84 art exhibitions around Europe opening in September 2026

The British Museum has sold every ticket to December for a show that does not open until 10 September. That show is the Bayeux Tapestry, leaving France for the first time since it was made nine and a half centuries ago and staying in London until July 2027. It leads a month in which Europe’s museums return to full strength: this issue gathers eighty-four openings across thirteen countries, seven times August’s dozen.

In Paris the Musée d’Orsay opens five displays at once, from a Monet itinerary marking the centenary of his death to a virtual-reality reconstruction of the vanished foundry where the Statue of Liberty was assembled, while the Grand Palais measures Cézanne’s grip on the avant-gardes through 180 works. Germany deals in firsts: Berlin stages Ryuichi Sakamoto’s first European retrospective, and Dresden mounts the first full Correggio survey ever held outside Italy. Vienna’s Albertina pairs Picasso with Bacon, and Mudam in Luxembourg brings together Yoko Ono, Atsuko Tanaka and their generation for a survey of postwar Japanese women artists that Europe has not attempted before. In the Netherlands, the Stedelijk receives the final stop of the touring retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, who is 97, and the Kröller-Müller reunites all 88 of its Van Gogh paintings; the last full showing was in 1984.

Louisiana spends its autumn on Remedios Varo, who painted her otherworldly interiors in Mexico City after fleeing Europe. In Copenhagen, the Hirschsprung hangs three married couples of Funen painters who divided family life and easel time between them. FOMU in Antwerp gives Graciela Iturbide her largest Belgian showing, 160 photographs across half a century. Leiko Ikemura’s glass sculptures join Carpaccio and Canova at the Gallerie dell’Accademia as the Venice Glass Week returns; several were blown on Murano for the occasion. And in Glasgow, the Burrell builds a show from thirteen drawings, Ingres and Manet among them.

🇦🇹 Exhibitions in Austria

Erika Giovanna Klien: All Is Movement

The Lower Belvedere devotes its autumn to Erika Giovanna Klien, a leading figure of Viennese Kineticism. Trained under the reformer Franz Čižek at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts, she moved to New York in 1929 and taught there while producing commercial designs. The exhibition presents every side of her output, from quivering birds in flight and dancing bodies to rotating machines, together with her theatre projects and observations of workers’ lives. Loans arrive from the Yale University Art Gallery and the Wien Museum. A 440-page catalogue gathers the newest research.

Carlone Contemporary: Asta Gröting – Things

Beneath the Carlone Hall’s frescoes of Apollo and Diana, the Upper Belvedere screens Things, a 2018 video by the German sculptor Asta Gröting. In extreme slow motion, organic and inorganic objects fly into a deep blue summer sky. Each one deforms grotesquely at the top of its arc while the viewer waits for the next launch. Gröting, who has shown at the Städel Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Venice Biennale, uses the piece to probe what ordinary objects conceal. The Carlone Contemporary series rotates such confrontations every six months.

Picasso – Bacon: What It Feels Like to Be Human

What it feels like to be human is the question the Albertina hangs over its pairing of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. Around 70 works from international museums and private collections show how Bacon competed with the Spanish painter throughout his career, returning to the subjects both men shared: crucifixions, screams, bullfights and the nude. Loans include Picasso’s Mother and Child (Study after Guernica) and Dora Maar alongside Bacon’s Self-Portrait of 1972 and Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne. Picasso never borrowed from the younger man, yet he watched his rise attentively.

Bernhard Leitner: SOUNDSPACESCULPTURE

Sound serves as building material in Bernhard Leitner’s exhibition at the Secession. For more than five decades the artist, born in Feldkirch in 1938, has arranged loudspeakers into structures whose waves penetrate the body, break against it or circle around it. Against a culture of ambient noise he sets slowness, intimacy and the listening body itself, treating space as a field charged with vibration and rhythm rather than a static container. The new work Wasser Würfel / Wand Wellen of 2026 anchors the presentation, curated by Jeanette Pacher.

Lap-See Lam: 192 Wing Lok Street

A Chinese restaurant that no longer exists anchors Lap-See Lam’s 192 Wing Lok Street. The Stockholm-born artist scans demolished interiors and rebuilds them as flickering digital environments where avatars drift and voices circulate. In her hands the restaurant becomes a vessel for layered stories of migration, labour and longing rather than a place to be reconstructed faithfully. Animation, sculpture and installation share the galleries with glass works made during a residency at Cirva in Marseille. The show deliberately resists resolution, exposing the gaps between memory and record.

JJJJJerome Ellis: A calendar commemorating slaves who escaped their enslavers, 1673–1886

The title says much already: JJJJJerome Ellis builds this exhibition around a calendar of escapes from slavery recorded between 1673 and 1886. Through performance, sound composition and text, the American artist treats stuttering, his own included, as a modulation of time rather than a deficiency. Broken rhythm becomes a form of resistance in which delay turns into duration and silence into strategy, linked to histories of Black fugitivity and improvisation. The presentation is co-organised with Index in Stockholm and KINDL in Berlin and curated by Bettina Spörr.

Elisabeth von Samsonow

Wood from a thousand-year-old linden tree supplies several of the sculptures in Elisabeth von Samsonow’s first solo presentation on this scale. Across sculpture, painting, drawing, film and a site-specific installation, the artist approaches the earth as a bearer of history, life, energy and collective memory, with the Gaia myth as a recurring point of reference. Works by Egon Schiele and the German Expressionists from the Horten holdings hang alongside her own, reflecting her scholarly engagement with both. An area for visitors’ creative experiments completes the show.

Prix Ars Electronica & S+T+ARTS Prize 2026

For five days the Lentos doubles as a festival venue. Six works by winners of the Prix Ars Electronica and the S+T+ARTS Prize, most of them Golden Nica or Grand Prize recipients, go on show while the Ars Electronica Festival examines its 2026 theme, Negotiating Humanity. The two competitions drew 4,329 and 2,719 submissions respectively, from more than a hundred countries each. Between them the selected pieces range across bodily perception, capitalist technologies, the new autonomy of AI, geopolitics and the climate crisis. Daily guided tours run throughout.

🇧🇪 Exhibitions in Belgium

Ali Cherri: Soul Witness

Mud shares the plinth with bronze, marble and stone in Soul Witness, a survey of the Beirut-born artist Ali Cherri at WIELS. Film, sculpture, watercolour and installation examine how the nation-state, the army and the museum decide which histories are kept and which are erased. Soldiers appear as vulnerable figures rather than heroic monuments, and the new film The Sentinel follows a French recruit through barracks routine and unsettling nights. Elsewhere, displaced archaeological fragments grow into fragile hybrid creatures that ask what museums do to the objects they hold.

Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to Fly With

Some 160 photographs survey half a century of Graciela Iturbide, whose work has never been shown at this scale in Belgium. Produced by C/O Berlin together with the Mexican photographer, Eyes to Fly With moves from her portraits of Zapotec women in Oaxaca, which upended conventional images of gender, to the White Fence series on identity and migration, her time among the Seri people and rarely exhibited pictures from India and Bangladesh. Vintage prints, colour work and contact sheets join her quiet record of Frida Kahlo’s sealed bathroom.

Léonard Pongo: Dialogue with the Source

In Dialogue with the Source, Léonard Pongo distils nearly a decade of fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo into photography, video and textiles. The Belgian-Congolese artist shoots with modified full-spectrum cameras that register wavelengths invisible to the human eye, lending the country’s landscapes an altered cast. People never appear in the pictures, yet the bond between humans and the land runs through every piece. The banana tree recurs as an emblem of life, fertility and cyclical renewal. Stories contributed by local communities and researchers shape the installation.

Lola Pertsowsky: In the Mother Tongue

Butter sculpted by the photographer’s mother counts among the subjects of In the Mother Tongue, Lola Pertsowsky’s contribution to FOMU’s Grant programme for photographers based in Flanders. Shot in her mother’s house on the Île d’Oléron, the series records the plants, animals and objects that share a home with its inhabitants: insects, food remnants, household devices. Pertsowsky, who trained at La Cambre and LUCA in Brussels, treats repetition as a way of learning to see, photographing the overlooked until it becomes intimate. Works include Beurre Sculpté par ma mère and Apple Sundial.

En Piste! 2026

Around one hundred artists from the Liège region take over La Boverie for the twelfth edition of En Piste. Some thirty galleries and art centres make the selection, turning the museum into a ten-day survey of the city’s contemporary scene, free to visit. In the museum’s glass-roofed hall, the selection for the Prix de la Création 2025 shows its winner Églantine Chaumont beside the four finalists Carole Louis, Anna Mancuso, Andrea Radermacher and Geneviève Van der Wielen. A preview evening opens the event at 6 pm on 3 September.

🇩🇰 Exhibitions in Denmark

The Funen Painters. Art Above All!

Three married couples share the walls in The Funen Painters. Art Above All! at the Hirschsprung Collection. Anna and Fritz Syberg, Alhed and Johannes Larsen and Christine and Sigurd Swane painted family life, gardens and the Funen countryside while negotiating who got time at the easel. Built on a research project into the couples’ correspondence, the exhibition follows the women’s struggle for professional recognition and watches shared ideals evolve and fracture over the years. Rural life appears throughout as a counterpoint to industrialisation, rendered by six painters who put art above all.

Jochen Lempert: Flora Incognita

A trained biologist stands behind the photographs in Flora Incognita, Jochen Lempert’s first solo presentation in Denmark. For over thirty years the German artist has photographed bird wings, insect bodies and the play of light on water in analogue black and white, hanging his unframed prints in small groupings that reveal quiet affinities between plants, animals, objects and people. Works such as Morning Glory and Vanessa atalanta Migration II ask visitors to slow down and look closely. Lempert’s photographs have entered the collections of the Centre Pompidou and MoMA.

Amalie Smith: Levende

Large display cases fill Charlottenborg’s north wing for Levende, in which Amalie Smith considers how living beings leave patterns and traces on the world. The cases hold hybrid sculptures of textiles, ceramics, natural materials and everyday objects, presented under an original sound work that wraps the galleries in a single environment. Smith, trained both at the Danish Academy of Creative Writing and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, has published nine books, and her exhibition zooms between macro and microscopic views of nature, science, art and artificial life.

Som Supaparinya: Reroute:

In her first Scandinavian solo exhibition, the Thai artist Som Supaparinya reads infrastructure as a form of power. Military routes, bridges, railways, dams and monumental construction projects run through two video installations built from field studies, archival research and interviews. Melted Stars examines Thailand’s repressed wartime involvement with Japan, while Mo num en ts traces the lasting consequences of the country’s Cold War alliance with the United States. Between them, Reroute: shows how national mythology, environmental exploitation and the control of collective memory intersect across Southeast Asia.

Sara Krøgholt Trier: The Surface of Everything

An amphitheatre in a city park sets the scene for the animated film at the centre of Sara Krøgholt Trier’s The Surface of Everything at Møstings. Visitors move through subdued light into an installation built around the film, whose characters gather in the modern arena without quite achieving self-awareness. Drawing on the amphitheatre’s history as a stage for political speech and public assembly, Trier asks how politics and fiction intertwine until reality becomes difficult to decode. The show is an early outing for an artist who graduated from the Royal Danish Academy in 2024.

Life, Longing & Landscape — Thorvaldsen’s Painting Collection

Nine newly renovated galleries at Thorvaldsens Museum present a selection from the sculptor’s private collection of more than 350 paintings, all shown when the museum first opened in 1848. Many works return after long spells in storage, sidelined for falling outside the familiar account of the Danish Golden Age. Canvases by Dietrich Wilhelm Lindau, Károly Markó the Elder and Albert Küchler hang alongside C.W. Eckersberg, Constantin Hansen and Wilhelm Marstrand, arranged by theme: everyday life in Italy, romantic ruins and dramatic landscapes that trace how Rome and Munich reshaped Nordic painters’ view of the world.

Pekka Halonen. The Call of Finland

They called Pekka Halonen the “Snow Painter”. The pictures explain why: frozen lakes, laundry rinsed through holes in the ice, forests silent under fresh snow. Ordrupgaard’s autumn exhibition surveys the Finn (1865–1933); conceived at the Petit Palais in Paris with the Ateneum in Helsinki, it now travels north. Halonen turned away from the modern city towards untouched nature and plain country life, painted in clear Nordic light. A leader of the artists’ colony at Tuusula, he studied in Paris in the 1890s, where he passed briefly through Gauguin’s orbit, and helped shape the Nordic symbolism of the century’s turn.

Collection Favourites

Ron Mueck’s Couple under an Umbrella, an elderly pair rendered at twice life size, presides over this year-long rehang of works that have defined ARoS. The sculpture stays on loan from Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands until March 2027, and the Dutch museum borrows Mueck’s Boy in exchange. Around it, sculpture, printmaking, video, ceramics and photography from the collection bring together Olafur Eliasson, Shirin Neshat, Bill Viola, Asger Jorn and Michael Kvium, among others. Highlights include Viola’s multi-channel projection Five Angels for the Millennium and Eliasson’s The inverted panorama house.

Remedios Varo

Over 70 paintings, drawings and notebooks bring Remedios Varo to Louisiana, in a survey organised with Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Mexican art historian Tere Arcq. Varo (1908–1963) left Spain for the Paris surrealist circles, fled to Mexico City in 1941 and only committed fully to painting from 1949. Her enigmatic canvases place musicians, scientists and travellers in fantastical interiors, painted with classical precision and fed by mythology, mysticism, quantum physics and Jules Verne. The result is a feminist surrealism centred on female creativity and empowerment.

Ann Lislegaard: Animoid

Science fiction supplies the lens for Animoid, which gathers three decades of Ann Lislegaard’s digital art at ARKEN. The Norwegian-Danish pioneer of 3D animation, sound and installation asks where the boundary runs between the human and the artificially created. An animated oracle owl speaks in fragmented voices from a three-metre LED screen in Oracles, Owls… Some Animals Never Sleep, while in Spinning and Weaving Ada a spider weaves the name of Ada Lovelace across mirrored boxes. Questions of gender, the body and biodiversity loss run beneath the sensuous surfaces.

Ovartaci

Fifty-six years as a psychiatric patient shaped the life work of Ovartaci, the self-taught Danish artist whose demon-like creatures and high-heeled women arrive at Kunsten this autumn. Painter, poet, engineer and yogi, Ovartaci (1894–1985) built a universe over six decades that radiates vitality, longing and togetherness, touching on gender identity, Buddhism and animism along the way. The exhibition connects her to the Cobra movement and art brut, and follows a presentation first shown at Amsterdam’s Cobra Museum, developed here with Kunstmuseum Brandts and Museum Ovartaci.

🇫🇷 Exhibitions in France

Hosts at the Louvre: Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton

Two artists in residence step out of their studios inside the Louvre for a joint exhibition in the Sully wing’s Salle de la Chapelle. Kader Attia shows a film and an installation drawn from his private wanderings through the museum, weighing the fluctuations of ages, memories and gazes. Elizabeth Peyton hangs paintings and drawings made during her residency, mixing reinterpretations of Louvre works with contemporary and historical subjects. Both artists kept on-site studios as the museum’s “Hosts” between 2024 and 2026, treating the collection itself as raw material.

Maurice Denis, Mystical Illustrator

A devotional bestseller of the fifteenth century anchors the Orsay’s autumn drawing show. Maurice Denis spent more than a decade illustrating Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ before Ambroise Vollard published the woodcut edition in 1903, a project that required nearly seventy woodblock cutters. Around 246 preparatory drawings, recently acquired by the museum, chart the Nabi painter’s route from first conception to finished page in pencil, ink, wash and tracing. Paintings on Christian subjects and an unbound copy of the book complete a study of faith pursued through decoration.

Auguste Bartholdi: Liberty Enlightening the World

Room 69 marks the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence with the sculptor who gave the republic its face. Auguste Bartholdi first conceived what became the Statue of Liberty for the Suez Canal, before the project turned into an allegory of American freedom, engineered with contributions from Viollet-le-Duc and Gustave Eiffel and funded through the Franco-American Union. A scale model of 1889 by Bartholdi and Thiébaut frères anchors the display, which follows the copper colossus from the workshops of Paris to its inauguration in New York in October 1886.

A Statue for Liberty, Bartholdi’s Dream, from Paris to New York

Virtual-reality headsets turn visitors into witnesses of the Statue of Liberty’s making, in an experience spread across nearly 700 square metres of the Amont Gallery. The journey runs alongside the museum’s Bartholdi exhibition and follows the sculptor from Versailles in 1865, through the Paris of the 1880s, to the New York inauguration of 1886. Gustave Eiffel and the journalist Joseph Pulitzer appear among the supporting cast. At its centre stands a meticulous recreation of the vanished Gaget, Gauthier & Cie foundry, where some 600 craftspeople assembled the copper figure.

Marie Bracquemond

Studies for a monumental ceramic panel form the core of this Marie Bracquemond display in Salle 33. The Muses of the Arts, her slip-painted earthenware ensemble, appeared at the Universal Exposition of 1878; the museum now unpacks its genesis through preparatory drawings and related paintings. The presentation rests on major donations of works by Marie and Félix Bracquemond made by their descendants in 2024, rounded out by new acquisitions. By favouring studies over the finished panel, the curators reveal how methodically the painter approached large-scale decorative commissions.

“I Spend My Life Painting”: A Claude Monet Itinerary

Five recently restored or newly studied paintings plot a Monet itinerary through the Impressionist Gallery, marking the centenary of the painter’s death. With La Pie as its signature image, the route crosses the banks of the Seine, rolling seas, spring freshness and snowy severity, following Monet’s devotion to painting outdoors from his early decades to the turn of the century. Letters and findings from the restorers, among them Bénédicte Trémolières and the C2RMF laboratory, show how much calculation lay behind the apparent spontaneity: composition, varnishing, the scale of the garden pictures.

Cezanne et nous

At the back of Père Tanguy’s Paris paint shop in the 1880s, a handful of painters discovered canvases by an artist who had all but given up exhibiting. From that quiet encounter the Grand Palais traces Paul Cézanne’s afterlife in modern painting, pairing some 70 of his works with paintings by roughly 80 artists who studied, argued with and remade him. Gauguin, Matisse, Mondrian, Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley and Peter Doig all appear. Re-creations of dealer Ambroise Vollard’s pioneering shows chart the rise that ended with Picasso pronouncing him “the father of us all”.

Eva Gonzalès: A Free-Spirited Artist

Nearly 100 paintings, pastels and prints give Eva Gonzalès the comprehensive survey she never received in her lifetime or since. The only pupil Édouard Manet ever took, Gonzalès (1847–1883) worked in the same Paris as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, building a distinct artistic identity in an era hostile to women painters, sustained by family support and her own determination. She died at 34, days after giving birth. After the Petit Palais, the exhibition travels to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in February 2027.

Histories of Landscape: From Monet to Hockney (1890–2025)

From Claude Monet to David Hockney, this survey follows 135 years of landscape painting to show how the genre outlived the upheavals of the twentieth century. Mounted with the Musée de Grenoble as part of the Monet centenary, the exhibition sets the master of Giverny in dialogue with painters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who kept transforming the tradition he brought to its peak. The Sorbonne professor Pierre Wat curates. After its Paris run, the show moves to Grenoble from 5 March to 4 July 2027.

The World According to Penn

Hung without chronology or theme, Irving Penn’s photographs turn Gallery 2 of the Bourse de Commerce into one vast mosaic of almost 450 prints made between the 1940s and the early 2000s. The display, part of the wider exhibition Remember Me, draws on the Pinault Collection’s extensive holdings of the American photographer, who reinvented fashion and portrait work with a sober, unflinching style. His Corner Portraits hang beside tradesmen, cigarette butts, faded flowers and couture, all shot against the plain backdrops of his studio. The photographs last appeared together at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2014–15.

Raymond Depardon

One picture per place: that was the rule Raymond Depardon set himself when he began photographing France in the 1980s with a large-format camera. Gallery 3 of the Bourse de Commerce gathers some fifty prints from the resulting series, La France, part of the museum-wide Remember Me. Travelling by van, the co-founder of Gamma and member of Magnum sought out small provincial towns whose shopfronts, roads and houses rarely enter the national portrait. Made in the spirit of Walker Evans, the pictures remain methodical yet warm, alert to modest detail and quiet humour.

Trop Mignon ! L’art du bonheur

Ancient Egyptian cats, the history of pink and Jeff Koons share the bill in Trop Mignon ! L’art du bonheur at Louvre-Lens. Some 300 works across painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation ask why art makes us feel good, treating tenderness and the cute as forms of cultural resistance in a turbulent world. Rosa Bonheur and Agnès Varda supply tributes to animals, while Géricault and Renoir hang near Cindy Sherman and Pierre et Gilles. Annabelle Ténèze of Louvre-Lens and Émilie Girard of Strasbourg’s museums curate the co-production.

Le Chant des images

La Capsule, the free-entry space for artists at Centre Pompidou-Metz, hosts Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky this autumn. In Le Chant des images the artist scrutinises the interactions of time, space, movement and memory, pursuing light, colour and transformation through an attention to the fragility of life. Since 2007 she has also worked with the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky under the joint signature pascALEjandro, fusing his symbolic universe with her pictorial one in images of alchemy, change and transmission. The presentation keeps afternoon hours, from Wednesday to Sunday, with longer days during school holidays.

Sentimental museum

The collecting habits of artists supply the material for Sentimental museum at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Daniel Spoerri, Annette Messager and Ben number among the figures examined, in an exhibition built from three collections: the museum’s own, that of macLYON and that of the Centre Pompidou’s national museum of modern art. Objects gathered, hoarded and arranged by artists across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveal collecting as a creative act in its own right, one the museum follows over a six-month run.

🇩🇪 Exhibitions in Germany

Ryuichi Sakamoto. seeing sound, hearing time

Seven works unfold across five large-scale installations and 1,500 square metres of the Rieckhallen in the first European retrospective of Ryuichi Sakamoto. The Tokyo-born composer (1952–2023) co-founded Yellow Magic Orchestra, won an Academy Award for his film scores and spent his late career building three-dimensional sound environments. IS YOUR TIME turns a piano damaged by the 2011 tsunami into an instrument played by live seismic data. Other rooms carry installations from the album async, made with Shiro Takatani and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and two Carsten Nicolai films set to Sakamoto’s final album.

This is the Modern World. Breakthroughs in Art, 1900–1960

The Lichtwark Gallery rethinks the Kunsthalle’s modern holdings, distilling a collection of over 3,000 works into roughly 125 pieces that track six decades of breaks with tradition. Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter stand for Expressionism; Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Braque and Picasso for the École de Paris; Munch, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Max Beckmann and Anita Rée for the early modern breakthroughs, with the Bauhaus, Surrealism, New Objectivity and post-war Art Informel following. A section on Hamburg artists roots the story locally, and the shadow of Nazi ideology falls across its middle chapters.

Mary Magdalene: Sin. Pray. Love.

Few biblical figures have been reinvented as often as Mary Magdalene. The Städel traces nearly a millennium of her images through more than 100 paintings, sculptures and prints, from the Middle Ages to Marlene Dumas, treating her as an independent figure through whom ideas of the body, faith and social roles come into view. El Greco, Georges de la Tour, Savoldo, Puvis de Chavannes, Böcklin and Beckmann all appear, with loans from the National Gallery in London, the Louvre, the Vatican Museums and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Correggio. Movingly Human

Dresden mounts the first comprehensive survey of Correggio’s career ever presented outside Italy. Antonio Allegri (1489–1534), named after his home town, worked mainly in Parma and was once ranked beside Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian for his handling of light and emotion, though his name now carries less echo. The Gemäldegalerie builds the show around its own panel paintings, among them Die Heilige Nacht and the Madonnas of St George and St Sebastian, joined by restored works and international loans such as Danaë and Noli me tangere.

Fühlst du’s?

Seventh- and eighth-graders curated the companion show to Dresden’s Correggio autumn. Working for about a year with the Gemäldegalerie, pupils of the Universitätsschule Dresden chose nine works from a pool of forty, among them Rubens’s Christus auf dem Meer and Victor Wolfvoet’s Das Haupt der Medusa, asking what the Old Masters make us feel rather than what scholarship says about them. Emotion serves as the shared language for reading historical painting and sculpture, and participatory stations invite visitors to add their own responses to the works on view.

Franz Marc. The Quest for a Better World

Two decades have passed since a German museum last gave Franz Marc a solo exhibition on this scale. K20 corrects that with over 120 paintings and works on paper by the co-founder of Der Blaue Reiter, gathered from public and private lenders and organised with the Kunstmuseum Bern. Marc (1880–1916) compressed his career into little more than a decade, moving from early nature studies through the blazing animal paintings to the abstraction he was still developing when he died at Verdun. A free audio guide is narrated by the actor Felix Kammerer.

All Eyes On: The Land of Cockaigne by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and its Acquisition History

The Land of Cockaigne came to the Alte Pinakothek through a sale held in 1917 by the auctioneers Paul Cassirer and Hugo Helbing, which dispersed the collection of Richard von Kaufmann. A cabinet display in the museum’s All Eyes On series retraces that journey and names the people who made the purchase possible. Several of them were persecuted, driven out or murdered as Jews under National Socialism; the presentation commemorates their role in enlarging Bavaria’s collections. Painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1567 and once owned by Emperor Rudolf II, the panel ranks among the museum’s principal works.

🇭🇺 Exhibitions in Hungary

The Architecture and Photography of László György Sáros

Buildings, photographs and writings share a single author in the Kunsthalle’s survey of László György Sáros. A pupil of Imre Makovecz and a prominent figure in Hungarian organic architecture, Sáros understands the organic as an attitude that places human life, and with it time, at the centre of architectural thinking rather than as a borrowing of natural forms. His camera dwells on built environments and their meetings with nature. Curator Julia Szerdahelyi presents the three strands as expressions of one impulse, the desire “to make others see”.

Posters and Drawings – An Exhibition of Graphic Designer József Árendás

Street advertising columns stand inside the Kunsthalle for the 80th-birthday exhibition of the graphic designer József Árendás, returning his posters to the setting they were made for. The condensed retrospective moves through three chapters: nostalgic film posters of the 1970s, the dramatic theatre posters he began making in 1983, and recent autonomous posters conceived as art in their own right. Drawings hang beside the printed sheets to expose the draftsmanship underneath. Curator Gréta Garami makes the case that thought, wit and craft can lift the poster into autonomous art.

🇮🇹 Exhibition in Italy

Leiko Ikemura. TransLucent – The Shape of Light 

As The Venice Glass Week returns, the Gallerie dell’Accademia opens its halls to Leiko Ikemura, whose glass sculptures occupy the ground and first floors alongside Carpaccio, Tiepolo and Canova. Several pieces were blown for the occasion at a Murano glassworks. Born in Japan and long based in Berlin and Cologne, Ikemura has moved freely since the 1980s between painting, drawing and sculpture in terracotta, ceramic and glass. Her series Sleeping Heads responds to the women of Venetian painting, taking Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple as its point of departure.

🇱🇮 Exhibition in Liechtenstein

Evi Kliemand. Walking on Water

To mark Evi Kliemand’s eightieth year, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein turns to its own holdings for a portrait of the principality’s painter and poet. Drawn largely from a 2002 gift by the collector Ralph Kellenberger, the display follows her development through paintings, drawings, figurines and photographic cycles, while recordings of her verse make the written work audible. Kliemand has spent decades at the meeting point of water and land: at Lavadina in Triesenberg, overlooking the Rhine Valley, at Intragna in Ticino, where two mountain streams join, and in Vaduz, where she lives. Shorelines and transitions run through everything she makes.

🇱🇺 Exhibitions in Luxembourg

Christine Sun Kim: For Ever

Sound takes visual form in the Leir Pavilion at Mudam, where Christine Sun Kim builds a site-specific installation from a Deaf perspective. The Berlin-based American artist translates auditory experience into infographics, musical notation and American Sign Language, deploying a lyrical irony that exposes the systems excluding those who do not hear. Her work probes the social and political dimensions of sound, and the power structures governing public and private space. Kim has shown at the Whitney, Tate Modern and the Venice Biennale; Léon Kruijswijk curates.

Kaihō: Japanese Women Artists after 1945

Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Atsuko Tanaka and Fujiko Nakaya lead Kaihō, the first European retrospective devoted to the women who shaped postwar Japanese art. Alongside these names hang lesser-known practitioners, in works running from the experiments of the Gutai group to early video art, some rarely shown outside Japan. The exhibition follows creative resilience and transnational activism across Asia, Europe and the Americas between the 1950s and 1990s. Mudam organises the show with the Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Guggenheim Bilbao; Florence Ostende is lead curator.

The Hearth Room

Casino Luxembourg marks its 30th anniversary with a walk-in installation that claims its entire first floor. The Hearth Room, by Christoph Meier and Ute Müller, operates as stage, laboratory and social sculpture at once, dissolving the line between performers and audience. Nothing follows a fixed script: the work evolves across its four-month run, with visitors invited into collective co-creation, and further contributions come from Stefan Guttmann, Ruben Mahler, Grisha Schmidt and Gregor Titze. The curators call it a social sculpture in progress. Admission is free.

Pipes have their ways

Garden hoses, PVC pipes and extractor hoods make the music in Emile Demerliac’s air-driven sound installation at Casino Luxembourg. Visitors set the piece going themselves, generating tones collectively through mechanical means, as Demerliac reimagines the traditions of the organ and the opera house in everyday industrial materials. Mechanics turn into a space for experimentation and encounter rather than a closed system. The installation won the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation Award 2024 in the spatial-design category and drew notice at Designblok Prague the same year. Admission is free.

Véronique Kolber: Deceptively Quiet

Sleepless nights after her daughter’s accident set Véronique Kolber’s Deceptively Quiet in motion. The Luxembourg photographer, trained in Brussels and Strasbourg, works through fear, vulnerability and endurance in nocturnal images of thresholds: doors, windows and eyes recur as portals to the subconscious, while self-portraits dissolve into digital noise and fragmentation. Harsh grain and obscured faces push the ordinary towards the uncanny, recording emotional reality rather than events. Photography figures here as witness and refuge at once, turning private crisis into a meditative visual narrative at the Centre d’Art Dominique Lang.

Max Mertens: [elemɛnˈtaːɐ̯]

A phonetic transcription serves as the title of Max Mertens’s exhibition at the Nei Liicht. Born in Luxembourg in 1982 and trained under the Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm, Mertens has exhibited internationally since 2003, working across drawing, sculpture and installation with a particular interest in questioning conventional ideas about sculpture, space and the relationship between artwork and viewer. A Robert Schuman Art Prize nominee, he opens on the same September morning as Véronique Kolber’s show at Dudelange’s sister centre, and both run to early November.

🇳🇱 Exhibitions in the Netherlands

Experimentation

Paper carries the whole argument of Experimentation at the Rembrandt House Museum. From Rembrandt and Hercules Segers to Geertruydt Roghman, Käthe Kollwitz, Willem den Ouden, Glenn Brown and Guy Vording, the exhibition gathers artists who tested techniques and materials without restraint in their pursuit of innovation. Many returned to the same subject again and again, approaching it from a fresh angle each time. Old Masters hang beside contemporary practitioners as fellow experimenters, all working on paper, in a show supported by the Jacques and Jacqueline Lévy-Willard Foundation.

Nadav Kander: The Edge of Things

Chernobyl, the Yangtze and the Obama White House have all passed before Nadav Kander’s lens. Foam surveys more than three decades of the London-based photographer, who took up the camera at thirteen and went on to produce 52 portraits of the Obama administration for The New York Times Magazine, the largest single-photographer portrait series the magazine has printed in one issue. Portraits of Rosamund Pike and David Lynch hang beside landscapes of the Thames and the Yangtze, joined by shadow, emptiness and silence. David Campany curates.

Hailun Ma: Hometown

Family, youth and street style in Xinjiang fill Hometown, Hailun Ma’s first major solo exhibition outside China. Moving between the candid and the composed, Ma documents the style subcultures of ethnic minority and multicultural communities in contemporary China, bridging local identity and global fashion in series such as Kashi Youth and Uruklyn. One of the country’s most influential emerging photographers, she joined the BoF 500 list in 2024 and has shot for Vogue, i-D and GQ China. Her pictures catch everyday moments of community life.

Keerthana Kunnath: Not What You Saw

Female bodybuilders from Kerala hold the frame in Not What You Saw, the first museum exhibition of the London-based Indian photographer Keerthana Kunnath. Her portraits balance strength and softness while dismantling assumptions about what a woman should look like, as the athletes train against the expectations of femininity that surround them in southern India. Kunnath uses the camera to open subjects that remain little discussed in her home region: sexuality, queerness, womanhood and mental health. The series records resistance conducted through muscle, posture and gaze.

Yayoi Kusama

Amsterdam is the final stop for the Yayoi Kusama retrospective organised with the Fondation Beyeler and Museum Ludwig, which have already shown it in Basel and Cologne. The Stedelijk’s version surveys more than seven decades of work, from early paintings made in Matsumoto through the happenings and performances of her New York years to recent production from Tokyo. Paintings, sculpture, drawings, collages and fashion all figure, alongside historic pieces never before seen in Europe and new works made for the occasion. One of her best-known installations returns here in a form built specially for the show. Kusama is 97.

A Chair and You

One hundred and fifty chairs by 124 designers take the stage at the Kunsthal, drawn from the collection of Thierry Barbier-Mueller and staged by the late director Robert Wilson as theatre of light, sound and scenography. Four environments reframe the everyday object, one of them a riot of colour inspired by Jackson Pollock, others stripped to modernist calm. The Geneva collection, built from the late 1990s, holds over 650 works, with Ettore Sottsass, Ron Arad, Donald Judd and Niki de Saint Phalle among its makers. Fondation Musée Barbier-Mueller and mudac Lausanne co-produce.

Henk Helmantel. In een nieuw licht

Walls and later additions come out of Museum Catharijneconvent to expose the medieval monastery beneath, a setting rebuilt around the paintings of Henk Helmantel. The Dutch realist (born 1945) shows his contemplative still lifes and church interiors beside medieval sculptures chosen by the painter himself, some from his private collection and some from the museum’s own. Reflections in glass vessels, arrangements of onions and quiet monastery views share a northern light and an exacting precision. The organisers describe the whole as a Gesamtkunstwerk, architecture included.

Van Gogh, All Our Paintings

Not since 1984 have all 88 of the Kröller-Müller’s Van Gogh paintings been shown together. Assembled largely by the museum’s founder, Helene Kröller-Müller, between 1908 and 1930, the collection reappears in full, arranged around the three virtues Van Gogh named in his first sermon as a trainee preacher in 1876: faith, hope and love. His preaching career was brief; the values outlasted it in paint. The Potato Eaters, Terrace of a Café at Night and The Sower all hang here, and a tactile display of Bridge at Arles lets blind visitors feel the picture.

Bart van der Leck / Charley Toorop

What Bart van der Leck and Charley Toorop shared was a conviction that art could better society; what they made of it could hardly have differed more. The Kröller-Müller sets the two friends on opposite sides of one exhibition, drawn from holdings that Helene Kröller-Müller bought from both artists on the advice of Henk Bremmer. Van der Leck pares farmers, miners and dock workers down to lines and planes of primary colour, while Toorop paints labourers and outsiders with raw, unsparing realism. Between them hangs her group portrait of Bremmer’s circle, with Van der Leck placed at its centre.

🇪🇸 Exhibition in Spain

Kenny Scharf

Expect fantastical creatures, cartoon faces and colour at full volume. The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza devotes an exhibition to Kenny Scharf as part of its programme around the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Born in Los Angeles in 1958, Scharf came up through New York’s East Village scene of the 1980s beside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, with Andy Warhol as mentor, and helped carry painting onto the street. Surrealism and popular culture feed the work, which takes in murals, sculpture, installations, performance and fashion, all aimed at flattening art’s hierarchies.

🇨🇭 Exhibitions in Switzerland

Van Gogh, Hodler, and a Cabriolet: The Collector and Pioneer Gertrud Dübi-Müller

A Van Gogh portrait, seventeen Hodler likenesses and a Piccard-Pictet motor car mark out the life of Gertrud Dübi-Müller (1888–1980), the Solothurn collector, photographer and mountaineer at the centre of this show in the Neubau. Around 80 works retrace how she built one of Switzerland’s foremost collections, starting from Van Gogh’s Portrait of Charles-Elzéard Trabuc and reaching Cézanne, Klimt and Matisse. Her own camera recorded artist friends, dirigible rides and a Matterhorn ascent. Unpublished documents and hand-painted postcards sent by her artist friends complete the portrait of a pioneer at the wheel.

Zilla Leutenegger: Spaces Between

Projected figures wander through drawn rooms in Zilla Leutenegger’s Spaces Between at Museum Tinguely. The Swiss artist (born 1968) combines mural drawing with video projection into what she calls video drawings, and the ten multimedia installations shown here, joined by monotypes, read as fragments of mysteriously inhabited architecture. Her alter ego reads, waits and observes, favouring atmospheric states over storylines. Curator Andres Pardey sets these quiet projections against the clatter of the Tinguely machines nearby, so that movement, light and space meet from opposite directions.

Evergreens: Selected Works from the Collection

In Evergreens, the Kunsthaus hangs Monet’s water lilies near Warhol’s soup can and lets a Tinguely sculpture keep company with a painting by H.R. Giger. Some 800 square metres of the Chipperfield building hold collection works made between 1622 and 1998, arranged by chronology and theme to spring unexpected pairings: Monet with Hodler, Gauguin and Bonnard among them. Albert Anker, Heidi Bucher, Marlow Moss, Cindy Sherman and Sophie Taeuber-Arp also figure. Selected Zurich residents add personal commentaries explaining what individual works in the show mean to them.

Collection Dialogue Sylvie Fleury & Shamiran Istifan: She-Devils on Wheels Angels on Heels

A feminist automobile club parks at the Migros Museum. Sylvie Fleury’s She-Devils on Wheels – Headquarters of 1997, unseen in public for two decades, restages her answer to the male preserves of motoring as a statement of self-empowerment. The collection work meets new pieces by Shamiran Istifan, whose practice draws on cultural codes of everyday life, feminist narratives handed down between women, and questions of class and belonging. Between the two Swiss artists, a generation apart, the dialogue on feminist expression stretches from the 1990s to the present day.

Nicole L’Huillier: Canción de Amor

How can art generate resonance? Nicole L’Huillier puts the question physically, through participatory sound installations in which listening and bodily presence cannot be separated. The Chilean artist builds communal spaces where visitors produce and share vibration rather than observe from a distance, and Canción de Amor extends the Migros Museum’s commitment to art as collective engagement. A second question shadows the first: how can we give without expecting anything in return? The show runs alongside the Fleury and Istifan collection dialogue, which opens at the museum the same day.

The Body Within Abstraction

Museum Haus Konstruktiv marks its 40th anniversary by putting the body back into abstraction. Eight modern and contemporary positions carry the argument: Heidi Bucher, Eva Fàbregas, Kimsooja, Dóra Maurer, Bruce Nauman, Steven Parrino, Chiharu Shiota and Franz West. Between them, the group brings together sculpture, installation and performance-based work, each approaching the corporeal as both a concept and a visual strategy within abstract practice. Sabine Schaschl curates the anniversary exhibition at the former power station on Limmatstrasse, the country’s leading house for constructive and concrete art.

MAMCO x SaSA: Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

Beneath Geneva’s old town, MAMCO instals Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige in the newly opened Site Archéologique Saint-Antoine. Three interconnected series burrow into subterranean time: Palimpsests joins drone footage to microscopic imagery of excavations, the Time Capsules turn drilled core samples of rock, clay and artefacts into sculpture, and the Trilogies run parallel narratives in photography, drawing and text. Cities buried beneath cities become the subject, along with the cycles of rupture and regeneration that put them there. MAMCO’s director Lionel Bovier curates the off-site collaboration.

Charles Blanc-Gatti. The Colours of Sound

Bach and Ravel supplied the scores; Charles Blanc-Gatti painted them. The Lausanne-born painter and filmmaker (1890–1966), trained in science and music, co-founded the Association of Musicalist Artists in 1932 and spent his career transcribing the vibrations of sound into light and colour. He patented a Chromophonic Orchestra pairing concerts with light projections in 1933 and realised the idea in the 1939 film Chromophony. The MCBA holds over forty of his paintings, works on paper and notebooks, nine of the canvases acquired as recently as 2023.

Edouard Chapallaz

Stoneware and glaze fill Le carré, mudac’s new 90-square-metre space, in a tribute to Edouard Chapallaz, one of the leading figures of twentieth-century Swiss and European ceramics. Drawn from the museum’s collection with loans from the Musées Barbier-Mueller and the Fondation Baur, the exhibition follows nearly seven decades of pursuit of the perfect form, shaped by slowness, attention to material and respect for natural processes. Earth, fire and the surrounding landscape run through the work. An unpublished monograph with archives and family testimonies accompanies the show.

3 x 2: Focus on Winterthur

Six regional artists, three cabinet rooms, two artists at a time: the second edition of 3 x 2 rethinks the Kunst Museum Winterthur’s December Exhibition tradition at Reinhart am Stadtgarten. Instead of a group show of ten or twelve names, each participant receives a room of their own, selected from around thirty portfolios that experts drew from an open regional call. The line-up emerges progressively over 2026, keeping an element of suspense in play. Konrad Bitterli and Andrea Lutz lead the curatorial team behind the experiment.

Jutta Koether

Villa Flora hands its walls to Jutta Koether, who emerged from Cologne’s Neoexpressionist circle in the 1980s and countered its male-dominated painting with gestural brushwork, the female body and pop-cultural borrowings. Now working between New York and Berlin, the German artist (born 1958) moves across painting, performance, music and publishing, building a counternarrative to the canon of modern painting. In Winterthur she engages the early French modernism collected by Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser at the villa after 1900, meeting the house’s history on her own terms.

Modernism Reloaded: Monet to Mondrian – Bailly to Baer

From Monet’s water lilies to Mondrian’s geometry, the Kunst Museum Winterthur rehangs the core of its modernist collection Beim Stadthaus. The route runs from Impressionism through Cubism, Surrealism and Constructivism to the post-war years, taking in Van Gogh’s postal worker, Klee’s Blooming, Giacometti and Morandi. Women hold equal billing this time: Alice Bailly, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Meret Oppenheim, Verena Loewensberg and Maria Lassnig all appear. The rehang credits the collectors whose purchases built the holdings, the Hahnlosers, Richard Bühler, Heinrich Wolfer and the Friedrich-Jezlers among them.

Samuel Guerrero. Sol Roto

You will not need a ticket for the newest offering at Kunsthalle Basel: it appears on the outside of the building. Since 1996 the institution’s rear wall has hosted a rotating series of solo presentations in public space, and for the coming year it goes to Samuel Guerrero’s Sol Roto, or “Broken Sun”, curated by the Barcelona art space Cordova. Born in 1997, Guerrero works where nature, technology and perception meet, using wood, concrete, light and sound to make pieces in which living processes and machine logic drive one another.

From Darkness to Light. Genevan Painting (1444–1782)

It has taken a joint campaign of study and restoration with the University of Geneva to put the MAH’s Genevan paintings on show. The result unfolds in three acts over eighteen months, with works added as the display advances. Act one gathers the little that survived the Protestant iconoclasm of August 1535, including Konrad Witz’s shutters of 1444 and an altarpiece fragment rediscovered in storage. Later chapters follow painting’s secular turn after the Reformation and its flowering in the Enlightenment, when Robert Gardelle, Jean-Étienne Liotard and Jens Juel portrayed Geneva’s high society. A catalogue raisonné records all 82 works.

Rachel Marks x MAH x Pozzi

A future acquisition is taking shape at the MAH. Rachel Marks, an American in Paris, has begun a research residency there, drawing above all on the Pozzi holdings for a commission that will enter the permanent collection. She works chiefly in recycled books and paper, turning discarded pages into forms that recall tree rings and flames. As a foretaste, her Kiiro, whose title means “yellow” in Japanese, is on show in the gamMAH space: a swirl of rolled paper inspired by Japan’s volcanic landscapes, seen earlier in Symfolia, her installation for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Kaari Upson. Dollhouse – A Retrospective

Death cut Kaari Upson’s career short in 2021. MASI Lugano now stages the first full retrospective of the American artist, produced with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk and Kunsthalle Mannheim. Sculpture, video, drawing and installation circle her enduring subjects: identity, the body, intimacy, illness and loss. The show reaches back to the Larry Project, her fixation on an unknown neighbour’s salvaged belongings, with which she made her name, and includes THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE, the monumental installation first seen at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Jannis Kounellis: Io sono un pittore

“I am a painter,” Jannis Kounellis insisted throughout a career conducted largely in steel, coal, jute and fire. The Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati takes him at his word with the first exhibition to read his work through painting, organised with the Archivio Kounellis in Rome. More than 35 pieces follow the Greek artist, who died in Rome in 2017, from the late 1950s to 2014, arranged as a constellation linking matter and weight, language and signs, instead of a chronology. The aim is a broader, more radical view of an artist usually filed under Arte Povera.

🇬🇧 Exhibitions in the United Kingdom

The Bayeux Tapestry

Nine centuries after English embroiderers stitched it, the Bayeux Tapestry crosses the Channel again. Lent by France for the first time since its making around 1072–77, the 70-metre embroidery recounts the Norman Conquest and the Battle of Hastings while recording the castles, ships, clothing and food of eleventh-century life. Scholars credit a Norman patron and English needlework guided by Canterbury manuscript drawings. The museum shows it flat under low light, on a one-way route of roughly 40 minutes. Tickets to December are already sold out; 2027 slots follow later.

Drawing Inspiration

Thirteen sheets make up the entire show at the Burrell Collection this autumn. Drawing Inspiration gathers works by Ingres, Manet and Millet, among them Manet’s The Spanish Dancer, Don Mariano Camprubi of around 1862 and his café study At the Café, alongside William Orpen’s Portrait of a Lady. The display treats drawing as a way of seeing, making and reflecting on the world, and joins The Big Draw Festival 2026 with its emphasis on process over finished product. Viewing slots are free and bookable; artist-led workshops carry a charge.