Art · London
Magritte at Gagosian London: 'This Is Still Not a Pipe' Opens Free in Mayfair on 24 September
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill shows Magritte beside more than forty later artists from 24 September to 12 December 2026, with the Fondation Magritte. Free.
A Magritte exhibition opens in Mayfair on Thursday 24 September 2026, and it costs nothing to see. 'This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte' is at Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London W1K 3QD, until Saturday 12 December, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm. The gallery is organising it in collaboration with the Fondation Magritte, and it opens with a reception on the Thursday from 6 to 8pm.
The premise is in the title. Rather than a straight retrospective, the show puts Magritte's own paintings next to work by more than forty artists of different generations, many of them making pieces for the exhibition, to trace what the gallery calls his afterlife. Time Out, which flagged the show on 18 September as a free opening, says it spans paintings, works on paper, sculpture and photography from across his four-decade career, with many loans from museums and private collectors.
The Magrittes in the room
Gagosian's page names six of the Magritte works: Les Fleurs du voyage (1926), L'Ombre céleste (1927), Le Parfum de l'abîme (1928), La Malédiction (1931), La Clef des songes (1935) and La Lampe philosophique (1936). That is the decade in which Magritte set his terms, from the early Paris years to the word-and-image games that give this exhibition its name.
Ninety years after the Surrealists came to London, Magritte is back in Mayfair with forty artists in tow.
Who made it, and why now
FAD Magazine reports that the exhibition is curated by Jasper Sharp and Bernard Lagrange with Charly Herscovici, president of the Fondation Magritte, and that it marks two anniversaries: twenty years since LACMA's 'Magritte and Contemporary Art', and ninety years since the International Surrealist Exhibition was held in London in 1936. HENI names John Baldessari among the later artists, with one loan coming from a private collection in Brussels.
The timing also suits the calendar. The run covers Frieze week, 14 to 18 October, when Mayfair's galleries are at their busiest, and it carries on into December after the fairs have packed up. A free Magritte show a few minutes from Bond Street is likely to be busiest on Saturdays; a weekday morning in the first fortnight is the quieter bet.