Reveals, Museum Openings, and Biennials to Go to

By no means earlier than within the historical past of the Venice Biennale has a curator died throughout the manufacturing of their present, making the 2026 version a primary. That exhibition was conceived by Koyo Kouoh, a star curator of the African artwork scene who died immediately and unexpectedly in 2025, having battled most cancers in personal. Kouoh did go away behind a framework for her present, which will probably be titled “In Minor Keys” and is now being seen by means of by a set of curators she had already appointed earlier than her passing. Complementing her important exhibition would be the ordinary set of nationwide pavilions bringing collectively artist emissaries from throughout the globe. Amongst these taking part on this planet’s largest artwork pageant for the primary time is El Salvador, whose first pavilion will probably be achieved by J. Oscar Molina.

Whereas the Venice Biennale often is the largest recurring artwork exhibition held wherever this yr, it’s hardly the one one. The Whitney Biennial, a once-every-two-years survey of American artwork the Whitney Museum in New York, kicks issues off in March, adopted by the Carnegie Worldwide at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Artwork in Might. Each of these reveals cater primarily to US-based viewers, however neither are all-American; the Whitney Biennial this time options artists from the Philippines, Afghanistan, Japan, Palestine, and elsewhere. Internationally, there’s the Diriyah Modern Artwork Biennale in January, the Biennale of Sydney in March, and the Gwangju Biennale in September. There’s additionally a brand new entrant to the biennial circuit: Rubaiya Qatar, a quadrennial staged throughout the titular nation that makes its debut in November.

Regardless of the repeatedly voiced sentiment that festivals have grown prohibitively costly for some galleries, these occasions simply maintain coming. This yr, Artwork Basel and Frieze, the 2 leaders within the truthful circuit, are each including Center Japanese editions to their respective portfolios. In February, Artwork Basel will launch a good in Qatar. In an uncommon transfer, Artwork Basel Qatar will probably be led not by a market knowledgeable however by an artist: Wael Shawky, whose previous accomplishments embody representing Egypt on the Venice Biennale, and who will now spearhead the shows of round 50 galleries. Seven months later, in November, Frieze will kick off its first truthful in Abu Dhabi, the place a long-awaited Guggenheim museum is anticipated to lastly open in 2026.

No new museum opening in 2026 is glitzier than Los Angeles’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork, a non-public establishment based by the married couple George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, each of whom seem on the ARTnews High 200 Collectors checklist. The museum has spent the previous a number of years buying vital works by Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, Robert Colescott, and others, and is now on the brink of unveil them in a brand new Ma Yansong–designed constructing. A collection of delays and a cascade of exits by high-ranking employees have solid a pall over the opening, which is at present slated for September. Whether or not or not the museum remains to be going through turmoil behind the scenes by that time, the inauguration will probably be intently watched.

The yr’s different massive personal museum will not be in an artwork vacation spot. The Muzej Lah will host the holdings of Slovenian philanthropists Igor and Mojca Lah, who each seem on the ARTnews High 200 Collectors checklist. Set within the Slovenian city of Bled, the David Chipperfield–designed museum could also be positioned in a picturesque mountain vary, however the artwork on view will not be merely eye sweet. Heady items by the likes of Hito Steyerl, Anselm Kiefer, Zoran Mušič, William Kentridge, Anne Imhof, and extra will determine within the galleries, which Chipperfield has known as “an excellent setting for the gathering and provides the customer a powerful sense of the encircling panorama.”

Kanal, a long-awaited Brussels artwork museum, is about to turn into one in every of Europe’s largest artwork areas, surpassing each the Centre Pompidou and Tate Fashionable—earlier than its 2016 enlargement, anyway—in scale. Set in a former Citroën storage, Kanal is years within the making and is now nearer than ever to turn into a actuality—if a posh association with the Pompidou and a long-running Belgian authorities shutdown don’t unravel issues. The plan, because it at present stands, is for the museum to open in November, kicking off a five-year-long partnership with the Pompidou that can see the Paris museum mortgage masterworks of contemporary artwork whereas it’s closed for renovation. (There will even be new commissions, together with a playground designed by the Turner Prize–successful structure collective Meeting.) Whether or not any of that can come to move is an open query. Kazia Redzisz, the museum’s director, just lately informed the Guardian that she by no means anticipated the federal government to be shut down throughout Kanal’s opening, including, “If there isn’t a call on the finances, we danger having to cease development, threatening your entire venture’s future.”

Since 2017, the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork’s Peter Zumthor–designed enlargement has polarized critics. The negativity hardly died down in 2024, when the enlargement, formally titled the David Geffen Galleries, was first unveiled to journalists, who’ve variously termed Zumthor’s area an “amoebic pancake” and “the blob.” Blobby although it could be, Zumthor’s construction provides a whopping 110,000 sq. ft to a museum that’s already fairly grand, making the opening of David Geffen Galleries a significant event. These galleries will notable not only for Zumthor’s concrete partitions however for what’s held inside them: LACMA’s curators have promised an unconventional grasp that breaks down the boundaries that sometimes separate curatorial departments. Outdoors these partitions, there will probably be new commissions by Liz Glynn, Diana Thater, Thomas Houseago, and extra.

The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork singlehandedly invented the blockbuster museum exhibition in 1978 with its monumental King Tut present; nonetheless right now, no different establishment does grandly scaled surveys like this one. However even by the Met’s personal requirements, its forthcoming Raphael retrospective is formidable. Seven years within the making and opening in March, the present options some 200 works testifying the continued brilliance of this Renaissance grasp, whose work of antiquity and biblical scenes established guidelines of perspective which are nonetheless in use right now. He is likely one of the most well-known artists of all time, a fixture in faculty curricula in varied disciplines and a pillar of artwork historical past. Astonishingly, he has by no means been the topic of a US retrospective till now.

In 2004, the Guardian reported that Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 readymade Fountain, a urinal turned on its facet, was voted essentially the most influential paintings of all time by 500 artwork professionals. There aren’t any indicators that Duchamp’s affect has dimmed within the years since, which makes it all of the extra shocking that the final retrospective for the Dada artist within the US, the nation the place he spent a part of his profession, was staged in 1973. The Museum of Fashionable Artwork and the Philadelphia Artwork Museum are rectifying that in 2026. In April, MoMA will premiere the exhibition, which options practically 300 works, together with the Cubism-inspired portray Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1913). That portray is often held in Philadelphia and has not visited New York—the place it premiered within the US, on the 1913 Armory Present—for the reason that final Duchamp retrospective.

Equally inspirational to many artists right now is Frida Kahlo, the Surrealism-affiliated Mexican painter whose explorations of Latina id and incapacity now appear method forward of their time. Following a brand new file for her set at public sale this previous November, two Kahlo reveals are alighting within the US. The larger of the 2, “Frida: The Making of an Icon,” opens on January 19 on the Museum of Advantageous Arts Houston in Texas and can disentangle quite a few myths about Kahlo’s persona that stay pervasive; the exhibition strikes throughout the pond, to Tate Fashionable in London, in June. MoMA, in the meantime, is surveying Kahlo’s marriage to the painter Diego Rivera in March with a small present opening in tandem with a brand new opera concerning the two artists debuting on the Metropolitan Opera in Might.

Now not an obscure determine of current artwork historical past, Ana Mendieta is right now thought-about a feminist artwork icon within the US, together with her performances connecting her physique to American and Cuban landscapes counted as among the key works of the Seventies. Shockingly, nobody has endeavored to provide her a retrospective since 1987, when New York’s New Museum surveyed her work in full. Tate Fashionable will one-up that present with an excellent greater retrospective as a result of open in July. Whereas Mendieta’s broadly seen images documenting performances about her physique and sexual violence will probably be on show, the exhibition additionally goals to reveal much less usually proven sides of her oeuvre, together with her movies, a few of which have been newly remastered.

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo continues its canon-expanding “Historiás” collection in 2026 with a slew of reveals centered across the historical past of Latin American artwork. The reveals are primarily a victory lap for Adriano Pedrosa, the museum’s creative director, who curated the 2024 Venice Biennale and is now giving a few of its members solo exhibitions on his house turf, working in collaboration with others on employees the museum. La Chola Poblete, an Argentine painter who obtained a particular point out at that Biennale for works that mapped histories of strife, will obtain a one-person present right here; Claudia Alarcón, a Wichí weaver whose work was successful with critics in Venice, will even see her work with the all-female Silät collective surveyed. However forward of the blowout “Latin American Histories” exhibition in September, Pedrosa and his crew will stage exhibitions for Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Damián Ortega, and the Colectivo Acciones de Arte.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, who at present serves because the creative director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, has revealed so many interviews with artists that it’s generally troublesome to recollect he has additionally often written on a extra simply accessible topic: himself. In 2026, he’s publishing his memoir, which roots his intense need to curate in childhood trauma. As this guide, titled Life in Progress, recounts, Obrist was hit by a automobile when he was simply six years previous. The incident induced an epiphany: “You need to make day-after-day nice, I spotted, and day-after-day one thing has to occur—you may’t look ahead to tomorrow,” as Obrist informed Frieze final yr, when the guide revealed in Europe. American readers now have the chance to learn the way Obrist made good on that realization.

Obrist’s establishment, the Serpentine Galleries, will even be within the information within the spring when it unveils a monumental David Hockney work depicting the altering seasons. The Hockney work is a direct response to the Bayeux Tapestry, which will probably be on view in London concurrently on the British Museum. The 224-foot-long embroidered material, which depicts the occasions previous the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, is often housed in France, and has not visited England in over 900 years. The mortgage has been mired in controversy: artwork historians have warned that the material is just too fragile for journey, and a few within the UK have raised questions on the price of bringing it house. But nobody would deny that the mortgage is something wanting momentous.

Some blockbusters impress due to the size of their checklists; others stun due to the prime quality of the few works on view. “Van Eyck: The Portraits,” opening on the Nationwide Gallery in London in November, will fall into the latter class. The exhibition is predicated round fewer than a dozen work, however these works are of big significance, accounting for roughly half of all of the portraits produced singlehandedly by Jan van Eyck within the Netherlands within the fifteenth century. Naturally, a kind of is a jewel of the Nationwide Gallery assortment: the Arnolfini Portrait (1434), which made progressive use of oil paint to attain a degree of element that was beforehand unattainable for painters to acquire. Surrounding it is going to be different intricate portraits from museums in Berlin, Bruges, and Vienna.

Some 650,000 folks visited the Rijksmuseum’s 2023 Johannes Vermeer retrospective, however Vermeer mania didn’t finish with when that present closed. If something, the craze is prone to proceed into 2026, which is able to see the discharge of a brand new biography. Titled Vermeer: A Life Misplaced and Discovered and releasing in April, it was written by Andrew Graham-Dixon, whose previous books embody the definitive biography of Caravaggio, and it must do so much to make clear some lacking particulars within the biography of Vermeer, a Dutch Previous Grasp whose luminous work are world-famous, whilst the main points of his private life stay elusive.

Extra so than different US Presidents, Barack Obama made visible artwork a fixture of his administration, at one level even hanging an Alma Thomas abstraction within the White Home effectively earlier than she had a giant retrospective. Obama has continued supporting the humanities since leaving workplace, and is now set to maintain doing simply that along with his Barack Obama Presidential Library, an unlimited Chicago area that doubles as a museum and an academic area that’s set to open in June. Set to look listed below are a variety of newly commissioned artworks by artists akin to Julie Mehretu, Aliza Nisenbaum, Kiki Smith, Idris Khan, Jenny Holzer, and extra. The constructing will even showcase native abilities akin to Theaster Gates, who will debut an set up making use of fabric from the Ebony and Jet archives.

Although he died at 96 practically a month in the past, many are nonetheless assessing the legacy left behind by Frank Gehry, whose postmodern constructions composed of pile-ups of metal varieties modified structure ceaselessly. Gehry could also be most well-known for the museums he designed, most notably the Guggenheim Bilbao. (And he died with but yet one more museum within the offing: the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, whose opening has not but been debated however seems to be within the close to future.) It’s becoming, then, that his largest posthumous celebration will happen at an artwork establishment. The Serralves Basis in Porto, Portugal, is feting Gehry with a retrospective in Might that can function documentation associated to greater than two dozen of his initiatives.

The World Cup returns in 2026, with the video games cut up throughout venues in Canada, Mexico, and the US, and artwork museums are responding in sort. Essentially the most high-profile soccer-related exhibition of the yr is about to happen in Mexico Metropolis on the Museo Jumex, which is staging “Fútbol y Arte. Esa misma emoción” (Soccer & Artwork. A Shared Emotion) in March. Among the many works included in that present is Marta Minujín’s 1977 portray Mi Mundial, by which a giantess reclines atop a soccer stadium. In the meantime, in February, LACMA is staging “Fútbol: The Stunning Recreation,” which broadly explores the intersection of sports activities and politics by means of such works as Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon’s famed 2006 video set up Zidane, a twenty first century portrait, concerning the titular French soccer phenom.

Sellers have bought a banana and pooping robots at previous editions of Artwork Basel Miami Seaside. How loopy is it to think about a gallery peddling a lifeless physique on the truthful? That’s the premise of The Gallerist, a brand new movie directed by Cathy Yan (of Birds of Prey fame) premiering on the Sundance Movie Pageant this month forward of a theatrical launch later within the yr. Natalie Portman stars within the movie, whose solid additionally consists of Jenna Ortega, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Da’Vine Pleasure Randolph, Zach Galifianakis, and Charli XCX.