84 Must-See Exhibitions and Biennials to See in Fall 2026

The art world tends not to agree on much, but few would disparage Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012), a video installation in which a troupe of musicians play their somber song together, each from a different room in a dilapidated house. Upon its debut, the work was immediately celebrated as a powerful piece about the frailty of human relations; it is now considered a classic. The Visitors will appear in this survey of the Icelandic artist’s work, which frequently takes the form of slow-paced videos in which banal acts take place over prolonged periods. The latest work to continue that theme is Sundays Without Love (2025), which brings to life a postcard of a countryside scene that Kjartansson keeps on his fridge.

September 3–January 31, 2027

This institution’s “Historiás” exhibition series has lived up to its name by drawing under-recognized art histories into the canon. Having previously tackled subjects such as Black Atlantic culture, indigenous rights, and environmentalism, the series is now turning its focus local, relatively speaking. “Latin American Histories” directs its attention to the entire region of which Brazil is a part, examining topics from Baroque art to the oppression of indigenous people to the Zapatista movement. Curators Amanda Carneiro and Julieta González have deliberately cast a wide net, viewing the region’s history as a collision of many narratives rather than a single cohesive story.

September 4–January 13, 2027

Rainer Maria Rilke concluded one famed poem with the line “You must change your life,” but he didn’t exactly provide an instructional manual for how to fulfill his directive. Taking that line as its inspiration, this edition of Asia’s top biennial suggests that there are infinite ways to meet Rilke’s demand, which is really about the many means by which one can reimagine oneself for the better. Artist Ho Tzu Nyen, the biennial’s curator, has amassed a list of 43 participants whose work can be seen as bearing this out. Those artists include an array of stars—among them the Indian photographer Sohrab Hura, a current participant in the Venice Biennale—as well as other, more mysterious participants, including one billed only as the Volcanoes of Jeju, a reference to the natural fissures off the coast of a South Korean island.

September 5–November 15

A few years ago, Koo Jeong A put out a query that was disseminated widely: “What is your scent memory of Korea?” On the basis of the 600 responses they received, Koo created a “scent landscape” for the Venice Biennale’s Korean Pavilion; it smelled woody, perhaps also a bit like mothballs. For Koo, the project was about trying to visualize the invisible, a theme they have considered in many sleek installations, and one they will continue to mull with this Leeum Museum show, which continues their “OUSSSMOS” installation series. Included here will be a newly commissioned work called [MOBIOUSSS], which a press release enigmatically describes as a “monumental luminous structure that evokes both the symbol of infinity and a skatepark.”

September 5–December 27

Ali Cherri has referred to his films contemplating wartime carnage and traumatic memories as “landscapes of violence.” Born in Lebanon and based in Paris and Beirut, Cherri infuses these films with surrealism, drifting in and out of dreams and often obscuring whether these works are set in the past or present. (To further the confusion, he makes sculptures that appear to have been created by bygone empires of the Middle East and Egypt.) The winner of the 2022 Venice Biennale’s award for a promising young artist, Cherri will here display an array of these films, including The Sentinel (2026), in which a French soldier shoots himself somewhere along the northern edge of Cyprus, then drifts around a set of ruins.

September 5–January 3, 2027

Unlike many other Brazilian modernists, Ismael Nery never entirely abandoned the human figure. But his people did not look like those you might see on the street: Nery’s sometimes had multiple faces and mismatched eyes. Occasionally, it wasn’t easy to tell where these people ended and the backgrounds behind them began, and frequently, Nery made their gender ambiguous—a gesture that feels particularly au courant today. Having appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale, which was that year organized by the celebrated Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, Nery is now getting an expansive survey in his homeland.

September 5–January 31, 2027

Annemirl Bauer’s name is likely to be unfamiliar to most people, even within Germany, and there are clear reasons why. During the 1980s, while working in East Germany, she spoke out against the requirement that women serve in the military; she also agitated for citizens of the GDR to be allowed to travel without restrictions. These protests gained Bauer the attention of the authorities, who began to surveil her. She died at the age of 50 in 1989, less than two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall; by that point she had built up a significant oeuvre of paintings and drawings that explicitly critiqued the constraints placed on East Germans like herself. At long last, she is getting a proper retrospective within Germany.

September 5–February 7, 2027

The question of how art can be used to enhance power is one that occupies rulers, presidents, and prime ministers today, but in fact that query is thousands of years old. While it did not begin in ancient Egypt, it was certainly in play during the 18th Dynasty (ca. 1550–1292 BCE), when three pharaohs—Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III, and Akhenaten—grew increasingly adept at using sculpture to impress their authority upon the masses. This show centers on that trio and includes a range of statues of Akenhaten, who had a predilection for objects that portrayed him with almond-shaped eyes and an elongated head. These reliefs and statues are otherworldly, off-putting, and undeniably singular.

September 6–December 6

Central Asia’s art scene has experienced a seismic shift in the past couple of years, thanks to the introduction of a new biennial in Bukhara and a range of new art spaces in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The newest of these institutions is the Centre for Contemporary Art Tashkent, whose inaugural show is “Hikmah,” a group exhibition whose name means “wisdom” in Uzbek. Mulling the transmission of ideas and the acquisition of knowledge, the show will feature an array of international artists, among them Tarik Kiswanson, a Paris-based sculptor whose work has explored his family’s Palestinian heritage and the movements of people across the globe.

September 6–January 31, 2027

The first edition of this triennial, in 2023, appears to have made a lasting impact on St. Louis, where some of its commissions remain viewable today. That makes Counterpublic one of the few biennial-style shows to be more than a parachute-in exhibition and offers a reason to keep tabs on the second edition, curated by Jordan Carter, Raphael Fonseca, Stefanie Hessler, Nora N. Khan, and Wanda Nanibush. Under the theme of “Coyote Time,” the exhibition is devoted to the notion of uncertainty and features artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Li Yi-Fan, and Ximena Garrido-Lecca. One of its more exciting offerings is a show within a show: a multi-museum survey for Juanita McNeely, whose figurative paintings examine misogynistic violence in all its grotesqueness.

September 10–December 13

Ayşe Erkmen’s Am Haus (1994), a set of 40 Turkish-language suffixes that are permanently arrayed across the facade of a building in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, is a gesture both subtle and impactful. Erkmen has noted that the work is legible only to those who speak Turkish, so that “the so-called outsider in German society becomes the insider.” Indeed, Kreuzberg is an artist-friendly neighborhood with a history of acting as a home to a large immigrant community. This exhibition, a celebration of Kreuzberg’s ability to turn outsiders into insiders, will present 100 works by migrants who have passed through the district, among them artists Colette Lumiere, Aykan Safoğlu, and Eduardo Arroyo.

September 10–January 17, 2027

When she appears in public, Ayana Evans often wears a bright green catsuit that is hard to miss. Such a gesture is of a piece with her performances, which are about drawing attention to Black womanhood and all the ideas attached to it. “She makes herself hypervisible,” the critic Seph Rodney once wrote. “Her black body cannot, and will not, be ignored or brushed aside.” Having staged memorable works that have variously involved doing jumping jacks for hours on end and wearing a sign that read “I JUST CAME HERE TO FIND A HUSBAND,” Evans will now bring her practice within museum walls in a show billed as her first survey. Included will be video and photographic documentation as well as eye-catching clothes that can be donned by attendees wishing to make themselves hypervisible as well.

September 10–February 7, 2027

The Preis der Nationalgalerie, one of Berlin’s top art awards, typically goes to an artist under the age of 40 based in the German capital. It was a surprise, then, when Maurizio Cattelan, a prankster artist in his mid-60s who was neither born nor based in Berlin, won the prize in 2025. Maybe that’s why the Neue Nationalgalerie has gone to great lengths to attribute a vague sense of Germanness to the Italian Cattelan, whom the institution notes has curated one edition of the Berlin Biennale and created one unforgettable Germany-themed sculpture: Him (2001), a tiny, penitent Adolf Hitler. Him is one of the artworks featured in this exhibition, which will also feature a new piece that the museum has called “a far-reaching intervention into the museum’s spatial framework.” That’s a pretty anodyne description for work by an artist known for duct-taping a banana to a wall and calling it art.

September 10–March 7, 2027

Sometimes, one work is enough to be an exhibition unto itself. Such is the case here, in this once-in-a-lifetime presentation of the Bayeux Tapestry, a 230-foot-long embroidered textile made between 1070 and 1082 that narrates the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England. Typically housed at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in France, the work has not visited the United Kingdom in roughly a millennium. That makes the loan extraordinary. It’s also extraordinarily valuable—insured at $1.5 million—because of its historical significance: The tapestry pioneered a new way of telling history by serializing its embroidered images, each of which is remarkably detailed.

September 10–July 11, 2027

In her 1980–2013 painting Tales from the Schwarzwald as Told by My Mother, Marion Wagschal renders a cascade of translucent figures interrupted by a thronelike chair, a mushroom, and leafy trees. Though it may seem to be Wagschal’s fantastical invention, the painting is meant to depict stories about Germany’s Black Forest that were imparted to the artist by her parents, who survived the Holocaust and moved to Trinidad and Tobago, where Wagschal was born in 1943. The painting demonstrates Wagschal’s acute ability to show how history morphs, growing stranger as it is told and retold. Having gained a cult following in Canada, where she has been based since the 1950s, Wagschal will now have a retrospective that examines the role of secondhand trauma in her art.

September 11–January 17, 2027

The German modernist painter Franz Marc assigned meaning to each of the bright hues he used in his landscapes. “Blue is the male principle, astringent and spiritual,” he once said. “Yellow is the female principle, gentle, gay and spiritual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the color to be opposed and overcome by the other two.” The artist combined those colors in pastoral scenes that exhibited a unique sense of harmony; they made him one of the primary artists of the Blaue Reiter movement of the 1910s. How Marc achieved that harmony before his untimely demise—he died at 36 while fighting in the Battle of Verdun—is the subject of this retrospective, billed as the first significant show devoted to the artist in two decades.

September 12–January 24, 2027

Protests in support of liberation are often accompanied by calls for solidarity, which is likely why this show includes artists from Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece, Catalonia, Slovenia, and other European locales that have faced periods of turmoil in the past 35 years. But rather than lingering on the trauma associated with upheaval, this show focuses on peacetime and the way artists have envisioned it. With an artist list spanning artists as diverse as Kosovar sculptor Petrit Halilaj and the Eurasian art collective Slavs and Tatars, the exhibition implicitly shows that one community’s afflictions are never meant to be solved alone.

September 12–May 9, 2027

There’s a tendency to call Surrealist art “dreamlike.” But that word would probably not have pleased Remedios Varo, the Spanish-born Mexican artist whose paintings of witchy figures conspiring in settings recalling cloisters and laboratories stand as some of the weirdest works of the 20th century. “The dream world and the real world are the same,” she once said of these paintings, which conjure rituals that exist outside the realm of reason. Once an obscure figure at the fringes of Surrealism studies, Varo has gained a large following over the past decade, and that is likely to make this retrospective, the biggest devoted to her in some time, a hit with scholars and new initiates alike.

September 18–January 10, 2027

Born in Syria and based for much of her career in the United States and France, Simone Fattal is known for sculptures that obliquely evoke the distant past: Adam and Eve (2021), a work that appeared at the 2022 Venice Biennale, depicted the biblical couple by way of two leggy figures without arms or facial features. While sculptures like these have in recent years been exhibited internationally, the rest of Fattal’s practice remains less widely known. This 100-work retrospective aims to remedy that with landscape paintings from early in her career, when she was still based in Beirut; writings published through her now-defunct Post-Apollo Press; and objects related to collaborations with Etel Adnan, the late painter and poet who was Fattal’s romantic partner.

September 18–January 24, 2027

“Flesh and meat are life,” the painter Francis Bacon once said. This view certainly showed in his art, which often featured people posed among carcasses; at times, his sitters themselves resembled raw meat, their faces appearing battered or carved. The tendency to view humans in this way also extended to one of Bacon’s main inspirations, Pablo Picasso, who gained fame—and, in some feminist corners, notoriety—for paintings that render bodies so abstract that they appear not to even belong to people. This 70-work show of Picasso and Bacon paintings elucidates a violent tendency running across their oeuvres that has been both hard to pin down and tough to swallow.

September 18–January 31, 2027

This exhibition is aptly titled, since painter Clare Rojas recently came back to her home state of Ohio after a prolonged period in California’s Bay Area, where she achieved fame during the 1990s. (The show’s city is also fitting: Rojas was born in Columbus.) Her art is, in a way, about how individuals relate to the environments that produce them, with abstracted birds and flowers recurring throughout her lush paintings. Perhaps somewhat relatedly, the release for the show notes that Rojas recently planted California poppies in the garden of her Ohio home.

September 18–February 7, 2027

“I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the making of my work,” Taryn Simon once said. “It’s a labor.” It’s no surprise she feels this way, given that her work has addressed topics such as wrongful incarceration, genocide, grief, and the fragility of democracy, often with a rigor that is rare among artists, even in a time when research-oriented art is widely exhibited. Using photography as her primary medium, she has frequently directed her attention toward America’s hidden histories, which may be one reason the Guggenheim chose Simon to fill its rotunda as the nation’s 250th anniversary year draws to a close. Though the actual contents of the show remain undisclosed, the museum has described the exhibition as “a massive constellation of images around a sweeping narrative that spirals through the space.”

September 18–March 14, 2027

In 1968, John Baldessari, a painter by training, finished a work called What Is a Painting? that featured nothing more than text. That text concluded, “Art is a creation for the eye and can only be hinted at with words.” The painting is perhaps the most emblematic work Baldessari ever produced. Like others in the Conceptualist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Baldessari used his practice to reflect on the very nature of art, showing it was not simply enough to see an object—one also had to read about it to fully consider it. Baldessari’s efforts to get at the true meaning of art, and in particular his vexed relationship to painting, guide this retrospective, which UCCA says is the first significant one for Baldessari in China.

September 19–January 3, 2027

Switzerland is a country so dense with art collectors that individuals of note continue to emerge from the depths of history with some degree of regularity. The latest to be considered is Gertrud Dübi-Müller (1888–1980), who was a pioneer in more sense than one. She collected Vincent van Gogh’s work in depth, modeled for Ferdinand Hodler (whose work she also bought), and traveled widely, sometimes in a car known as a Pic-Pic, which was not in widespread use when she began driving it in the early 20th century. In tribute to her, the Kunstmuseum Basel will survey both her life and her art collecting—and will even display her photographs, one of which shows her behind the wheel of her prized Pic-Pic, ready to go wherever the road might take her.
September 19–February 7, 2027

While some in power attempt to exclude immigrants from U.S. history, this exhibition highlights artists of Asian descent and suggests that postwar America would have looked much different without them. Some of the subjects of this show are best known for works that cleanly fit the traditional notion of art: Isamu Noguchi and Ruth Asawa, for example, are typically recognized for their sculptures. But in placing the focus on design objects, the show argues that these artists developed lamps, tables, and furniture with a fresh look by drawing on the aesthetics of modernist art. Many artists in this show experienced forms of displacement: The Taiwan-born sculptor Leo Amino remained in the United States after emigrating from Japan, the nation where he was raised, because he disagreed with the swell of nationalism taking place there.

September 20–January 10, 2027

This exhibition uses a formula that is increasingly prominent at major museums in the United States: Take a well-known painter, and turn the focus to their works on paper. The subject this time around is Andrew Wyeth, the artist known for his American landscapes permeated by a palpable sense of alienation. As with his oil paintings, his watercolors depict locales in Pennsylvania and Maine, imaging fishermen at work, mourners burying a loved one in a hilly graveyard, and more. Many of the 75 works in the exhibition have never been shown before, according to the museum.

September 20–January 18, 2027

No new museum this year is quite as ambitious as the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, an institution founded by collectors George Lucas and Mellody Hobson at a cost of more than $1 billion. Its titular focus is admittedly vague; the institution’s website notes that it is a museum about the “power of visual storytelling.” But the Lucas Museum has steadily acquired such an exciting array of works, from masterpieces by Robert Colescott and Norman Rockwell to an expansive archive related to Black cinema, that the elusiveness of its central premise matters little. What form the museum’s presentations will ultimately take—and how they will be mounted without several high-ranking curators who resigned in the run-up to the opening—remain to be seen.

Opens September 22

Amar Kanwar was born in New Delhi more than a decade and a half after the partition of India, but the devastating division of the nation into two countries is encoded in his lineage: Both of his parents fled the state of Punjab because of it. The trauma of the partition continues to inform Kanwar’s poetic film installations, which approach notions of separation and alienation in ways both metaphorical and not. This exhibition collects several of those installations, including Such a Morning (2017), which premiered to acclaim at Documenta 14. There’s also the debut of a new work called The Charcoal Man, an installation combining disparate moving images and texts that find “coherence from disintegration, insight from fusion, and stories from within stories,” as Kanwar has put it.

September 23–January 31, 2027

It is hard to imagine now, but little more than a decade ago, Arthur Jafa was known mainly to cineastes as the cinematographer of acclaimed films such as Crooklyn and Daughters of the Dust. But in 2016, Jafa rocked the art world with Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, his heartbreaking seven-and-a-half minute montage of clips related to the Black experience in America. Nearly a decade after that video’s memorable debut at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, the city will at last get a proper survey for Jafa. The White Album (2018), the video essay on whiteness that won Jafa top honors at the 2019 Venice Biennale, will be included, as will an assortment of other works about racism and histories of violence that qualify Jafa as one of today’s most exciting artists.

September 24–January 4, 2027

At first glance, Teresa Margolles’s art may seem unassuming in appearance, her materials banal. In fact, her ultimately disturbing installations often testify to state-sanctioned carnage and systemic disparities and the way that both are often hard to see, even when they are put right in front of us. Vaporization (2002), for example, is a room filled with mist and little more; its droplets in fact come from the water used to wash bodies in morgues. That installation is one of several that will appear in this show, billed as the Mexican artist’s first major survey in the United States. The exhibition extends from Queens to Manhattan, where, at the Museum of Modern Art, Margolles will unveil a new work that involves dripping water onto hot steel plates. Per PS1, that water is “imbued with organic substances recovered from sites of violence.”

September 24–February 2027

Depending on whom you ask, Anne Imhof’s sprawling performances are either protest-minded statements about group dynamics or banal provocations calculated to go viral on social media. Whether you like them or not, these pieces, which often stretch on for hours and involve copious amounts of nudity and live music, have generated conversation, which is more than can be said for most artworks. With this survey, the Golden Lion–winning German phenom brings her art to Asia, a region that has yet to get a proper taste of it. Alongside pieces related to past performances, there will be a new commission called House of Swans, a performance that follows “a heroine struggling on her path to love through a chaotic cityscape,” per press materials.

September 25–January 3, 2027

In one 1983 Sesame Street special, Oscar the Grouch memorably surveys all the partially broken objects on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and finds himself charmed, describing chipped statues from antiquity as “busted and heavenly.” It’s telling that even Oscar had nice things to say about half-preserved treasures, whose mysteries continue to entrance us centuries after their creation. Oscar would be pleased with this survey of sculptural fragments. Alongside ancient works from Egypt, Cambodia, Greece, and elsewhere, there will be contemporary contributions, courtesy of artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Huma Bhabha, and Robert Gober. A new piece by Mark Manders, an artist known for giant sculptures of crumbling human heads, has fittingly been commissioned for the exhibition.

September 25–January 24, 2027

Rather than considering the Japanese contemporary art scene as a whole, this survey limits its focus to women artists whose work helped fulfill the goal of liberation, as suggested by the show’s title, which translates to “breaking free.” The 39 artists included run the gamut from Gutai pioneers to technology-obsessed sculptors; there are also artists who were born in Japan but spent large parts of their career outside it, among them Ruth Asawa and Yoko Ono. One of the show’s purposes is to canonize the un-canonized, so it’s appropriate that the exhibition’s most tantalizing strand has to do with the notion of history itself. That section of the show will feature Toshi and Iri Maruki’s Hiroshima Panels (1950), which processes the grief associated with the explosion of a U.S.-dropped atomic bomb in the titular city.

September 25–February 14, 2027

Curator Allison Glenn’s edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art has the same title as Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, which charts an Igbo community’s attempts to resist the threat of white settlers in colonial Nigeria. Both Achebe’s novel and this show “engage rupture as a generative force,” per a press statement—seemingly a nod to the ways many of the artists chosen do not linger over the pain associated with colonialism, racism, and other forms of violence, but seek to discover new ways of surviving in spite of it. Those artists include Antonio Obá, Charisse Pearlina Weston, Dawit L. Petros, Rebecca Belmore, and Solange Pessoa.

September 26–December 20

Recurring across many of Wifredo Lam’s Surrealist paintings are beings that are neither humans nor gods but something in between. These beings have often been viewed as parallels for Lam’s own hybridity: The artist’s mother had Congolese and Cuban ancestry, and his father was born in China. Lam makes a fitting protagonist for this concise group show, which explores points of intersection between networks of Black, African, and Chinese artists. Lam will figure here alongside artists such as Ming Wong, Candice Lin, Christian Nyampeta, and Yinka Shonibare.

September 26–February 21, 2027

Indian-born artist Balraj Khanna spent much of his career in England, where he painted abstractions that evoked animals and meteorological phenomena—“the theatre of the natural world,” as he once put it. Responding to everything from parks in France to the pain of the Indian partition, whose violence he personally observed, Khanna utilized outré painterly methods; one body of work was made by blowing his paint onto canvases that were dusted with sand. His goal in doing so was to find a kind of artistic liberation, as this exhibition’s title suggests. This is the first U.K. survey for Khanna, who died in 2024.

September 30–February 21, 2027

The advent of photography, changes in urban design, and social upheaval have all been suggested as reasons for the radical shift in French art during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This exhibition proposes one more factor: tourism on the French Riviera. According to the curators of the show, artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri Matisse were all attracted to the Riviera because it offered respite from Paris’s hustle and bustle. The cerulean blues of the ocean and the glitz surrounding it moved them to hone styles such as Pointillism and Fauvism. If the 120 works in this show are any proof, these artists’ trips to the Riviera were not exactly vacations, since the calm also spurred their creativity.

October 2–January 31, 2027

It’s fair to be suspicious of any museum exhibition that touts its co-curator as “pop royalty,” but it’s also not possible at this point to completely ignore RM, a member of the K-pop group BTS who has amassed a significant art collection. The exhibition is both a chance for RM to show off his holdings—it includes pieces by Kim Yun Shin, Chang Ucchin, and other Korean artists whose work he owns alongside masterpieces from the SFMOMA collection—and an opportunity on the museum’s part to cozy up to a fervent fandom it has yet to entirely tap. “My only hope,” RM has said of the 200-work show, “is that this exhibition can be a small but sturdy bridge for many.”

October 3–February 7, 2027

One of the major achievements of Australian modernism is Sidney Nolan’s 1946–47 series of paintings about Ned Kelly, the 19th-century bushranger whose violent exploits symbolized the lawlessness prevalent during his day in Victoria–New South Wales. Nolan envisioned Kelly as a half-human entity with a big black square for a head, suggesting a sense of alienation mirrored by the emptiness of the landscape that surrounds him in most works. Nolan may have departed Australia for England in 1951, less than five years after completing the series, but this show, focusing on the artist’s pre-London period, implies that Australia left a lasting mark on the artist, who explored such topics as nationalist sentiment and the wide-open frontier.

October 3–February 7, 2027

In 2015, four years before her death at 91, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian estimated that she had spent roughly half her career outside her native Iran, working from a studio in New York that she loved dearly. Yet she had a complicated relationship with the city; she also described how, when she began her second stay in New York in 1979, following the Islamic Revolution, she found herself longing for her homeland. She made collages in response, embedding them with fabric from her mother’s clothing and her own jewelry. These are not the most famous works by Farmanfarmaian, who is better known for her glorious abstract sculptures covered in shimmering glass, but pieces like these collages will come to the fore in this survey, which explores the artist’s transnational existence and its impact on her practice.

October 3–February 28, 2027

When it comes to Abstract Expressionists, the Met will always be most closely aligned with Jackson Pollock, whose crowning achievement, the drip painting Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950, is a star of the Met’s modern art galleries. But this fall, Pollock must share the spotlight there with Lee Krasner, another Abstract Expressionist painter who happened to be married to him. The Met is mounting a 120-work blockbuster that surveys the two artists alongside each other, utilizing a double-portrait format that has become increasingly popular at major museums. In this case, the format helps right a historical wrong: Krasner was long relegated to the status of “Pollock’s wife” before feminist critics and curators began giving her the artistic credit she deserved during the 1970s and ’80s.

October 4–January 31, 2027

Baltimore is not considered as central to the photographic tradition as, say, Paris or New York, but maybe it ought to be, for it has produced legions of talented artists, as this sizable exhibition proves. Its 200 participants include an array of photographers across the decades, among them Henry Fitz, who brought daguerreotype technology to Baltimore in the mid-19th century; Irving Henry Phillips, a photojournalist whose images helped shape the Baltimore Afro-American during the mid-20th century; and Gioncarlo Valentine, whose recent pictures of Black Baltimoreans have earned him many fans.

October 4–February 21, 2027

Two years ago, an acclaimed Mary Cassatt show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art reassessed the Impressionist’s paintings of mothers and children as forceful pictures of female labor. Staged on the 100th anniversary of the American painter’s death, this 80-work survey aspires to be another significant contribution to the field of Cassatt studies with a focus on the artist’s firebrand personality, which led her to strike out on her own and fund a life solely through her art. According to the Orsay, this mind-set extended to her politics—she advocated for women’s suffrage. If you still haven’t had your fill of Cassatt’s work after this exhibition, head to the Art Institute of Chicago, which is staging a show about her late-career period this season.

October 6–January 31, 2027

The pinnacle of Kurt Schwitters’s explosive creativity was his 1923–37 Merzbau installation, which turned the room of a building in Hanover, Germany, into a cathedral-like space filled with collages and sculptural elements. Merzbau no longer exists, but Schwitters’s remaining paintings and collages continue its quest to destroy any division between life and art. Utilizing ready-made materials from the mass media and objects of his own making, Schwitters showed that the stuff of the everyday could look right at home in museums and art galleries, fulfilling one of the main goals of the Dada movement that he was a part of. This 300-work exhibition suggests that he was responding to the turbulence of the years between the world wars, with his bric-a-brac acting as a parallel for the roiled European psyche.

October 6–February 7, 2027

Inji Efflatoun was a painter associated with the Egyptian Art et Liberté group (an offshoot of Surrealism active from about 1938–48) who became known during the 1940s for landscapes filled with roiling oceans and gnarled bodies. While her paintings of the ensuing five decades grew more straightforward, bluntly addressing topics such as her imprisonment under the Nasser regime and the conditions of labor in rural Egypt, they continued to evince the same leftist politics of her Surrealist works, which rejected the Western concept of reason as an explicitly anticolonial gesture. The Surrealist paintings began a career-long query: What kind of reality did she and other Egyptians want for themselves? The question continues to resound in this retrospective.

October 7–February 14, 2027

We’ve come a long way since 1971, when, in a famed ARTnews essay, the art historian Linda Nochlin denounced the marginalization of female Old Masters such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Lavinia Fontana, both of whom now regularly appear in the permanent collections of major museums in the United States and Europe. Increasingly, there is an understanding that these artists were two of many women actively producing art during their day—not “women painters” but simply painters, period. In tribute to the shifting tides in the scholarship surrounding these artists, the National Museum is convening 50 artworks by female Old Masters like Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster, and Michaelina Wautier, whose work will appear here alongside pieces by their respective teachers.

October 8–February 7, 2027

Having mounted a hit retrospective for Raphael in 2020, the Scuderie del Quirinale is now doing a big show for another Italian Old Master with this survey of Jacopo da Pontormo, one of the key figures of the 16th-century Mannerist movement. Pontormo had a flair for brash coloration, deliberately exaggerated bodies, and chaotic composition—all flourishes that flew in the face of the cool sense of reason and rationality associated with the Renaissance. Although art has, of course, gone in far stranger directions since Pontormo’s death in 1557, his paintings still feel shocking today. Witness his masterpiece, The Carmignano Visitation (ca. 1528–30), in which a staid biblical scene is brought to life through its subjects’ dazzling robes, which come in shades of pink, orange, teal, and green. The painting rarely travels beyond the church outside Florence that holds it, but it’s headed to Rome this fall with a fresh restoration.

October 8–February 7, 2027

Mark Leckey’s 1999 video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, one of the crucial artworks of its decade, may center on the titular jeans manufacturer, but it is really about the denizens of discos and raves who wore its products. Composed mainly of archival footage, the video suggest that Fiorucci played a role in shaping the culture of its time and implies that fashion plays an outsize role in our lives. No surprise, then, that the video is included in this show, which demonstrates that Leckey was hardly the only Brit fascinated in the 1990s by clothing and all that attends it. Though not explicitly a Young British Artists survey, the 100-work exhibition could function as one, with Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, and many more all represented.

October 8–February 14, 2027

Among the Arte Povera artists of the 1960s, Luciano Fabro often stood out. Like many of his Italian compatriots affiliated with the movement, he made sculptures that brought together industrial forms and organic materials. Unlike many of his colleagues, he did so by using vexed symbols that proliferated in the real world, with a number of his works invoking the form of Italy itself, which he rendered in iron, bronze, gold, and other mediums. Perhaps this is why Fabro called himself the movement’s “heretic”—and why some observers have had a hard time classifying him. The Pirelli HangarBicocca’s retrospective, the first show of its kind mounted in Italy since Fabro’s death in 2007, may help this heretic find his home.

October 8–February 21, 2027

People often call Robert Ryman’s paintings monochromes, which theoretically makes sense, since he worked almost exclusively using white paint. But the American artist was quick to refute that label as false. “The gray of the steel comes through; the brown of the corrugated paper comes through; the linen comes through; the cotton (which is not the same as the paint—it seems white): all of those things are considered,” he once said. “It’s really not monochrome painting at all.” Nearly a decade after Ryman’s death, the optical effects of his spare paintings of the 1960s and ’70s continue to intrigue. Billed as the biggest show of his work in the United Kingdom in 30 years, this survey offers a great opportunity to investigate why.

October 8–February 28, 2027

When Nottingham Contemporary notes that this exhibition represents a “deeply meaningful homecoming,” the institution means it in more ways than one: Sarah Cunningham not only was born and raised in Nottingham but was a gallery assistant at Nottingham Contemporary. That the show puts such an emphasis on place is appropriate, given that Cunningham painted landscapes that appeared blurry, as though they were half-recalled memories that were at risk of being forgotten. Cunningham’s first major survey in the United Kingdom is also shot through with melancholy, functioning as an elegy for the artist, who died in 2024 at the age of 31.

October 9–January 10, 2027

Though he was core member of the Minimalist movement in 1960s New York, with ties to artists like Donald Judd and Mark di Suvero, David Novros remains less famous than many of his colleagues. That may change with this survey, which spotlights his spare paintings, many of which are composed of L shapes arranged to create what appear to be three-dimensional spaces. Of these works, the critic John Yau once astutely observed, “They are not simply shapes placed against the wall, as their openings make the wall integral to our experience.” Mounted to mark Novros’s 85th birthday, this 40-work exhibition aspires to provide a window onto how his work does just that.

October 9–February 21, 2027

The Fondation Louis Vuitton typically puts on its most high-profile exhibitions in the fall, when foreigners are in town for Art Basel Paris, and its big show for this season has an appropriately lengthy checklist that includes more than 600 objects. More than half of these works are by its subject, Gustave Fayet, who made paintings, rugs, ceramics, and design objects. But Fayet is better known for the art he bought than for the art he produced, and the real draw of the exhibition are the Impressionist artworks he collected, which are now held in museums across the globe, from Cleveland to Copenhagen. Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne will be among those represented.

October 9–March 8, 2027

“I dislike the separation of culture and nature,” the sculptor Solange Pessoa told ARTnews last year. “I have this imagination of an integrated philosophy, a natural philosophy, which incorporates culture as part of nature.” That integrated philosophy plays out in sculptures, paintings, and installations that fuse bodily materials—hair principal among them—with earthen matter, drawing out piquant associations between humanity and the natural world it inhabits. A true nonpareil of Brazil’s art scene since the 1990s, Pessoa has in recent years moved into the spotlight with an array of biennial appearances and museum shows, the latest of which is this survey featuring two new installations alongside past works.

October 10–March 28, 2027

Having staged the definitive Andy Warhol retrospective in 2018, the Whitney is now mounting a major survey for another Pop master: Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings often looked like images ripped straight from comic books, speech bubbles and all. In painting distressed women, gigantic explosions, and fast cars at a large scale, often with their Ben-Day dots left visible, Lichtenstein erased the division between high and low, blazing a trail for many others who came after him. This retrospective, the first devoted to Lichtenstein in the city he called home from 1963 until his death in 1997, aspires to prove his continued relevance through the inclusion of works by Louise Lawler, Sturtevant, and Alex Da Corte, the latter of whom served as a co-curator of the exhibition alongside Meg Onli.

October 14–May 10, 2027

Last year after a flood, the French photographer Sophie Calle created a unique installation, placing all her damaged artworks in an underground cavern. The conditions of the cavern ensured that the works would deteriorate further over time—and she embraced that fact, urging the presentation’s organizers to “directly bring them to the garbage” at the end of its run. Calle’s ongoing fascination with mortality, loss, and change fittingly guides this survey of her work, which includes an array of pictures taken across her career, from her conceptual photographic projects of the 1980s examining voyeurism and gendered power dynamics to more recent works contending with the weight of art history.

October 16–February 7, 2027

Psi-Girls (1999), arguably the most famous work by multimedia artist Susan Hiller, includes clips from five films featuring telekinetic young women. Manipulated by Hiller and projected at a large scale, these clips show the girls starting fires, moving drinking glasses, and generating unease in the people around them. It is a befitting encapsulation of Hiller’s practice, in which she accumulated visual material—photographs and films, primarily—in her search to see all that was invisible. “I consider that definitions of reality are always provisional . . . that we are all involved collectively in creating our notions of ‘the real,’” she once said. This survey is likely to make viewers question reality in the same way that Hiller herself did.

October 17–January 10, 2027

For two decades, collectors have been trying to open an art museum in a former Renault car factory on Île Seguin, an island in the River Seine; Laurent Dumas has finally succeeded where others before him have failed. Dumas’s museum, Le Large, comes with more than 250,000 square feet of exhibition space, and if its inaugural exhibition is any indication, its ambitions are equally, well, large. Cecilia Alemani, the curator of the acclaimed 2022 Venice Biennale, has been tapped to do the opening show, which broadly considers the notion of machinery across recent art history. The show will feature works from Renault’s collection alongside new commissions from artists such as Théo Mercier, Thu Van Tran, and Bertrand Lavier.

October 17–March 7, 2027

M+’s offerings tend to bring artworks into dialogue with non-artworks, and this show focused on fictional universes and fearsome creatures is no different in that regard. It’s being teased with a painting from the 1950s by Kim YoungHwan, who was aligned with a Korean strain of Surrealism. But the museum’s press materials suggest that one will also find haute couture, video games, and ephemera related to popular TV shows. Reaching back even farther in time, there will also be ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Tibetan Buddhist scrolls, and a whole lot more.

October 17–April 4, 2027

Without Los Angeles’s Brockman Gallery, there might be no David Hammons—he had his first solo show there in 1971, then went on to achieve acclaim. Likewise John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and a host of others who passed through the gallery, which was essential in fostering more than one generation of Black artists before the mainstream commercial system embraced them. Founded by artist Alonzo Davis and his brother Dale, the Brockman Gallery was a rarity in its time: Artist Ulysses Jenkins, who worked there for two years, recalled it as one of the few places he knew of that supported Black art. Now it is celebrated in this exhibition, which includes works by Hammons, Suzanne Jackson, Carrie Mae Weems, and others with Brockman ties.

October 18–January 24, 2027

Never mind that Salvador Dalí and Sigmund Freud met only once, in 1938, and never mind that their encounter didn’t go so well, with the famed psychoanalyst saying of Dalí’s art, “In classic paintings I look for the unconscious, but in your paintings I look for the conscious.” (Dalí was visibly unappreciative of Freud’s response, leading Freud to term him a “fanatic.” Ouch!) This show proposes that Freud’s theories are one key to unraveling the mysteries of Dalí’s Surrealist paintings, which are famously rife with references to sexual hang-ups and psychological torment. Alongside Dalí’s work, the show will also feature pieces by others inspired by what the museum calls “Freudian thought,” among them Gino Severini, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Arp.

October 20–January 24, 2027

Even by the standards of the Surrealist cohort, Leonor Fini produced paintings that were transgressive, filled as they were with images of androgynous people, bodacious sphinxes, flipped power dynamics, and sexual subversion. (The artist, who was openly bisexual, bucked what was expected of women during her day in her personal life as well.) Born in Argentina and based for much of her career in France, Fini made art so ahead of its time that it can be difficult to remember that it’s roughly a century old. And yet, it is a blast from the past, in part because Fini looked toward art history for inspiration. This 100-work show demonstrates how she drew liberally from art of the Renaissance, German Romanticism, Symbolism, and other movements and remade it anew.

October 23–February 21, 2027

Tapping a modish fascination with spiritualist women, this exhibition surveys an array of female artists from the Nordic region who have looked beyond our world to engage with mysterious beings in other realms. Beginning in the 19th century and continuing to the present day, the show includes such artists as Rita Kernn-Larsen, a Danish Surrealist who painted hallucinatory nudes; Anna-Eva Bergman, a Swedish painter of luminous abstractions who drew her inspiration from the landscape around her; and Outi Pieski, a Sámi artist from Finland whose sprawling installations frequently enlist yarn and draw on craft traditions known as duodji.

October 23–February 28, 2027

Though she is now considered one of the most important artists in recent Australian art history, Rosalie Gascoigne had a slow start—she did not exhibit her assemblages of tossed-off objects until the 1970s, when she was in her mid-50s. But after she began showing these works, critics could not get enough of them; an appearance at the Venice Biennale came in 1982. Born in New Zealand and based in Canberra, Gascoigne gathered objects that most might consider junk—scrap wood, old wheels, dirty dolls—and asked how they retained the memories of the places from which they had come. Gascoigne, who died in 1999, said that she was trying to “recall the feeling of an actual moment in the landscape.” This retrospective will explore how she succeeded in doing so.

October 24–February 14, 2027

Though Wilhelmina Barns-Graham often looked to the British landscape for inspiration, the abstractions that resulted typically did not resemble natural formations of any kind. This was, of course, the point: Barns-Graham said she wanted to explore the relationship between one’s interiority and the outside world, once noting that her process was one of “looking in / looking out.” Barns-Graham has always been esteemed by enthusiasts of British modernism, but she has never gotten a proper retrospective until this one, which includes a whopping 170 works. It is fittingly being staged in St Ives, the British city where the Scottish-born artist spent the formative years of her career.

October 24–May 3, 2027

Think of Gardar Eide Einarsson as a heavy-metal Cady Noland. Like her, he makes sleek installations referencing distinctly American subjects, such as police violence and national pride. (American flags devoid of color recur in the work he’s made since moving from his homeland of Norway to the United States on September 10, 2001, the day before the Twin Towers fell.) Also like Noland, Einarsson revisits the legacy of Minimalism, using pared-down symbols and images to suggest that the movement was really all about asserting an uneven power dynamic. Einarsson’s work has a heart of darkness that is virtually unparalleled; whether you like his art or not, that makes him stand out. Whether it is too dark, even in these dark times, is something worth considering while visiting this 125-work show, Einarsson’s first major survey in the country where he was born.

October 29–February 27, 2027

To sum up Marisa Merz’s practice in one sentence feels unfair, so we won’t even try. Here, instead, is a brief list of some things she produced: knots of hemp tied to a wire mesh, installations formed from suspended pieces of aluminum, self-portraits without any recognizable features, little busts that look less like human heads than animal parts. Some have lumped this Italian sculptor, who died in 2019, with Arte Povera, but her art doesn’t quite fit with that 1960s movement or, really, any other concurrent one. The feverish bursts of creativity she unleashed cannot be contained by one retrospective, which may be the reason three institutions banded together to mount a single show. The exhibition will also feature pieces by artists whose work dialogues nicely with Merz’s, including Solange Pessoa, Lara Favaretto, and Miriam Cahn.

October 29–April 4, 2027 (all venues)

Many artists throughout time have periodically felt a burning desire to escape the claustrophobic confines of their studio for somewhere more picturesque. This exhibition proposes that the tendency was particularly pronounced between 1830 and 1930, when European painters fled their homes for artist colonies that ended up spurring new styles. One such colony was in Skagen, in the north of Denmark. During the 19th century, that seaside town became the meeting point for an array of Scandinavians, among them the Norwegian painter Christian Krohg, whose time in Skagen turned his style gritty and unsentimental as he began to focus on local fishermen and peasants.

October 30–January 31, 2027

In 1994, Mariko Mori boarded the Tokyo subway wearing a silvery dress that made her look like a cyborg. Photographs of this action, a performance of sorts, emphasize the otherworldliness of Mori’s outfit—and the leering gazes of the men around her. The piece stands in well for Mori’s practice, which has seen the artist consider why Japan of the present day finds itself so occupied with the futuristic female form. With fembots and female AI assistants now the stuff of everyday life, the Mori Art Museum is appropriately giving a retrospective to Mori this season. Included will be Wave UFO (1999–2002), a flying saucer–like sculpture that viewers can enter; inside, they can hook themselves up to equipment that interprets their brain waves.

October 31–March 28, 2027

Séraphine Louis’s life was about as colorful as her paintings. While working as a housekeeper for families in the French town of Senlis, this self-taught artist began producing mystifying still lifes featuring plants and bowls that burst with leaves and fruit. In these often otherworldly paintings observers have found a spiritual quality that some have attributed to her Christian faith; others have analyzed them through the lens of her psychological profile: She had bouts of paranoia and spent the last decade of her life in a psychiatric hospital. But such a reading deprives these works of their edge. For full effect, they require a retrospective like this one, which will synthesize Louis’s eventful life story with her equally rich art.

October 31–April 12, 2027

The painter Peter Bradley once said that when it comes to abstraction, “the colors and shapes of the paintings . . . are seen in our daily lives.” What might it mean, then, for an artist like Bradley to invoke the colors associated with Blackness? That query guides this ambitious survey, which establishes a lineage of 40 Black artists working in abstraction that includes Bradley, Melvin Edwards, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and other giants of the 1960s and ’70s alongside younger talents like Carolyn Lazard, Aria Dean, and SoiL Thornton. Though touted as a painting show, the exhibition’s star work may be a sculpture: Torkwase Dyson, an artist known for her gigantic installations composed of arcing black forms, has been commissioned to create a new work responding to the concept of Black liberation.

Opens November 5

Recent exhibitions have revisited the notion of ancient empires, showing that they were more sprawling than many realize. For example, the Met’s memorable 2023 exhibition “Africa & Byzantium” explored how ancient Greece’s tendrils reached Egypt, Ethiopia, and other nations. Building on the legacy of that scholarship is this exhibition, which will place Greco-Roman artifacts in the context of objects from China, India, and elsewhere. The Fondazione Prada has a taste for exhibitions with an edge, and this one continues that sensibility. Rather than situating its array of works in traditional galleries, as most museums would, this show will be staged in what the Fondazione Prada has called a “set,” designed by the architect Renzo Piano.

November 5–March 1, 2027

Legend has it that, in 1968, at a University of Vienna event that featured a range of outré performances by the Actionists, the artist Franz West led the crowd in applauding works that many considered offensive. Such a gesture put West on the right side of art history—the Actionists are now canonized—and helped render him a central figure of the Austrian art scene, a reputation he would continue to hold until his death in 2012. Known for large-scale sculptures that trouble the division between art and design while also jokingly needling the merits of functionalism, West will be posthumously feted on what would have been his 80th birthday with two concurrent shows in Vienna. At the Albertina, West is receiving a conventional retrospective in one of the city’s great museums. Meanwhile, the Wien Museum is focusing on West’s deep connections to Vienna, with an emphasis on documentation related to his site-specific sculptures.

November 6–March 29, 2027 (Albertina); November 6–May 2, 2027 (Wien)

While UFOlogists continue to puzzle over a tranche of files released by the Pentagon earlier this summer, one U.S. museum is devoting an entire structure to a show whose centerpiece will contend with the existence of aliens. Laurent Grasso, a winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp, will here debut Cosmic Time, a film he made following collaborations with scientists at the SETI Institute. Grasso has not released details about the film, but he’s described it as being about “invisible forces that are often difficult to grasp.” Surrounding it will be other works by Grasso, who will not provide explanatory labels for them in an attempt to enhance their mystery.

November 7–January 16, 2028

It took a lot of guts for the Impressionists to defy the artistic conventions of the French art world—and it took some great art dealers to help their work weather a critical firestorm and enter the annals of art history. Rather than charting the movement’s rise through the contributions of artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, this exhibition focuses on the art market that upheld them. Paul Durand-Ruel, whose Paris gallery gave formative shows to Monet and Édouard Manet, is an obvious protagonist in that narrative, but the show will also place due emphasis on less well-known collectors like Jean-Baptiste Faure, an opera singer who acquired works by Manet, Monet, and Edgar Degas that now reside in the collections of major museums across the globe.

November 7–February 21, 2027

Sámi art, long relegated to the margins of Nordic art history, has gradually gained mainstream attention, making appearances at some of the world’s biggest museums and biennials. One recurrent figure in those presentations is Aage Gaup, a sculptor, set designer, and member of the Máze Group, a collective of artists that, during the 1970s, showed future generations what Sámi collectivity could look like. Like many Sámi people of his era, Gaup was legally forced into a childhood education that bore no relation to his Sámi ways; he spent a career rekindling his relationship to Sápmi, its culture, and its lore via his art. Many of his spare sculptures thus evoke Sápmi’s landscape, tenderly alluding to its hills and fields by way of arcs of wood.

November 11–January 24, 2027

At the current Venice Biennale, Abbas Akhavan is representing Canada with an installation that transforms the nation’s pavilion into a terrarium-like space. Inside, water lilies are growing from seeds transported from England. This transnational way of working is typical for the Iran-born artist, whose installations consider what happens when objects and people travel—and what gets lost in the process. With his star at its height, Akhavan will receive a survey that will include installations enlisting such materials as soil and water.

November 12–April 18, 2027

West Africa will have a strong biennial season this fall, with the Dak’Art biennial in Dakar and the Lagos Biennial happening concurrently. (The Dakar event remained undetailed at press time.) The Lagos Biennial, for its part, is titled “The Museum of Things Unseen”; the show will feature artists whose work pays mind to the complex array of market and institutional forces that shape the art world. Furen Dai, Chinyere Obieze, and Sam Hopkins are curating the show, whose artist list has not yet been released.

November 14–December 6

While the paintings and drawings that Sheroanawë Hakihiiwë produces may look to Western eyes like abstractions, they are, for him, ways of recording the Yanomami culture that he interacts with daily. Working in a remote part of Venezuela, Hakihiiwë takes the jungle around him as his inspiration, often depicting spare trees set against vibrantly hued backgrounds. Minimalist though these works may be, they have made some noise in the Western art world, with New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Italy’s Venice Biennale both showing pieces in recent years. Hakihiiwë will have his first U.S. survey with this exhibition, featuring an animation, an installation, and newly commissioned works.

November 19–March 28, 2027

Diane Severin Nguyen’s unforgettable 2021 video If Revolution Is a Sickness tracks a Vietnamese child in Warsaw, repeatedly invoking the trauma of the American war in Vietnam, if only obliquely. But the video is not entirely a downer; its finale is a bombastic K-pop-inspired dance routine set to a song written by the artist and Ryder Bach that refers to revolutionary sentiment. The sequence suggests a reconciliation with the pain of the conflict. “We make life through images,” the artist has said of her work. Here, she will debut a new video installation whose vague yet intriguing description notes: “The new film takes flight as the viewer is caught between sky and ground in a moving pursuit. Sentiment merges with machinery and music becomes a force.”

November 20–May 16, 2027

At last, Qatar’s rapidly expanding art scene has a recurring art festival with Rubaiya Qatar, an expo that will take place once every four years. Rather than being a single art exhibition, as most biennials are, Rubaiya Qatar has a more diffuse format, with several mini-shows cohering to form a larger one. The star presentation this time is “Unruly Waters,” a show about Qatar’s position in a globalized world that will take place at the Al Riwaq Art + Architecture pavilion and the Museum of Islamic Art. Alongside it will be such events as a new performance by Rirkrit Tiravanija, who will repeatedly make bread with a range of bakers acting as emissaries from an array of Qatari cultures.

November 21–April 30, 2027

Sure, the National Gallery has Jan van Eyck’s most famous painting—The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), an iconic work of the Northern Renaissance—but why not enjoy all eight of the Flemish artist’s other portraits alongside it? These nine paintings account for nearly half of all the works that have been concretely attributed solely to Van Eyck; that they have all been convened for this exhibition is nothing short of a small miracle. Seen together, the paintings will display Van Eyck’s fabulous ability to furnish his portraits with a level of detail made possible by his pioneering use of oil paint. His skill is evident in Portrait of a Man, his 1433 painting of a person—perhaps the artist himself—whose eyes are surrounded by highly naturalistic wrinkles.

November 21–April 11, 2027

Kanal, a 430,000-square-foot art complex in a former Citröen garage, has had a particularly difficult road to opening: A Belgian government shutdown threatened its funding, a partnership with Paris’s Centre Pompidou occasionally appeared to fray, and a fire ripped through part of the museum during construction, thankfully with little damage to the structure. Against all odds, Kanal is finally almost here. The museum, which cost an estimated €230 million to build, will kick off with a show that is fittingly titled “A Truly Immense Journey”; included will be 350 works from the Pompidou collection, among them pieces by Henri Matisse and Alberto Giacometti. There’s a playground by Assemble, a Turner Prize–winning architecture group, and performances by Miet Warlop, the transgressive performance artist currently representing Belgium in the Venice Biennale.

Opens November 28, 2026

The graphic novel Soft City (1969–75), Hariton Pushwagner’s magnum opus, is filled with endless rows of anonymous buildings, gibberish murmurings, and giant crowds of people arranged as though they were objects on an assembly line. The book was an implicit critique of capitalism and its obsession with order and was flavored with a kind of quirkiness that ran through all of Pushwagner’s output. (His pseudonym was itself idiosyncratic, translating from the Norwegian to “a ton of Hare Krishna pushwagons”; he was born under the much plainer name of Terje Brofos.) Soft City will be contextualized alongside Pushwagner’s paintings, prints, and friezes contending with dissatisfaction and alienation in this retrospective, the most important one for the Oslo-based artist in Norway since his death in 2018.

November 28–April 11, 2027