61 art exhibitions around Europe opening in May 2026

This issue of Kunsti Radar brings together exhibitions opening in May 2026 across twelve countries in Europe — the kind of selection that makes a good argument for keeping a flexible travel budget. The range is wide: from Danish collective flooding an entire museum with blue light and staging it as a ship going under to a Lithuanian composer inviting strangers to collectively build a monumental structure inside a former Berlin railway hall. That breadth is, more or less, what this newsletter is for.

The highest-profile openings are easy to spot. The National Gallery in London presents the first UK exhibition dedicated solely to Zurbarán, gathering nearly fifty works from collections including the Louvre and the Art Institute of Chicago. Tate Britain follows with the first major European Whistler retrospective in thirty years, while Jasper Johns is retraced across seven decades at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. In Switzerland, Pierre Huyghe arrives at the Fondation Beyeler with an exhibition designed as an ecosystem, and Cao Fei fills three floors of the Kunstmuseum Basel with twenty years of digital worlds.

Elsewhere, several shows deserve equal attention. The Hepworth Wakefield stages two strong sculpture exhibitions simultaneously, with Mrinalini Mukherjee’s monumental fibre works and Lewis Hammond’s mythology-inflected paintings opening within days of each other. In Liverpool, John Akomfrah’s Venice Biennale commission arrives at the Walker with the city’s own history of migration folded into every frame. And in Málaga, the Carmen Thyssen makes the case for Francisco and Juan Ribalta, a father-and-son partnership at the height of Spanish Baroque whose work deserves considerably more attention than it typically receives outside Spain.

There is enough here to keep the most committed museum-goer occupied well into the summer; the full selection, organised by country, follows.

🇦🇹 Exhibitions in Austria

IN-SIGHT: Johann Baptist Lampi The Elder and The Younger

What lies beneath the surface of a painting can be just as telling as what sits on top of it. This focused exhibition at the Upper Belvedere in Vienna examines two works by Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder and his son Johann Baptist the Younger, both of which were significantly altered through overpainting. In a Neoclassical family portrait by the Elder, X-ray imaging revealed a hidden depiction of a mother embracing her children; in a Biedermeier Venus by the Younger, a concealed Cupid had caused the work to be misidentified for over a century. Curated by Katharina Lovecky.

Helga Philipp: Spaces of Movement

Austrian artist Helga Philipp (1939–2002) spent her career asking a deceptively simple question: what happens to the eye when geometry is set in motion? One of the leading figures of Austrian concrete and op art, she built a precise visual language from mathematical principles, serial structures, and kinetic forms. Around 50 works across painting, drawing, printed graphics, and object art trace the full range of her output from several decades — a body of work in which perception itself becomes the subject.

Charlotte Perriand. Living Modernism: Design, Photography, Architecture

Few designers of the twentieth century thought as holistically as Charlotte Perriand. After a decade in Le Corbusier’s studio, where she led numerous furniture and interior projects, the French architect and designer went on to develop a comprehensive vision of how people should live, fusing architecture, design, and photography into a single practice. This exhibition, the first of its kind in Austria, surveys her work across all three fields. It is produced in collaboration with the Kunstmuseen Krefeld and the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. Curated by Katharina Ehrl and Barbara Herzog.

Masterpieces of Furniture Art

A gilded late Gothic reliquary shrine, normally kept in the Salzburg Museum’s sculpture collection, travels to the Bergbau- & Gotikmuseum in Leogang as the centrepiece of this focused exhibition on medieval furniture. The shrine, crafted around 1475 for the Bürgerspitalskirche in Salzburg and notable for its elaborate carvings and figural reliefs, is shown alongside chests and cabinets from the Lungau region that share its ornamental character — evidence of a remarkably accomplished local workshop active from around 1455.

Traces of Reality: 200 Years of Photography from the Collections of the Museums of the City of Linz

Photography turns 200, and the Lentos Kunstmuseum marks the occasion with a collection exhibition that traces the medium from its earliest experiments to the present day. Organised around five thematic threads, the show examines the conditions that make a photograph: technical choices, subject matter, and the shifting ways artists have used the medium since Joseph Nicéphore Niépce first fixed an image onto a pewter plate. Works range from nineteenth-century daguerreotypes and darkroom experiments of classical modernism through to contemporary digital practice.

🇧🇪 Exhibitions in Belgium

Antony Gormley: Geestgrond

British sculptor Antony Gormley brings his characteristically elemental approach to the KMSKA with an exhibition that spreads across the entire museum rather than confining itself to designated galleries. His lead and iron figures respond to the building’s architecture and its permanent collection, while a section titled Heart gathers early works, notebooks, sketches, and source materials into something resembling a personal archive. The title Geestgrond refers to a light sandy soil formed after the Ice Age, fertile with care over time, but it doubles as a metaphor for the inner life from which art grows.

Chambres d’Amis turns 40

In 1986, the curator Jan Hoet took contemporary art out of the museum and into private homes across Ghent. The project Chambres d’Amis became one of the most discussed exhibitions in Belgian art history. Forty years on, S.M.A.K. marks the anniversary by inviting three artists from its subsequent city-wide projects Over The Edges and TRACK to design new gallery displays of works from the original exhibition. Heike Pallanca, Haim Steinbach, and Susanne Kriemann each shape a room around their own artistic sensibility, giving the historical works a fresh context for today’s audiences.

Carole Vanderlinden | Keep a promise

Paintings that look simple but aren’t — that’s a fair entry point into the work of Brussels-born artist Carole Vanderlinden (b. 1973). Her canvases and works on paper emerge from an unplanned process of experimentation with paint, colour, and rhythm, drawing on philosophy, music, sketchbooks, art historical references, and the textures of everyday life. This solo exhibition brings together work from the past five years and coincides with the publication of the first comprehensive monograph on her practice, issued by Zolo Press.

Anniversary exhibition : Behind the scenes of a collection

Ten years after its reopening, La Boverie marks the occasion not with a loan show but with a deep look into its own holdings. Around 300 works from the City of Liège’s collection fill the museum’s upper gallery, mixing well-known masterworks by artists including Picasso, Magritte, Van Gogh, and Ensor with pieces that have rarely or never been shown publicly. The route also takes visitors behind the scenes of how a museum actually works, from conservation and acquisitions to the decisions that keep works in storage. A richly illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

🇩🇰 Exhibitions in Denmark

Animals Take the Stage. Sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye

Known in his time as “the Michelangelo of the Menagerie”, the French sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye (1795–1875) brought animals into nineteenth-century art not as decorative props but as creatures with personalities and anatomical depth. This exhibition presents the Glyptotek’s collection of 34 small bronze sculptures, nearly all cast during the artist's lifetime, drawing on his close observation of the period’s new zoological gardens and the era’s growing scientific fascination with the natural world. The works raise a question the museum puts directly to its visitors: has our relationship to animals really changed since then?

Nikoline Liv Andersen: The Eternal Smile

Danish textile and clothing artist Nikoline Liv Andersen builds her practice around the shifting phases of life, from love and fertility through to decay and mortality. Her works, constructed through embroidery, weaving, and knitting, translate these themes into richly crafted compositions in which nature and humanity are inseparable. At Design Museum Denmark, they are arranged as a floating installation of light, painted, and embroidered fabrics, placed in conversation with objects from the museum's own collection. The title borrows from a novel by Pär Lagerkvist.

Afgang 2026, MFA Degree Show

Every year, Kunsthal Charlottenborg hands its galleries over to the newest graduates of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ Schools of Visual Art. This edition features 27 artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound, and performance. It is less a curated thematic show than a survey of where a generation of emerging practitioners currently stands, making it one of the more reliable places to spot new Danish artistic talent before it disperses into the wider art world.

Nina Beier & John Miller: The Populace

What happens when you fill a gallery with mannequins and portraits and ask visitors to navigate among them? Danish artist Nina Beier (b. 1975) and American artist John Miller (b. 1954) have collaborated before, and their shared territory is familiar ground: the uneasy relationship between original and copy, between consumer culture and art, between the act of looking and the discomfort of being looked back at. The Populace occupies ARoS’ new Salling Gallery as a large-scale installation that folds portraiture, power dynamics, and the gaze into a single unsettling space.

Svend Wiig Hansen: Walking, falling, standing

For over fifty years, the Danish artist Svend Wiig Hansen (1922–1997) returned obsessively to the human figure: fragile, solitary, caught between endurance and collapse. Working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and film, he used raw forms and bold brushstrokes to ask what it means to be human in a world shaped by post-war anxiety and social isolation. This solo exhibition at ARoS organises his work around three states of motion. Walking, falling, and standing become metaphors for the larger rhythms of vulnerability and resilience that run through his practice.

SUPERFLEX: Come Hell or High Water

ARKEN sits close to the water, and one day it will likely be claimed by it. The Danish artist collective SUPERFLEX takes this fact as the starting point for a solo exhibition that stages the museum as a sunken ship. Blue light fills the galleries, sandbags block the entrance, and transport crates stacked in the Art Axis hold three decades of the group’s work. At the heart of the show is The Ark Factory, a functioning production facility where parts of an artificial reef are made using a new technique for creating marine habitats. Over time, sections will be placed on seabeds around the world as rising waters reshape coastlines.

Thomas Dambo: The Garbage Man

Thomas Dambo has spent a decade hiding giant troll sculptures made from recycled materials in forests and public spaces around the world, turning waste into a reason to explore. Now ARKEN brings him indoors for the first time, inviting him to fill the museum’s galleries with the same spirit of play and environmental curiosity that made his outdoor works a global phenomenon. Visitors can also take part in a troll-building workshop using timber salvaged from the museum’s own recently removed flooring, making the act of repurposing materials part of the experience itself.

Late Picasso

Picasso’s final works were long dismissed as the output of an artist past his prime. The broad-brushed musketeers, lovers, and self-portraits of his last decade have since been thoroughly reassessed, and this exhibition arrives as part of that reappraisal. More than 60 paintings and works on paper from the 1960s and 1970s make the case for a late period defined by raw energy and genuine experimentation. All works are drawn from the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, and the showing is the most extensive of this body of work in the Nordic region in forty years.

Thanks for the Food: The Skagen Painters’ Pantry

Food in Skagen at the turn of the twentieth century told two very different stories. Local fishermen made do with haddock heads stuffed with a porridge of milk, liver, and raisins, while at Anna and Michael Ancher’s table, pineapple featured at dessert and Anna’s sister Hulda served oysters at Brøndum’s Hotel. This exhibition draws on paintings, drawings, photographs, and objects from the museum’s collection to trace how food reflected the push and pull between local tradition and creeping modernity in the town between 1870 and 1930.

🇫🇷 Exhibitions in France

Youssef Nabil: To dream again

The Franco-Egyptian photographer and filmmaker Youssef Nabil (b. 1972) has worked in a single distinctive mode since the 1990s: black-and-white silver prints, hand-coloured using a technique borrowed from early cinema, that evoke a dreamlike Egypt steeped in nostalgia and desire. His connection to the Musée d’Orsay is personal. A visit to the museum in 1992 left a lasting mark on his practice, and this exhibition places his works in direct conversation with the paintings that shaped him, including works by Puvis de Chavannes and Odilon Redon. He is the first artist to take over the museum’s Orientalist Gallery.

Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was producing large-scale abstract paintings from 1906 onwards, well before Kandinsky or Malevitch arrived at abstraction, yet she kept them hidden and instructed that they remain sealed for twenty years after her death. Her work only reached a wider public in 1986. This exhibition, a co-production between the Grand Palais and the Centre Pompidou and the first monographic show dedicated to her in France, centres on the monumental cycle Peintures du Temple (1906–1915) and traces the spiritual, esoteric, and scientific sources that fed her singular visual language.

Mossi Traoré: Fashion, Too

Trained equally in the street and alongside established couturiers, French designer Mossi Traoré treats clothing as a tool for cultural transmission rather than a commercial proposition. His school, the Ateliers Alix, named in homage to Madame Grès, promotes an approach to haute couture that is rigorous but open to all. At the Mucem, nearly 150 works bring his sculptural silhouettes into dialogue with popular cultures, urban arts, and traditional craftsmanship, alongside objects from the museum's own collections and pieces by artists including Madame Grès, Lee Bul, and Hassan Massoudy.

🇩🇪 Exhibitions in Germany

Many Shades of Grès: Fashion Becomes Art

Germaine Émilie Krebs, who became known to fashion history as Madame Grès (1903–1993), built her reputation on floor-length pleated dresses that looked less like garments than draped ancient sculpture. She designed directly on the body, gathering metres of fabric into a few centimetres of volume with extraordinary precision. The Kunstgewerbemuseum holds 25 of her models, one of the largest collections outside Paris, and this exhibition places them at the centre of a broader display of around 150 objects. It is the first presentation of her work in the German-speaking world.

CHANEL Commission: Lina Lapelytė. We Make Years Out of Hours

Voices, simple movements, and thousands of small wooden blocks are the raw materials for this large-scale commission by Lithuanian artist and composer Lina Lapelytė. Visitors are invited to join a group of performers in assembling a monumental structure inside the museum’s 2,500-square-metre Historic Hall, collectively building something over time that none of them could make alone. Lapelytė is best known for Sun & Sea, the opera awarded the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. This is the second edition of the CHANEL Commission and forms part of Hamburger Bahnhof’s 30th anniversary programme.

Inside Archives: Interventions on Leni Riefenstahl’s Nuba Work

Students from the MA programme Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts have spent a semester grappling with one of the most contested bodies of work in the history of photography: Leni Riefenstahl’s photographs and films of the Nuba people of Sudan, made during her travels there in the 1960s and 1970s. The resulting exhibition brings together installations, video, photography, and text by the students alongside works by Sudanese artists, collectively attempting to break open the images' inherited meanings and find new ways of telling these stories.

Cassirer and the Breakthrough of Impressionism

Paul Cassirer (1871–1926) ran one of the most consequential commercial galleries in modern art history. Operating from Berlin, he staged a relentless programme of exhibitions that introduced German audiences to Degas, Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh, while simultaneously championing the Berlin Secession and early figures of classical modernism such as Edvard Munch, Ernst Barlach, and Paula Modersohn-Becker. More than 100 works drawn from major collections trace both the scope of his taste and the lasting imprint his efforts left on German museums, including the Nationalgalerie itself.

“Are We Still up to It?” — Art & Democracy

Over 50 works from the Bavarian State Painting Collections are installed in the unfinished historic rooms of Herrenchiemsee Palace, the island retreat that Ludwig II modelled on Versailles and that hosted the constitutional convention which laid the foundations for the German constitution in 1948. The setting is entirely deliberate. Works by Picasso, Beuys, Richter, Lassnig, Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel, among others, are arranged in ten chapters that address creative freedom, constitutional values, and civic participation. The title quotes a song by the German tech rap group Deichkind.

Carrying

The ground beneath Museum Brandhorst and the surrounding Kunstareal was once occupied by the Prinz-Arnulf-Kaserne, a military barracks built in 1826 and popularly known as the “Türkenkaserne” — a name that traces back to Ottoman prisoners of war brought to Bavaria for forced labour in the late seventeenth century. This group exhibition, curated by Franziska Linhardt, takes that buried history as its starting point. Artists including Hêlîn Alas, Cana Bilir-Meier, Louise Lawler, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith activate spaces inside and outside the museum to explore how histories of violence, migration, and cultural dispossession get carried forward through images, names, and monuments.

Elmgreen & Dragset: Stillleben mit Gemüse

The artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset treat the Städel not as a venue but as a prop. Their figurative sculptures and installations spread across the entire museum and into the neighbouring Liebieghaus, placing themselves in quietly absurd dialogue with works from a collection that covers seven centuries of art history. Visitors are effectively sent on a treasure hunt, discovering pieces in unexpected corners and encountering everyday scenes charged with dry humour and pointed questions about social convention, institutional habit, and how museums condition the way we see. The duo have been collaborating since 1995.

🇮🇹 Exhibitions in Italy

Creature, Creatori: San Francesco e l’arte contemporanea

Rather than retelling the familiar story of St Francis through religious iconography, this exhibition uses his way of seeing the world as a lens for reading Italian art from the post-war period to the present day. His Canticle of the Creatures, with its radical attention to nature, animals, and the bonds between living things, becomes a framework for works from the MAXXI collection alongside pieces made specifically for the occasion. The exhibition is part of the celebrations marking the eighth centenary of the death of St Francis of Assisi.

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960) and Richard Prince (b. 1949) are both American artists who treat images as raw material rather than finished objects, pulling from movies, music, pulp fiction, social media, and mass culture and routing them through their own sensibilities to produce something charged and unstable. Their practices have rarely been examined together, and this exhibition does it as a series of thematic juxtapositions, setting works side by side to draw out shared obsessions and illuminate the differences between them. The show also makes public a long-running creative exchange between the two artists, including a collaboratively produced zine.

Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy

Marina Abramović becomes the first living woman artist to receive a dedicated exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, and the timing is significant: she turns 80 this year, and Venice is in the middle of its Biennale. The exhibition places her work in direct dialogue with the museum’s Renaissance collection, including a pairing of her Pietà (with Ulay) (1983) with Titian’s unfinished Pietà (ca. 1575–76). Alongside projections of historic performances such as Rhythm 0 and Balkan Baroque, visitors are invited to lie or sit on interactive stone structures embedded with crystals, participating in what the artist describes as an energy transmission.

🇱🇮 Exhibition in Liechtenstein

In Focus: Carmen Herrera, Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko

Abstraction has never been a single movement with a single story, and this exhibition of some 60 works makes the case for its enduring plurality. Three recent acquisitions sit at the centre: works by Carmen Herrera, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mark Rothko, each representing a distinct strand of abstract practice — the departure from the object, geometric construction, and colour-field painting. Surrounding them are loans from the foundation's own collection by artists including Mondrian, Klee, Albers, Pollock, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, tracing abstraction as the genuinely global, cross-generational movement it has always been.

What was Important Today. A Picture Chronicle by Ursula Wolf

Every day for ten years, Liechtenstein artist Ursula Wolf made a drawing in response to the day's news. The habit began as a personal exercise and gradually accumulated into a vast body of small works recording what caught her attention across a decade of events both momentous and fleeting. Presented at the NationalMuseum as a walk-in collage, the exhibition invites visitors to wander through this visual chronicle and reflect on what we deem important, and on how quickly those judgements can change.

🇱🇺 Exhibition in Luxembourg

Dodeka: 12 Works for 12 Cantons

To mark its 20th anniversary, Mudam Luxembourg is sending twelve works from its collection out into the country rather than keeping them within its own walls. Each work travels to one of Luxembourg’s twelve cantons, where it is hosted by a local museum, town hall, library, or cultural centre, entering into dialogue with the community and its heritage. The title draws on the Greek word for twelve. Visitors who collect a stamp at each of the twelve sites are rewarded with a year of free admission to Mudam.

🇳🇱 Exhibitions in the Netherlands

Kho Liang Ie: Mid-Century Modernist

Born in Indonesia to a Chinese family and trained in Amsterdam, Kho Liang Ie (1927–1975) brought a distinctive sensibility to Dutch design: functionalist in structure but never austere, his furniture and interiors balanced modernity with warmth and a keen attention to the human scale. His best-known work remains the interior of Schiphol Airport. More than 200 objects trace the full range of his output, including collaborations with Pierre Paulin, Sheila Hicks, and Geoffrey Harcourt, alongside a reconstruction of his 1971 Stedelijk exhibition. The accompanying publication is the first monograph on his work since 1986.

Draw Withdraw Redraw

The word “drawing” does a lot of work in this group exhibition. It encompasses mark-making, extraction, chance, movement, and resistance — and the show uses that expanded field as its framework, bringing together works by AYO, Bani Abidi, Cinthia Marcelle, Felipe Mujica, Misheck Masamvu, Nohemi Perez, and Thierry Oussou. The title’s three-part rhythm suggests an ongoing process rather than a fixed outcome: returning to the same place only to find it changed. Curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Honey Kraiwee.

Ruud Kuijer

Sixteen sculptures by Dutch artist Ruud Kuijer (b. 1959) fill the Rietveld Pavilion in the Kröller-Müller’s sculpture garden this summer. Working in concrete and steel, Kuijer strips sculpture back to its most fundamental questions: how something stands, lies, hangs, or leans. His work neither narrates nor symbolises; it lets materials and forms speak in relation to each other. The pavilion itself, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1955 and known for its subtle play of light and open space, proves an apt partner for work this concerned with the relationship between object and architecture.

Sin Wai Kin: Still Life

Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto) makes video works in which they perform as multiple characters, using costume and make-up to inhabit figures drawn from art history, fantasy, and drag. Their practice circles around a persistent question: how have the stories told through portraiture shaped who we are allowed to be? At the Frans Hals Museum, their moving portraits enter into dialogue with Old Masters from the collection, including works by Frans Hals, Judith Leyster, and Leo Gestel. A new commission, Still Life (2026), features the artist’s own parents sharing a Cantonese meal, surrounded by vanitas still lifes from the permanent collection.

🇪🇸 Exhibitions in Spain

In the Italian Manner. Spain and the Mediterranean Gothic, 1320–1420

Italian art transformed the visual culture of medieval Spain, and this exhibition traces how that transformation happened. During the fourteenth century, the western Mediterranean became a crossing point in both directions: merchants, clerics, and artists carried works and techniques between the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, giving rise to aesthetic and iconographic innovations that reshaped painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts across the kingdoms of Portugal, Castile, Navarre, and Aragon. More than a hundred works in diverse media, drawn from 56 institutions worldwide, bring together Italian maestros such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti alongside local masters including the Serra brothers and Ferrer Bassa.

Ewa Juszkiewicz

Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984, Gdańsk) works by returning to eighteenth and nineteenth century female portraiture and quietly dismantling it. Her sitters remain posed and elegantly painted, but their faces are concealed beneath elaborate arrangements of fabric, vegetation, or cascading hair, drawing on Surrealist sensibility to short-circuit the conventions of a genre long defined by the male gaze. The result is portraiture that refuses to be read in a single way. More than twenty paintings from the collection of Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza are on show alongside newer works made specifically for the occasion.

in situ: Igshaan Adams. Unsettling Dust: The Body’s Archive

Rope, beads, wire, and strips of fabric are the raw materials from which Igshaan Adams (b. 1982, Cape Town) constructs large-scale woven compositions that hold together memory, race, sexuality, and religion. His childhood in Bonteheuwel, a community shaped by Apartheid-era divisions, is the persistent source: the patterned linoleum floors of domestic interiors there become, in his hands, abstract geometries charged with intimacy and loss. A recent collaboration with the Garage Dance Ensemble produced works that literally carry the traces of bodies in motion, dancers having moved across painted linoleum to create collective imprints that then shaped the woven pieces.

Jasper Johns: Night Driver

Few artists have managed to sustain genuine reinvention across seven decades, but Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of them. The exhibition traces his career from the flags, targets, numbers, and maps of the 1950s that broke decisively with Abstract Expressionism, through the crosshatch paintings of the 1970s and the emotionally charged imagery of the 1980s, to the quiet, elusive work of his later years. Around a hundred works from public and private collections worldwide are on show, ending with the Catenary series, in which a real string arcs across the canvas, introducing a subtle sense of gravity and time.

Joana Vasconcelos: Transfiguration

Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos builds her practice around the transformation of everyday materials: textiles, ceramics, and tiles are gathered, scaled up, and reconstituted into sculptures and monumental installations that sit at the intersection of cultural tradition and contemporary art. This survey covers her output from the late 1990s to recent works, tracing an artistic evolution shaped by a consistent interest in Portuguese heritage, collective identity, and the critical possibilities of craft. Loans come from major institutions including the Fondation Louis Vuitton and MUSAC, alongside works from the artist’s own studio.

The Ribalta family and the naturalistic Baroque

At the heart of early seventeenth-century Valencian painting were Francisco Ribalta and his son Juan, whose work brought a new emotional intensity to religious subject matter. Francisco’s art combined rigorous naturalistic description with a raw devotional power that placed him among the finest painters of the Spanish Golden Age. Ten works from the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia illustrate the range of their achievement, from saints and biblical scenes to the collaborative output of their family workshop, casting light on a chapter of Spanish Baroque painting that remains less widely known than it deserves.

🇨🇭 Exhibitions in Switzerland

Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future

Chinese artist Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou) has spent over two decades making work about what technological and economic transformation does to human life, building digital worlds, virtual-reality environments, and video installations that are simultaneously speculative, documentary, and strange. Her first solo exhibition in Switzerland fills three floors of the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart with key works including Whose Utopia (2006), RMB City (2007–), Asia One (2018), and Nova (2019–), alongside elaborate physical installations that materialise elements from the videos, blurring the boundary between the screen and the space around it.

Pierre Huyghe

Fiction and reality, biology and technology, chance and control — in Pierre Huyghe's (b. 1962, Paris) practice, these oppositions dissolve into living situations that shift and respond over time. His works bring together organisms, algorithmic systems, and cinematic elements into environments that seem to think for themselves, making unpredictability a core artistic principle rather than a side effect. This exhibition, conceived exclusively for the Fondation Beyeler, places newly created works alongside key recent pieces, transforming the museum into something closer to an ecosystem than a gallery.

Janiva Ellis: Geneva

Funny, unsettling, and deliberately slippery in meaning — the paintings of New York-based Janiva Ellis (b. 1987) draw on popular imagery and art historical motifs to build scenes that refuse easy interpretation. Her work pulls at the white supremacist myths woven into dominant cultural narratives, exposing their contradictions through figuration that moves between controlled precision and raw gesture, putting visibility, erasure, and survival up for debate without resolving them neatly. This is her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, presenting a new body of paintings.

Édouard and Marguerite Naville

Switzerland’s first Egyptologist, Édouard Naville, died a century ago, and many of the pharaonic objects now held by the MAH arrived through his excavations. This exhibition marks that anniversary while also correcting the historical record: his wife Marguerite, long confined to his shadow, is here recognised as a fully-fledged Egyptologist in her own right. Together, their archives illuminate both a formative period in the history of Egyptian archaeology and the particular cultural values of turn-of-the-century Geneva.

Quickkopy Conceptualism. Bay Area Dada to Bay Area Punk

A year-long seminar between MAMCO and the Geneva University of Art and Design culminates in this exhibition, built around the Ecart Archives, the legacy of the 1970s Geneva-based artist collective. The show traces the Mail Art networks that connected alternative scenes across the Western world, focusing on the Bay Area Dadaists, a loose grouping of San Francisco artists whose fanzines, collages, and performances drew on the Dadaist spirit of contestation and fed, in turn, into the early American punk scene. Artists represented include Anna Banana, Monte Cazazza, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and The Residents.

Fokus. Klee’s versos

Paul Klee had a habit of using both sides of his picture supports, whether paper, cardboard, or canvas. In around 600 of his 9,600 works, drawings, watercolours, or paintings appear on the reverse. This focused exhibition draws attention to that hidden layer, showing how Klee treated the recto and verso not as front and back but as parts of a continuous working process, connecting them in form, content, and pictorial logic. The backs of his works turn out to be far more than afterthoughts.

🇬🇧 Exhibitions in the United Kingdom

Zurbarán

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664) painted saints as if they had just walked in from the street, their life-size figures rendered with a directness and naturalistic force that sets him apart even among the great painters of seventeenth-century Seville. His still lifes hold a similar quality: ordinary objects arranged with almost devotional attention. This is the first exhibition in the UK dedicated solely to his work, gathering nearly fifty paintings from collections including the Louvre and the Art Institute of Chicago, and tracing his career across four decades of altarpieces, monastic imagery, and quietly extraordinary canvases.

James McNeill Whistler

American, British, and French all at once, James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) resists easy national categorisation as much as he resists easy stylistic ones. He made the Thames at night into near-abstract washes of blue and gold, stripped portraits back to their essential tonal relationships, and consistently pushed Victorian painting towards something quieter and more elusive. This retrospective, the first major European exhibition of his work in thirty years, brings together paintings, prints, drawings, and designs ranging from his teens in St Petersburg to his late self-portraits.

Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific

Drawn from the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, this exhibition brings over forty artists from across the Asia Pacific region to the V&A in a collaboration built on three decades of the Asia Pacific Triennial. The show is organised around three themes: how artists respond to histories of migration and conflict; how traditional knowledge and ceremonial customs continue to shape contemporary making; and how spirituality and systems of faith find expression in art today. First Nations perspectives are foregrounded throughout, with works ranging from shell necklaces and porcelain busts to large-scale sculpture.

Obi Agwam: Love letters to you and me

Born in Lagos and raised in Queens, New York, Obi Agwam (b. 1999) makes paintings and sculptures rooted in portraiture, with a visual language that draws on American cartoon aesthetics and African American imagery. His starting point is his own journal writing: moments of reflection and emotional vulnerability alchemised into imaginary subjects built from real memory and conversation. The guiding question of this new series is “If this memory were a person, what would it look like?” The works were made during his residency at the Royal Academy Schools and explore identity, love, and the importance of imagination.

Wendy McMurdo | The Digital Mirror

What technology does to childhood is the central question running through the work of Scottish photographer Wendy McMurdo. Her images of children absorbed in screens, gaming, and networked play were made at the precise moments when these experiences were becoming normal rather than novel: from early computer-based learning in schools through to the spread of the internet. This survey, her largest exhibition to date, brings together more than fifty photographs alongside digital animations and loans of works that influenced her practice, concentrating on the period from 1995 to 2018.

John Akomfrah: Listening All Night To The Rain

Originally commissioned for the British Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, this multi-channel film and sound installation by Sir John Akomfrah (b. 1957, Accra) arrives in Liverpool with particular resonance. Its themes of migration, memory, racial injustice, and belonging are deeply connected to the city’s own history. Drawing its title from the poetry of eleventh-century Chinese writer Su Dongpo, written during political exile, the work unfolds across sculptural installations with embedded screens inspired by religious altarpieces, set within colour fields influenced by Rothko, with water running through it all as a connecting thread. Listening, Akomfrah argues, is itself a form of activism.

Gender Stories

Centuries of art, personal objects, and lived experience come together in this touring exhibition tracing how gender has been expressed, constrained, mythologised, and contested across time. Works by Grayson Perry, David Hockney, James Tissot, Catherine Opie, and Zanele Muholi sit alongside new film pieces, a Suffragette teapot designed by Sylvia Pankhurst, a linen smock worn by the artist Gluck in 1930s London, and a Liverpool LGBTQ+ football scarf. The exhibition also features a watercolour by Sarah Biffin, a celebrated nineteenth-century miniaturist who was born without arms, painted using her mouth, and spent her final years in Liverpool.

Aleksandra Kasuba: Shelters for the Senses

Lithuanian-American artist Aleksandra Kasuba fled Lithuania after the Second World War and eventually settled in New York and then New Mexico, where the landscape of the American Southwest fed her longstanding fascination with shells, rocks, and organic form. Her work ranges from early paintings and mosaics to sculptures and architectural designs that imagine alternative ways for people to inhabit the world, drawing on nature as both source and model. This is the first UK museum exhibition of her work, organised in collaboration with the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and covering six decades of practice.

Andy Warhol: Art Star

Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and The Beatles come to Wolverhampton as part of the ARTIST ROOMS touring programme, a collection jointly owned by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. The local context adds a productive layer: the gallery holds a significant collection of Pop art, including Campbell's Soup 1968, which is shown alongside the ARTIST ROOMS works, inviting new readings of Warhol’s practice within a city historically shaped by labour and manufacture. The exhibition also touches on his origins in New York’s queer creative scene and the impact of the AIDS crisis on his world.

Lewis Hammond: Crystal in the Shade

Lewis Hammond (b. 1987, Wolverhampton) paints haunting, statuesque figures in dark, earthy tones, drawing on Caravaggio, Velázquez, and Goya to create work that moves between mythology and contemporary life. His figures carry a charged ambiguity, suspended between the personal and the archetypal. This exhibition, his first museum presentation in the UK, features a new body of paintings developed specifically for the Hepworth Wakefield and takes home as its subject: what it means to belong somewhere, and what it feels like to be without that anchor. The show also marks Hammond’s own return to Britain after several years based in Berlin.

Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms — Women sculptors of India and Bangladesh

Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) built her practice across forty years, producing monumental fibre works, ceramics, bronzes, and works on paper that fused abstraction with sensuous figuration, drawing equally on ancient sculptural traditions, Indian craft and textile heritage, and modernist experimentation. This exhibition places her at the centre of a broader history, presenting her work alongside four pioneering women sculptors of the same generation: her mother Leela Mukherjee, Meera Mukherjee, Novera Ahmed, and Pilloo Pochkhanawala. It is the first time these artists have been brought into dialogue in the UK, and the exhibition directly challenges Western accounts of global modernism that have long overlooked their contributions.