10 brilliant exhibitions about to close

Considered by Salvador Dalí to be “the most important female surrealist artist”, Leonora Carrington was one of the most original artists of the 20th century. Painter, writer, playwright, and pioneer of feminist and ecofeminist thought, the first Italian retrospective at Palazzo Reale in Milan celebrates her life and art. Over sixty works retrace Carrington's journey through Europe, the United States, and Mexico, revealing an imaginary world where science and mysticism coexist, and from which the wounds of war, tormented loves, and psychological fragility resurface, while her deep connection with Italy is also highlighted. The works, from major international institutions, will arrive at the Musée du Luxembourg in 2026.

Among the wonders of Florence, there is one that is not always included in city tour itineraries, which is a real shame: the Museo di San Marco. Here you will find the world's largest collection of works by Beato Angelico, one of the greatest painters of the early Renaissance, who worked in the convent between 1438 and 1445. The Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, in collaboration with the Museum of San Marco, is celebrating Beato Angelico with a major exhibition, the result of over four years of work, which explores the artist's production, style, and influences, in dialogue with other masters of Italian art such as Masaccio, Lippi, Ghiberti, and Michelozzo. Over 140 works from international museums are on display at the two venues, including the extraordinary reconstruction of the San Marco Altarpiece, with 17 of the 18 known parts reunited for the first time in over three centuries.

What happens when art attempts to give shape to the invisible? The new project by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, which has picked the rooms of Palazzo Morando as its exhibition venue, is inspired by the mysterious Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini and her library focused on spiritualism and alchemy. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini, the exhibition explores artistic practices related to trance, mediumship, and psychic automation, focusing on themes such as mythology, mysticism, and inner exploration. A rare collection of sixteen works by Swedish painter Hilma af Klint is complemented by a concert of works by intellectuals, artists, and historical and contemporary artists, including Georgiana Houghton, Emma Kunz, Judy Chicago, Diego Marcon, and Chiara Fumai.

In 2007, Google launched a fleet of cars equipped with cameras, GPS, and scanners to map every road in the world. Since then, over two hundred billion images have been collected, covering more than ten million miles in one hundred countries: this is the basis for Jon Rafman's Nine Eyes project, which is coming to a museum for the first time with Report a concern – The Nine Eyes Archives. Since 2008, Rafman has continued to archive and interpret these accidental photographs of bizarre, poetic, or disturbing moments, revealing how digital surveillance can transform our perception of reality. The exhibition features large-format Street View shots, an archive of more than three hundred images, a slideshow, and the film You, the World, and I, along with new AI-animated works.

The exhibition Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days offers a broad and radical overview of five decades of the artist's work, characterized by irony, pop references, and sharp investigations into sexuality, violence, political paranoia, and metaphysics. Active between Berkeley and New York, Bacher soon adopted a male name to challenge the idea of identity and authorship. From the 1970s onwards, she worked with her own and found photographs, manipulating them, combining them, and transforming random details into revelations, before expanding her practice to sculptures, videos, and installations. The exhibition, open until January 4, recounts symbols of American history, placing them in dialogue with intimate questions about being an artist. The title, taken from her unfinished book, evokes an open and unfinished work, constructed by affinity rather than chronology.

After the Berlin, Helsinki, and Lausanne stages, the MEP in Paris presents Wish This Was Real, the first solo exhibition in France by Tyler Mitchell, a leading figure in new photography. The exhibition spans ten years of work, including photos, videos, and sculptures, exploring themes close to the artist's poetics, self-determination, and the beauty of everyday things. In his images, Mitchell mixes past and future, with a dynamism between utopia, beauty, and symbolic landscapes, showing the influence that the “New Black Vanguard” has had on his work. The exhibition is divided into three sections: Lives/Liberties, Postcolonial/Pastoral, and Family/Fraternity.

Far from the glossy imagery of fashion, Dirty Looks. Desire and Decay in Fashion explores how the “dirty” aesthetic has redefined the last half-century of creativity. And how better to begin than with the iconic boots of Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth II, two versions of a deep desire to reconnect with the earth, or with mud. Through more than one hundred and twenty works by over sixty designers—from Margiela to Rick Owens, Carol Christian Poell, and Junya Watanabe—a true poetics of the “dirty look” takes shape, in which wear, stains, debris, and decay become lyrical, political, and critical languages.

In view of the fiftieth anniversary of Alvar Aalto's passing, the monographic exhibition at the Serralves Museum in Porto retraces the work that the architect developed together with his two wives –first Aino Maria Aalto, and then Elissa Aalto – emphasizing how they revolutionized the humanist face of Modernism, anchoring it to nature, context, materials, and well-being. From Artek icons to architectural masterpieces, such as the Viipuri Library, Villa Mairea, Baker House, the Kunsten Museum, and the church in Riola, the exhibition recounts the importance of the Aaltos in defining the identity of young Finland between the two world wars, inspired by their travels and contact with an international environment.

The Studio Museum in Harlem has recently reopened its doors, and with From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence, it aims to celebrate the success and lasting impact of its residency program. With specially commissioned works, pieces from the collection, and loans from friends and family, the exhibition pays tribute to more than fifty years of activity by a platform that has supported more than one hundred and fifty artists of African and Afro-Latin descent. Conceived in 1968 and launched in 1969, the residency – envisioned by William T. Williams as an intimate community of exchange – has fostered a climate of experimentation and dialogue with the Harlem neighborhood over the decades and to this day.

The Barnes Foundation is dedicating an absolutely unique exhibition to Henri Rousseau, bringing together for the first time ever the two largest collections of the artist's work: that of the Barnes, the most extensive in the world, and that of the Musée de l'Orangerie. With nearly sixty works, the exhibition presents never-before-seen combinations—including The Sleeping Gypsy, Unpleasant Surprise, and The Snake Charmer—thanks to exceptional loans from international museums. In addition, new technical and conservation discoveries are at the heart of the exhibition project: underlying paintings, reworked compositions, revised dates, and the reconstruction of the context of some works conceived for a public competition. Curated by Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson, A Painter's Secrets invites us to move beyond the myth of Henri Rousseau as a “naïve” painter to reveal a conscious artist, attentive to the market and capable of creating subjects that responded to the tastes of the modern public.

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., a major exhibition explores the decisive role of photography in the Black Arts Movement (1955–1985), showing how African American artists and those from the diaspora gave rise to a new Black aesthetic in the climate of the civil rights struggles. There are about 150 works on display, including photographs, videos, collages, and installations by over 100 artists, including Roy DeCarava, Dawoud Bey, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems, along with contributions from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom. Divided into nine sections, the exhibition explores themes such as self-representation, community, fashion, media, and rituality, highlighting images that have fueled pride, activism, and new narratives of Black life, from Romare Bearden's collages to protest photographs to the works of Ulysses Jenkins and Lorna Simpson.

The largest retrospective dedicated to Louise Bourgeois ever held in Korea can be visited until January 4 at the Hoam Museum of Art in Yongin, with over one hundred works spanning her entire career. From the Personages of the 1940s to the Cells of the 1990s, to the textiles and gouaches of her later period, the exhibition lays bare the emotional heart of Bourgeois' practice. The title, taken from her writings, refers to the tensions between opposites (mother/father, conscious/unconscious, masculine/feminine) that fuel her recurring forms. The exhibition features masterpieces such as The Destruction of the Father, Jenus Fleuri, Red Room (Parents), and Cell (Black Days), displayed in a two-story layout that separates rationality and order on the lower floor from emotion and the unconscious on the upper floor.

The exhibition Fluxus, by Chance, at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, offers a dynamic and radical interpretation of one of the most subversive movements of the 20th century. Fluxus was born in the late 1950s from the meeting of figures who did not initially consider themselves artists: George Brecht was a chemist, Robert Filliou an economist, La Monte Young a musician, Emmett Williams an anthropologist, and George Maciunas a colorblind graphic designer. It was precisely this heterogeneity that created fertile ground for a collective, cosmopolitan, and participatory practice that sought to dissolve the hierarchies between artist and audience through actions, games, festivals, publications, and magazines. The exhibition reconstructs the Dadaist roots of the movement and showcases its contemporary legacy with artists such as Jonathan Monk and Claude Closky.