New exhibitions opening in January 2026: the highlights

As we prepare to step into 2026, the art world is taking a moment to catch its breath. The first half of January will remain relatively quiet, offering a brief pause before the cultural calendar accelerates. But as the month progresses, the season wakes up with a remarkable run of openings.

The highlights are worth the wait. In Basel, the Fondation Beyeler dedicates its spaces to Paul Cezanne for the first time , while London’s British Museum explores the royal history of Hawaiʻi. In Amsterdam, the Rembrandt House Museum offers a hands-on look at the Dutch master’s methods.

Contemporary voices are just as vital. The Louisiana Museum in Denmark presents a fresh take on Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Mona Hatoum returns to Milan with a site-specific takeover of Fondazione Prada. It is a promising start to the year, giving us plenty of reasons to look forward to the weeks ahead.

Kunsti team hopes this selection helps you map out your first cultural trips of the year. It feels good to be back in the rhythm of discovery, and we look forward to sharing more with you as the year unfolds.

🇦🇹 Exhibitions in Austria

Sandra Mujinga: Skin to Skin

For her first museum show in Austria, Norwegian artist Sandra Mujinga transforms the central hall of Belvedere 21 into a spectral, sensory landscape with Skin to Skin. At the exhibition’s core stands an uncanny assembly of 55 larger-than-life figures — hooded, hybrid forms reminiscent of both deep-sea creatures and digital avatars — that interrogate the double-edged sword of visibility in our surveillance age. Amplified by mirrored surfaces and a thrumming electronic score, the installation draws on the concept of the “doppelgänger” to suggest that in a world of constant exposure, the ultimate survival strategy might just be blending into the shadows.

PREMIERE! The Oesterreichische Nationalbank Collection

The Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB) has long been a quiet powerhouse behind Austria’s cultural scene, having laid the financial groundwork for the Leopold Museum itself in 1994. Now, the museum highlights this partnership with Premiere!, the first comprehensive exhibition of the bank’s art holdings. The presentation surveys Austrian artistic production from 1918 to the present, moving from the sharp focus of New Objectivity — featuring works by Rudolf Wacker and Franz Sedlacek — to the abstract experiments of the post-war era. Curated dialogues between generations are a key feature, juxtaposing Maria Lassnig with Tobias Pils, and Svenja Deininger with Ernst Caramelle, to trace the structural evolution of the country’s visual language.

🇧🇪 Exhibition in Belgium

Els Nouwen: OXOMORON

In OXOMORON, M-Museum Leuven presents a compelling survey of Antwerp-based artist Els Nouwen, whose work deftly eludes easy classification. Beginning with photographic source material — culled from media, art history, or her own archives — Nouwen transfers these images to canvas with clinical precision before systematically disrupting them through overpainting, scratching, and erasure. The resulting canvases hover uneasily between figuration and abstraction, exposing the “ragged seams of perception” in an era defined by polished, high-definition imagery. Curated by Ralph Collier, the exhibition invites viewers to engage in a process of “slow looking,” revealing how the tension between order and chaos can turn the act of observation into a participatory event.

🇩🇰 Exhibitions in Denmark

Foersom & Hiort-Lorenzen: Laboratorium

Designmuseum Denmark continues its Laboratorium series — a programme dedicated to unpicking the design process from initial spark to finished object — by stepping inside the workshop of Johannes Foersom and Peter Hiort-Lorenzen. Active for more than five decades, the duo merges the practical precision of their backgrounds as a cabinetmaker and a ship’s carpenter with a long tenure as educators at the School of Arts and Crafts. The exhibition functions as an open studio, displaying classic full-scale drawings on manifold paper, scale models, and prototypes to illustrate the rigorous development cycles behind their extensive furniture portfolio.

Belongings: Affection as a Design Strategy

Designmuseum Denmark approaches the sustainability debate from a refreshing psychological angle with Belongings: Affection as a Design Strategy. Produced in collaboration with the Danish Design Center and artist Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, the exhibition posits that emotional durability is just as crucial as the physical kind. The show takes the form of an immersive installation where visitors are invited to bring a personal item and — via AI technology — enter into a literal dialogue with it. By giving a voice to the inanimate, the museum explores how deepening our relationships with objects might be the most effective way to curb our throwaway culture.

Hannah Toticki: Hard Water Soft Pipes

At Møstings, Danish artist Hannah Toticki unpacks the hidden infrastructure of our most vital resource with Hard Water Soft Pipes. Transforming the venue into an immersive landscape of glass and industrial piping, the exhibition renders the usually invisible circulation of water — from the city’s subterranean networks to the human body — suddenly tangible. Toticki intertwines these modern technical systems with a reinterpretation of the Naiads, the freshwater nymphs of Greek mythology, creating a sensory dialogue between ancient folklore and modern utility to question our fragile dependence on the natural world.

Memoryscapes

For the second installment of its Architecture Connecting series, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art turns its gaze to the intersection of memory and design with Memoryscapes. The exhibition spotlights two practices — Beijing’s DnA_Design and Architecture and the Paris-based Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane — that treat the past not as a static relic, but as a vital construction material. Xu Tiantian employs what she calls “architectural acupuncture” to revitalize rural Chinese traditions, while Tsuyoshi Tane applies an “Archaeology of the Future” to high-profile projects like the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Together, they demonstrate how excavating local narratives can be the most effective way to engineer the future.

Basquiat — Headstrong

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art brings a fresh perspective to a global icon with Basquiat — Headstrong, the artist’s first solo presentation in Scandinavia. Stepping away from the dense text and symbols that typically define his oeuvre, the exhibition concentrates exclusively on his large-scale oilstick drawings of the human head produced between 1981 and 1983. Many of these works were kept by Basquiat for his own private collection, offering an intimate look at his study of facial structure — ranging from anatomical skulls to highly stylised masks — as a vessel for raw emotional energy.

Kirsten Justesen: Countess Danner

MAPS Museum turns its attention to the intersection of sculpture and social history with Countess Danner, an exhibition dedicated to Kirsten Justesen’s monumental tribute to one of Denmark’s most formidable historical figures. The show delves into the artistic labour behind the four-metre-tall bronze work, which honors Louise Rasmussen — the milliner who defied social convention to marry a king and found a lasting refuge for women. Through a collection of sketches, scale models, and archival documents, visitors can trace how Justesen translated the legacy of this 19th-century trailblazer into a permanent fixture of the contemporary cityscape.

🇫🇷 Exhibitions in France

A Total Art: Drawings from the Vienna Secession

Architectural ambition defines the Musée d’Orsay’s upcoming exhibition, A Total Art: Drawings from the Vienna Secession. Anchored by a major new acquisition — Josef Hoffmann’s 1911 design for the Austrian Pavilion in Rome — the show illuminates the drafting table as a site of radical experimentation for Viennese Modernism. Displayed alongside forty-two works by Otto Wagner’s pupils, including Emil Hoppe and Marcel Kammerer, Hoffmann’s graphic masterwork illustrates the pursuit of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), revealing how these architects envisioned a world where the boundaries between structure and ornament were fully dissolved.

Beaubourg Competition 1971: A transformation of architecture

The Centre Pompidou revisits its own genesis with Concours Beaubourg 1971, an exhibition hosted at the Académie d’Architecture that dissects the pivotal moment when the museum’s radical form was first conceived. Drawing from a pool of 681 original entries submitted to the international jury — presided over by Jean Prouvé — the show moves beyond the winning design by Piano, Rogers, and Franchini to survey the broader architectural zeitgeist of the early 1970s. Through a curated selection of previously unseen plans, models, and photographs, the presentation illustrates how the competition became a battleground for conflicting ideologies — from Beaux-Arts traditionalism to avant-garde structuralism — ultimately reshaping the discipline and the profession for decades to come.

Time Reversed: Through the Ages of Life

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg (MAMCS) reverses the clock with Le Temps retourné, a curated journey through human existence that begins at the end. Visitors enter through an “in memoriam” space and travel backwards through old age, adolescence, and childhood, finally arriving at birth. Drawing from the museum’s own holdings — with works ranging from Renoir and Muybridge to Marlene Dumas and Sarah Jones — the exhibition captures bodies and faces frozen in specific phases of life. Curated by Estelle Pietrzyk, the show also weaves in pieces from across the Strasbourg museum network, creating a dialogue between eras that underscores the universality of the human timeline.

🇩🇪 Exhibitions in Germany

Rico Reframed. New Perspectives on Puhlmann’s Fashion Photography

At the Museum für Fotografie, the legacy of Rico Puhlmann undergoes a radical stress test with Rico Reframed. Presented in parallel with the museum’s comprehensive Puhlmann retrospective, this showcase invites fifteen students from the Lette Verein Berlin to engage directly with the photographer’s archive. The emerging artists dismantle the polished, sculptural elegance of Puhlmann’s mid-century work, using it instead as a raw material to explore contemporary realities — from queer identity and non-normative beauty to the fluid nature of street style. Curated by Katja Böhlau and Ina Schoof, the project bridges the gap between the 1950s and today, demonstrating how a historical archive can serve as a potent catalyst for new visual languages.

Kulturforum NOW!

The Kulturforum Berlin — that modernist archipelago of solitary masterpieces by Scharoun and Mies van der Rohe — has long suffered from the lack of a cohesive urban glue. With Kulturforum: NOW!, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin confronts this disconnect by handing the drawing board to the next generation. Showcasing ten visionary projects by architecture students from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), the exhibition reimagines the site’s underused intermediate spaces as vibrant hubs for urban life. Mentored by Professor Bettina Götz and atelier le balto, these proposals move beyond mere infill to suggest how landscape and structure might finally knit this fragmented cultural powerhouse into a unified whole.

Style — Paper — Scissors. Lette Graphics × Johanna Beckmann

The Kunstbibliothek facilitates a creative collision between 19th-century craft and contemporary graphics with Style — Paper — Scissors. In this collaborative showcase, students from the Lette Verein Berlin — the historic institution where women first gained access to formal arts training 150 years ago — engage directly with the work of Johanna Beckmann (1868–1941), a virtuoso of the silhouette technique. By transposing Beckmann’s stark, nature-inspired cuts into modern formats ranging from cyanotypes and silkscreen posters to digital animation, the exhibition reveals how the rigorous simplicity of the paper cut remains a vital source of graphic invention.

Fashion x Craft: Echoes of Tomorrow. Handcrafted Fashion at the Gemäldegalerie

The Gemäldegalerie becomes an unlikely runway for sustainable innovation with Fashion x Craft: Echoes of Tomorrow. This exhibition is the culmination of a year-long initiative by the Fashion Council Germany, eBay, and The King’s Foundation, challenging five emerging designers — collectively known as the V-Collective — to fuse traditional analogue skills with futuristic aesthetics. After residencies in Berlin and Highgrove where they mastered everything from bobbin lace-making to metalwork, the group presents a 24-piece collection crafted entirely from deadstock materials. Set against a raw, studio-style installation that contrasts sharply with the museum’s polished halls, the show explores how fading techniques can be preserved not as nostalgia, but as vital tools for the next generation of design.

Gallery Looks. Fashion Staging at the Gemäldegalerie

Gallery Looks explores what happens when modern fashion meets classic art. The exhibition features photos and videos from a special project where models wore German designs right next to the museum’s Old Master paintings. Visitors can see new clothes by designers like Karen Jessen displayed alongside the historic artworks that connect to them. It also highlights a unique tribute by Dior’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson, who liked the museum’s architecture so much that he built a copy of its rooms for a fashion show in Paris.

Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca: The Tunnels We Diga

The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents a major solo show by Brazilian-Irish duo Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca. Known for working with people who usually create art outside of museums, they make videos and installations that mix documentary with performance. A highlight of this exhibition is a brand new work about the “Straight Edge” music scene in Germany — a subculture of hardcore punk that avoids alcohol and drugs. The show explores how different groups use music and dance to express who they are.

🇮🇹 Exhibition in Italy

Franco Battiato. Un’altra vita

Five years after his death, MAXXI hosts Un’altra vita (Another Life), an exhibition dedicated to the Italian artist Franco Battiato. The show looks beyond his famous songs to explore his work as a filmmaker, writer, and thinker. It is organized into seven sections that trace his entire career — from his early experimental music and huge pop success to his deep interest in spirituality. At the center of the exhibition is a special octagonal room designed for immersive listening, where visitors can focus entirely on the sound. The display also includes rare photos, posters, and personal objects that tell the story of his creative life.

Mona Hatoum: Over, under and in between

Fondazione Prada’s upcoming exhibition, Over, Under and In Between, sees the return of Mona Hatoum to Milan with a site-specific project designed for the Cisterna building. Set to open in January 2026, the show features three large-scale installations that reactivate the former distillery’s industrial architecture, using archetypal forms — the web, the map, and the grid — to address themes of instability and confinement. In the entrance, a delicate spiderweb made of hand-blown glass spheres hangs overhead, while the central room features a floor map of the world composed of thousands of loose red glass marbles, deliberately ignoring political borders. The final room houses all of a quiver, a motorised metal grid that endlessly collapses and rebuilds itself, symbolising a permanent state of precariousness.

🇱🇮 Exhibition in Liechtenstein

Körper — Raum — Volumen (Body — Space — Volume)

The Kunstraum Engländerbau in Vaduz presents Körper – Raum – Volumen, a group exhibition drawn from the Cultural Foundation Liechtenstein’s collection. Curated by Doris Bühler and Elmar Gangl, the show features over 70 works by more than 30 artists — including FauZie As’Ad, Evelyne Bermann, and Georg Malin — to explore how art occupies and defines physical space. While the focus is on sculpture and three-dimensional forms, the display also includes drawings, photography, and tapestries. This exhibition offers a rare public view of a collection that is typically distributed across government offices and embassies, serving as a "living" archive of contemporary art from the region.

🇳🇱 Exhibitions in the Netherlands

​​An Ode to Printmaking

The Van Gogh Museum highlights a turning point in graphic art with An Ode to Printmaking, a focused exhibition centered on the rare 19th-century album L’Estampe originale. Opening in January 2026, the show displays around 35 prints from this complete set — one of only three in the world — featuring works by masters like Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gauguin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition explores how publisher André Marty elevated printmaking from simple reproduction to high art by demanding that artists be personally involved in the production process. Beyond the technical innovation of color lithography, the collection offers a snapshot of late 19th-century society, revealing how women were depicted for the gaze of the album’s primarily male collectors.

​​Rembrandts Masterclass

The Rembrandt House Museum invites visitors to become apprentices in Rembrandt’s Masterclass. Taking place in the home where the Dutch master taught for nearly twenty years, this interactive exhibition breaks down his genius into five hands-on lessons: Observation, Technique, Emotion, Experimentation, and Marketing. Visitors can try sketching his famous elephant, Hansken, or directing a dramatic scene to understand his composition. The experience ends with a viewing of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deijman, a masterpiece on loan from the Amsterdam Museum.

Jan Dibbets 1966-1976 — Toward Another Photography

H’ART Museum presents the first major Amsterdam show for Jan Dibbets since 1972, focusing on the decade when he swapped painting for the camera. Curated by Erik Verhagen, the exhibition uses archival documents to place Dibbets in the global rise of Conceptual Art and Land Art during the 1960s and 70s. It traces how he helped redefine photography — moving it away from simple documentation toward a new artistic language.

Make Some Noise: Desire. Stage. Change.

The Van Abbemuseum concludes its Positions series with Make Some Noise: Desire. Stage. Change., transforming the galleries into a dynamic space for sound and action. Curated by Zippora Elders, the show features artists like Simon Fujiwara and New Theater Hollywood who use the body to express desire and courage. Through a mix of sculpture and live performance — including a procession by Felisha Carénage — the exhibition breaks the traditional silence of the museum to create a “resonant chamber” for new ideas.

🇪🇸 Exhibitions in Spain

Andrea Canepa: Bundle

The Museo Reina Sofía presents Bundle, a large-scale intervention by Andrea Canepa that wraps the exterior of the Palacio de Cristal. While the building undergoes restoration, Canepa transforms it into a “contemporary praxinoscope” inspired by ancient Paracas funeral bundles. Using the glass facade to display a cyclical sequence of textiles, she turns a protective cover into a moving meditation on memory and ritual that shifts as visitors walk around it.

Elena Asins: Antigone

Marking the tenth anniversary of her death, the Museo Picasso Málaga pays tribute to Elena Asins, a key figure in Spanish conceptual art known for her rigorous use of math and algorithms. The exhibition focuses on her final major work, Antigone — a stark installation on loan from the Reina Sofía — shown alongside a related audiovisual piece. By stripping the Greek myth down to abstract geometric forms, Asins explores the "internal structure" of tragedy rather than just telling the story.

🇨🇭 Exhibitions in Switzerland

Cezanne

For the first time in its history, the Fondation Beyeler devotes a full exhibition to Paul Cezanne, a pivotal figure in its own collection. Focused on the artist’s final and most influential period, the show gathers around 80 oil paintings and watercolors — spanning still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and bather scenes. It highlights how Cezanne’s radical approach to form and color broke away from tradition, laying the groundwork for modern art and influencing generations of painters who followed.

Diambe

Kunsthalle Basel presents the largest institutional solo show to date for Brazilian artist Diambe. Working across sculpture, painting, and film, Diambe uses organic materials like plant dyes, beeswax, and foodstuffs to create works that explore the body, territory, and colonial history. The exhibition features a new film and a series of “choreographed” sculptures that mimic the movement of bees, weaving a narrative about loss, rebirth, and the natural world.

Colour: Art in the Park-Villa

Museum Rietberg presents Colour at the Park-Villa Rieter, an exhibition split between Indian painting and historical photography. One section decodes the symbolic and technical use of pigment in Indian art, offering new insights into traditional workshop practices. The other, titled Everything is Illuminated, gathers hand-coloured prints and early film from 1880 to 1980 to explore how color shaped the visual history of Africa and Asia.

Observatories: Carte Blanche with John M Armleder

The Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH) gives carte blanche to Genevan artist John M Armleder for Observatoires. Armleder transforms the museum into an immersive maze of lights, mirrors, and unexpected objects — including a gallery of animals. The exhibition challenges visitors to simply “observe” and experience the institution in a completely new way.

Fokus. Hans Fischli (1909–1989)

The Zentrum Paul Klee highlights the work of Hans Fischli, a Swiss architect and former Bauhaus student of Paul Klee. The exhibition centers on his Zellengebilde (Cell Formations) — a series of drawings created while he was in prison for refusing military service. Curators Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen connect these works of confinement to three of his architectural projects, exploring the political atmosphere of the 1930s and 40s.

Jack Goldstein. Pictures, Sounds and Movies

The Kunst Museum Winterthur presents the first major Swiss retrospective of Jack Goldstein, a key figure of the “Pictures Generation.” Known for appropriating images from mass media, Goldstein moved from performance and film to spectacular airbrush paintings of war scenes and natural phenomena. By having assistants execute these works, he removed his own hand to mimic the slick, distant look of advertising. The exhibition gathers his films, records, and large-scale paintings to explore his lifelong focus on how media shapes our perception of reality.

🇬🇧 Exhibitions in the United Kingdom

Hawaiʻi: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans

The British Museum explores the history of the Hawaiian Kingdom (1795 — 1893) in Hawaiʻi: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans. Marking 200 years since the royal visit of King Liholiho and Queen Kamāmalu to London, the exhibition focuses on the diplomatic ties between the islands and Britain. Visitors can see rare feather cloaks (ʻahu ʻula), helmets, and intricate wood carvings displayed alongside contemporary works by Native Hawaiian artists, telling a story of cultural resilience and independence.

Turner in January

The National Galleries of Scotland upholds a century-old tradition with its annual presentation of Turner in January. Since 1900, a collection of 38 watercolours by J.M.W. Turner has been displayed only during the year’s darkest month. This timing honors the bequest of Henry Vaughan, who stipulated the works be shown when natural light is low to prevent fading. The 2026 edition also features a special loan from the Tate: Turner’s Norham Castle, Sunrise, offering a rare chance to see this masterpiece alongside the permanent collection.

Andy Warhol: Pop Icon

Lakeside Arts, in partnership with Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, presents Andy Warhol: Pop Icon, a survey of the American artist who redefined modern art during a time of social and political upheaval. The exhibition features iconic portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor alongside early drawings from the 1950s and his lesser-known “stitched photographs”. By exploring themes of fame, consumerism, and mortality, the show highlights how Warhol’s work continues to challenge artistic conventions.

Cover photo by Ali Inay on Unsplash