The biggest and best art exhibitions, London, Winter 2018

Review: Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, V&A ★★★★★

Tech heads, listen up! A new exhibition at the V&A London celebrates digital art and the rapidly changing design of video games. It's brilliant.

Courtauld Impressionists: From Manet to Cezanne, National Gallery, review ★★★★★

As the Courtauld Gallery closes for a two-year refurbishment, National Gallery presents the creme-de-la-creme of the Courtauld Impressionist collection.

Review: Pierre Huyghe, Serpentine Galleries, London ★★★★★

New Pierre Huyghe Serpentine exhibition harnesses the power to inspire awe and fear simultaneously. We left pondering some seriously, big but important questions.

Turner Prize 2018 exhibition, Tate Britain

An exhibition of work by the four shortlisted Turner Prize artists opens at Tate Britain this September. Awarded annually to an artist born, living or working in Britain, for an outstanding artistic contribution over the last twelve months, the Turner Prize reflects the best of British Art today.

Overtly political in their practice and deemed by the jury to 'reflect our times', this year's four shortlisted artists are:

British collective Forensic Architecture, Ph.D. student Naeem Mohaiemen, Glasgow-based flimographer Charlotte Prodger and multi-media artist Luke Willis Thompson.

Review: Oceania exhibition, Royal Academy, London ★★★★★

The new Royal Academy Oceania exhibition makes an almighty splash, as the UK's first large-scale overview of South Pacific art in over forty years.

Review: Yayoi Kusama exhibition, Victoria Miro London ★★★★★

Dots, infinity nets, pumpkins and more: Yayoi Kusama returns to Victoria Miro London this October. And she doesn't disappoint.

Good Grief, Charlie Brown! Celebrating Peanuts and Its Cultural Legacy, Somerset House

Good Grief! Don't miss the upcoming celebration of Peanuts, the nation's much-loved comic strip, and the life of its creator, Charlies M Schulz, at Somerset House this autumn.

Royal Academy Exhibition review: Klimt/Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina Museum ★★★★★

This glorious Royal Academy exhibition celebrates the centenary of the revolutionary Austrian Modernists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.

Ribera: Art of Violence, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road

A pioneer of the Spanish Baroque movement, Jusepe de Ribera is known for his preoccupation with violence. This exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery showcases forty-five of his works that portray saints and other figures undergoing torture and religious brutality. Expect a series of shocking paintings and drawings that may not be for the fainthearted...

Gainsborough's Family Album, National Gallery

Featuring over fifty paintings from public and private collections across the world, Gainsborough’s Family Album will chart Gainsborough's career trajectory and his rise from an eighteenth-century provincial artist to the realms of fame and fortune.

Further afield: Schiele & Basquiat, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

Both prolific, both revolutionary, both dead at 28: Schiele and Basquiat, working at opposite ends of the C20th, single handily changed the course of art history.

This autumn, to mark the centenary of Schiele's death and the 30th anniversary of Basquiat's death, the Fondation Louis Vuitton will present a major comparative showcase of their work. With many pieces never seen before in Europe, this artistic extravaganza will certainly merit a trip to Paris.

Further afield: Once in a Lifetime: Pieter Bruegel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

In celebration of the 450th anniversary of the death of Dutch Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has staged the world's first monograph exhibition of the artist. This 'miracle' exhibition, which comprises rare and extremely fragile loans from private and public collections around the world, displays about half of all the known works by Bruegel the Elder; about forty paintings, sixty drawings and eighty prints can be attributed to him today.

Renowned for his landscapes, biblical paintings and detailed peasant scenes, Bruegel is today regarded as one of art history's first social documentarians. Thanks to a number of Habsburg collectors and connoisseurs in the region, the Kunsthistorisches Museum houses the largest collection of paintings by the artist in the world; Vienna, notes the museum's curator, is therefore as an ideal location for such a prestigious and significant show.

It is extremely unlikely that Bruegel's works will be reunited again anytime soon, so this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition truly does merit a trip to Vienna in itself!

Image Detail: Bruegel’s Dulle Griet (around 1562) has been restored especially for the show. © Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, Belgium