Art · London
Magritte Exhibition in London: 'This Is Still Not a Pipe' Is Free in Mayfair Until 12 December
The Magritte exhibition in London is free at Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm, until 12 December 2026, with 40-plus later artists.
The Magritte exhibition in London opened 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 organised it in collaboration with the Fondation Magritte, and it opened 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.
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 show opened in the last week of September and ran through Frieze week, 14 to 18 October, when Mayfair's galleries were at their busiest. It carries on to 12 December, open Tuesday to Saturday only, so it is closed on Sundays and Mondays.