Multihyphenates rule this winter, a season headlined by attempts to fully assess artists whose work resists the traditional museum retrospective format. Within Germany alone, Shu Lea Cheang, who has shown her work in movie theaters, on the internet, and in art galleries, will finally get a career-spanning survey, and Semiha Berksoy, a Wagnerian soprano by training, will get an expansive show of her art. Leigh Bowery, an unclassifiable character associated with 1980s London, is getting a Tate retrospective, and Rammellzee, a Basquiat collaborator and a madcap graffiti artist, is having a Palais de Tokyo retrospective.
The ambition guiding these shows is shared by group exhibitions happening simultaneously. The Sharjah Biennial, the Middle East’s foremost recurring art festival, returns, its five curators having opted for an “open-ended proposition” format guided mainly by the artists they’ve chosen. In Chicago and Los Angeles, sprawling, knotty shows explore the African diaspora of the past, present, and future. In Switzerland and Norway, Northern European art, both of the modern and Gothic variety, takes center stage.
Under-recognized artists of the past are getting their due, with Ethel Carrick, Rachel Ruysch, and Gertrude Abercrombie among those receiving big shows. But it is lesser-known—and more obscure—artists of the more recent past that dominate museum programming this time around. Hamad Butt and Donald Rodney, two giants of recent British art history, are both being surveyed. Both died young, and both remain obscure beyond England. Canonization awaits them as new art histories are being told across the globe.
Below, a look at 40 of the winter’s most exciting shows.
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“Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art” at Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Image Credit: Kunstmuseum Basel How unfair it is Rachel Ruysch, a Dutch painter active during the 17th and 18th centuries, never made it into the history books. Ruysch’s still lifes, cluttered as they are with gangly blooms and bountiful stems, wowed viewers during her day, but they have since been sidelined by the works of her male colleagues. No longer. This show assembles several dozen of her paintings—around one-fifth of all the canvases she ever produced—on the occasion of the 360th anniversary of her birth, with a special focus on how these works act as unlikely snapshots of Dutch colonialism in action. Expect the show, which will appear next year in the US at the Toledo Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, to do some art-historical rewriting of its own. A section of it will explore the life of Anna Ruysch, Rachel’s sister, who was an artist in her own right.
Through March 16, 2025
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“Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery Lucy Bull has compared her vibrantly hued abstract paintings to Rorschach tests, suggesting that the images viewers see within them say a lot about their interior states. Psychology is generally not what most have discussed when they talk about Bull—most have focused on the vast sums often attached to this young painter’s canvases. But this show, billed as Bull’s first-ever US museum show and opening during Art Basel Miami Beach, will offer a chance to see her art as more than a mere market phenomenon.
December 3, 2024–March 30, 2025
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Semiha Berksoy at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
Image Credit: ©The Estate of Semiha Berksoy and Galerist There aren’t many opera singers who can say they had retrospectives at art museums, but the late Semiha Berksoy can now posthumously claim that rare achievement. With her art having recently appeared in the Venice Biennale, this Turkish multihyphenate is now getting an 80-work survey that will include her paintings and works on paper. In those pieces, Berksoy memorialized people in her circle, including her mother, who died when the artist was 8 years old, and revisited elements of the operas in which she sang, painting herself as she performed arias for rapt audiences. In doing so, Berksoy suggested a direct line between painting and performance—art, for her, did not begin once she left center stage.
December 6, 2024–May 11, 2025
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“Hamad Butt: Apprehensions” at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Image Credit: Courtesy John Hansard Gallery/Tate Not long before he died of AIDS-related causes at age 32 in 1994, Hamad Butt nearly died because of his art. He and a gallery director were driving one of his artworks—a 1992 sculpture called Familiar Part 3, Cradle, composed of hanging glass balls filled with chlorine gas—when the car ran over a plastic bottle, causing the piece to come perilously close to breaking open. His work often functioned that way, offering up elegant sculptures that could kill their viewers if disturbed. In that way, they acted as metaphors for the fragility of his own body. His first-ever retrospective assembles a grouping of these dangerous, alluring objects, placing a special focus on the Pakistani-born artist’s identity as a queer Muslim man of the South Asian diaspora.
December 6, 2024–May 5, 2025
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Ethel Carrick at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Image Credit: National Gallery of Australia As a year of celebrations toasting Impressionism’s 150th anniversary draws to a close, Australia’s foremost museum is impassionedly making the case for the canonization of Ethel Carrick, a British-born painter whose fame sometimes has sometimes taken a backseat to that of her husband, the artist Emanuel Phillips Fox. Carrick’s full-dress retrospective will prove that she was equally adept at Impressionist styles as him, depicting market scenes and landscapes that dissolve into brushy arrays of strokes. A core focus of this 140-work show is Carrick’s internationalism—the ways that her travels across Europe, India, and North Africa shaped her stylistic choices.
December 7, 2024–April 27, 2025
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“Echoes from the Borderlands” at Dia Art Foundation, New York
Image Credit: Courtesy Echoes from the Borderlands Archive New York may be far away from the borderlands between the US and Mexico, but the geographical distance between the two locales will feel much shorter this December when the voices of people from California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas fill a gallery of Dia’s Manhattan space. The three people behind this sound piece—writer Valeria Luiselli, journalist Ricardo Giraldo, and composer Leo Heiblum—have intended the work as a testament to the layered histories of violence and survival that have accumulated in the borderlands. To hear the piece in full requires a time investment: its four segments run 24 hours in total.
December 11, 2024–March 6, 2025
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“llona Keserü: Flow” at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist Although Ilona Keserü paints abstractions, nearly all of her compositions seem corporeal, with vibrantly hued, wavy forms that variously recall the outlines of faces, fulsome hips, and people in motion. Her art is in that way intimately related to bodies, even when they are not outright depicted. Well-known in her home country of Hungary and less often seen beyond it, Keserü’s art now gets the survey it deserves, with a special emphasis on the material qualities of paintings, some of which are embossed and stitched so that they move into the third dimension.
December 13, 2024–October 26, 2025
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“Projects: Marlon Mullen” at Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image Credit: ©2024 Marlon Mullen/Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Working from his studio at the NIAD Art Center, an organization that has devoted itself to people with developmental disabilities, Marlon Mullen has painted the covers of print issues by ARTnews, Art in America, Artforum, and other art publications. The smeary, slightly warped images that result suggest highly personal interpretations of publications meant mainly for the art world elite. Mullen eyes those covers with admiration—and suspicion. Twenty-five of his charming paintings will be assembled here in this show, astoundingly his first ever at an institution of MoMA’s caliber.
December 14, 2024–April 20, 2025
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“Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” at Art Institute of Chicago
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston This season’s most ambitious show is “Project a Black Planet,” a 350-object exhibition about how artists have responded to the movement to view Africa as a unified whole. With a specific focus on Garveyism, Négritude, and Quilombismo, the show acts as both a useful history lesson and a wide-reaching survey of how artists have adopted Pan-Africanist tenets in conceptual ways. Take the case of Yto Barrada’s Tectonic Plate (2010), in which a map of the world is represented using movable pieces. All of those pieces can be dragged toward Africa, the suggestion being that the continent still exerts a strong pull on the world—even when its diasporas are not always evident.
December 15, 2024–March 30, 2025
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“Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Image Credit: ©Sandra Brewster/Courtesy the artist and Olga Korper Gallery/Los Angeles County Museum of Art This exhibition’s diverse offerings include meditations on the Black Lives Matter movement and British colonialism in Ghana, collages of cut-out images of body parts, and photographed landscapes silkscreened onto canvas. The 70 works contained here do not evince a singular aesthetic, which, of course, is the point. Among the artists behind those works are Zohra Opoku, Awol Erizku, Abdoulaye Ndoye, and Yinka Shonibare.
December 15, 2024–August 3, 2025
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“Rasquachismo: 35 Years of a Chicano Sensibility” at McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
Image Credit: ©The Estate of Nivia Gonzalez/McNay Art Museum In 1989, scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto theorized rasquachismo, a term that he described as “an underdog perspective, a view from los de abajo.” The make-do aesthetic he was describing involved the upcycling of materials by Chicanx artists, whom he noted were re-utilizing cars, tchotchkes, and other ephemera—what many might view as junk—as a means of survival. Thirty-five years on, rasquachismo and its feminist response, domesticana, as postulated by artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, remains just as influential as it was then. This show surveys the aesthetic via works by Luis Jiménez, Margarita Cabrera, Nivia Gonzalez, and more.
December 19, 2024–March 30, 2025
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Lubaina Himid at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
Image Credit: ©Lubaina Himid/Courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens, London, and Greene Naftali, New York/Photo Andy Keate This imaginative painter, a key figure of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, has for decades been creating installations and paintings that envision Black liberation in all its many forms. Having become the first Black woman ever to win the Turner Prize in 2017, she has since collected many accolades, including the Maria Lassnig Prize, which came with this exhibition, a survey of her works across the years. Included will be some of her newer paintings, in which people cloistered in domestic settings plot out how best to solve issues afflicting society, from the aftermath of colonialism to urgent ecological problems.
January 18, 2025–April 27, 2025
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“Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery” at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Image Credit: Illinois State Museum In the wake of Surrealism, there followed a flood of nonpareils, but even among them, Gertrude Abercrombie stands out for her singular weirdness. Starting in the 1930s, this Chicago-based artist produced tiny paintings of sparse, moonlit landscapes. Sometimes, they were peopled with cats and freestanding doors; other times, they contained stone-faced women and boulders. Dozens of eerie, unsettling, and transfixing paintings like these will figure in this show, which is being touted as the most comprehensive Abercrombie show ever staged. After its run in Pittsburgh, the show will travel to the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, which co-organized it.
January 18, 2025–June 1, 2025
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“Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight” at Menil Collection, Houston
Image Credit: ©Estate of Joe Overstreet/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Photo Jenny Gorman There were many artists who pushed abstract painting in new and strange directions during the 1960s, but none quite like Joe Overstreet, who freed his unstretched canvases from the wall, folding them and stringing them up so they appeared to stand alone. The gesture was an implicitly liberatory one in a way that synched with the politics of his more figurative work referring to the civil rights era and the Black Power movement. In this survey, both modes of working will be shown side by side, offering a rare and overdue look at this talented painter.
January 24, 2025–July 13, 2025
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“After the End: Cartographies for Another Time” at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France
Image Credit: Image ©Centre Pompidou-Metz/©2024 ADAGP, Paris/Photo Patrick Brunet/Collection of Royald Lally When he directed Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía, Manuel Borja-Villel polarized local critics by disregarding the prevailing Western narrative of recent art history—he disturbed the traditional flow of European modernism and lured artists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into the mix. He’ll continue that sensibility with this group show, whose theoretically ambitious thesis centers around how artists have disregarded the typical understanding of time’s flow. Per the exhibition’s description, neoliberalism and Eurocentrism will be rebutted; artists from the Caribbean are put front and center. Among those artists are modernists such as Rubem Valentim, Wilfredo Lam, Maya Deren, and Baya, as well as contemporary artists such as Basma Al-Sharif, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Myrlande Constant.
January 25, 2025–September 1, 2025
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“Northern Lights” at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland
Image Credit: Munchmuseet, Oslo Discussions of modernist landscape painting inevitably center around Impressionist art, but this exhibition of Scandinavian and Canadian artists working between 1880 and 1930 suggests that Frenchmen didn’t necessarily dominate the genre. Boreal forests are ostensibly the subject of all 80 works in this exhibition, whose transatlantic focus underlines how a single biome can exert just as strong an influence upon artists as geography. But not every work here represents real-world sights—you are unlikely to see coniferous trees and snow-swept peaks, for example, in works by Hilma af Klint, whose abstractions channeled spiritual states.
January 26, 2025–May 25, 2025
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“Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism” at Royal Academy of Arts, London
Image Credit: ©Lasar Segall/Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo “I want to be the painter of my country,” wrote Tarsila do Amaral in 1923. Her paintings of bulbous creatures set among verdant landscapes helped her achieve that goal, making her one the most famous modernists in Brazil for a period, but this exhibition proposes that nine others ought to share the mantle of helping to define a new aesthetic paradigm for the country. Across 130 works, the exhibition shows that abstraction could be seeded with nationalist potential, with recognizably Brazilian images and symbols synthesized with artistic innovations pouring in from Europe.
January 28, 2025–April 21, 2025
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Alexej von Jawlensky at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
Image Credit: Max Ehrengruber/Private Collection, Riehen, Switzerland Standing before one of Alexej von Jawlensky’s paintings from the 1920s, in which jagged planes of color assemble to form highly abstracted faces, it can be hard to imagine that this Russian-born painter ever worked in figuration. In fact, before linking up with the German Expressionists, he painted recognizable landscapes and people—subject matter that, with its lively color palette and odd perspectival effects, appeared to veer close to abstraction without ever succumbing to it. His turn away from representational imagery will be traced in this survey.
January 30, 2025–June 1, 2025
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“Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields” at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
Image Credit: Chuho An/Courtesy Kukje Gallery The South Korean–born star will here debut a sprawling new work filled with moss, river rocks, and banknotes stuffed between faux stones. The installation, titled Mignon Votives (2025), is being billed as a statement on nature in flux, but the joy of this artist’s work is its mysteriousness, its unwillingness to make sense. Alongside that piece, she will show other works that resist easy reads, including her beloved sculptures with bells affixed to their surfaces.
February 1, 2025–April 27, 2025
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“Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds” at Tate St. Ives, England
Image Credit: ©Tate In her painting Scylla (1938), Ithell Colquhoun shows a little ship passing between two boulders sticking out of a shallow ocean. But those boulders look less like rocks than they do legs, and the algae between them looks less like aquatic plant life than pubic hair. This double entendre typifies the plainspoken weirdness evident in many works by Colquhoun, a British artist who drew parallels between female bodies and the world that surrounds them. A Surrealist who was formally kicked out of the movement after her flirtations with occultism, Colquhoun has long been denied proper canonization. Here, at long last, comes her big opportunity in the form of a 200-work retrospective drawing heavily on the Tate’s vast holdings of her art, a relatively recent addition to the museum network’s collection.
February 1, 2025–May 5, 2025
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Precious Okoyomon at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
Image Credit: Clelia Cadamuro/©Precious Okoyomon/Courtesy Venice Biennale Precious Okoyomon has earned widespread acclaim for room-filling installations composed of plants, sculpted figures, and occasionally even animals—the one they produced for the 2022 Venice Biennale featured live butterflies that could be spotted around streams and kudzu. The prolific young artist has not yet revealed what they have in store for the Kunsthaus Bregenz, a beloved contemporary art museum that specializes in extremely large and extremely challenging commissions, but the institution has said their show will feature installations that deal with “their dreams and humanity.”
February 1, 2025–May 25, 2025
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“Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” at Museo Jumex, Mexico City
Image Credit: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo Yielding Stone (1992), one of Gabriel Orozco’s most famous works, involved rolling a plasticine ball around Mexico City. The ball collected debris strewn across city streets and came to bear the imprints of sewers it moved across, and in that way acted as a record of all that it came into contact with. Orozco’s continued efforts in the years since to create artworks that capture his surroundings and the flow of time have made him one of Mexico’s most celebrated living artists. Some 300 of those works will be brought together for this mega-survey, Orozco’s first in his home country since 2006.
February 1, 2025–August 3, 2025
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“Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me” at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Image Credit: ©Wafaa Bilal/Courtesy the artist As responses to the US-led war in Iraq go, few have been quite so memorable as Wafaa Bilal’s Dog or Iraqi (2008), a deeply upsetting piece in which he had people vote online on whether he, an Iraqi-born artist, or Buddy, a canine companion, should be waterboarded. (Bilal was ultimately picked to be the torture victim and subsequently fulfilled the task.) The piece typifies Bilal’s practice, which has incisively explored how the internet and the media have inured Americans to conflicts that take place abroad. During a time when the US is being forced to assess its involvement in another conflict in the Middle East, this one in Gaza, Bilal’s MCA survey is likely to strike a chord.
February 1, 2025–October 19, 2025
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Sharjah Biennial
Image Credit: Photo Karim Sahib/AFP via Getty Images If most biennials are provided with a concrete theme and just one curator, this edition of the foremost recurring art exhibition in the Middle East functions differently. It has five curators, not one—Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala, and Zeynep Öz—and they have termed their theme “an open-ended proposition” because it has evolved repeatedly since their show was first announced. They’ve said that the artists themselves have helped mold the theme. Among those artists are Cassi Namoda, Alia Farid, Naeem Mohaiemen, Raven Chacon, and the Te Matahiapo Collective.
February 6, 2025–June 15, 2025
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“American Photography” at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Image Credit: ©Amanda López/National Museum for American History, Washington, D.C. Never mind that early photography was pioneered by Brits and Frenchmen—this show posits that it was Americans who’ve steered the medium’s course all along. Across the 200 pictures featured here, there will be advertisements, studio photographs, documentary photographs, and experimental images; the show’s curators have committed to no one aesthetic, viewing the tradition as diverse and impossible to entirely pin down. Ming Smith, Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol, Lisette Model, and James Van der Zee are among the greats who will be featured here.
February 7, 2025–June 9, 2025
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“Nancy Holt: Power Systems” at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio
Image Credit: ©Holt/Smithson Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Wexner Center for the Arts The gauges and clanking pipes used to warm buildings are typically contained within walls, where they are kept out of sight, out of mind. But for her 1984 installation Heating System, Nancy Holt rearranged these pipes so they now wound their way through a gallery space—viewers could not possibly ignore the building infrastructure. That gem of an artwork, not seen since 1985, now makes a rare appearance in this survey, which features sculptures, photographs, and films in which Holt made the case that our existence was predicated upon systems we’d rather not think much about.
February 7, 2025–June 29, 2025
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“Joyce Wieland: Heart On” at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Image Credit: ©National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa/Art Gallery of Ontario In her art, Canadian artist Joyce Wieland reused her flag’s red and white tones in images and objects that invoked womanhood—lipstick kisses on sheets of paper, a maroon brassiere against a white background, a canvas stained with pinkish splotches that recalled menstrual bleeding. For her, this was all a means of casting Canada as a feminist entity, showing that women were central to her nation during the 1960s and ’70s, a time when gender parity was even farther from being achieved than it is today. Perhaps for that very reason, Wieland broke new ground for women artists in Canada, and now, a new generation will have access to her films, sewn artworks, paintings, and more via this retrospective, the late artist’s first in her home country in more than 30 years.
February 8, 2025–May 4, 2025
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“Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Image Credit: Photo Jörg P. Anders/Courtesy State Museum in Berlin In 2023, Germany spent the year toasting this Romantic painter, whose visions of people contemplating seas and forests continue to inspire fear and awe roughly two centuries after they were made. The multitude of exhibitions that resulted belies the fact that those outside Germany have less often had access to his art—the US, for example, has seen exactly two significant shows devoted to him. Make that three in 2025, when the Met opens this 75-work survey that features rare loans such as Monk by the Sea (1808–10), the ultimate expression of Friedrich’s fascination with sublime states at the limits of vision. That painting, along with others here, has never before been shown in this country.
February 8, 2025–May 11, 2025
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“Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson” at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Image Credit: Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Estate of John Wilson/Private Collection The MFA Boston is located not far from the neighborhood of Roxbury, where John Wilson is treated as something of a local legend. Now, Wilson is being awarded a retrospective that aspires to bring him to the attention of the nation writ large. Traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art following its run in Boston, the show focuses on how Wilson dignified the Black people he represented with a humanity that white artists denied them during the 20th century. All the while, he used modernist strategies to confront the horrors of racism, using the visual languages of Mexican muralism and European sculpture to immortalize the most pressing issues impacting his community.
February 8, 2025–June 22, 2025
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“Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night” at Whitney Museum, New York
Image Credit: ©Christine Sun Kim/Courtesy the artist/Collection of Daniel Nguyen This exhibition is in some ways a homecoming for Christine Sun Kim, who, for seven years, acted as an educator and a consultant for the Whitney, where she focused on Deaf visitors and designed events led in ASL. That labor, though not exactly an artwork, dovetailed with her artistic practice, which has utilized musical notation and conceptual strategies to ponder the differences and similarities between ASL and written English. She plays on the intersections between the two in works such as Prolonged Echo (2023), a mural that translates the ASL sign for the word “echo” into a thick black line that bounces around a set of walls, along with the words “HAND” and “PALM” above, to denote a gesture that is tough to represent using written English.
February 8, 2025–July 2025
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“Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal” at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Image Credit: ©1970 Chuck Stewart Photography, LLC/Fireball Entertainment Group In keeping with recent shows memorializing figures such as James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and more, this show is less an exhibition about the titular jazz musician than it is a tribute to various facets of her personality and output. Divided into sections about spirituality, sound, and what curator Erin Christovale has called “Architectural Intimacy,” the show does include archival materials and audio related to Coltrane, but the true stars of the exhibition are the 19 contemporary artists responding to her life. Among them is the filmmaker Ephraim Asili, who will debut a new film about Coltrane’s harp, a posthumous gift of sorts from her husband, the jazz musician John Coltrane, who died before she received it.
February 9, 2025–May 4, 2025
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“Linder: Danger Came Smiling” at Hayward Gallery, London
Image Credit: ©Linder Sterling/Courtesy of the artist; Modern Art, London; Blum, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York; Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Paris and dépendance, Brussels With a medical grade scalpel in hand, Linder has excised from magazines images of all kinds—fashion models, manicured hands, consumer objects, and lips, lots of them—and rearranged them to form collages. A punk at heart, she uses her savage methods to rebut the violence inherent in the male gaze. Her feminist experiments across the years form the basis of this retrospective, which explores how her photomontages explore sex, sexuality, and liberation.
February 11, 2025–May 5, 2025
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“Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker” at Whitechapel Gallery, London
Image Credit: Photo Lisa Whiting In his 1987 installation The House That Jack Built, Donald Rodney placed a headless figure before a set of X-rays of the artist’s chest. Arranged in the shape of a house, the X-rays were augmented with text that referred to Rodney’s own battle with sickle cell anemia and the denigration of Black bodies across time. How this artist drew a line between his own illness and historical conditions impacting the Black community forms the basis of this retrospective, which formerly appeared at Spike Island and Nottingham Contemporary, and has now made its way to London, the city where Rodney died in 1998 at age 36.
February 12, 2025–May 4, 2025
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“Machine Love: Video Game, AI, and Contemporary Art” at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist For a show about gaming, AI, and other subjects that exist on the fringes of what is traditionally shown in museums, perhaps it makes sense that this exhibition will start with a sculpture by Beeple, the artist most closely aligned with the NFT boom of 2021. From there, this exhibition will explore how video game technology and AI can be used to generate Covid-era love stories, queer fantasias, and incisive critiques of the surveillance state. Lu Yang, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and Jacolby Satterwhite are among those set to show here alongside Beeple.
February 13, 2025–June 8, 2025
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“Shu Lea Cheang: Kiss Kiss Kill Kill” at Haus der Kunst, Munich
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist An AI self-portrait, an ecologically destroyed Staten Island, hackers, cyborgian women, and more: all these things and more figure in the work of Shu Lea Cheang, an influential pioneer known best for art about how race, sexuality, and gender shape our relationships to technology. Her output has spanned beloved net artworks to boundary-pushing, criminally underseen films meant for theatrical viewing. Her diverse output should make this survey, which opens about a month before Cheang debuts a new performance at Tate Modern in London, a rather unusual affair.
February 14, 2025–August 3, 2025
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“Huguette Caland. 1964–2013” at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Image Credit: ©Huguette Caland Estate/Image ©2024 Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence With her “Bribes de Corps” paintings of the 1970s, Huguette Caland let curvaceous abstractions stand in for women’s bodies, often creating delicious sensuality from little more than uneven circles set against a differently colored background. These works have justly risen to fame following the Lebanese artist’s death in 2019, but her oeuvre also includes abstractions that looked quite unlike these, and that’s to say little of the textiles, collages, and drawings that she produced, many of which have been less frequently shown. Her first-ever European retrospective, a 200-work affair, aspires to show that she was more than the “Bribes de Corps” paintings, showing how her time spent in Beirut, Paris, and Venice Beach influenced her broader quest for liberation via art.
February 19, 2025–August 25, 2025
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Rammellzee at Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Image Credit: Courtesy Red Bull Arts New York and Rammellzee Estate You could call Rammellzee a street artist, a performance artist, a musician, or just generally an eccentric, but perhaps the best term for him is his own: “gothic futurist,” a reference to his own theories about a form of work that fuses medieval aesthetics and styles that do not exist yet. A collaborator of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rammellzee died young, at age 49, in 2010, but the rich array of performance documentation, paintings, drawings, and more that he left behind has found a wide audience in the US. Now, it will gain an audience abroad, too, in the form of a 100-work retrospective that will include previously unseen archival materials.
February 20, 2025–May 11, 2025
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Bracha L. Ettinger at Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf, Germany
Image Credit: ©Bracha L. Ettinger Bracha L. Ettinger has the rare distinction of being both a painter and a psychoanalytic theorist, with her 1995 book The Matrixial Gaze postulating a form of seeing that is notably female. She has been lauded for abstractions that channel that titular gaze and hint at unseeable spirits, but more recently, it something other than her art that has generated attention for her. In 2023, not long after the October 7 Hamas attack, the Israeli-born artist quit the Documenta 16 selection committee, speaking of challenges associated with Israel’s war in Gaza. Her resignation was followed several days later by that of another member, Ranjit Hoskote, who faced controversy over his alleged support for the pro-Palestine BDS movement. This survey, though seemingly not focused on her politics, is being explicitly framed by the museum as her first in Germany since her Documenta resignation—something all the more notable because she has rarely ever shown in the country, citing generational trauma inherited from her parents, who were Holocaust survivors.
February 22, 2025–August 31, 2025
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“Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern, London
Image Credit: ©Fergus Greer Here is a retrospective for a figure so exuberant, his name demands an exclamation point. Depending on who you ask, Leigh Bowery might be termed an artist, a model, a performer, a personality, or something else entirely. Most famous for founding the London nightclub Taboo, a popular watering hole during the ’80s, this Australian-born multihyphenate went on to model for Lucian Freud, perform in drag, and stage live artworks for galleries in which audiences got a chance to ogle at the body horror on offer. Though he died of AIDS-related causes at 33, Bowery left behind a surprisingly expansive oeuvre, the contents of which will be surveyed here alongside artworks that involved his participation, among them paintings by Freud and a film by Charles Atlas.
February 27, 2025–August 31, 2025
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“Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light” at Nationalmuseet, Oslo
Image Credit: Andreas Kilger/Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin Might the key to understanding modern art of the 19th and 20th centuries be Gothic and Renaissance art from hundreds of years prior? That’s the proposition put forward by this monumentally scaled exhibition, whose 250-work checklist pits Vincent van Gogh and his colleagues beside Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and Albrecht Dürer. The show suggests that seemingly recent artistic obsessions with macabre subject matter were, in fact, quite old after all.
February 28, 2025–June 15, 2025