36 Museum Shows and Biennials to See in Winter 2025

A cynic might say that humanity will never fully recover from all that we have wrought upon our ravaged planet; an optimist might counter that we may as well learn to survive anyway. This show combines both viewpoints, exploring extractive technologies and business practices while also showing that ecologically minded artists are envisioning new worlds to come. With an artist list that runs the gamut from dead icons like Joseph Beuys to living stars such as Christopher Kulendran Thomas, the show culminates on its closing day with a performance by the duo Sybling, who will partly take place at the Garzweiler mine in nearby Jüchen.

November 29, 2025–April 19, 2026

The highest-profile museum show opening in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach is this survey of work by Joyce Pensato, a painter beloved for her oddball images of characters from cartoons and comic books rendered at a grand scale. Executed in drippy black paint allowed to trickle down the canvas, her renderings of Homer Simpson, Batman, Felix the Cat, and others are both menacing and beautiful—a strange brew, to be sure. Sixty-five works will be on hand in the first large-scale survey for Pensato sine her death in 2019.

December 2, 2025–March 15, 2026

The Mexican city of Campeche used to be home to many natural oil springs. But when Minerva Cuevas conducted her research there, she largely failed to find them. Instead, she turned her attention to the Mexican oil giant Pemex, which extracts oil in the surrounding region, reportedly impacting fisheries and the local marine ecology. In work informed by her investigations, Cuevas often sets pre-Hispanic imagery alongside corporate insignia, showing how Mexico’s history is being eroded in the present by commercial interests. Her climatology-focused art, which will be surveyed here, seeks to reclaim that history.

December 5, 2025–March 8, 2026

Great self-portraits can sometimes feel like daggers, piercing those who come before them. By that measure, the Finnish modernist Helen Schjerfbeck was a great self-portraitist: She generally pictured herself with her chin lifted toward the viewer but with her eyes often averted or closed. How she wrung maximal emotional effects from her minimal visual language will be the subject of this 60-work survey—the first sizable one in the United States for an artist already well known in Scandinavia.

December 5, 2025–April 5, 2026

We’ve come a long way from the Land Art of the 1960s and ’70s, which often involved staging large-scale interventions in nature that were by turns awe-inspiring and destructive. These days, many artists are displaying a keener awareness of humanity’s role in reshaping the environment and trying to do as much as they can to preserve the world around them. This show charts that change in thinking, covering Earthworks and Arte Povera before arriving at the present with a younger generation of artists. Among them is Asunción Molinos Gordo, whose research-driven sculptures explore the notion of pensamiento campesino, or peasants’ knowledge—information gained by those who tend the earth.

December 5, 2025–May 3, 2026

The award for the world’s biggest, creepiest baby goes to Ron Mueck’s 2006 sculpture A Girl, an astonishingly detailed, 16-foot-long rendering of an infant with a mottled face. This piece might stick out in any other artist’s body of work, but Mueck has continually produced pieces that question what really counts as human when people’s bodies are scaled up and presented back to us in gigantic form. These unsettling works have been seen across the globe and are now being given a fittingly grand survey in Australia, Mueck’s home nation.

December 6, 2025–April 12, 2026

Luca Lo Pinto, the previous artistic director of this venerable museum, is credited with having smoothed out MACRO’s programming after a rough period for the institution. Earlier this year, he handed off the leadership post to Cristiana Perella, with whom he has now curated a wide-ranging survey of the contemporary art scene in Rome as it currently stands. The show’s 70-artist participant list features names both established and little-known: Isabella Ducrot, a 94-year-old painter who only recently gained fame, will show alongside Agnes Questionmark, a young sculptor whose 2024 Venice Biennale contribution resembled an alien on an operating table and meditated on the surveillance of trans bodies.

December 11, 2025–April 6, 2026

Margarita Paksa, one of the most acclaimed artists to emerge in Argentina during the postwar years, made work that was blindingly direct, setting words like Violencia and Libertad in a sniper’s crosshairs for a group of well-known prints. A vocal critic of the Argentine government’s treatment of its citizens, Paksa frequently used words in her art that mirrored those used to transmit political ideas to the masses—only in her case, she was talking back to power. Paksa had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires in 2012; now, five years after her death, the institution is once again highlighting her bracing art.

December 12, 2025–February 16, 2026

If you come to a biennial, chances are you’re there to see it in one go. But artist Nikhil Chopra and the Goa-based HH Art Spaces have designed their edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India’s top biennial, as a “living ecosystem; one where each element shares space, time, and resources, and grows in dialogue with each other,” as they put it, with durational performances and other long-term events being staged throughout the show’s run. Even if you only have time to visit once, though, the exhibition itself seems promising, with participants including Pallavi Paul, Tino Sehgal, Monika Correa, and Sandra Mujinga.

December 12, 2025–March 31, 2026

The art world is not exactly short on Duchamp superfans, but as artists go, Saâdane Afif certainly counts among the Dadaist’s greatest devotees. In 2008 he began collecting Duchamp-related texts and installing them on a bookshelf for a piece called The Fountain Archives. If a urinal counted as art, Afif’s thinking went, then certainly words related to it did, too. That project is but one example of this French artist’s multivalent practice, which often considers how meaning morphs when context changes. The Fountain Archives will feature in this mini-retrospective of Afif’s art, which also includes a fresh body of work produced in response to Jeff Koons’s iconic “The New” sculpture series of the 1980s. Afif’s take is ironically called “The Old.”

December 12, 2025–September 13, 2026

Some museums have begun presenting shows of well-known painters that focus on work other than their paintings—the point being that these artists worked in more disciplines than previously realized. The latest show to do so centers on Zao Wou-Ki’s prints, which acted as a place for the Chinese-French artist to hash out ideas before committing them to paint. Etchings, lithographs, and more will be marshaled to bring out aspects of Zao’s work unfamiliar to viewers in Hong Kong, where his paintings are highly prized.

December 13, 2025–May 3, 2026

With this survey, whose subject was born in the former Yugoslavia, the Muzeum Susch continues its rich tradition of giving under-recognized European women artists their due. Though all but forgotten today, Edita Schubert achieved some degree of fame during her lifetime for a diverse body of work that included paintings produced not only by using a brush, but also by putting her body through holes in her canvas. Schubert said she was moved during the 1970s to take up this method of working as a way of rejecting conventional approaches to painting female nudes. It was a fitting remark for an artist who sought to buck tradition and forge new paths.

December 13, 2025–May 17, 2026

In 1960 Burkinabe photographer Sanlé Sory opened his studio; later, he recalled that it “fulfilled people’s fantasies,” offering a space for young Africans to stand before his camera in chic clothes and realize who they wanted to become. Sory’s pictures—along with those of other studio photographers such as Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, both from Mali, and Ambroise Ngaimoko, of the Democratic Republic of Congo—helped construct an idea of modern Africa for generations to come. The show explores how Sory and others of his era accomplished this and extends that quest into the present with more recent photographic works by Samuel Fosso and Silvia Rosi.

December 14, 2025–July 25, 2026

Collectors across the globe have in recent years opened a succession of glitzy, expensive private museums, not all of which have made a lasting impression. But Dib Bangkok, a new institution founded by the late Thai collector Petch Osathanugrah, is sure to be remembered, in part because it is such a major addition to Thailand’s rapidly expanding art scene. The museum’s 1,000-piece collection, featuring works by artists ranging from Montien Boonma to Frank Stella, will be exhibited in a 71,000-square-foot former warehouse. Worth noting will be new works from artists such as Fujiko Nakaya, who is known for her vast outdoor installations that make heavy use of fog.

Opens December 21, 2025

This highly focused, feminist-minded show is limited to five artists active in Southeast Asia between the 1960s and the 2010s: Nirmala Dutt (Malaysia), Imelda Cajipe Endaya (Philippines), Amanda Heng (Singapore), Dolorosa Sinaga (Indonesia), and Phaptawan Suwannakudt (Thailand). Pondering topics such as decolonization and the patriarchy, these women generally sought, through their work, to envision the societies they wished to live in. How close are we to achieving those societies? This exhibition will explore the question.

January 9, 2026–November 15, 2026

While the British Museum continues to face widespread scrutiny over its role in histories of dispossession and plunder, the institution has begun exploring colonialism and its aftereffects more bluntly in its galleries. Case in point is this 150-work survey, which charts the Hawaiian kingdom’s efforts to negotiate with—and resist—the British empire starting in 1824, when King Liholiho and Queen Kamāmalu visited London. Treasures such as a dazzlingly colored cloak worn by Kamehameha I will appear in this show, along with a nine-foot-tall sculpture of the god Kū and the Anglo-Franco Proclamation of 1843, the United Kingdom’s and France’s formal recognition of Hawaii’s independence.

January 15, 2026–May 25, 2026

“Who owns Frida Kahlo’s legacy?” asked one NBC News headline earlier this year. It’s a good question, considering that an array of Kahlo-related paraphernalia has generated a spread of Kahlo-related lawsuits. That so many individuals are squabbling over her trademark suggests a fascination not with what Kahlo produced but with what she signified as a painter roped into the Surrealist movement, as a Mexican who spent part of her career abroad, and as a disabled woman who battled depression. Now comes this 120-work show, which focuses specifically on Kahlo’s self-image and its influence on corporations and other artists—some of whom have obscured what her art was really about. Mari Carmen Ramírez, the exhibition’s curator, has promised a show that aims to “separate Frida Kahlo the artist from Frida Kahlo the phenomenon.”

January 19, 2026–May 17, 2026

Born in South Korea and based for much of her short career in the United States, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha explored the experience of trying and failing to communicate, often focusing on words and how they fall short. In performances, films, and her landmark 1982 poetry collection Dictée (recently reprinted, and now gaining a cult following), Cha quietly established herself as one of the most remarkable talents of her era. Following a posthumous star turn at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, she is now getting a proper retrospective.

January 24, 2026–April 26, 2026

This show’s piquant title derives from the name of a massive sculpture by Louise Nevelson. A cubelike array of the artist’s trademark black abstract elements, Mrs. N.’s Palace (1964–77) variously resembles an apartment and a tomb. Nevelson debuted the room-size piece on her 80th birthday; she had never before produced a work so large. But it was not the only “environment,” as she called Mrs. N.’s Palace and similar pieces—that she produced. This show shines a light on that lesser-seen side of her oeuvre.

January 24, 2026–August 31, 2026

This Swiss museum has a collection rich in modern art. So it’s no surprise that it owns some remarkable pieces by one of the great artists of the late 19th century: Paul Cézanne, who fractured mountains, apples, and bathers into discrete geometric forms, paving the way for Cubism to follow. Until now, the museum has never mounted a show dedicated specifically to Cézanne, something it will now remedy. The 80 paintings and drawings included are not likely to yield fresh perspectives on the French artist, but only a true grinch would turn down the opportunity to see dozens of Cézannes in one place.

January 25, 2026–May 26, 2026

While the Futurists were busy trying to paint high-velocity movement and industrial change in Italy during the 1910s, the Metaphysical painters were thinking through something else entirely: the world that existed in one’s mind. Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà began representing cities that looked quite unlike our own, with vacant plazas and unclassifiable creatures, while Giorgio Morandi went in a different direction, painting and repainting arrangements of gray-toned vessels. The experiments of these artists and others are the subject of this 300-work survey, which proposes that the Metaphysical painters’ attempt to portray tortured psychological states remains relevant more than a century on. To prove the point, the three-museum exhibition will also feature works by William Kentridge that pay homage to Morandi.

January 28, 2026–June 21, 2026

Because of their international scope, biennials have almost always had to contend with migrations both past and present. But following last year’s Venice Biennale, titled “Foreign Everywhere,” the subject has suddenly moved from the background to the foreground, as becomes clear from the concept of this biennial. Curators Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed have said their show, “In Interludes and Transitions,” will revolve around “thinking of the world in procession,” with special attention paid to the Arab region. Artists such as Nour Mobarak, Yazan Khalili, Raqs Media Collective, and Yu Ji will take part.

January 30, 2026–May 2, 2026

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings get all the attention, in large part because they command top dollar on the market. But this show suggests that Basquiat’s creativity may be more fully glimpsed in a lesser-seen side of his oeuvre: his works on paper, where he first scrawled his Picassoid skulls and jittery figures before remaking them on a large scale in paint on canvas. The exhibition is being billed as a first in Scandinavia, where exhibitions devoted to the artist are scarce.

January 30, 2026–May 17, 2026

Martin Parr’s high-contrast photographs evince a wackadoo sensibility that is all his own: His most famous images, featuring beachgoers trying not to look into the sun while attempting to catch a tan, are as distinctive as they are strange. But this 180-work survey suggests that these pictures are no joke, for they take seriously issues related to climate change and ecological disturbance. Quentin Bajac, the museum’s director and curator of this show, will also focus on how Parr has pictured overtourism in India, Italy, and many other nations that are now struggling with the negative environmental side-effects of welcoming too many visitors.

January 30, 2026–May 24, 2026

When Nikola Tesla said that “Everything is light,” he meant it in the sense that all matter is formed from similar basic elements. To put it another way, we are our environments, and our environments are us. The same statement could apply to the works in this offbeat show, whose three artists—Cerith Wyn Evans, Ann Lislegaard, and P. Staff—use fluorescent and neon illumination to explore how light remakes us as human beings. Staff, the youngest of the bunch, is known for installations that bathe rooms in uneasy shades of yellow and blue. By turns beautiful and disorienting, Staff’s installations allude to bodily systems, hinting at a connection between these works and the people who view them.

February 6, 2026–May 10, 2026

Who could blame artists for continually returning to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an ancient Roman poem in which people are transformed into animals and trees, often in erotic situations tainted by violence? This show about the influence of Metamorphoses across the centuries will likewise be hard to resist. Alongside work by contemporary artists such as Ulay and Louise Bourgeois, the exhibition will feature famed Renaissance works such as Titian’s Danaë (1560–65), which depicts a woman whom Jupiter seduced with a shower of gold.

February 6, 2026–May 25, 2026

In the 1930s and ’40s, during the apex of her career, Emily Carr painted landscapes swathed in voluminous foliage and abstract forms that recall gray shrouds. Why did the Canadian painter represent the British Columbian landscape in such dark tones? What did her visions of roiled nature, especially in the lands of First Nations peoples, mean? This exhibition, billed as the largest one devoted to her in British Columbia in two decades, seeks to get to the bottom of these questions, whose slippery answers have been debated by an increasingly large fan base in recent years.

February 6, 2026–November 8, 2026

Conceptual artists have named all sorts of things artworks, from urinals to bejeweled skulls, but few have claimed that an entire town could count as a work of art. That was exactly what the Argentina-born artist Alberto Greco did in 1963 when he put down roots in Piedralaves, Spain, defining it is as a readymade of sorts that he then altered with his own interventions. (One involved having locals hold signs that read “Work of Art” in Spanish.) Greco was questioning whether it was possible to make art come alive beyond the confines of a gallery, hence the title of this exhibition, which surveys an artist whose work is rather difficult to display.

February 11, 2026–June 8, 2026

Admirers of Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits don’t exactly ignore the clothes depicted in his paintings: The Blue Boy (ca. 1770) remains a classic because of the hues of its sitter’s outfit, an anachronistic homage to garments seen in Anthony van Dyck’s pictures of the century before. But the people portrayed tend to hog the spotlight, which makes this wardrobe-themed show about the British painter a delight. Some two dozen works will be assembled for it, including the famed Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (ca. 1750), on loan from London’s National Gallery.

February 12–May 11, 2026

Next year, St. Peter’s Basilica will celebrate the 400th anniversary of its consecration, making the church a point of pilgrimage for both historical and religious reasons. Inside the church is Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s ornate altar canopy, or baldacchino, an iconic work of the Baroque movement that was commissioned by Pope Urban VIII, who was born Maffeo Barberini. The relationship between Bernini and the Barberini family, which often commissioned him to make extravagant marble portraits of its members, forms the basis of this survey featuring rare loans from museums such as the Louvre and the National Gallery in London.

February 12, 2026–June 14, 2026

Among Richard Avedon’s most memorable portraits is the one of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, who in 1958 posed for the legendary fashion photographer with one finger to each of his eyes. Duchamp was then in his 70s, and Avedon’s camera takes in all of his wrinkles and blemishes—features that were notably not present in Duchamp’s pictures of himself as Rrose Sélavy, taken during the 1920s. That photograph demonstrated Avedon’s knack for capturing the look of aging, a subject that underpins this 100-work survey.

February 12, 2026–August 9, 2026

As retrospectives go, few this season are quite so overdue as this one for Edmonia Lewis, a key artist of 19th-century America who achieved fame during her day—a rare feat for a Black artist at the time. The Death of Cleopatra, her 1876 sculpture depicting the titular Egyptian queen’s suicide, remains a classic for the way that it brought Neoclassicism to a politically roiled United States. This exhibition, billed as the first of its kind, enlists similar works to show that Lewis seeded her sculptures with potent political commentary, often using them to fight for the rights of Black Americans, whom she frequently rendered as strong and defiant. The show will also explore Lewis’s Anishinaabe heritage and feature works by contemporary Indigenous artists such as Bonnie Devine (Serpent River Ojibwa), whose installations likewise function as elegant protests.

February 14, 2026–June 7, 2026

During the early 20th century, while artists in Paris were pushing painting toward abstraction, Vilhelm Hammershøi was painting cloistered, grayish interiors in Copenhagen. These paintings, which sometimes contain only a single female figure facing away from the viewer, have more in common with Dutch Golden Age art than French modernism, which makes them both fascinating to look at and tough to place within the context of their era. With around 100 works, this survey promises to provide a sturdy framework for understanding this enigmatic Danish painter, whose contemplative art continues to find admirers among younger painters today.

February 17, 2026–May 31, 2026

Tracey Emin’s first show at her longtime gallery White Cube, in 1993, was memorably titled “My Major Retrospective 1963–1993”; it featured tiny photographs of paintings that she destroyed, effectively making the exhibition an elegy for art that was already gone. Now, more than 30 years later, she has an actual retrospective that will include pieces from that very show. A force of the British art scene, Emin has used her shocking, moving art to explore failed romantic encounters, sexual trauma, and her battle with cancer. Always, she has remained fascinated by death and loss. Her 90-work Tate retrospective may feature art meant to be permanent, but it will be animated by a highly personal sense of grief all the same.

February 26, 2026–August 31, 2026

Back in 2010, when Rose Wylie was 76, the Guardian termed her “Britain’s hottest artist.” Since then she has only risen further: David Zwirner, one of the world’s most powerful galleries, took her on and now regularly exhibits her scrappy paintings—often accompanied by scrawled text—of women ranging from Elizabeth I to Marilyn Monroe. Now in her 90s, Wylie is getting what is being billed as her biggest institutional show to date at one of London’s premier museums—a sign that this painter, who still works from a small cottage in Kent, has officially moved in from the margins.

February 28, 2026–April 19, 2026

Photorealism is both easy to take in and difficult to appreciate: easy because its images are highly legible, but difficult because those images often look ugly (at least by the prevailing painterly standards in the West). That contradiction has always shadowed the movement, whose mostly American purveyors, starting in the late 1960s, painted with photography in mind, translating camera-made images to canvas with an uncanny level of detail. On the heels of a recent Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles show about photorealism comes another reassessment featuring artists such as Audrey Flack, whose towering paintings of the 1970s examine knickknacks at a grand scale, exploding the boundaries between big and small, high and low.

February 28, 2026–August 2, 2026