The Christmas holidays are the perfect time to catch up on what the rest of the year leaves behind: highly anticipated exhibitions, unmissable retrospectives, and international exhibitions that will close in the first weeks of January, which are worth catching a flight for. As museums and institutions around the world prepare to announce their plans for 2026, the end of the season promises to be extremely busy, and you can take these weeks to tick off the last few items on the list of exhibitions to see that you compiled at the beginning of last year.
Two unique exhibitions are currently underway in Italy: on the one hand the visionary universe of Leonora Carrington at Palazzo Reale in Milan, and on the other the Renaissance enchantment of Beato Angelico between Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco in Florence.
Away from Italy, Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris deserves special mention, and will be open until January 19, 2026: more than one hundred seminal works tracing the movement's extraordinary variety since the 1960s, when an entire generation of artists launched a radical new approach to art.
In Basel, the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler brings works never before exhibited in Europe to the Old Continent—sculptures, paintings, installations, and the new Infinity Mirror Room designed for the occasion, which can carry viewers into the kaleidoscope of her imagination. And if you didn't get to see them during the summer months, at MACBA in Barcelona, the Coco Fusco I Learned to Swim on Dry Land exhibition is on until January 11, and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers retrospective will close the following week.
But this is not the end of the story: in Europe's major cities, there is a wide range of exhibition projects dedicated to fashion, with Dirty Looks at the Barbican Centre in London, and architecture with the exhibition dedicated to Alvar Aalto in Porto, as well as Tyler Mitchell's photographs in Paris, and the Centre Pompidou works on display in Shanghai for the exhibition dedicated to Fluxus.
Whatever your plans are for the end of the year, Domus has selected a list of exhibitions to see before they close, which are worth noting in the last pages of your diary.
