An art weekend in Europe: 10 exhibitions to see right now

One of the most eagerly awaited reopenings of the new year is undoubtedly MACRO, which welcomed visitors back on December 11 under the guidance of its new artistic director Cristiana Perrella. Among the new exhibitions dedicated to the capital, UNAROMA offers a broad overview of the contemporary city, a choral portrait of today's artistic Rome, understood as a hybrid and constantly changing ecosystem. Curated by Perrella herself together with Luca Lo Pinto, the exhibition brings together over seventy artists of different generations and languages, including performance, cinema, music, poetry, and visual arts. The exhibition design by Parasite 2.0 adopts the metaphor of the cinematic green screen as a shared surface on which stories and imagery are layered, encouraging the coexistence of different visions.

In 2026, Vienna is hosting a traveling retrospective dedicated to the work of one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, who radically redefined the language of photography: Daido Moriyama. Starting with the iconic image of a stray dog from 1971, symbol of a raw and restless vision of reality, the exhibition—with over two hundred photographs, archival materials, and videos—reconstructs the career of Moriyama, a leading figure in Japanese street photography from the postwar period to the present day. The exhibition covers his work for Japanese magazines, his break with photojournalism, his experience with the Provoke generation, and the radical approach of Farewell Photography (1972). After overcoming the crisis of the 1980s, Moriyama developed a more introspective visual lyricism, reflecting on identity, memory, and history, leading to experiments with color and digital photography and the ongoing Record magazine project.

From January 29 to March 29, 2026, the Berlin branch of the Pace Gallery will host an exhibition dedicated to the great American director David Lynch, highlighting the many facets of his artistic practice and presenting paintings, sculptures, watercolors, photographs, and early short films. Perhaps not everyone knows that Lynch considered himself a visual artist even before he was a filmmaker, having graduated in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The exhibition – which precedes a major retrospective scheduled for fall 2026 at Pace in Los Angeles, the artist's hometown – explores materiality and image as a sensory and mental experience, with works that evoke subconscious dimensions of the present. The exhibition is completed by photographs of abandoned industrial sites in Berlin in the late 1990s.

Martin Parr, who recently passed away at the age of 73, is being celebrated with an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris that offers a reinterpretation of his work in light of the widespread disorder that characterizes our times. Through around one hundred and eighty works spanning over fifty years of production, from his early black-and-white works to his most recent series, the exhibition reveals the consistency of a gaze that was able to lucidly recount the excesses of our lifestyles. Divided into five thematic sections, the exhibition highlights how, without ever placing himself in a position of moral superiority, Martin Parr has practiced a form of "visual guerrilla" which, through cliché and a good dose of humor, questions dominant representations and invites us to reconsider our relationship with the world.

The National Gallery in Reykjavík continues its series dedicated to video installations with Innocent Bodies, presenting two recent films by Agnieszka Polska (1985), an internationally renowned Polish artist. The exhibition reflects on the vulnerability of contemporary existence in an era marked by constantly changing relationships between humans, technological systems, and the natural world. Central to Polska's research is the analysis of the affective economy, or how artificial forces and unnatural states of life influence emotions, the body, and consciousness. Longing Gaze (2021–22), made after the pandemic, addresses the paradox of intimacy in the age of digital surveillance, evoking isolation, loss of physical contact, and hyperconnection, while in The Book of Flowers (2023) we see scientific 16mm footage from the 1940s and 1950s, manipulated by artificial intelligence and rearranged into an alternative and imaginary natural history based on an evolutionary symbiosis between humans and plants.

The exhibition Gravity, Be My Friend brings two emblematic works by Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of immersive video art, to Stockholm, inviting the public to enter dreamlike environments that explore the body, desire, and gender identity through poetry, irony, and technological experimentation. The exhibition brings together two works of contrasting scale: a large installation that occupies an entire gallery, designed to accommodate over a hundred people, and a micro-work located in the restaurant space. In the first video, which also gives the exhibition its name, the artist explores the experience of watching from a lying position, promoting a state of physical and emotional relaxation that opens up a more empathetic and vulnerable perception. The second work depicts a figure trapped between fire and lava, evoking a desire for care and compassion.

The Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein presents Let Yourself Be Free, an exhibition by American artist Tony Cokes (1956, Richmond, Virginia), curated by Letizia Ragaglia and conceived as a dialogue with the museum's collection. The exhibition includes light boxes, writings, video installations, and a new work, alongside selected works by artists from the collection. Cokes is known for his videos in which texts and quotations are combined with bright colors and music, stimulating critical reflection on images, sounds, politics, culture, and power. His post-conceptual practice works like a DJ: he samples and remixes material from the media, pop culture, and philosophy, questioning dominant codes, racism, consumerism, and power relations. The exhibition explores his interest in the history and reception of conceptual art and minimalism, combining Cokes' works with those of artists such as Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol.

House of Music is Peter Doig's project in which the British painter explores the role of music, cinema, and collective meeting spaces in his practice. The gallery is transformed into a listening space, where recent paintings are integrated for the first time with sound, diffused through two sets of rare and restored analog speakers, including a Western Electric/Bell Labs system from the 1920s and 1930s, recovered from disused cinemas in the United Kingdom. The works, many of which were created during his stay in Trinidad, depict musicians, dances, and listening spaces, images that refer to the artist's personal memory, found photographs, and imagined scenes. Every Sunday, the space comes alive with live listening sessions: musicians, artists, and collectors share tracks from their archives, constructing a collective soundscape.

Originally commissioned for the British Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Listening All Night to The Rain is an exhibition by British filmmaker John Akomfrah, produced in collaboration with TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, marking Akomfrah's return to Spain eight years after the presentation of his immersive installation Purple (2018). The exhibition, reworked here in its most ambitious and experimental form, consists of five immersive multi-channel video installations in which Akomfrah interweaves geopolitical documentation and cinematic fiction, giving voice to subjects from the British diaspora and adopting a cyclical and non-linear view of time, capable of connecting distant places and historical moments. A founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective (1982), Akomfrah is known for his multi-screen installations that explore racial injustice, colonial legacies, migration, and the climate crisis.

Soft Robots explores the hopes and fears that new technologies arouse in our age. The exhibition, curated by Copenhagen Contemporary, presents works by fifteen international artists who reflect on life in the new technological ecology, between artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and digital realities, investigating the relationship between humans and machines. The works, many of which were created specifically for the exhibition, oscillate between poetry and criticism, seeking the “breath” and soul hidden in the landscapes of the future among digital avatars and seductive machines. The concept of the exhibition is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Nightingale (1843), in which a natural nightingale is replaced by a soulless golden robot. Themes such as the doppelgänger, the robot-fetish, the voice, and the breath become metaphors for our relationship with technology and the search for the true self.