Tag: artist

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2025 has got off to a strong start for museum exhibitions internationally. “Paris Noir” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris has brought the influence of Black artists in the French capital into the mainstream. Anselm Kiefer is juxtaposed with Van Gogh in an unprecedented exhibition at both the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and Leigh Bowery has taken over London’s Tate Modern with his boundary-pushing installations.

As we enter the spring months, there are several major new shows to watch for internationally. Museums are opening their doors to more expansive solo shows and retrospectives, giving space to sorely under-acknowledged international artists as well as career-capping shows for established artists.

Here are the best shows to see at museums across the globe in spring 2025.

David Hockney, “25”

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

Through Aug. 31

“I think it’s going to be very good.” So said David Hockney himself of this exhibition in Paris—which is just as well, as he’s apparently been closely involved in its curation. With more than 400 works, it’s the biggest exhibition the 87-year-old painter has ever had, trumping even his gigantic 2014 show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The Fondation Louis Vuitton is devoting all of its galleries—11 rooms—to the lauded British painter’s work, representing the breadth of his career but with a particular focus on the last 25 years.

The exhibition also serves as a map, charting Hockney’s peripatetic career. The artist has portrayed a variety of locales across his decades of work, from his hometown of Bradford, England, to the swimming pools and pastel villas of Los Angeles. Later, Hockney returned to painting stark, leafless trees in Yorkshire, England, then London, and then Normandy, France, where he now lives. Breadth is the name of the game here, and this show is set to be as close to exhaustive as you can get, including a variety of media (one room will be devoted to digital landscapes drawn on an iPad). It’s both a look back at Hockney’s extraordinary career and an exploration of his current artistic practice: Excitingly, some of the pieces he’s working on right now will be displayed.

Rosa Barba, “The Ocean of One’s Pause”

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

May 3–July 6

The center of MoMA’s sweeping exhibition of Rosa Barba’s work is the newly commissioned work Charge (2025), which considers light as both a source of scientific innovation and an enabler of ecological change. Climate change is also a theme of her film Aggregate States of Matter (2019). The work, which was added to MoMA’s collection last year, examines how celluloid film—temporary, degradable—can be used to record and echo the fragility of the natural landscape. “The Ocean of One’s Pause” displays 15 years of Barba’s art, across video art, kinetic sculpture, and sound. Added to various performances by Barba is a soundtrack by percussionist Chad Taylor and singer Alicia Hall Moran, which the artist describes as an “exploded poem.”

Ed Atkins

Tate Britain, London

Through Aug. 25

Where does the person end and the avatar begin? Ed Atkins’s body of work looks at the gap between technology and the self, and this Tate Britain show—the largest U.K. survey exhibition of Atkins’s works to date—has a solipsistic bent. The vast show, taking Atkins’s own body, experiences, and feelings as his subject, will combine his digital art with paintings, drawings, and even embroidery. The artist’s computer-generated video art is provocative and sometimes absurd—Hisser (2015) follows a person who “apologises, masturbates, and falls into a sinkhole,” according to the show notes.

To reduce Atkins’s work to the mess, bodily substances, and sordidness of his avatars is to miss his poetry. His pieces often originate from or are linked to his writing; the scripts behind his videos are sometimes later published as standalone poems. There is hope and a raw expression of love among the grimy self-pathologizing: A central part of the show displays a mass of Post-It notes with drawings made for his children, tiny missives of emotion.

Lorna Simpson, “Source Notes”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

May 19–Nov. 2

This exhibition veers away from the pioneering conceptual photography that American artist Lorna Simpson is known for. Instead, the show focuses more on her evolving painting practice over the last 10 years. In May, The Met will open the first major exhibition of Simpson’s paintings, which draw on the same themes that she has come back to again and again over her career: race, gender, and identity.

Many are portraits, whose subjects stare—almost accusingly—at the viewer from a nebulous wash of cobalt blue or gray. Other faces share the canvas with collaged photography or magazine cut-outs. Simpson first exhibited her paintings at the 2015 Venice Biennale; “Source Notes” takes some of her paintings from that debut. Other works are from her ongoing “Special Characters” series, which uses found images—often the faces of Black women taken from beauty or wig advertisements in Ebony magazine—and steeps them in bright colors, reminding us of the repetitive, capitalistic imagery we consume.

Edvard Munch, “Edvard Munch Portraits”

National Portrait Gallery, London

Mar. 13–June 15

This spring, the National Portrait Gallery gives a welcome overview of Edvard Munch’s body of work beyond The Scream (1893). The show “Edvard Munch Portraits” seeks to depict the Norwegian artist as a “social being,” not just as a talented but troubled painter who struggled with poor mental health all his life. The show follows Munch chronologically through his adolescence and early adulthood with his family, to his period mixing with the bohemian groups of Kristiania (as Oslo was previously known). The works then trace his formative trip to Paris and the four years he spent in Berlin, where he met collectors and patrons, and lastly, his return to Norway, where he was surrounded by friends and supporters he dubbed his “Guardians.” He used his piercing style of portraiture to capture his sister Laura’s melancholic stare and the anarchist writer Hans Jaeger’s jutting, defiant chin. The works are deft introductions to the people with whom he surrounded himself, and reveal his relationships with them.

This is the first U.K. exhibition to focus exclusively on his portraits, and it features many that have never been shown in the U.K. before. One such example is a mysterious portrait of Munch’s friend Thor Lütken, painted in 1892, which contains a painting within a painting: two small, ghostly figures hidden on the man’s sleeve.

Arpita Singh, “Remembering”

Serpentine Galleries, London, UK

Through July 27

It only took 60 years for the prolific Indian artist Arpita Singh to finally get a solo museum exhibition outside of India. London’s Serpentine Galleries is known for seeking out under-acknowledged artists and bringing them into the limelight, and this exhibition is certainly doing the city a favor. Singh is a figurative artist who came of age in post-independence India at a time of social upheaval. Her painstakingly detailed works—often playing on several layers of perspective and meaning—are an evocative mix of the personal and the public: using domestic images alongside political references and real-life events.

On display are a number of Singh’s large-scale oil paintings in her signature, candy-colored palette, as well as more intimate watercolors, etchings, and ink drawings that explore femininity and family. As Singh said in the show notes, “‘Remembering’ draws from old memories from which these works emerged. Whether I am aware or not, there is something happening at my core. It is how my life flows.” Her work borrows elements from Indian miniature paintings and folk art, weaving in subtle symbols of violence: One painting depicts the goddess Kali, surrounded by fruit and flowers, holding a tiny, perfectly-formed gun.

It is also the first time that Serpentine has exhibited a South Asian artist in its main galleries. For the occasion, the museum has commissioned the most comprehensive publication on her work in the last 10 years, which explores the influence she has had on contemporary art in India and internationally.

“City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s”

National Gallery Singapore

Apr. 2–Aug. 17

It’s easy to imagine the Parisian district of Montparnasse as a hub for expat artists and intellectuals in the 1920s, with people like Ernest Hemingway hobnobbing with Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Josephine Baker on Left Bank café terraces. However, Asian artists are strangely left out of that picture.

The National Gallery Singapore is seeking to correct this image, with its large exhibition exploring Paris as a “City of Others”—a crossroads for migrants from around the world, particularly as a source of fertile creativity for Asian artists. The show runs concurrently with the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition, “Paris Noir,” in the French capital itself, which casts a light on the African, Caribbean and Afro American artists who lived and worked in Paris after the Second World War. “City of Others” instead focuses on the interwar years, displaying works by artists such as Foujita Tsuguharu, Georgette Chen, Lê Phổ, and Liu Kang, alongside archival images from the city. The show also goes beyond the visual arts (and a section on the influence of Asian artisans on the Art Deco movement) to explore Asian artists’ work across different art forms like theater and dance.

Saya Woolfalk, “Empathic Universe”

Museum of Arts and Design, New York City

Apr. 12–Sept. 7

Multimedia artist Saya Woolfalk is known for creating an entire body of work based on an imagined world. She has invented a race of women, known as “Empathics,” drawing on cultural symbolism and folklore from international art, craft, and storytelling, including African American, Brazilian, and Japanese myths. This show is novelistic in scope—or perhaps more like a series of sci-fi novels—as it invites the visitor to discover the lore of this new race of people and how they use a blend of technological innovation and the magic of their universe to transform themselves and their future.

The exhibition straddles textiles (through the design of elaborate costumes for the Empathics), digital projections, narrative videos, glass sculpture, and even dance performance, in a collaboration with the Alvin Ailey/Fordham University BFA Dance Program. Woolfalk’s boundary-pushing art presents neither a dystopia nor a utopia, instead forcing us to ask questions about capitalism, colonialism, and the use of technology that are painfully relevant to today’s world. This is both Woolfalk’s first retrospective and first major exhibition in New York, drawing on two decades of her practice.

Tracey Emin, “Sex and Solitude”

Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy

Mar. 16–July 20

The provocative, blood-and-entrails work of artist Tracey Emin may seem incongruous with a Renaissance palace in the heart of Florence. “Sex and Solitude” marks the first major exhibition at a museum in Italy for the artist, and it covers more than 60 works from across her career. This is Emin at her grotesque, confrontational, and confessional best. The show features the installation work Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), an internal room filled with paintings and supplies. The work refers to the ’90s performance piece, when she locked herself inside a room in a Stockholm gallery for three and a half weeks—the time between periods of menstruation. Here, the artist tried to force herself to reckon with the medium of painting, which she had become disgusted by after two traumatic abortions.

The show also includes painting, neon, film, and sculpture works, including her recent huge bronze sculpture I Followed You To The End (2024) in the museum’s courtyard, which shows the lower half of a woman’s body on her knees, legs sprawled, in a submissive, sexual pose also evocative of birth, the carnal functions of the female-coded body. As ever with Emin, those with delicate constitutions should abstain.

Ai Weiwei, “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei”

Seattle Art Museum, Seattle

Through Sept. 7

Ai Weiwei needs space—and Seattle Art Museum is going to give it to him, devoting all three of its locations across the city to a single artist for the first time in its 90-year history. It is the artist and dissident’s largest-ever exhibition in the U.S., and it features over 130 works created over four decades, from the 1980s to the 2020s. The show has also been extended for six months longer than the museum’s usual runs to enable as many people as possible to see it. All of the artist’s most famous works will be there, like Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Illumination (2019), and Sunflower Seeds (2010)—with which he took over Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall—as well as new pieces that have never been exhibited before.

As the exhibition shows, Ai is capable of creating large-scale works, like his 15-meter-long reimagining of a Claude Monet’s Water Lilies painting (in 650,000 LEGO bricks). However, the work also includes small but powerful works that skewer globalization and American capitalism, like Neolithic Vase with Coca Cola Logo (gold) (2015). In the exhibition’s show notes, curator Foong Ping writes that Ai’s work is a reminder “of our own agency for collective resistance.”

Taymour Grahne Projects, the London-based gallery known for its roster of contemporary talent, has announced plans to open a flagship location in Dubai. The gallery will celebrate the launch with a solo exhibition by American artist Gail Spaien, titled “Arranging Flowers.” The inaugural exhibition will open on September 18th and will remain on view until November 6th.

Founded in New York in 2013, Taymour Grahne Projects has operated spaces in New York and London in the past, but more recently, the gallery has garnered attention for its sharp nomadic programming approach. The gallery will span a 2,000-square-foot space in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, a cultural hub of streets home to galleries such as Leila Heller Gallery and The Third Line.

“Opening a permanent space in Alserkal Avenue feels like a homecoming,” London-born, Lebanese Finnish dealer Taymour Grahne said in a press statement. “Having lived in Beirut and travelled extensively in the region, I have strong personal and professional ties to this part of the world, and specifically to Dubai. The city’s rapidly expanding cultural landscape and growing community of collectors make it the ideal location for this next chapter of the gallery’s journey.”

More recently, the gallery has been noted for its commitment to artists from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and its diaspora. Over the years, Grahne has established long-standing relationships with artists from the region. The gallery was one of the first to showcase works by notable figures such as Emirati artist Mohammed Kazem and the late Abu Dhabi–based artist Tarek Al-Ghoussein. Today, the gallery’s roster includes artists like Lebanese American artist Daniele Genadry, Kuwaiti artist Ala Younis, and French Algerian artist Katia Kameli.

Dubai’s rising population is fueling growth in its arts and culture scene, especially in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the city welcomed more than 180,000 new inhabitants in 2022. Among the newcomers are several international dealers. Recent additions include Efiɛ Gallery, established by the Mintah family in 2021, which recently expanded into a new space in Alserkal Avenue itself. Nearby is NIKA Project Space, founded by collector Veronika Berezina in 2023. Plus, in January 2025, London-based JD Malat Gallery opened its new 1,700-square-foot space in Dubai’s Opera District.

“It is a sign of the city’s fast-growing art scene, and we can’t wait to see the fresh energy and critical conversations Taymour will bring,” said Basmah El-Bittar, director of Alserkal Avenue. “With a diverse mix of international and regional artists, the gallery presence will only deepen the Avenue’s role as a hub for cutting-edge contemporary art in the region.”