LONDON—There’s an exhilarating feeling of anticipation and excitement in the London art air this September, with a slate of great gallery and museum shows that will take us right up to the fourth Frieze Art Fair (Oct. 12-15)—which I don’t need to tell you is not to be missed.

Outside of Frieze, the top event this fall is bound to be the opening of Jay Jopling’s West End White Cube gallery, which has been carved out of a converted electricity generating station in a tiny square off Duke Street. The opening show is Gabriel Orozco—and this, believe me, is going to be the hot ticket of the season. I’ll be reporting fully on this opening, hopefully from inside the crowd-control barrier.

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We’re also looking forward to the “USA Today” show at the Royal Academy from Oct. 4-Nov. 4. This is Charles Saatchi’s pick of exciting American contemporary talent, and he’s already stoked up the controversy with a rare interview in The Guardian newspaper in which he lambasts the current crop of British art graduates, their art schools and YBAs generally. The show features 80+ works from more than 30 artists, including Kelley Walker, Dan Colen, Mark Grotjahn, Banks Violette, Terence Koh, Carter, Mark Bradford, Ryan McGinness, Wangechi Mutu and Dana Schutz.

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Not to be outdone on the art-from-across-the-pond front, the Serpentine Gallery is showing from Sept. 9-Oct. 15 “Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millenium” in which curators Hans Ulrich Obrist (does that man ever sleep?), art critic Daniel Birnbaum and Gunnar B. Kvaran, director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, have picked work from their journeys of discovery all over America to offer a bird's-eye view of what’s going on stateside. The exhibition features more than 40 artists and surveys practices spanning appropriation, Pop and socio-political critique.

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The 20/21 British Art Fair, running from Sept. 13-17 at the Royal College of Art, is billing itself as showing all the great names in British art from 1900 to the present day. And there is a very good roster of some 60 exhibitors in the flourishing field of 20th-century British art, and the fair should offer some very interesting Pop Art pieces—serving as a nice warm-up to the big Pop Art show at the Royal Academy coming up later in the fall.

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Meanwhile, there’s plenty to see around the commercial galleries at the beginning of the season. Riflemaker Contemporary Art, that highly successful gallery in a converted gunmaker’s on Beak Street, owned by collector Tot Taylor, always comes up with quirky and interesting shows.

Opening the gallery’s fall program today is Julie Verhoeven’s “Ver-boten, Ver-Saatchi, Ver-Heaven” installation (“in 3D and sometimes 4D,” the gallery notes), with a soundtrack of slamming doors, muffled voices, footsteps and distant piano nocturnes specially composed by ex-Blur member Graham Coxon.

“Ver-heaven” is a surrealist/Dadaist funhouse of ghosts, mirrors, shutters, needlepoint drawings, live plants and bejewelled space rockets—“a bricolage of fancy and fantasy, of the tasteful and tasteless … in muted tones which threaten to explode into Verhoeven’s trademark DayGlo,” as the gallery puts it.

The central object around which the exhibition is organized is the dressing screen, upon whose panels are hung the motifs and symbols of the installation. The dressing screen, according to the gallery, “stands for the unreal, the ambiguous, a world of shadows, vanity, wild imaginings, concealment and illicit behaviour.”

This highly theatrical bit of escapism, which exemplifies Verhoeven’s “more is more” aesthetic, is on view through Nov. 11. The gallery’s advice to visitors: “Make sure to look in hidden corners.”

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Idris Khan’s first one man show at the Victoria Miro gallery, on view through Sept. 30, is definitely not to be missed. This young artist graduated from the Royal College of Art two years ago.

He re-photographs and digitally layers a sequence or series of pictures in an enigmatic play of appropriation. His photographs possess characteristics more akin to drawing or painting and are presented as a kind of photographic palimpsest, animated by the accumulative intervention of the artist’s hand.