LONDON—Since graduating from London’s Royal Academy Schools in 2004, Francesca Lowe has gained a reputation as something of a pictorial conjurer. Though a consummate handler of line and color, she seems almost willfully to spurn her illusionistic skills by breaking her images into fragments she calls “Lego pieces” or “stock phrases” and then reassembling them into large-scale acrylic-ink-and-gesso fantasies. She admits happily to a sort of plagiarism; as she told Dazed and Confused recently, “I take things from past paintings or from adverts and then quote them back, and lace them with other things to make … a sort of truffle.”

Lowe’s current exhibition, "Terminus," at London’s Riflemaker gallery through December 15, is a collaboration with the esteemed Scottish poet and novelist Alasdair Gray, who wrote a specially commissioned short story in response to her pictures. The subject of both text and image is personal morality and codes of behavior; it’s a surrealist morality tale set—rather appropriately—in a fairground or, more specifically, the “Fairground of Life.

In addition to the Frieze Art Fair—“essential viewing”—and the Zoo Art Fair—“for the fresh zest and invigoration of the emergent factors”—Lowe recommends the following “must-see hit list.”

1. The Future Can Wait at Truman Brewery’s Atlantis Gallery, October 10–14: “One of the biggest-ever museum-scale, privately curated exhibition for breaking artists. Laced with gems.”

2. Dunkelheit at St. Pancras Crypt, Euston Road, through October 27: “The perfect antidote to those suffering from art fair fatigue. An otherworldly experience in which darkness and obscurity combine.”

3. Weapons of Mass Communication: War Posters at the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, through March 30. “This one has been heavily advertised on the tube, and personally I can’t wait to see it!”

4. Decadence, Decay and the Demimonde at Home House, 20 Portland Square, through November 11; Grand opening October 10, 6 pm–midnight: "... It will be to the art world, what the Vanity Fair, pre-Oscar party is to the film world."

5. The British Museum, currently showing two great small shows: Faith, Narrative and Desire: Masterpieces of Indian painting in the British Museum and The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army.