo was ‘dress as though your life depends on it, or don’t bother’, and the exhibition reflects this philosophy through costume, film and photography that capture the anarchy and experimental creativity of the period. Members of the Taboo inner circle included pop star Boy George, fashion designers BodyMap, Pam Hogg, John Crancher and Rachel Auburn, and dancer Michael Clark.

The exhibition is curated by Martin Green and NJ Stevenson, with Artistic Director David Cabaret and Creative Consultant James Lawler.

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael. Florence, c. 1504 Royal Academy of Arts (October 10 to 13, 2024)

A triumvirate of Renaissance household names-Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael-are the subject of an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, which examines a period around 1504 when their lives briefly intersected in Florence. Focussing on drawing and featuring more than 40 works including Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo, Leonardo’s Burlington House Cartoon and Raphael’s Bridgewater Madonna, the intimate exhibition in The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries will explore how the trio influenced and competed against each other.

Expressions in Blue: Monumental Porcelain by Felicity Aylieff Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (October 26, 2024 to March 23, 2025)

Felicity Aylieff is a practising artist and also Professor of Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art. After a four decade career creating, teaching and expanding the art of Ceramics, she is truly deserving of this important exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.

‘Expressions in Blue: Monumental Porcelain by Felicity Aylieff’ will present a collection of forty show-stopping ceramic vessels to visitors of Kew Gardens. Exploding the myth that ceramics are fragile, domestic objects, Aylieff’s mammoth vases are hand-made in the studio in Jingdezhen, China that she set up with her Japanese potter husband Takeshi Yasuda.

A gigantic pair of blue and white vases hand-painted with calligraphic strokes, one of them 17ft tall and her largest to date, will be exhibited for the first time, as well as a collection of Fencai pots decorated with floral images inspired by the Kew’s archival 19th Century botanical drawings.