Alex Lidagovsky, Girl Who Dresses The Clouds, 2020, polished stainless steel, 55 x 21 x 18.5cm, IDENTITY – Ukrainian Artists’ Community, £7,500

LONDON Art Fair features works from two modernist homes built in the late 1930s and run by the National Trust, the show’s museum partners, at its 2026 season opener.

The NT is Europe’s largest conservation charity, with 360-plus buildings in its care, and 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, by Ernő and Ursula Goldfinger and The Homewood, in Esher, by Patrick Gwynne, were both designed by the architects as family homes to include art.

Pieces on show include those by Henry Moore, Max Ernst, Prunella Clough, and more from Hampstead; and from Esher, most notably three works on paper by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

The 38th LAF is up and running at the Business Design Centre in Islington* and continues until Sunday, see www.londonartfair.co.uk for full details.

More than 120 galleries from home and abroad are represented, selling some excellent modern and contemporary art, complemented by an impressive programme of talks and tours throughout.

John Hoyland, Untitled 8, 1978, acrylic and pastel on paper, image size: 67 x 49cm, paper size: 77.5 x 57cm, original, signed and framed, Eames Fine Art, £12,300

The Platform presentation, guest curated by Dr Ferren Gipson, is on the theme of The Unexpected, with artists challenging “conventions in material, process, and form in their work”.

An Encounters section has “the freshest contemporary art” from some 23 galleries, and among them IDENTITY – Ukrainian Artists’ Community, most of whom have moved to the UK owing to the war.

They offer a variety of styles and techniques on the theme “geometry of the universe”.

Siger Gallery’s exhibit “focuses on anxious artistic practices”, both challenging and unnerving.

Guillermo Monroy’s mixed media sculpture Speechless, for example, particularly so; with a masked young female as if coffined in a violin case.

And the Cole Levi-Klimt stand has a more overt religious theme, which includes an intriguing take on the Madonna and Child by Paul Freud.

With both smaller and larger galleries at the fair there’s enormous choice.

From oils by LS Lowry (price on application) and rare early works by David Hockney to oils from Walter Sickert, Ivon Hitchens, Kyffin Williams and many, many, more.

Henri Matisse, Paul-Caen Martin (Yellow), ink on a yellow gouache base, c1951-1952, signed ‘HM’, Fairhead Fine Art, framed, £45,000

And, of course, there are up-to-date pieces, some just delivered in time for this week; something to interest every visitor, from fun pieces to photography, textiles, and “explorations” that aim for something else. It’s so vast a fair that highlights are entirely personal choice.

Horton London has a poignant World War I bronze, A Tired Soldier by William McMillan, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1918, showing a serviceman sitting in the mud, his steel helmet in his hands.

Fairhead Fine Art feature an original Henri Matisse drawing, signed “HM”, with a provenance through the Matisse family.

And Eames Fine Art has a 1978 work, not exhibited before, by John Hoyland.

Vincent and Rebecca Eames come to the show just a week after receiving the Critics’ Circle Visual Arts and Architecture Award for Best Private Gallery Exhibition 2024. Their Norman Ackroyd: Notes on Water show in September that year started in the week of the Royal Academician’s death.

Of the Hoyland, Vincent said: “John was grappling with the motif of the diagonal during this period and this would open up his investigation into other geometrical forms for much of the next decade”.

• LAF 2026* runs until January 25 at the Business Design Centre, N1 0QH.