36 Museum Exhibits and Biennials to See in Winter 2025

A cynic would possibly say that humanity won’t ever totally get well from all that now we have wrought upon our ravaged planet; an optimist would possibly counter that we could as properly be taught to outlive anyway. This present combines each viewpoints, exploring extractive applied sciences and enterprise practices whereas additionally exhibiting that ecologically minded artists are envisioning new worlds to return. With an artist record that runs the gamut from lifeless icons like Joseph Beuys to dwelling stars comparable to Christopher Kulendran Thomas, the present culminates on its closing day with a efficiency by the duo Sybling, who will partly happen on the Garzweiler mine in close by Jüchen.

November 29, 2025–April 19, 2026

The very best-profile museum present opening in Miami throughout Artwork Basel Miami Seaside is that this survey of labor by Joyce Pensato, a painter beloved for her oddball pictures of characters from cartoons and comedian books rendered at a grand scale. Executed in drippy black paint allowed to trickle down the canvas, her renderings of Homer Simpson, Batman, Felix the Cat, and others are each menacing and exquisite—a wierd brew, to make certain. Sixty-five works will likely be readily available within the first large-scale survey for Pensato sine her demise in 2019.

December 2, 2025–March 15, 2026

The Mexican metropolis of Campeche was once residence to many pure oil springs. However when Minerva Cuevas performed her analysis there, she largely failed to search out them. As an alternative, she turned her consideration to the Mexican oil big Pemex, which extracts oil within the surrounding area, reportedly impacting fisheries and the native marine ecology. In work knowledgeable by her investigations, Cuevas typically units pre-Hispanic imagery alongside company insignia, exhibiting how Mexico’s historical past is being eroded within the current by business pursuits. Her climatology-focused artwork, which will likely be surveyed right here, seeks to reclaim that historical past.

December 5, 2025–March 8, 2026

Nice self-portraits can typically really feel like daggers, piercing those that come earlier than them. By that measure, the Finnish modernist Helen Schjerfbeck was an important self-portraitist: She usually pictured herself together with her chin lifted towards the viewer however together with her eyes typically averted or closed. How she wrung maximal emotional results from her minimal visible language would be the topic of this 60-work survey—the primary sizable one in the USA for an artist already well-known in Scandinavia.

December 5, 2025–April 5, 2026

We’ve come a great distance from the Land Artwork of the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, which regularly concerned staging large-scale interventions in nature that had been by turns awe-inspiring and harmful. Lately, many artists are displaying a keener consciousness of humanity’s function in reshaping the atmosphere and attempting to do as a lot as they’ll to protect the world round them. This present charts that change in pondering, masking Earthworks and Arte Povera earlier than arriving at the moment with a youthful era of artists. Amongst them is Asunción Molinos Gordo, whose research-driven sculptures discover the notion of pensamiento campesino, or peasants’ data—info gained by those that have a tendency the earth.

December 5, 2025–Could 3, 2026

The award for the world’s greatest, creepiest child goes to Ron Mueck’s 2006 sculpture A Lady, an astonishingly detailed, 16-foot-long rendering of an toddler with a mottled face. This piece would possibly stick out in every other artist’s physique of labor, however Mueck has frequently produced items that query what actually counts as human when individuals’s our bodies are scaled up and offered again to us in gigantic type. These unsettling works have been seen throughout the globe and are actually being given a fittingly grand survey in Australia, Mueck’s residence nation.

December 6, 2025–April 12, 2026

Luca Lo Pinto, the earlier inventive director of this venerable museum, is credited with having smoothed out MACRO’s programming after a tough interval for the establishment. Earlier this yr, he handed off the management publish to Cristiana Perella, with whom he has now curated a wide-ranging survey of the up to date artwork scene in Rome because it presently stands. The present’s 70-artist participant record options names each established and little-known: Isabella Ducrot, a 94-year-old painter who solely just lately gained fame, will present alongside Agnes Questionmark, a younger sculptor whose 2024 Venice Biennale contribution resembled an alien on an working desk and meditated on the surveillance of trans our bodies.

December 11, 2025–April 6, 2026

Margarita Paksa, one of the vital acclaimed artists to emerge in Argentina in the course of the postwar years, made work that was blindingly direct, setting phrases like Violencia and Libertad in a sniper’s crosshairs for a gaggle of well-known prints. A vocal critic of the Argentine authorities’s therapy of its residents, Paksa regularly used phrases in her artwork that mirrored these used to transmit political concepts to the lots—solely in her case, she was speaking again to energy. Paksa had a retrospective on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in Buenos Aires in 2012; now, 5 years after her demise, the establishment is as soon as once more highlighting her bracing artwork.

December 12, 2025–February 16, 2026

For those who come to a biennial, likelihood is you’re there to see it in a single go. However artist Nikhil Chopra and the Goa-based HH Artwork Areas have designed their version of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India’s high biennial, as a “dwelling ecosystem; one the place every factor shares house, time, and sources, and grows in dialogue with one another,” as they put it, with durational performances and different long-term occasions being staged all through the present’s run. Even should you solely have time to go to as soon as, although, the exhibition itself appears promising, with individuals together with Pallavi Paul, Tino Sehgal, Monika Correa, and Sandra Mujinga.

December 12, 2025–March 31, 2026

The artwork world shouldn’t be precisely quick on Duchamp superfans, however as artists go, Saâdane Afif actually counts among the many Dadaist’s best devotees. In 2008 he started accumulating Duchamp-related texts and putting in them on a bookshelf for a chunk referred to as The Fountain Archives. If a urinal counted as artwork, Afif’s pondering went, then actually phrases associated to it did, too. That challenge is however one instance of this French artist’s multivalent follow, which regularly considers how which means morphs when context modifications. The Fountain Archives will function on this mini-retrospective of Afif’s artwork, which additionally features a recent physique of labor produced in response to Jeff Koons’s iconic “The New” sculpture collection of the Eighties. Afif’s take is paradoxically referred to as “The Outdated.”

December 12, 2025–September 13, 2026

Some museums have begun presenting reveals of well-known painters that concentrate on work aside from their work—the purpose being that these artists labored in additional disciplines than beforehand realized. The most recent present to take action facilities on Zao Wou-Ki’s prints, which acted as a spot for the Chinese language-French artist to hash out concepts earlier than committing them to color. Etchings, lithographs, and extra will likely be marshaled to deliver out elements of Zao’s work unfamiliar to viewers in Hong Kong, the place his work are extremely prized.

December 13, 2025–Could 3, 2026

With this survey, whose topic was born within the former Yugoslavia, the Muzeum Susch continues its wealthy custom of giving under-recognized European ladies artists their due. Although all however forgotten at the moment, Edita Schubert achieved a point of fame throughout her lifetime for a various physique of labor that included work produced not solely through the use of a brush, but additionally by placing her physique by way of holes in her canvas. Schubert mentioned she was moved in the course of the Seventies to take up this technique of working as a means of rejecting typical approaches to portray feminine nudes. It was a becoming comment for an artist who sought to buck custom and forge new paths.

December 13, 2025–Could 17, 2026

In 1960 Burkinabe photographer Sanlé Sory opened his studio; later, he recalled that it “fulfilled individuals’s fantasies,” providing an area for younger Africans to face earlier than his digicam in stylish garments and understand who they needed to turn into. Sory’s photos—together with these of different studio photographers comparable to Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, each from Mali, and Ambroise Ngaimoko, of the Democratic Republic of Congo—helped assemble an thought of recent Africa for generations to return. The present explores how Sory and others of his period achieved this and extends that quest into the current with newer photographic works by Samuel Fosso and Silvia Rosi.

December 14, 2025–July 25, 2026

Collectors throughout the globe have in recent times opened a succession of glitzy, costly non-public museums, not all of which have made an enduring impression. However Dib Bangkok, a brand new establishment based by the late Thai collector Petch Osathanugrah, is certain to be remembered, partly as a result of it’s such a serious addition to Thailand’s quickly increasing artwork scene. The museum’s 1,000-piece assortment, that includes works by artists starting from Montien Boonma to Frank Stella, will likely be exhibited in a 71,000-square-foot former warehouse. Price noting will likely be new works from artists comparable to Fujiko Nakaya, who is thought for her huge outside installations that make heavy use of fog.

Opens December 21, 2025

This extremely targeted, feminist-minded present is restricted to 5 artists energetic in Southeast Asia between the Nineteen Sixties and the 2010s: Nirmala Dutt (Malaysia), Imelda Cajipe Endaya (Philippines), Amanda Heng (Singapore), Dolorosa Sinaga (Indonesia), and Phaptawan Suwannakudt (Thailand). Pondering matters comparable to decolonization and the patriarchy, these ladies usually sought, by way of their work, to examine the societies they wished to dwell in. How shut are we to reaching these societies? This exhibition will discover the query.

January 9, 2026–November 15, 2026

Whereas the British Museum continues to face widespread scrutiny over its function in histories of dispossession and plunder, the establishment has begun exploring colonialism and its aftereffects extra bluntly in its galleries. Working example is that this 150-work survey, which charts the Hawaiian kingdom’s efforts to barter with—and resist—the British empire beginning in 1824, when King Liholiho and Queen Kamāmalu visited London. Treasures comparable to a dazzlingly coloured cloak worn by Kamehameha I’ll seem on this present, together with a nine-foot-tall sculpture of the god Kū and the Anglo-Franco Proclamation of 1843, the UK’s and France’s formal recognition of Hawaii’s independence.

January 15, 2026–Could 25, 2026

“Who owns Frida Kahlo’s legacy?” requested one NBC Information headline earlier this yr. It’s a great query, contemplating that an array of Kahlo-related paraphernalia has generated a ramification of Kahlo-related lawsuits. That so many people are squabbling over her trademark suggests a fascination not with what Kahlo produced however with what she signified as a painter roped into the Surrealist motion, as a Mexican who spent a part of her profession overseas, and as a disabled girl who battled melancholy. Now comes this 120-work present, which focuses particularly on Kahlo’s self-image and its affect on firms and different artists—a few of whom have obscured what her artwork was actually about. Mari Carmen Ramírez, the exhibition’s curator, has promised a present that goals to “separate Frida Kahlo the artist from Frida Kahlo the phenomenon.”

January 19, 2026–Could 17, 2026

Born in South Korea and primarily based for a lot of her quick profession in the USA, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha explored the expertise of attempting and failing to speak, typically specializing in phrases and the way they fall quick. In performances, movies, and her landmark 1982 poetry assortment Dictée (just lately reprinted, and now gaining a cult following), Cha quietly established herself as one of the vital exceptional abilities of her period. Following a posthumous star flip on the 2022 Whitney Biennial, she is now getting a correct retrospective.

January 24, 2026–April 26, 2026

This present’s piquant title derives from the title of an enormous sculpture by Louise Nevelson. A cubelike array of the artist’s trademark black summary components, Mrs. N.’s Palace (1964–77) variously resembles an house and a tomb. Nevelson debuted the room-size piece on her eightieth birthday; she had by no means earlier than produced a piece so giant. But it surely was not the one “atmosphere,” as she referred to as Mrs. N.’s Palace and comparable items—that she produced. This present shines a lightweight on that lesser-seen facet of her oeuvre.

January 24, 2026–August 31, 2026

This Swiss museum has a group wealthy in trendy artwork. So it’s no shock that it owns some exceptional items by one of many nice artists of the late Nineteenth century: Paul Cézanne, who fractured mountains, apples, and bathers into discrete geometric types, paving the way in which for Cubism to comply with. Till now, the museum has by no means mounted a present devoted particularly to Cézanne, one thing it can now treatment. The 80 work and drawings included will not be more likely to yield recent views on the French artist, however solely a real grinch would flip down the chance to see dozens of Cézannes in a single place.

January 25, 2026–Could 26, 2026

Whereas the Futurists had been busy attempting to color high-velocity motion and industrial change in Italy in the course of the 1910s, the Metaphysical painters had been pondering by way of one thing else solely: the world that existed in a single’s thoughts. Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà started representing cities that seemed fairly not like our personal, with vacant plazas and unclassifiable creatures, whereas Giorgio Morandi went in a unique course, portray and repainting preparations of gray-toned vessels. The experiments of those artists and others are the topic of this 300-work survey, which proposes that the Metaphysical painters’ try to painting tortured psychological states stays related greater than a century on. To show the purpose, the three-museum exhibition will even function works by William Kentridge that pay homage to Morandi.

January 28, 2026–June 21, 2026

Due to their worldwide scope, biennials have virtually all the time needed to take care of migrations each previous and current. However following final yr’s Venice Biennale, titled “International In every single place,” the topic has out of the blue moved from the background to the foreground, as turns into clear from the idea of this biennial. Curators Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed have mentioned their present, “In Interludes and Transitions,” will revolve round “pondering of the world in procession,” with particular consideration paid to the Arab area. Artists comparable to Nour Mobarak, Yazan Khalili, Raqs Media Collective, and Yu Ji will participate.

January 30, 2026–Could 2, 2026

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work get all the eye, largely as a result of they command high greenback in the marketplace. However this present means that Basquiat’s creativity could also be extra totally glimpsed in a lesser-seen facet of his oeuvre: his works on paper, the place he first scrawled his Picassoid skulls and jittery figures earlier than remaking them on a big scale in paint on canvas. The exhibition is being billed as a primary in Scandinavia, the place exhibitions dedicated to the artist are scarce.

January 30, 2026–Could 17, 2026

Martin Parr’s high-contrast pictures evince a wackadoo sensibility that’s all his personal: His most well-known pictures, that includes beachgoers attempting to not look into the solar whereas making an attempt to catch a tan, are as distinctive as they’re unusual. However this 180-work survey means that these photos are not any joke, for they take significantly points associated to local weather change and ecological disturbance. Quentin Bajac, the museum’s director and curator of this present, will even concentrate on how Parr has pictured overtourism in India, Italy, and plenty of different nations that are actually fighting the damaging environmental side-effects of welcoming too many guests.

January 30, 2026–Could 24, 2026

When Nikola Tesla mentioned that “All the pieces is mild,” he meant it within the sense that each one matter is shaped from comparable primary components. To place it one other means, we’re our environments, and our environments are us. The identical assertion might apply to the works on this offbeat present, whose three artists—Cerith Wyn Evans, Ann Lislegaard, and P. Employees—use fluorescent and neon illumination to discover how mild remakes us as human beings. Employees, the youngest of the bunch, is thought for installations that bathe rooms in uneasy shades of yellow and blue. By turns lovely and disorienting, Employees’s installations allude to bodily programs, hinting at a connection between these works and the individuals who view them.

February 6, 2026–Could 10, 2026

Who might blame artists for frequently returning to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an historic Roman poem during which persons are reworked into animals and bushes, typically in erotic conditions tainted by violence? This present in regards to the affect of Metamorphoses throughout the centuries will likewise be arduous to withstand. Alongside work by up to date artists comparable to Ulay and Louise Bourgeois, the exhibition will function famed Renaissance works comparable to Titian’s Danaë (1560–65), which depicts a girl whom Jupiter seduced with a bathe of gold.

February 6, 2026–Could 25, 2026

Within the Nineteen Thirties and ’40s, in the course of the apex of her profession, Emily Carr painted landscapes swathed in voluminous foliage and summary types that recall grey shrouds. Why did the Canadian painter signify the British Columbian panorama in such darkish tones? What did her visions of roiled nature, particularly within the lands of First Nations peoples, imply? This exhibition, billed as the most important one dedicated to her in British Columbia in twenty years, seeks to unravel these questions, whose slippery solutions have been debated by an more and more giant fan base in recent times.

February 6, 2026–November 8, 2026

Conceptual artists have named all kinds of issues artworks, from urinals to bejeweled skulls, however few have claimed that a complete city might depend as a murals. That was precisely what the Argentina-born artist Alberto Greco did in 1963 when he put down roots in Piedralaves, Spain, defining it’s as a readymade of kinds that he then altered along with his personal interventions. (One concerned having locals maintain indicators that learn “Work of Artwork” in Spanish.) Greco was questioning whether or not it was doable to make artwork come alive past the confines of a gallery, therefore the title of this exhibition, which surveys an artist whose work is fairly troublesome to show.

February 11, 2026–June 8, 2026

Admirers of Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits don’t precisely ignore the garments depicted in his work: The Blue Boy (ca. 1770) stays a traditional due to the hues of its sitter’s outfit, an anachronistic homage to clothes seen in Anthony van Dyck’s photos of the century earlier than. However the individuals portrayed are inclined to hog the highlight, which makes this wardrobe-themed present in regards to the British painter a delight. Some two dozen works will likely be assembled for it, together with the famed Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (ca. 1750), on mortgage from London’s Nationwide Gallery.

February 12–Could 11, 2026

Subsequent yr, St. Peter’s Basilica will rejoice the four-hundredth anniversary of its consecration, making the church some extent of pilgrimage for each historic and spiritual causes. Contained in the church is Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s ornate altar cover, or baldacchino, an iconic work of the Baroque motion that was commissioned by Pope City VIII, who was born Maffeo Barberini. The connection between Bernini and the Barberini household, which regularly commissioned him to make extravagant marble portraits of its members, types the premise of this survey that includes uncommon loans from museums such because the Louvre and the Nationwide Gallery in London.

February 12, 2026–June 14, 2026

Amongst Richard Avedon’s most memorable portraits is the one among Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, who in 1958 posed for the legendary style photographer with one finger to every of his eyes. Duchamp was then in his 70s, and Avedon’s digicam takes in all of his wrinkles and blemishes—options that had been notably not current in Duchamp’s photos of himself as Rrose Sélavy, taken in the course of the Twenties. That {photograph} demonstrated Avedon’s knack for capturing the look of growing old, a topic that underpins this 100-work survey.

February 12, 2026–August 9, 2026

As retrospectives go, few this season are fairly so overdue as this one for Edmonia Lewis, a key artist of Nineteenth-century America who achieved fame throughout her day—a uncommon feat for a Black artist on the time. The Loss of life of Cleopatra, her 1876 sculpture depicting the titular Egyptian queen’s suicide, stays a traditional for the way in which that it introduced Neoclassicism to a politically roiled United States. This exhibition, billed as the primary of its sort, enlists comparable works to point out that Lewis seeded her sculptures with potent political commentary, typically utilizing them to battle for the rights of Black Individuals, whom she regularly rendered as sturdy and defiant. The present will even discover Lewis’s Anishinaabe heritage and have works by up to date Indigenous artists comparable to Bonnie Devine (Serpent River Ojibwa), whose installations likewise perform as elegant protests.

February 14, 2026–June 7, 2026

In the course of the early twentieth century, whereas artists in Paris had been pushing portray towards abstraction, Vilhelm Hammershøi was portray cloistered, grayish interiors in Copenhagen. These work, which typically include solely a single feminine determine dealing with away from the viewer, have extra in frequent with Dutch Golden Age artwork than French modernism, which makes them each fascinating to take a look at and hard to put inside the context of their period. With round 100 works, this survey guarantees to offer a sturdy framework for understanding this enigmatic Danish painter, whose contemplative artwork continues to search out admirers amongst youthful painters at the moment.

February 17, 2026–Could 31, 2026

Tracey Emin’s first present at her longtime gallery White Dice, in 1993, was memorably titled “My Main Retrospective 1963–1993”; it featured tiny pictures of work that she destroyed, successfully making the exhibition an elegy for artwork that was already gone. Now, greater than 30 years later, she has an precise retrospective that can embody items from that very present. A pressure of the British artwork scene, Emin has used her surprising, transferring artwork to discover failed romantic encounters, sexual trauma, and her battle with most cancers. All the time, she has remained fascinated by demise and loss. Her 90-work Tate retrospective could function artwork meant to be everlasting, however it will likely be animated by a extremely private sense of grief all the identical.

February 26, 2026–August 31, 2026

Again in 2010, when Rose Wylie was 76, the Guardian termed her “Britain’s hottest artist.” Since then she has solely risen additional: David Zwirner, one of many world’s strongest galleries, took her on and now usually displays her scrappy work—typically accompanied by scrawled textual content—of ladies starting from Elizabeth I to Marilyn Monroe. Now in her 90s, Wylie is getting what’s being billed as her greatest institutional present up to now at one among London’s premier museums—an indication that this painter, who nonetheless works from a small cottage in Kent, has formally moved in from the margins.

February 28, 2026–April 19, 2026

Photorealism is each straightforward to absorb and troublesome to understand: straightforward as a result of its pictures are extremely legible, however troublesome as a result of these pictures typically look ugly (at the very least by the prevailing painterly requirements within the West). That contradiction has all the time shadowed the motion, whose principally American purveyors, beginning within the late Nineteen Sixties, painted with images in thoughts, translating camera-made pictures to canvas with an uncanny degree of element. On the heels of a current Museum of Modern Artwork Los Angeles present about photorealism comes one other reassessment that includes artists comparable to Audrey Flack, whose towering work of the Seventies look at knickknacks at a grand scale, exploding the boundaries between huge and small, excessive and low.

February 28, 2026–August 2, 2026