75 Museum Exhibitions and Biennials to See in Spring 2026

Renaissance art is sometimes seen as the paragon of beauty: Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus has continued to inform how artists of all stripes today approach the concept. Seeking to muddy the notion that art of this era was all about prettiness, harmony, and grace, this group show shines a light on how Renaissance artists considered beauty’s obverse, ugliness, in works contending with states of inebriation and disability. Sometimes those two states of being combine, as in Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem’s Laughing Jester, from the late 16th century. This jester is missing a few teeth, but his happy face suggests an inner peace that one might say is rather beautiful.

Through June 14

While most artists’ practices can be boiled down to a few thematic concerns, Carol Bove’s cannot. She has produced a rich array of sculptures, including shelves lined with books, monumental abstractions composed of looping white forms, and sizable steel objects that look light in her hands—and that’s to say nothing of all the art exhibitions that she’s curated, most recently one devoted to Harry Smith at the Whitney Museum. What ties all these disparate bodies of work together? Her rotunda-filling Guggenheim Museum retrospective will offer some answers as well as a space for play, with lounges featuring new chess sets designed by Bove.

March 5–August 2

The history of American modernism, as it is commonly told, tends to ignore Pacific Northwest artists almost entirely. As a result, nearly every artist in this supersize show of Northwest modernism will be unfamiliar to most viewers. These artists, despite being based outside New York, were conversant with movements such as social realism and Surrealism. Among the 150 pieces featured here will be work by Z. Vanessa Helder, a Washington-based watercolorist whose paintings of the 1930s and ’40s often depict houses set atop rolling hills largely unpopulated by humans.

March 5–August 2

A nude woman raising her arms before a crucified Christ, a female figure grabbing a sphinx with its breasts bared, a giant skeleton marching above a city: these are among the many unforgettable images seen the work of Félicien Rops, a Belgian painter, illustrator, and printmaker. An affiliate of the Symbolist movement of the late 19th century, he led a colorful life—one that included a romantic relationship with poet Charles Baudelaire—and produced art that subverted his day’s mores for gender and sexuality in ways that remain provocative today. Some 70 works by him will be brought together for this survey, which will implicitly underline Rops’s influence on contemporary art.

March 6–May 31

Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s Spanish Pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale was a faux museum of sorts: an institution called the Pinaocteca Migrante, whose purpose was to offer visual proof of colonial conquests in Latin America. Through paintings, sculptures, and vitrine displays, the Peruvian artist utilized the aesthetics of Western museums, then turned them on their head, offering narratives that until recently were largely shut out of institutions in North America and Europe. This has been a goal of Gamarra Heshiki’s practice since the 1990s, which will be surveyed here via 80 works.

March 6–June 7

There may never have been a Latino painting survey as big and as far-reaching as this one. The 58 artists in the show work in a variety of genres, from portraiture to still life, and paint in both abstraction and figuration. Accordingly, the exhibition celebrates diversity, difference, and disagreement. Some artists in the show even bristle against the medium’s traditional strictures: Yvette Mayorga, an artist known for her rococo-inspired creations, applies her paint like cake icing, rendering her work nearly sculptural.

March 6–September 6

Photographer Claude Cahun has inched her way toward mainstream recognition for pictures shot in 20th-century France that envisioned the self as multiple and gender as fungible. Less attention has been paid to Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore, who, like Cahun, has sometimes been classified as a Surrealist. This exhibition, a double portrait of sorts, will survey their outputs as well as their activism. Both artists protested the Nazi regime, earning them death sentences; they were spared, just barely, by the end of World War II—and thank goodness for that.

March 6–August 9

In 1968 at the Venice Biennale, David Lamelas presented what appeared to be a writer’s desk; at various times, a performer would sit there and read Italian media reports on the American war in Vietnam. Staged far from the horrors of that conflict, the piece questioned how gaps in space and time alter our experience of the world—a topic that has continued to intrigue this Argentine artist for more than half a century. His biggest U.S. survey in nearly a decade will feature that 1968 performance as well as films and videos meditating on similar themes. The exhibition will also see the premiere of a new installation composed of 17 TVs playing in a darkened room; aptly, it’s called Situación de tiempo II, or Situation of Time II.

March 6–January 16, 2027

During the 1990s, as the art world rapidly grew more international, Cameroonian sculptor Pascale Marthine Tayou started producing works made from cheap materials imported from abroad. His installations have grown increasingly grand in scale: One 2014 sculpture, called Africonda, featuring towels wound to look like a snake, would measure more than 300 feet long if uncoiled. The subject of that work and many others by Tayou is globalism, specifically the way it has reshaped Africa, but his art is not all so dour. He has said he wants to introduce “a little light into so much darkness,” and with this survey he will do just that.

March 7–August 2

For many, Henri Matisse’s 1943–47 book Jazz is the zenith of the French modernist’s career, visualizing human bodies and bursts of sound using curvy forms, each produced using paper and a few snips of a scissor. Even for a ceaselessly creative artist who spent a career distilling the world to its most basic forms, Jazz was a breakthrough. The Art Institute owns a full set of the prints related to the book, but it has never shown them all together until now, making this show both a crowd-pleaser for the public and a must for Matisse mavens.

March 7–June 1

Few would envy the curators tasked with creating an edition of the Whitney Biennial in 2026, the year that marks the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. Any show about art in the United States would have trouble living up to the moment, which is already fraught with pronouncements about what does and doesn’t count as American, but the Whitney Biennial is the survey of American art, raising the stakes even higher. In a time when many conservative politicians have railed against immigrants, curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer have notably loaded their show with artists born outside the States, including the Palestinian-born painter Samia Halaby and the Vietnamese-born conceptual artist Sung Tieu. The suggestion: What constitutes American-ness is constantly evolving, even when some may not want it to.

March 8–August 23

The main attraction in London this year may be the Bayeux Tapestry, which will return to British soil for the first time in 900 years this fall, but the tapestry is getting a counterpart in A Year in Normandie (2020–21), David Hockney’s 295-foot-long response to it. This ambitious painting, featuring views from the windows of the artist’s studio in the titular French region, will be complemented by an array of recent works. Hockney made a plea for slow looking during the pandemic, when he obsessively sketched the outdoors on his iPad. These paintings, which continue that method of working, are among the most brightly hued paintings in the 88-year-old artist’s oeuvre—which is saying quite a lot.

March 12–August 23

Hearts recur across Fernanda Laguna’s paintings, writings, and works on paper, which are all about love. Best known in Argentina for establishing Belleza y Felicidad, an alternative art space on the edge of Buenos Aires that has provided a lifeline to the marginalized communities in its vicinity, Laguna makes art that may look fanciful, at times even childlike. But her works featuring spinning planets, furry kittens, and written words of affirmation are underpinned by a real belief in the value of compassion. This 200-work retrospective seeks to expose the more serious side of her art.

March 13–June 22

The biggest biennial of the Pacific region is this time helmed by Hoor Al Qasimi, head of the Sharjah Art Foundation, who has exhibited a deft ability to uncover previously unseen affinities between artists in the Global South. Her edition of the biennial is titled “Rememory,” a reference to a concept from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved that describes how events are recalled by dispossessed peoples. Central to the exhibition will be big commissions by Indigenous artists such as Edgar Calel and Gabriel Chaile, who will participate alongside renowned practitioners such as Emily Jacir, Bouchra Khalili, and Dread Scott.

March 14–June 14

Real Rothko-heads know that the New York School painter found some of his greatest inspiration far from the Big Apple, in locales such as Florence, where, on one fateful trip, he absorbed works by Michelangelo and came out a changed artist. Seeking to invert our understanding of this Abstract Expressionist, “Mark Rothko in Florence” takes him back to Italy, which has seen few major surveys devoted to his art. The 70-work show extends beyond the walls of Palazzo Strozzi, with part of it set at the Museo di San Marco, where his color-field abstractions will be shown alongside beloved paintings by Fra Angelico. Another part will be set in the Michelangelo-designed Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which Rothko himself visited.

March 14–August 23

Now in her 90s, Korean sculptor Kim Yun Shin remains committed to working with heavy machinery, using it to carve blocks of wood into elegant abstractions. “When inspiration strikes, I immerse myself completely, picking up the chainsaw and finishing the piece in a single day,” she told ARTnews in 2024, the year she made her Venice Biennale debut. Three years after her Seoul Museum of Art retrospective became a surprise hit, she is getting another Korean survey that will shine a light on how she wields weighty materials with grace, making them appear light.

March 17–June 28

Unlike most other Impressionists with large followings, the jury is still out on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose gauzy images of Parisian life remain praised by many and trashed by others. Whether you yourself feel much affection for Renoir, the painter did know a thing or two about love, a subject he returned to frequently in works such as Dance at Bougival (1883), his canvas displaying a couple amorously twirling around together on a dance floor. That painting, a favorite of visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, is traveling back to Paris for this blockbuster, which focuses on how Renoir perceptively captured seduction, intimacy, and romantic adoration.

March 17–July 19

Photographers Peter Hujar and Liz Deschenes are by no means a natural pairing, which makes this exhibition all the more intriguing. Hujar created lush black-and-white pictures documenting members of his circle like artists Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz, both of whom were romantically involved with Hujar; Deschenes is known for conceptual photography exploring how our eyes make sense of the medium. These two practices seem quite unalike, but the artists are similar, a description of the show claims, because they both “employ the fundamental properties of the medium—light, chemistry and time—to explore what a photograph can be.” The exhibition could be eye-opening, and maybe a little beguiling.

March 19–June 28

When L. V. Hull began crowding her yard in Kosciusko, Mississippi, with found objects that she transformed into art, her neighbors looked on with confused amazement. “Old L. V., she’s crazy,” the artist recalled people saying. She continued on, undaunted, until her death in 2008, leaving behind paintings on shoes and bottles, sculptures of boxers, and a whole lot more. The self-taught artist is having a moment in Jackson this season, with the opening of this retrospective and the premiere of a documentary about her life. Meanwhile, over in nearby Kosciusko, her home recently entered the National Register of Historic Places, and the L. V. Hull Legacy Center is about to be inaugurated.

March 20–June 14

Seoul may be in the name of this vast, enterprising group show, but its 74 contributors are not solely Korean—which is very much the point. The show, according to its description, “unfolds the present moment of queer art and its future possibilities,” and that means refusing to limit itself to proscribed categories. Alongside Korean stars such as Mire Lee and Ayoung Kim, the participants include American painter Mark Bradford, British filmmaker Derek Jarman, and Filipina artist Maria Taniguchi, whose spare paintings often resemble black monochromes and are typically leaned against walls in ways that recall Minimalist sculpture.

March 20–June 28

For a 2016 project called Joanne, Simon Fujiwara linked up with his secondary school teacher, Joanne Salley, who had become a tabloid topic after her students began sharing her topless photos. Fujiwara set about helping her reclaim her image by photographing her using the sleek aesthetic of lifestyle brands; she appeared happy before Fujiwara’s camera, even confident. This project was about self-reclamation and identity in flux, something Fujiwara has repeatedly pondered in the paintings, videos, and installations that will be assembled in this mid-career survey.

March 20–August 23

This season, the New Museum is getting a new museum—sort of—in the form of an expansion that will double its gallery space. This moment of transformation has led the museum to mount a blowout called “New Humans,” which will convene 150 artists whose work deals with technology’s power to reshape the body. The New Museum has always devoted itself to contemporary art, so it’s no surprise that the show features plenty of today’s big art stars, including Anicka Yi, Hito Steyerl, Wangechi Mutu, and Precious Okoyomon. But intriguingly, the exhibition also reaches back to the 20th century with artists such as Hannah Höch and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, both of whom were affiliated with the Dada movement, suggesting that concerns about the body and technology predated the internet by decades.

Opens March 21

If you thought Flemish masters were based only in Flanders, think again. “Van Dyck, the European,” as this Anthony van Dyck survey is called, is so named because of its subject’s itinerant career, which took him from Antwerp to Genoa to London, where he died at age 42 in 1641, having established himself as one of the greatest portraitists ever. Van Dyck was able to obtain such praise, the 58-work show asserts, only because he so dexterously absorbed the stylings of Italian and British painting. With his portraits now widely dispersed, a Van Dyck survey takes a good deal of wrangling to organize, which may be why no institution has endeavored to do a show like this since 1999, the year of a Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in London.

March 20–July 19

In 1999 at the New York gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Rirkrit Tiravanija created a plywood replica of his East Village apartment that acted as a site for birthdays, feasts, and even the occasional bath (the replica had a bathroom with functioning plumbing). Many artworks have asked what happens when art enters everyday life, but this piece, like so many others by Tiravanija, posed an opposite question: What happens when life itself becomes art? This retrospective repeats the inquiry, focusing specifically on Tiravanija’s architecturally themed sculptures and installations. The Pirelli HangarBicocca has said the show will be “reactivated,” suggesting that life will enter art once more.

March 26–July 26

More so than other modernists, Henri Matisse tended toward Minimalism, producing paintings defined by unbroken blocks of warm color. Yet even by his own standards, the paintings and works on paper he made in his final years were especially spare. The shift was in part brought on by illness. In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed with cancer, which left him without the ability to paint in his studio and moved him to engineer his famed cutouts, which he could make from his bed using a pair of scissors. This 300-work mega-exhibition explores the 13-year period that ensued, breathing new life into a painter whose artistic wit was sapped only by his death in 1954 at age 84.

March 24–July 26

Conjure a painting of Venice, and you are almost certainly thinking of a work by Giovanni Antonio Canal, the 18th-century Italian artist who worked under the moniker Canaletto and created enduring images of St. Mark’s Square, the Doge’s Palace, and quite a few other memorable sites in the lagoon city. Rather than simply mounting a retrospective of his output, the Kunsthistorisches Museum has placed his work alongside that of his nephew, Bernardo Bellotto, whose paintings of canals contain an equal level of crisp detail. Can Bellotto hold a candle to his uncle? He certainly thought so—he also called himself Canaletto at times.

March 24–September 6

Many of Hurvin Anderson’s paintings depict spaces that drip into abstraction: leafy trees whose branches appear to melt, empty barbershops that seem unusually spare. Born in England to Jamaican parents from the Windrush generation, Anderson makes work about how spaces are imbued with memories that are at risk of slipping away. The Turner Prize–nominated artist’s paintings of the past few decades have been beloved by English audiences; now, they will be surveyed by one of the country’s greatest institutions.

March 26–August 23

Eschewing dominant styles such as Pop and Minimalism, Shirley Gorelick painted figurations starting in the 1960s, a time when doing so was largely considered a no-no. Her paintings reproduced her subjects—family members and friends, mostly—with extreme realism, imperfections and all, and subverted art-historical genres, with certain paintings featuring nude Black women in poses traditionally adopted by white models. A protagonist of the feminist art movement in New York during the 1970s, Gorelick will here be surveyed in a show revolving around her large-scale works, which were sometimes bigger than the people she depicted.

March 27–June 28

This exquisitely named exhibition follows a popular formula seen widely in American and European museums today: Pair two established greats and see where their oeuvres intersect. On its face, Maria Lassnig and Edvard Munch are not a natural coupling, since these painters worked in different nations, in different styles, and at different times (Munch in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lassnig predominantly in the mid and late 20th century). But this show’s 180 works propose that both were using portraiture as a means to explore tortured psychologies, often through expressive brushwork and lush color, and that there are more similarities between Lassnig and Munch’s practices than is readily apparent.

March 27–August 30

Despite being one of the most significant painters to emerge from London in the past half-century, New York–based Cecily Brown has had surprisingly few museum shows in the British capital. Her most significant London outing in years will arrive this spring at the Serpentine, which will show a selection of Brown’s canvases marked by maelstroms of paint strokes that only sometimes cohere to reveal landscapes and nude women. Dense with art-historical allusions, these paintings have an “unstable nature in that nothing’s fixed,” as she once put it. That line of thinking apparently even applies to the Serpentine itself, whose building Brown painted in a 2024 work slathered with swarms of green strokes that threaten to consume the museum.

March 27–September 6

With the FIFA World Cup kicking off in Mexico City (and other locations) this summer, the Museo Jumex is turning over one of its biggest art spaces to a show about soccer (or football, as the locals there call it). Viewing the competition as one fraught with power dynamics related to gender and nationhood, the exhibition amasses some 100 artworks by 60 artists from across the globe. Among them is Iñaki Bonillas, a Mexican artist celebrated for his photographic work about how people and pictures change across time; he’s been commissioned to make a new piece for the show.

March 28–July 26

The name says it all for this retrospective, the first in Europe for an American artist whose contributions to the Minimalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s are still under-recognized. Anne Truitt remains best known for her monolithic sculptures, each painted in just a few tones. Collapsing the division between painting and sculpture, these works consider whether it is possible for color alone to communicate depth and how bold hues can reorient one’s perception of space. Relative to sculptures by Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and other Minimalists, these works have a lighter touch, which was intentional. “Vulnerability is a guardian of integrity,” Truitt once said.

March 28–August 2

An attentiveness to the written word is inscribed in Rachid Koraïchi’s last name. It comes from the word Qurashite, a reference to the Qur’an, which the Algerian artist’s family members studied in scholarly settings. Koraïchi himself makes words his medium, albeit in a very different way: He often takes Islamic calligraphy, something he practiced before he attended art school, and alters its characters until they appear brushier, more abstract. Koraïchi, whose five-decade-long career will be surveyed here, has since branched out to mediums such as printmaking and painting; he’s even produced a memorial to dead migrants who wash ashore in Tunisia, describing his piece as a “paradise.”

March 28–August 30

This survey was planned as a celebration of the conceptual artist Franco Vaccari, a giant of recent Italian art, and ended up functioning as a memorial for him—he died in December, not long before he was to turn 90. Vaccari remains most famous for his installation staged at the 1972 Venice Biennale, where visitors could enter a photo booth and have their portraits taken if they agreed to hand over the resultant photos to Vaccari, who exhibited them. The installation, which will be remade for the Museion show, created a record of the Biennale’s attendees, forming a social network of sorts that might otherwise be difficult to see. Vaccari would continue his project of visualizing the invisible with installations resembling bars and cinemas.

March 28–September 13

Though Brassaï was born in Hungary, it is France with which the modernist photographer is most closely aligned—specifically Paris, whose streets he often shot at night, cloaked in eerie blackness. From that blackness his camera captured glowing lampposts, a twinkling Eiffel Tower, and blaring taillights, all subjects he pictured from oblique angles that made for sharp, diagonal compositions. In so doing, Brassaï found a means of portraying a city rapidly changing as it modernized. This sensibility will be evident in the 100 photographs assembled here.

March 28–October 4

No one would dispute that Raphael is among the most famous European artists of all time. His 1509–11 painting The School of Athens is a landmark artwork of the Italian Renaissance and a staple of undergraduate art history courses; his 1512 painting Sistine Madonna is so well known that details of it are printed on T-shirts and trinkets sold around the globe. A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is even named after him. Despite so much renown, American audiences have never gotten a chance to take stock of all the ways Raphael revolutionized the rules of perspective and shaped the Western canon. That will change this spring with this 200-work Raphael retrospective, the kind of big-budget blockbuster that the Met does best.

March 29–June 28

London-based Michael Armitage got his big break in Venice at the 2019 Biennale, where he exhibited dreamy paintings, done on lubugo bark cloth, that were based loosely on sights seen in Nairobi, the city where he was born. Seven years later, he is returning to Venice with a survey at the Palazzo Grassi, one of two private museums operated in the lagoon city by billionaire collector François Pinault. The exhibition will chart Armitage’s rise as a painter unusually adept at processing the violence of the present, not by representing it outright but by alluding it to it obliquely, as he did in a recent body of work addressing migration and disaster at sea.

March 29–January 10, 2027

Maurizio Cattelan, one of the great pranksters of this century, outdid himself when he exhibited a banana duct-taped to a wall as a sculpture in 2019 and titled it Comedian. It was a smart gesture—comedic genius, if you will—because if you thought the sculpture was a bad joke, its title asserted that you were pretty much correct. This wry strain of humor is not limited to Cattelan, who is one of around 140 artists in this show focusing on a kind of self-lacerating comedy that the curators say is unique to Italian artists. Other participants include Paola Pivi, Lucio Fontana, Alighiero Boetti, and Gino De Dominicis.

April 2–September 20

The spiritual turn in art of the past decade is not exactly new, but as artists continue to draw on religions and deities that exist beyond the Western canon, the trend still excites. This group show roots today’s spiritual art in yesterday’s, with a solid helping of historical works by artists such as Belkis Ayón, the Cuban printmaker whose beguiling art was steeped in Abakuá, an all-male Afro-Cuban tradition. Her work will appear here alongside contributions by ascendant artists such as the painter Hanna Hur, whose abstractions delineated by variations in barely-there white made her one of the stars of the Hammer Museum’s 2025 “Made in L.A.” biennial.

April 4–August 23

Western museums are designed to keep artworks safe from bitter cold, torrential rain, and, lately, blazing fires. But the 22 artists in this show, all hailing from the Americas, do not set their work apart from nature, in part because their work cannot exist without it. Some artworks in this show do look like art in the classical sense: Uitoto artist Santiago Yahuarcani paints his dense cosmologies directly onto bark cloth, while Santa Clara Pueblo sculptor Rose B. Simpson crafts her mysterious beings from ceramic. Other artists work in more unusual modes: The Kaqchikel sculptor Edgar Calel, for example, has made vast installations from rocks, dirt, candles, and fruit that require repeated tending while they are on view.

April 5–August 23

Henry Taylor once fondly recalled David Hammons discussing “Picasso being influenced by Africans, and . . . we got to see what they saw and take it back, embrace our heritage, our history.” Hammons’s words appear to have directly informed some of Taylor’s paintings, one of which even remakes Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, with the models depicted as Black women. Taylor’s relationship to his Spanish-born forebear is not the explicit subject of this 100-work retrospective, which broadly surveys Taylor’s unclassifiable paintings of Black American life. But seeing the show at a Picasso-themed museum ought to offer an illuminating lens for this body of work.

April 8–September 6

Brion Gysin never became a household name, even though many members of his circle—from William S. Burroughs to Salvador Dalí—gained mainstream fame. At last the British painter and poet gets his chance in the spotlight with a retrospective that will center on his cut-ups, for which he sliced written tracts into pieces, then rearranged the fragments to form new texts. A continuation of works produced in the 1930s as a result of his dalliances with the Surrealists, these pieces embrace chance, with Gysin ceding to forces beyond his control.

April 10–July 12

The title of this show implies a paradox: Isamu Noguchi gained approval from critics for his modernist sculptures, but he achieved fame with the general populace for his design objects, most notably his Akari lamps, for which bamboo strips act as the elegant armature for arcing wabi paper. The process of bridging the gap between Noguchi the sculptor with Noguchi the designer continues with this exhibition, which is billed as the first retrospective devoted solely to his design in more than two decades. On view here will be tables, stools, lights, stage sets, ceramics, and more, as well as documentation of environments that Noguchi produced for public spaces such as gardens and plazas.

April 10–August 2

This heady group exhibition examines the “work” in “artwork,” showing that much of what appears in galleries and museums is the product of intense labor. Traversing disciplines such as disability studies and Marxist economics, the exhibition focuses on how artists today envision museums, plantations, and even homes as sites riven by class divisions and power imbalances. The remedy, for some participants, has been to stop supplying labor: Autumn Knight, for example, has staged performances as part of a series called “Nothing,” in which the artist seeks to do exactly that.

April 11–August 2

The National Gallery of Australia continues a stream of big shows highlighting First Nations artists with this blockbuster featuring people from the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. Much of their work contends with the land they call home—something that Betty Chimney and Raylene Walatinna, both of the Yankunytjatjara people, paint as kaleidoscopic bursts of purple and pink pricked by little white dots. The show is a celebration, but it very nearly was derailed by controversy that delayed it by two years: Australian media reports alleged that non-Indigenous staffers had helped craft works in the show produced through the APY Art Centre Collective, spurring an investigation by the museum that discovered no proof to back up these claims.

April 11–August 23

The last American Marcel Duchamp retrospective, in 1973, moved one New York Times critic to note that “the cult of Duchamp will always be a cult of true and ardent believers.” The Dada artist’s cult is hardly gone, and its believers have not grown any less ardent in the half-century since that review, which is why this retrospective is among the spring’s most anticipated shows. Co-organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it travels after its run in New York, the exhibition amasses a whopping 300 works. Among them are Duchamp’s early flirtations with styles such as Cubism and Orphism—Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), the 1912 painting that stoked controversy at the Armory Show, is making a rare visit to New York—and his Dada Readymade sculptures, by which he proposed that anything, even a tipped-over urinal, could count as art if an artist deemed it so.

April 12–August 22

An alternate name for this survey might be “Dance Dance Revolution.” Much like that video game, this exhibition suggests that shimmying to familiar tunes can offer a means of finding freedom, particularly in the Americas, where choreographies and music drawing on traditions from across the Atlantic inspired genres such as dancehall and reggaetón. The exhibition will spotlight an array of joyous artworks, including paintings by Denzil Forrester, a Grenada-born artist based in London whose paintings of nightclubs burst with color. The celebratory spirit can even be found in works contending with tumultuous political events such as a 2019 protest movement in Puerto Rico that resulted in regime change.

April 14–September 20

To see this group show in full, one would need to travel more than 1,000 miles between its two venues. Such an odyssey may not make for an easy experience, but the distance involved is well suited to the exhibition’s concept, which revolves around modes of transit and means of mapping. Some, though not all, of the 40 artists involved are based in the Middle East; most consider conventional notions surrounding transportation as something to be subverted. This is certainly the case in work by Subas Tamang, a young member of Nepal’s Tamsaling community whose print series “Study of History” explores the importation of luxury cars to his homeland during the 1940s, laying bare class divisions.

April 12–October 4 (Dubai); May 20–October 17 (Jeddah)

Why did the 19th-century French sculptor Auguste Rodin invest so much time thinking about the 16th-cenutry Italian artist Michelangelo? Because Michelangelo offered a “liberation from academicism,” Rodin once said. “He is the bridge by which I passed from one circle to another.” Remaking Michelangelo’s sculptures and further exaggerating the proportions of those works, Rodin thus plotted a path forward for many modernist sculptors after him. The artistic dialogue across time between these two giants forms the basis of this show, a collaboration between the Louvre and Paris’s Musée Rodin.

April 15–July 20

The Fondation Louis Vuitton specializes in full-dress retrospectives for accepted greats of recent art history that do not reinvent the wheel but still manage to awe both the public and the art world elite. The museum’s latest subject is Alexander Calder, the American modernist beloved for sculptures with dangling elements that twist gently when the air around them is disturbed. These days, Calder risks overexposure—there have lately been many, many shows about him—but if you must see one of them, make it this one, whose impressively long checklist numbers 300 works. Calder spent some of his formative years in Paris, which makes the show a homecoming of sorts.

April 15–August 16

There are plenty of reasons to love New York these days: A new mayor has offered fresh hope for many in the city, a blanket of snow from a harsh winter is (finally!) melting, and a controversial congestion pricing plan appears to be having a positive impact. This year’s edition of “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1’s quinquennial for artists based in the city, aims to offer 53 more reasons, one for each of its participants. The artist list, which runs the gamut from emerging talents like Coumba Samba and Covey Gong to established figures like Julia Wachtel and Jay Carrier, is in part a celebration of New York as a melting pot: Participants include artists originally from Hong Kong, China, Venezuela, and Guatemala.

April 16–August 17

This 100-work survey of paintings, prints, and sculptures takes its name from a new piece Derrick Adams is making for it: a painting of the titular toy known for offering a stereoscopic view of slides placed before its lens. These brightly hued toys allow their users to access parts of the world that may look quite unlike their own, something Adams has said he wants to do with his paintings of children playing and people partying. “That’s the benefit of being an artist: You can actually create the environment you want to experience every day,” Adams once told ARTnews.

April 16–September 7

Martin Wong once said that when he painted Chinatowns in New York and San Francisco, he worked “not in a Western style but an Eastern style,” a remark that hinted at a desire for these images to be imbued with Chinese heritage. In these paintings, fire-breathing dragons and fighting Bruce Lees collide in spaces that are clearly imagined but rooted in reality. Wong’s attempts to reconcile fact and fiction—and Chineseness and Americanness—are at the center of this 100-work show, the biggest one devoted to the singular painter since a traveling retrospective finished its run nearly a decade ago.

April 17–July 18

In the United States, the phrase “crisis of masculinity” has officially entered the mainstream discourse, riling people across the political spectrum. Judging by this exhibition, the debate surrounding that “crisis” is also having a moment in Europe. This timely group show ranges around the 20th and 21st centuries to explore how artists—not just male ones—have contended with manliness and its discontents. The main draw will be recent works by Salman Toor, Reba Maybury, and Bruno Zhu, among others, but some of the star pieces here are older. One is a painting from the 1970s by the Dutch artist Melle in which a figure formed from multiple phalli masturbates in sight of a giant pomegranate that has opened to spill its seeds.

April 17–August 2

Before he became one of the most famous artists working today (or one of the most infamous, depending on whom you ask), Richard Prince held a day job at Time-Life, where he clipped articles of note from print media for writers at the company. This act, an innocent form of stealing, informed much of Prince’s photographic work of the 1970s and ’80s, which involved appropriating others’ images to question American myths and test what counted as true authorship. He has since moved in a variety of different directions, some of them controversial—he has been the subject of lawsuits brought by people who claim he unfairly pilfered their work. All will be surveyed in this show, which takes place in tandem with another big Prince show in Europe: an exhibition pairing his work and Arthur Jafa’s at the Fondazione Prada in Venice.

April 17–August 16

Only in 2024 did this vaunted Swiss museum acquire its first Helen Frankenthaler painting, a sign that the Abstract Expressionist, a key figure in postwar American art history, is not quite canonized yet in some corners of Europe. The acquisition has now occasioned a 50-work survey for Frankenthaler, whose soak-and-stain technique involved pressing her thinned-down paint into her canvases rather than piling it on top, as many of her male colleagues did. Featured here will be an array of those paintings, made using tools as diverse as sponges, brushes, and squeegees.

April 18–August 23

Earlier this year, the city of Philadelphia approved a plan to move an iconic statue of Rocky Balboa from the bottom of this museum’s steps to the top, installing in its place a monument to the boxer Joe Frazier. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that the decision was “a bigger smack in the face than a sucker punch in the ring,” which is fairly specific proof that the debate surrounding monuments—who should be depicted and whom they serve—remains unsettled. Picking up where the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles’s 2025 show “Monuments” left off, this show explores public statues and their discontents, with documentation of actual monuments placed alongside artworks by Kara Walker, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and more.

April 25–August 2

During the course of a life that lasted almost exactly a century—she died in 1961, less than a month shy of her 100th birthday—Anna Casparsson worked almost exclusively in embroidery, a medium that wasn’t considered a serious art form by most established institutions until very recently. The Swedish artist’s subject was often landscapes populated only by trees, whose branches she rendered using clusters of dense stitches. This is the first time since 1960 that the Moderna Museet, arguably Sweden’s most important modern art museum, has given her a proper showcase, proving that she may have finally moved inward from the margins of her country’s art history.

April 25–September 27

With its top-tier holdings of Surrealist art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a prime destination in Venice—which makes it hard to remember, sometimes, that its namesake founder spent a good deal of time outside Italy. This show zeroes in on her time in London, where she ran Guggenheim Jeune, her first gallery, from 1938 to 1939. Though that gallery lasted just 18 months, it provided some artists with milestones, among them Wassily Kandinsky, who got his first show in the British capital through Guggenheim. The gallery also provided Guggenheim with milestones of her own: It was in London, after all, that she staged her first exhibition of Surrealism, which became one of her main areas of interest.

April 25–October 19

Fiber art has only recently entered the mainstream discourse, which may be why Aurèlia Muñoz, a Catalonian artist who began working in textiles in the 1960s, has largely evaded canonization. Muñoz’s technique of choice was macramé, which involves knotting instead of knitting or weaving. Working with jute and other thick fibers, Muñoz produced objects that appeared corporeal, at times even animalistic: One 1977 work is composed of suspended beige elements that look like two birds’ crisscrossing pairs of wings. This long-overdue survey, which will feature sculptures and collages as well as textiles, aims to show that pieces such as that one pointed a way forward for many artists working today.

April 29–September 7

Swiss photographer Walter Pfeiffer has compared himself to his cats, who sit for prolonged periods before mouse holes before seizing a rodent. Similarly, Pfeiffer patiently waits a while before snapping his pictures, which depict people he knows well. Often characterized by an off-kilter humor, Pfeiffer’s photographs show revelers partying, bathers reclining, and people hanging out; they are brash, sexy, and in some cases overtly queer. Some 100 of these pictures will be gathered here.

April 29–September 12

Cecilia Vicuña won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she exhibited an array of sculptures composed of refuse sourced from the waterlogged city. In a show of big, hefty commissions, Vicuña’s new works appeared touchingly frail, and in that way, they emblematized her concept of arte precario, or “precarious art,” which not so much reshapes the environment as honors it. With an oeuvre that spans paintings, drawings, and performances, the Chilean-born artist has emerged as a guiding light to many younger artists who’ve drawn inspiration from her explicitly leftist work. The Castello di Rivoli will offer another opportunity to examine why; its centerpiece will be a new commission whose details the museum has kept under wraps.

April 30–September

Duan Jianyu reached artistic maturity during the 1990s, at a time when many Chinese artists were staging avant-garde performances about skewed power dynamics and political oppression. Her paintings, by contrast, occupy an entirely different register, filled as they are with bright pops of color and dreamy images of the countryside. Drawing on Socialist Realist painting, then torquing the aesthetic until it appears surreal and less austere, Duan creates art that pays mind to the “mundane and ordinary aspects” of life, as she described it. One of her biggest museum shows in China to date will survey several decades’ worth of art on that subject.

May 1–August 30

It feels both difficult and unfair to reduce the work of Aleksandra Kasuba—an artist whose diverse practice included architectural designs, kinetic sculptures, and gallery-filling installations—to a single set of interests. But were one to try, one might say the Lithuanian-born artist was concerned primarily with reordering her viewers’ perception of space. “I want my work to be no longer space-filling, but space-making,” she wrote in 1965, relatively early in her career. She pursued this aim in works that no longer exist: One outdoor sculpture staged in New York in 1972 was called Cocoon and consisted of a fabric structure that she and her students altered over time. That means this survey can provide only a vague sense of her output, but even in its modified form, her oeuvre remains potent.

May 2–October 4

In the past, the Carnegie International has been based almost entirely at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the institution that has staged it since 1896. This edition of the quadrennial, however, will extend to other venues across Pittsburgh. Such a gesture is in keeping with this year’s theme of “If the word we,” which celebrates multiplicity and openness. Curated by Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park, the show convenes 61 artists from nations ranging from Peru to the Philippines. The exhibition will feature a host of commissions, including one by the sculptor Torkwase Dyson, who will debut a new installation in the planetarium at the Kamin Science Center.

May 2–January 3, 2027

Few artists across art history have wielded black paint as deftly as Francisco de Zurbarán, a Spanish painter whose images of Christian subjects are ensconced in darkness. Take Agnus Dei (ca. 1635–40), in which Zurbarán represents the Lamb of God before a shadowy background; an open portal somewhere outside the canvas casts a stream of light through the void. Regularly housed at the Prado museum in Madrid, that painting is one of around 50 masterpieces that will come together for this Zurbarán retrospective, which will attest to the timelessness of this painter’s flair for religious drama and extravagant lighting.

May 2–August 23

Now returning for its 61st edition, the greatest art exhibition in the world returns, this time with a twist due to an unfortunate turn of fate: Its curator, Koyo Kouoh, died while creating the show, leaving five advisers whom she selected to see her project to fruition. The resultant show will be titled “In Minor Keys” and will focus on artists who “refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches,” as she put it in an accompanying text. Guadalupe Maravilla, Dan Lie, Wangechi Mutu, and the late Seyni Awa Camara are among the 111 talented artists featured in the main show, which is complemented by a range of national pavilions, some of them already controversial.

May 9–November 22

While the Met’s beloved fashion exhibitions have always been prized for the bounty of gorgeous clothing on view, they have not always been destinations for art. Seeking to close the gap between its Costume Institute and the rest of its programming, the Met is opening 12,000 square feet of fresh gallery space for fashion shows abutting the Great Hall. First up is “Costume Art,” an exhibit that teases out connections across time between attire of all kinds and painting, sculpture, and more. One section will be devoted to nudes and will feature a Hans Bellmer photograph of a headless doll; the picture will appear in the same context as a lumpy Comme des Garçons ensemble designed by Rei Kawakubo.

May 10–January 10, 2027

It tends to be an event whenever James McNeill Whistler’s painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 (1871)—better known as Whistler’s Mother—leaves Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. But the fact that it has rarely visited England, the country where the American-born artist’s career reached its apex, makes the painting’s presence in the British capital this season all the more resonant. It was in London that Whistler pushed his portraiture ever closer to abstraction, betraying accepted traditions for color and composition and blazing a trail for modernists after him in the process. A visit to this 150-work retrospective at Tate Britain should confirm as much: Take in Whistler’s hazy paintings of the Thames, then stroll over to the river itself to see just how much he diverged from reality.

May 21–September 27

Unfortunately, it is hard to remember a moment in recent history when conflict didn’t dominate the news cycle, and that makes this show both timely and timeless. Its broad focus is South Asia, and while all of the artists in the show do in some way contend with war, many are equally focused on its aftereffects. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, for example, has made films and sculptures about unexploded ordnance—ammunition that has not yet gone off—found in his native Vietnam, where the landscape remains disturbed by what is locally termed the American War of the 1960s and ’70s.

May 22–October 18

In 1999, Mary Ellen Carroll set out to “make architecture perform in this age of the political, and to treat policy as a ready-made,” purchasing a house in Houston that she proceeded to modify repeatedly. Having remade the home again and again, and on one occasion even rotating the entire structure 180 degrees, the artist proceeded to stage a 2017 performance in which the abode was destroyed by an excavator. Titled prototype 1, this project—which remains ongoing in the form of continued work done to the lot—figures in this survey for an artist whose work questions whether a piece can ever be completed, even after it is declared done by its maker.

May 22–November 1

Trecento history memorably got a rewrite in 2024 in a knockout survey at the Met showing that Sienese painters plotted a path for the Renaissance masters who came after them. But with Spain so closely connected to Siena and other regions during the 14th century through trade routes and the like, might not Spaniards have made a significant contribution to the trecento aesthetic too? This show looks at the two-way exchange of artistic ideals, putting Italian painters like Ambroglio Lorenzetti and Andrea di Petruccio alongside artists such as Ferrer and Arnau Bassa, two Catalonians who helped establish the Italianate Gothic style as a fixture of Spanish art during the era.

May 26–September 20

There is arguably no such thing as an unnecessary Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition; long after his AIDS-related death in 1996, the conceptualist continues to exert a strong influence on today’s artists. Born in Cuba and based in the United States for much of his career, Gonzalez-Torres spun tender, complex statements about mortality and the passage of time from materials such as wrapped candies, strings of light bulbs, and printed historical timelines. But at a moment when there are so many Gonzalez-Torres shows, what makes this one special? Its curators: Alejandro Cesarco, a conceptual artist, and Nancy Spector, a curator who staged a posthumous U.S. pavilion for Gonzalez-Torres at the 2007 Venice Biennale. It’s an unusual pairing that may cause Gonzalez-Torres’s art to appear even more poetic than we already know it to be.

May 27–October 12

Following a show for Harriet Backer staged two years ago, the National Museum is mounting an exhibit for another overlooked female painter of the 19th century, Asta Nørregaard. Having crossed paths with Backer in her native Norway, Nørregaard studied in Munich and spent time in Paris before returning to Oslo, where she continued painting portraits in the French academic style. Nørregaard was not an Impressionist, but she appears to have absorbed some of that movement’s more experimental tendencies: Her portraits of wealthy women and herself are sharply focused, except in small areas where her paint blurs and creates a gauzy effect.

May 28–October 18

The title of this exhibition evokes someone who travels in darkness, speeding away just a moment after coming into view. It’s an apt way of describing Jasper Johns, the nonagenarian American artist whose paintings are imbued with meaning that escapes easy interpretation. Take the works from his 1997–2003 series “Catenary,” a few of which appear in this 100-work survey. In these paintings, expanses of smudgy gray—blackboards, maybe—are interrupted by arcing white lines and images of hurricanes seen from above. What Johns is trying to show us remains largely out of reach, but the paintings and drawings are intoxicating nonetheless.

May 29–October 12