Whether you’re a Frieze lover or hater, there’s no denying that the arrival of the art fair behemoth into London each autumn prompts the city’s galleries and museums to bring out their big shows. On the eve of the 23rd edition of the fair (15-19 October), the Nerve team presents our favourite recent exhibition openings in the city, along with some outside of London - from William Kentridge’s large scale works at Yorkshire Sculpture Park to a virtual reality acid house experience in Cardiff. And for those who just want to know our critics’ pick of this week’s music and films, we’ve got you covered…

If you don’t have a craving for cake before you enter this gorgeous exhibition of Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of quintessential American treats, toys and pinball machines, you certainly will when you leave. The Californian artist was an illustrator and art director before turning his keen eye for an arresting image to still life painting in the 1950s. His cakes and sweets, hotdogs and slices of pie, lovingly painted with thick, swirling brushstrokes, all look good enough to eat, and yet a sense of melancholy, of fleeting pleasures, quietly lingers over them.

Imogen Carter, co-founder, the Nerve

Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov (born 1938) documented his country's history in an extraordinary, humane, sometimes comic, always subversive body of work. From early dissident days when he shot sanctioned Soviet events before hand-colouring them in garish colours, through to tender portraits of bomzhes or the homeless in his home town of Kharkiv this is his first major UK retrospective. Note: free entry on Friday evenings (5-8pm).

Jane Ferguson, co-founder

The largest exhibition of the American painter's work outside the US to date, this sprawling survey will be the first time many in the UK encounter his vivid, vast, visually complex works that are as much about Black life as they are about art, craft, looking, paying attention, how and what we see (and sometimes don't).

Emily LaBarge, art critic

Peter Doig’s House of Music has to be the most generous show currently running in London. Moody evocations of nightlife painted by Doig hang alongside a huge antique sound system on the walls of a room furnished with slouchy chairs, where you can sit and listen to inspirational tracks from the artist’s own vinyl collection, or to the playlists of visiting artists or musicians. It’s a hugely pleasurable tribute to the interrelatedness of artforms and cultures, and the multi-dimensionality of imagination itself. It also resonates in interesting ways with the early works of Edward Burra (on display at Tate Britain until Sunday), a music aficionado from an earlier era, who was similarly drawn to the edgy intimacies of dance hall culture.

Claire Armitstead, writer

This is the first European exhibition to focus on South African artist William Kentridge’s sculptures. Dozens of them - many instantly recognisable from his drawings and films. It opened in the summer but nothing beats seeing the outdoor works against the changing seasonal skies of the Yorkshire Moors. Equally delightful is the immersive Lowry 360 (free entry but booking advised) that takes visitors into L.S. Lowry’s iconic 1953 painting Going to the Match. Led by Boltonian narrator Sophie Willan, visitors enter the ground with the crowds Lowry depicted arriving for 3pm kick-off to see Bolton Wanderers.

Susan Ferguson, writer

If you've ever come out of an 'immersive' installation feeling hugely underwhelmed, this will alter your idea about what that word means. A convincing, hi-tech melding of VR, cinema and acid house bangers, it transports you - via a headset, audio script and haptic vest pumping out bass beats - back to the early 90s. Through a series of vignettes - including a police incident room, smoke-filled car, and journey home at birdsong-dawn - you spend 40 energising minutes 'in pursuit' of an illegal warehouse rave. Old hands, prepare to leave a bit teary with nostalgia. The post-rave era generations might - as one twentysomething put it - come out feeling “a bit sad I wasn’t there”.

Sarah Donaldson, co-founder

The kings of rock'n'rave return with their first Soulwax full-length in seven years, featuring both the most prescient album title of 2025 and some of its heaviest, most inventive electro epics, updating their sticky-floored electro-rock sound for Charli XCX generation. You can also still catch them on tour until mid January.

Kate Hutchinson, music critic

This latest adaptation of the seminal sci-fi-horror by Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro manages to be both true to the proto-feminist spirit of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, relevant to our present, A.I-related anxieties and genuinely optimistic for humanity’s future. It’s excellent. Just watch out for Jacob Elordi’s dodgy northern accent as ‘The Creature’. That’s the true abomination.

Ellen E Jones, film critic