All the must-see exhibitions of 2026

Founded in 1996, the Shanghai Biennale is the first international contemporary art biennial in mainland China and one of the most influential in Asia. Since 2012 it has been permanently hosted at the Power Station of Art, maintaining a strong connection with the city, promoting cultural innovation, and observing social change and new forms of knowledge production. Today, it stands as a key platform for international dialogue and exchange in contemporary art.
This year’s edition, curated by Kitty Scott, Strategic Director of Fogo Island Arts, will take place from November 8, 2025 to March 31, 2026 at the Power Station of Art. It will bring together more than 250 works by 67 artists and collectives from China and around the world, drawing inspiration from recent scientific discoveries about the interactions between different forms of life.

The Island is Hito Steyerl’s site-specific project for the Osservatorio in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The exhibition weaves together narratives marked by the motif of flooding to address authoritarian shifts driven by artificial intelligence, the climate crisis, and the pressures placed on scientific research. At its core is a new film created for the project, expanded into a video installation with objects, structures, and interviews. Combining documentary, science fiction, and references to quantum physics, Steyerl reorganizes time and space to explore new perceptual and narrative possibilities.

In the exhibition D’un seul souffle, Claire Tabouret presents life-size models, sketches, and preparatory studies for the six stained-glass windows she created for Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Winner in December 2024 of the competition organized by the Ministry of Culture in partnership with Atelier Simon-Marq, the artist offers a glimpse behind the scenes of this exceptional commission.
Each model is a full-scale reproduction of a bay in the cathedral’s south aisle, produced using monotype—a technique Tabouret frequently employs—enhanced with stencils for rosettes and decorative motifs. The project respects the building’s neutral light, creating a gentle transition with Viollet-le-Duc’s stained glass while introducing bright, balanced colors.

With Grottesco, Eva Jospin transforms Galerie 9 into an immersive world of more than fifteen works, including new pieces created specifically for the exhibition. The title evokes the legendary rediscovery of the Domus Aurea, where the “grotesque” first emerged as a blend of vegetal, architectural and fantastical forms. For years, the motif of the grotto—alongside the forest—has shaped Jospin’s practice, expressing hidden depths, unfolding spaces, and proliferating patterns. The exhibition unfolds like a landscape to be explored step by step: from a promontory and a cenotaph to a dome-shaped grotto, through ruins and troglodyte dwellings, culminating in a dense, enveloping forest. Nothing is revealed at once; the visitor must retrace their path, discovering shifting perspectives and recurring motifs where architecture merges with nature and materials blur into one another. Among the new works, embroidered bas-reliefs stand out: hybrids of textile and sculpture that turn embroidery into volume and architectural structure. These pieces mark a new direction in Jospin’s practice, expanding her exploration toward increasingly hybrid forms.

New Humans: Memories of the Future will inaugurate the New Museum’s expanded building with an exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes. New Humans will trace a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and social changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures.

Over, under and in between is a site-specific project by Mona Hatoum for Fondazione Prada, comprising three installations that reflect on instability, vulnerability, and precarity. Drawing on recurring motifs in her work — the web, the map, and the grid — Hatoum transforms the Cisterna into a series of charged environments. A suspended network of glass spheres, a world map made of loose red beads, and an oscillating metal structure each evoke tension, fragility, and the shifting nature of experience.

Benni Bosetto (Merate, 1987; lives in Milan) develops a practice that brings together drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance to explore identity as something fluid and constantly transforming. Her work draws on literary, anthropological, popular, and psychoanalytic sources, investigating gestures, rituals, and altered states of perception linked to dreaming or meditation. At its core is the body, observed in its vulnerabilities and imaginative possibilities, alongside themes such as intimacy, care, rest, and sensuality. For her first major institutional exhibition, Bosetto transforms the Shed into a reinvented domestic environment inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca.

Bruce Conner (1933–2008), a key figure of American counterculture and a precursor of contemporary montage, is the focus of an exhibition bringing together seven of his most significant films. The presentation highlights his pioneering use of found footage, evident in works like A MOVIE (1958) and CROSSROADS (1976), where archival images become sharp meditations on violence, spectacle, and the power of the image. Alongside these landmark pieces are films built around music — Breakaway, Looking for Mushrooms, Mongoloid, America Is Waiting — which anticipated music video aesthetics long before their mainstream emergence. The exhibition culminates with THREE SCREEN RAY (2006), a striking visual trilogy projected across three synchronized screens. Together, these works reveal an artist who transformed discarded materials into new visions, incisively questioning American culture and our relationship with images.

This landmark exhibition surveys forty years of Tracey Emin’s practice, bringing together her most iconic works alongside pieces never shown before. Through painting, video, textiles, neon, writing, sculpture, and installation, Emin continues to push against boundaries, using the female body to probe passion, pain, and the possibility of healing. A defining figure of contemporary British art, Emin rose to prominence in the 1990s with works such as My Bed, which challenged conventional ideas of what art could be and blurred the line between private and public experience. The exhibition expands our understanding of her work, foregrounding its raw autobiographical force and her engagement with themes of love and trauma, while highlighting the enduring role of painting in her recent practice.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington will present Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection (February 27 – July 26, 2026), a major exhibition highlighting the pivotal contribution of women artists to abstract art from the postwar period to today. Featuring 80 works by 68 artists — including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Cecily Brown, Sheila Hicks, Julie Mehretu, Joan Mitchell, Wangechi Mutu, Faith Ringgold, Sarah Sze, and Kara Walker — the show showcases formal innovations, material experimentation, and intergenerational dialogues that have expanded the language of abstraction. Through paintings, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, and mixed-media works from the Shah Garg Collection, the exhibition underscores how women artists have used abstraction to address questions of identity, representation, and power. After previous iterations in New York, Berkeley, and St. Louis, this marks the exhibition’s first presentation within a women-focused institution.

Clair-Obscur brings together a selection of modern and contemporary artists from the Pinault Collection to explore how chiaroscuro continues to shape art today. The exhibition transforms the museum into a landscape of light and shadow, reflecting — with a nod to Agamben — on what remains hidden or in penumbra in our present. Highlights include works by Bruce Nauman, Victor Man, Bill Viola, and Pierre Huyghe, alongside a site-specific project by Laura Lamiel.

The Whitney Biennial — the Museum’s signature survey of contemporary American art — returns in March 2026 for its eighty-second edition. Founded in 1932 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the Biennial has long traced the evolving landscape of art in the United States and remains the longest-running exhibition of its kind, with more than 3,700 artists participating over the decades.

Opening on March 5, 2026, the exhibition will be the most extensive museum presentation of Carol Bove’s work to date. It traces twenty-five years of her career, from early drawings to new monumental metal and steel-tube “collage sculptures.” Bove will also intervene in Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda with subtle design adjustments that shift the viewer’s perception of the space.
Her practice, spanning diverse materials and approaches, is defined by a precise use of scale, color, and spatial relationships, creating perceptual experiences that — as she notes — “open the world.”

The exhibition explores the contemporary art scene of South Korea through the language of video art. Balancing technological experimentation and narrative urgency, a new generation of artists addresses themes of identity, memory, and the social transformations of a country suspended between tradition and hypermodernity.

For his first exhibition at the Serpentine, David Hockney presents new paintings made on an iPad during the pandemic, inviting viewers to slow down and rediscover the beauty of the everyday. At the heart of the show is A Year in Normandy, the ninety-metre-long frieze inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and shown in London for the first time — a sweeping portrayal of the seasons around his Normandy studio, now in dialogue with the landscape of Kensington Gardens.

The exhibition dedicated to Mark Rothko unfolds across Palazzo Strozzi and two key Renaissance sites in Florence — the Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana — highlighting the dialogue between the artist’s vision and the Italian tradition. Curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, it brings together works from the 1930s to 1970, many of them never before shown in Italy, thanks to loans from the artist’s family and major international collections.

Simon Fujiwara will transform Mudam into an immersive environment, placing his works within an exhibition design inspired by theme parks. Bringing together projects from the past seventeen years, this mid-career survey offers a comprehensive insight into his practice. Drawing on personal narratives as well as broader cultural phenomena, Fujiwara reflects on the mechanisms of history, art history, and architecture, revealing—with disarming humour and sharp criticality—their entanglement with contemporary advertising, entertainment, and online culture. The exhibition traces the evolution of his complex visual language, highlighting his distinctive ability to expose the absurdities and contradictions of the world we inhabit.

Cecily Brown presents paintings inspired by the Serpentine’s setting in Kensington Gardens, a place of personal significance for the artist. Nature, park life, and her recurring motifs — couples, woodland scenes, and uncanny walks — appear in new works shown alongside key paintings from 2001 onward. Picture Making is Brown’s first major institutional painting show in the UK since 2005, marking a symbolic return after thirty years in New York.

To mark the 90th birthday of Franco Vaccari (born 1936, Modena), Museion presents a major solo exhibition that, for the first time, places the artist’s immersive environments at the center of his practice. The show highlights the conceptual depth and international reach of Vaccari’s work, underscoring the pioneering nature of his participatory pieces and their striking relevance today. Visitors are invited to experience what Vaccari called the “concealment of the artwork”: a process in which the spontaneous actions of the public become an integral part of the piece itself. Developed from research by art critic and historian Luca Panaro — who co-curates the exhibition with Frida Carazzato — the project unfolds across two floors of the museum in a display designed by Fosbury Architecture.

At Palazzo Grassi, the Pinault Collection presents a significant group of works by Michael Armitage (Kenya, 1984) produced over the past decade. In these paintings, references to East Africa intertwine with Western mythologies and art-historical imagery, generating vivid compositions that also touch on aspects of Kenya’s recent history.
Bringing together paintings and drawings, the exhibition focuses on key themes in Armitage’s practice, including the relationship between political and personal narratives, mythology, and migration. Armitage creates a journey that weaves together memory, collective history, and symbolic imagery, offering visions that feel both grounded and dreamlike.

Opening at the National Gallery in May 2026, this will be the first major UK exhibition devoted to Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664). Bringing together around 50 paintings from international collections, the show traces the full range of his work — from monumental saints and powerful altarpieces to his celebrated still lifes. Renowned for his striking naturalism and emotional intensity, Zurbarán emerges as one of the key figures of 17th-century Spanish painting. The exhibition will later travel to the Musée du Louvre and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tate St Ives presenta la prima mostra museale nel Regno Unito dedicata ad Aleksandra Kasuba. Fuggita dalla Lituania dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale e trasferitasi negli Stati Uniti, Kasuba ha sviluppato in sei decenni una pratica che dal dipinto e dal mosaico evolve verso sculture e ambienti architettonici. Il suo lavoro trae ispirazione dalle forme della natura — conchiglie, rocce, vegetazione, organismi marini — riflettendo un interesse costante per il rapporto tra essere umano e ambiente.
Animata da uno spirito di sperimentazione, Kasuba immaginava modi alternativi di vivere e creare. Questo approccio è alla base delle sue collaborazioni negli anni Sessanta con il collettivo Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), che riuniva artisti, ingegneri e scienziati per esplorare nuove possibilità tra arte e innovazione.

The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Koyo Kouoh, will unfold under the theme In Minor Keys, which invites a reconsideration of the subtle, the marginal, and the unexpected in contemporary art. The 2026 edition will spotlight voices.

In a moment when certainty gives way to interpretation and ambiguity, Stan Douglas’s work feels particularly urgent. Since the late 1980s, he has used film, photography and multidisciplinary projects to examine how technology and media shape perception and collective memory. His practice challenges linear histories, revealing how the past is continually reconstructed through human intervention. This retrospective highlights Douglas’s impact on cinematic analysis, his experiments across media, and his influence on subsequent generations of artists. Music — especially jazz, a long-standing inspiration — often plays a key role in his work as a way to address issues of race, class and inequality. His new project Birth of a Nation investigates the links between flamenco and Spanish politics, showing how cultural forms can be reframed or appropriated by external forces. The exhibition is co-produced with Jeu de Paume, where it will be presented from February to May 2027.

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind celebrates over seventy years of the artist’s work in her first major museum exhibition in Southern California. Organized with Tate Modern, the show invites visitors to participate in many of Ono’s pieces, including Wish Trees for Los Angeles, which transforms The Broad’s olive trees into a collective installation dedicated to hope and desire. The exhibition features her celebrated “instruction works,” with original drafts of Grapefruit (1964) and live activations of participatory pieces. Materials from Ono and John Lennon’s peace campaigns are also included, along with iconic films and videos such as Cut Piece and BOTTOMS. Recent installations like Helmets (Pieces of Sky) and My Mommy is Beautiful complete the exhibition, reaffirming Ono’s vision of art as a shared gesture—one that fosters imagination, solidarity, and new possibilities.

The Fondation Beyeler will present a major exhibition dedicated to Pierre Huyghe (1962, Paris), one of today’s most innovative and influential artists. Conceived specifically for the museum, the show brings together newly created works and significant pieces from recent years. Huyghe is known for his boundary-defying practice, in which fiction and reality merge and cinematic, technological, biological, and digital elements form living, evolving situations. The exhibition invites viewers into the artist’s fascinating and unpredictable world, where new forms of subjectivity and perception can emerge over time.

For fifty years, Kenzi Shiokava transformed discarded materials into sculptures that merge carving, assemblage, and a deep sensitivity to the hidden vitality of objects. His first solo museum exhibition brings together more than fifty works from the 1970s to the 2000s, including carved wooden totems and box assemblages animated with found and natural elements. The show highlights the transcultural nature of his practice, which blends Japanese carving traditions, South Los Angeles assemblage, and diverse spiritual references. 

Ibrahim Mahama brings a collaboratively conceived exhibition to the Fondation Cartier, inviting Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Gideon Appah, James Barnor, CATPC, Courage Dzidula Kpodo with Postbox Ghana, Zohra Opoku, Tjaša Rener, and Feda Wardak to take part. One of the most influential artists of his generation, Mahama is known for installations made from discarded materials and industrial fragments transformed into new forms.
For the new space at Place du Palais-Royal, he has envisioned The Harvest Season, an environment reflecting the cycle of creation and the value of collective work, inspired by the art centers he has founded since 2019 in Tamale, northern Ghana. The exhibition will occupy the entire space with site-specific works and new versions of some of his landmark installations.

Born in Montreal, Allison Katz is one of the most compelling painters of her generation. For her first institutional solo exhibition in Quebec, she presents recent works alongside new paintings in a display conceived specifically for the MMFA. Katz has developed a distinctive visual language that weaves together psychoanalytic theory, popular culture, and art history to explore identity, representation, and the workings of the human psyche. The spatial arrangement of the paintings is integral to her practice: Jeu d’esprit unfolds as a kind of puzzle, with works positioned to create shifting associations and thematic echoes. Visitors are invited to piece together these clues — from biographical references to broader reflections on memory, influence, and the construction of the self.

The Mori Art Museum presents a retrospective of Mariko Mori, an artist who for thirty years has intertwined art, science, and spirituality. Featuring eighty works—including installations, sculptures, videos, and photographs—the exhibition traces her evolution from explorations of posthuman identity in the 1990s to engagements with ancient philosophies and contemporary scientific theories.
Organized with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, this is Mori’s first major exhibition in Japan since 2002. Including previously unseen archival materials, it offers an immersive journey that reflects on the relationship between humanity, technology, and the environment.

This exhibition brings into focus the work of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, two key figures in twentieth-century British art. By examining their intertwined lives and over five decades of collaboration, the show illuminates the depth and complexity of their creative relationship and their prominent role within the Bloomsbury Group, whose progressive ideals left a lasting mark on British culture. More than 250 pieces are on view, ranging from portraits, still lifes, and landscapes to painted furniture, ceramics, textiles, and other decorative works. A major highlight is the rare presentation of Duncan Grant’s studio, temporarily relocated from Charleston, their home in Sussex. While celebrating their shared projects, the exhibition also reveals the distinct trajectories each artist pursued, offering a vibrant portrait of two creators whose work reshaped the visual language of modern Britain.

For the inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize exhibition at MOCA, Julian Charrière (b. 1987, Morges, Switzerland; lives in Berlin) will present a new commission alongside recent works focused on the fragility and resilience of the planet’s water systems. As the first museum show in Los Angeles for the artist, the exhibition highlights Charrière’s interdisciplinary approach, bringing together immersive environments that probe humanity’s shifting relationship with the Earth. Through these works, visitors are invited to confront the urgent realities of climate change and environmental degradation while reflecting on the raw and elemental beauty of the natural world.

As the inaugural recipient of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize, Cecilia Vicuña presents Quipu of Encounters: The Dream of Water at MOCA. This new project, part of her long-standing series of collective actions, connects the water crises in Chile and Los Angeles through collaborations with artists, communities, scientists, and Indigenous activists. Inspired by the Andean quipu as a system of connection, the work culminates in a ritual gathering in Los Angeles and is accompanied by documentation, testimonies, and recordings from the actions in Chile.

For the first time in history, all of Jan van Eyck’s portraits will be brought together in a single exhibition. The show presents the nine paintings securely attributed to the artist, offering a close look at his revolutionary approach to depicting the human figure. Through meticulous attention to detail — skin, gaze, light — van Eyck established a new model of portraiture that still feels strikingly alive today. The sitters come from his everyday world: merchants, craftsmen, and members of his circle. The exhibition restores this concrete, human context, revealing how the genre of portraiture expanded beyond elite subjects.

The artistic partnership between Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, active since 1995, is among the most innovative in the field of multimedia installation. Their works — including their renowned “audio walks” — place listening at the center of perception, creating immersive environments where the real and the virtual blur together.
Through a refined use of sound, technology, and spatial awareness, the duo constructs intimate, narrative settings infused with cinematic echoes and collective memories, inviting visitors to rethink time, space, and recollection.
For their first major institutional retrospective in Italy in twenty years, the Navate will host monumental installations alongside new works conceived specifically for Pirelli HangarBicocca, offering a multisensory experience that is both absorbing and disorienting.

Duan Jianyu’s painting is defined by light, deliberately muted brushwork and a palette that allows her to observe contemporary society with irony and imagination. Her works play with narrative, symbols and collective memories, creating frictions between image and language and generating unexpected links across different times and contexts.
This exhibition — her first major institutional solo show in Beijing — brings together key series from the past decade alongside more recent works, with a particular focus on the Sharp, Sharp, Smart cycle, which marked a shift in both her methods and her approach to constructing an image. The presentation offers a concentrated look at a pivotal moment in her practice, highlighting her ongoing engagement with the limits and possibilities of painting.