December arrives with exhibitions that push imagination and reveal how artists and architects reframe the worlds we inhabit. From Marguerite Humeau’s visions in Helsinki to Magdalena Abakanowicz’s monumental textile forms in Paris, the month charts practices drawn from transformation and embodied experience.

Tokyo’s TOTO Gallery·MA foregrounds Marina Tabassum Architects’ climate-attuned design ethos, while Milan sees Hito Steyerl reimagine narrative and time through a science-fiction lens and OMA‘S Countryside exhibition reframes the rural as a terrain for future living. Meanwhile, major presentations by Doug Aitken in Mumbai, Alex Da Corte in New York, and Christian Marclay in Berlin expand the conversation across continents.

Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and listings on our dedicated events guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them around the globe.

Marguerite Humeau: Torches

Unfolding like an opera in multiple acts, the exhibition presents a series of speculative scenes that imagine new ways of being — what if humans could evolve into collective organisms, attuned to all forms of life? In her practice, Marguerite Humeau explores the origins of life, the mysteries of early human history, and possible futures for its survival.

Working primarily through sculpture and immersive installation, Humeau combines materials as diverse as 150-year-old walnut, hand-blown glass, alabaster, beeswax, and even cyanobacteria or wasp venom. Her meticulously crafted works are often animated by sound and light, transforming space into a site of myth-making and inquiry.

She describes: ‘Being an artist is a way I filter and channel knowledge and bring physical worlds alive… imagining what has vanished or what may still come.’ 

name: Torches
artist: Marguerite Humeau
museum: HAMHelsinki
location: Helsinki, Finland
dates: until March 15th, 2026

Marguerite Humeau, The Holder of Wasp Venom, 2023. Marguerite Humeau, ‘Meys’, White Cube Bermondsey, 5 April – 14 May 2023. © Marguerite Humeau. photo: © White Cube (Julia Andréone).

Magdalena Abakanowicz:The Thread of Existence

A pioneering force in contemporary sculpture and textile art, Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) stands as one of the most influential Polish artists of the 20th century. The Musée Bourdelle now stages the first major French exhibition devoted to her work.

Shaped by the trauma of war and life under political censorship, Abakanowicz created immersive, poetic, and often unsettling forms that draw on the organic world, seriality, and monumentality. Her sculptures and textiles — at once political, humanistic, and deeply intuitive — echo many of today’s environmental and feminist concerns.

Bringing together around eighty ensembles in a newly restored concrete gallery, the exhibition traces her evolution through a chronological and thematic lens, foregrounding her powerful sculptural installations alongside key textile works, drawings, and photographs. The Thread of Existence draws on the artist’s belief that fabric is a fundamental unit of the human body.

name: The Thread of Existence
artist: Magdalena Abakanowicz
museum: Musée Bourdelle
location: Paris, France
dates: April 12th, 2026

Abakan rouge, 1969, Magdalena Abakanowicz. Tate, Présenté anonymement, 2009. photo © Magdalena Abakanowicz

Lee Miller

Tate Britain presents the most comprehensive UK retrospective to date of Lee Miller, celebrating her as one of the 20th century’s most compelling and uncompromising artistic voices. After first working in front of the camera as a sought-after model in the late 1920s, Miller quickly moved behind the lens, becoming a central figure in the avant-garde communities of New York, Paris, London, and Cairo.

The exhibition traces the full sweep of her career — from her involvement with French Surrealism to her pioneering fashion and war photography — while also highlighting lesser-known chapters, including her striking images of the Egyptian landscape in the 1930s.

With around 250 vintage and modern prints, many never shown before, the survey reveals the clarity, curiosity, and courage that shaped her vision. As Miller once said of her refusal to follow anyone else’s path, ‘It was a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.’

name: Lee Miller
artist: Lee Miller
museum: Tate Modern
location: London, UK
dates: until February 15th, 2026

Lee Miller, Model with lightbulb, Vogue Studio, London, England c.1943 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024

People Place Poiesis

TOTO Gallery·MA hosts People Place Poiesis, an exhibition that traces how Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA) reshapes architecture in Bangladesh through climate-attuned design, community agency, and lightweight systems built for a rapidly changing world.

The show spans two floors and extends into the courtyard with a full-scale Khudi Bari, MTA’s now-seminal flood-resilient housing prototype, installed alongside a newly developed Japan-specific version built with architect Kazuya Morita and students from Kyoto Prefectural University.

Previously presented in Munich and Lisbon, this Tokyo edition sharpens the spatial contrasts of the exhibition, placing rural, urban, and transnational responses in close conversation.

name: People Place Poiesis
architect: Marina Tabassum Architects
museum: TOTO GALLERY·MA
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: until February 15th, 2026

image courtesy of TOTO GALLERY·MA

Hito Steyerl: The Island

‘The Island’ is a site-specific project by filmmaker Hito Steyerl at Osservatorio in Milan, weaving together a new film, installation elements, and interviews to explore flooding as a metaphor for the rise of AI-driven authoritarianism, the climate crisis, and the politicization of science.

Drawing on quantum physics and science fiction, Steyerl collapses temporal and spatial boundaries, creating a series of narrative ‘leaps’ that move from microorganisms to galaxies, from the Neolithic to imagined futures. Inspired in part by an anecdote from critic Darko Suvin — who survived a 1941 bombing by imagining himself inside a Flash Gordon serial — the project reflects on how alternate worlds can emerge in moments of crisis.

Hito Steyerl provokes ‘a clash between two different notions of time: the junk time of technology and capitalism that disrupts time with continuous jumps and loops that interrupt and exhaust us, and the deep time — not human time, Neolithic time, underwater time — times that are outside of the human artificially created spectrum.’

name: Hito Steyerl: The Island
artist: Hito Steyerl
museum: Osservatorio Fondazione Prada
location: Milan, Italy
dates: December 4th, 2025 — October 30th, 2026

Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015, installation view from the Venice Biennale, German Pavilion, 2015. image courtesy theartist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. photo: Manuel Reinartz

Dynastic Jewels

Focusing on jewelry as both a symbol of power and a vessel of personal meaning, this exhibition traces the stories of pieces linked to some of Europe’s most iconic figures, including Catherine the Great, Joséphine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise, and Queen Victoria. From tiaras and diadems to brooches, necklaces, and rare gemstones, these creations were designed for the splendor of royal courts, where they signaled lineage, authority, and imperial ambition.

As the third in a trilogy of exhibitions developed in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the show brings together glittering works from the V&A and The Al Thani Collection, many shown in France for the first time.

name: Dynastic Jewels
museum: Hôtel de la Marine
location: Paris, France
dates: December 10th, 2025 — April 6th, 2026

Queen Victoria Coronet Designed by Prince Albert; made by Kitching & Abud. London, 1840-42Sapphires, diamonds, gold and silver © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Hélio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica — an artist and theorist of the 20th century — developed a practice that moved fluidly between sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, and performance, fundamentally reshaping ideas of participation and abstraction. A key figure in Brazil’s Neoconcrete movement and a co-founder of Tropicália, Oiticica explored how art could respond to and emerge from the social, political, and economic realities of Latin America, insisting on embodied experience and spatial awareness as central to meaning.

At Dia Beacon, the exhibition centers on Grande Núcleo (Grand Nucleus) (1960–63), one of Oiticica’s most immersive environments. Composed of rectangular panels painted in shifting tones from bright yellow to deep orange and arranged in a multidirectional grid, the work breaks away from the flat pictorial plane of his earlier Metaesquemas and Monocromáticos. Instead, it invites viewers to move among its forms, making their own presence an essential part of the work’s structure and unfolding.

name: Hélio Oiticica
artist: Hélio Oiticica
museum: Dia Beacon
location: New York, USA
dates: from December 5th, 2025

Hélio Oiticica, Grande Núcleo (Grand Nucleus), NC3, NC4, NC6, 1960–63. © César and Claudio Oiticica, courtesy Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Doug Aitken: UNDER THE SUN

The Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) presents Doug Aitken’s first exhibition in India, Under The Sun, a three-floor exploration of time, perception, and place. Each level of the NMACC Art House is ordered chronologically under themes of past, present, and future, and unfolds through a constellation of sculptures, textiles, film, and an immersive new light installation.

At the heart of the exhibition is a suite of site-specific commissions, many emerging from a two-year collaboration between Aitken’s studio and more than a dozen artisans across India. Working with local materials and advanced craft techniques, these collaborations weave regional knowledge into Aitken’s wider investigation of how we navigate history and imagine what comes next.

name: Under The Sun
artist: Doug Aitken
museum: Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC)
location: Mumbai, India
dates: December 6th, 2025 — February 22nd, 2026

Doug Aitken, NEW ERA, 2018. video installation with three channels of video (color, sound) three projections,freestanding room, PVC projection screens, mirrors © Doug Aitken. courtesy Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and 303 Gallery, New York

Alex Da Corte:Parade

Matthew Marks presents Alex Da Corte: Parade, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York in more than five years, spanning both of the gallery’s West 22nd Street spaces. The show features eleven new sculptures set within a carefully staged narrative environment, reflecting Da Corte’s interest in how images from popular culture and art history shape contemporary life.

Though Da Corte works fluidly across video, performance, painting, and drawing, Parade centers sculpture — the medium he considers the grounding force of his practice, ‘because… it has a side you cannot see. And that is uniquely human.’

The exhibition comprises three chambers separated by thresholds of art historical reference. Da Corte himself appears throughout the installation in life-size sculptural form: as the Pink Panther recast as a house painter; as Popeye perched on a brick piano, quietly contemplating a pumpkin; and as a figure reclining in a reconstruction of Paul Thek’s legendary 1967 installation The Tomb.

name: Alex Da Corte: Parade
artist: Alex Da Corte
museum: Matthew Marks Gallery
location: New York, USA
dates: until December 20th, 2025

Alex Da Corte, Housepainter II, 2025, image courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Christian Marclay:The Clock

Christian Marclay’s The Clock arrives in Berlin for the first time, bringing his 24-hour video installation to a newly built cinema space inside the Mies Glass Hall. Painstakingly assembled over several years, the work functions as an absorbing journey through a century of cinema and as a fully operational timepiece: each moment on-screen corresponds precisely to the local time of its exhibition, collapsing cinematic fiction into real-time experience.

Drawing on scenes from thrillers, westerns, sci-fi films, and countless lesser-known titles, The Clock weaves together shifting moods, narratives, and eras, allowing viewers to feel time unfold in multiple directions at once. The work is on view daily during the museum’s opening hours, with select weekend opportunities to experience the full 24-hour cycle.

name: Christian Marclay:The Clock
artist: Christian Marclay
museum: Neue Nationalgalerie
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: until January 25th, 2026

Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010 © Christian Marclay. photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby)

Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave

Qatar Museums, in collaboration with AMO under Samir Bantal and Rem Koolhaas, presents Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave, a sweeping exhibition that reconsiders the rural world as a site of sustainability, innovation, and future possibility. Spanning a geographic arc from Africa through the Middle East and Central Asia to China, the project illuminates regions long linked by history and still home to most of the world’s population.

Through immersive installations and research-driven narratives, Countryside challenges the dominance of the urban lens and asks how rural life might offer more humane and ecological responses to contemporary crises. Presented across both Qatar Preparatory School (QPS) and the National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ), the exhibition encourages cross-generational dialogue and opens space for imagining new ways of living beyond the city.

name: Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave
architect: AMO / OMA
museum: Qatar Preparatory School (QPS) and NMoQ Gallery
location: Doha, Qatar
dates: until June 30th, 2026

image © Marco Cappelletti Studio

Mr. Strangelove or: How He Learned to Stop Conventional Art Style and Love to Draw the Girls

Mr., a leading figure of Japan’s Superflat and Neo-Pop movements, presents his first solo exhibition in Kaohsiung — a vibrant, immersive world shaped by the wide-eyed innocence and exuberant energy of anime-inspired characters. With imagery that feels both playful and uncanny, he blurs dimensional boundaries and invites visitors into a universe built from ‘ultimate cuteness’ and uninhibited imagination.

Since the mid-1990s, Mr. has helped redefine contemporary Japanese art by channeling into his work otaku culture and the atmosphere of 1980s Japan, an era steeped in manga, anime, and emerging subcultures. Curated by Kenji Kudo, director of the Tagawa City Museum of Art, the exhibition features around 70 works, including large-scale paintings, sculptures, and early receipt graffiti.

name: Mr. Strangelove or: How He Learned to Stop Conventional Art Style and Love to Draw the Girls
artist: Mr.
museum: Neiwei Arts Center
location: Kaohsiung, Taiwan
dates: until April 26th, 2026

Mr. Stay With Me – A Long Tale of This World, 2020 Acrylic paint and silkscreen print on canvas.241.2×466.6 cm ©️ 2020 Mr./Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. courtesy Perrotin

Soft Robots:The Art of Digital Breathing

Soft Robots gathers works by fifteen artists and collectives to explore how emerging technologies like AI and synthetic biology are reshaping our sense of self in a world defined by surveillance capitalism and digital doubles. In this shifting technological ecology, the exhibition looks beyond utopian promises and dystopian fears, asking what kind of future we are building alongside our machines. Many works were created specifically for the show, revealing how art can probe these questions with poetry and critical imagination.

Drawing on perspectives that challenge the Western divide between the natural and the artificial — including pan-Asian philosophies like Shintoism, which sees spirit in all things — the exhibition moves fluidly between avatars, doppelgängers, and seductive machines. Inspired in part by Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Nightingale,’ it reflects on what might be lost when the mechanical stands in for the soulful.

name: Soft Robots:The Art of Digital Breathing
museum: Contemporary Copenhagen
location: Copenhagen, Denmark
dates: until April 19th, 2026

A.A.Murakami, Beyond the Horizon ©A.A.Murakami. commissioned by M+, 2024. photography byAdam Kovář and PETR&Co. model by Ashley Lin. image courtesy the artist

Seeds of Hate and Hope

Seeds of Hate and Hope brings together artists including Mona Hatoum, William Kentridge, Zoran Mušič, Peter Oloya, Kimberly Fulton Orozco, and Indrė Šerpytytė to reflect on how individuals have witnessed, endured, and responded to mass atrocities — from genocide and ethnic cleansing to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Rather than depicting violence directly, the exhibition presents works shaped by personal histories and shared memory, offering space for grief, resistance, and healing.

By highlighting artistic responses across the 20th and 21st centuries, Seeds of Hate and Hope underscores art’s capacity to confront the legacies of conflict and to challenge the simplistic narratives often found in media imagery. The works on view point to the ways resilience and solidarity can take root even in moments of profound rupture, emphasizing empathy and human dignity as essential forces against prejudice, dehumanization, and hate.

name: Seeds of Hate and Hope
museum: Sainsbury Centre
location: Norwich, UK
dates: until May 17th, 2026

Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot, 2006. stainless steel, neon tube. courtesy the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. © Mona Hatoum.all rights reserved, DACS 2025. image courtesy White Cube. photo: Stephen White

Robert Therrien:This is a Story

The Broad presents Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the most extensive museum exhibition of the late artist’s work to date. Known for his uncanny shifts in scale and his transformation of familiar objects — giant tables and chairs, outsized dishes, alongside intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels — Therrien developed a visual language that feels at once playful, enigmatic, and deeply rooted in memory.

Featuring more than 120 works across five decades, the exhibition offers an unprecedented look at his evolving practice, located just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio he occupied for nearly thirty years. Many pieces, including works made shortly before his passing in 2019, have never been shown in a museum, opening new perspectives on his lifelong exploration of perception, narrative, and the quiet strangeness of everyday forms.

name: Robert Therrien: This is a Story
artist: Robert Therrien
museum: The Broad
location: Los Angeles, California
dates: until April 5th, 2026

image courtesy The Broad

Ron Mueck: Encounter

Ron Mueck: Encounter brings an exceptional selection of the celebrated Australian sculptor’s work exclusively to Sydney, marking his most significant solo exhibition in the country in over a decade and his first in the city since 2003. Since the late 1990s, Mueck has transformed figurative sculpture with his meticulous realism, using shifts in scale to probe themes of birth and death, solitude and connection, and the complexities of the human condition.

At the center of the exhibition is Havoc, an immersive new installation featuring a pack of larger-than-life fighting dogs created especially for this presentation. Oversized yet quietly charged, the work draws viewers into a space that feels both intimate and unnervingly tense.

name: Ron Mueck: Encounter
artist: Ron Mueck
museum: Art Gallery of NSW
location: Sydney, Australia
dates: December 6th, 2025 — April 12th, 2026

Ron Mueck Couple Under an Umbrella 2013/2015, collection museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands © Ron Mueck, photo: Antoine Van Kaam

The House on Utopia Parkway

Gagosian presents The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson, a Paris exhibition conceived with curator Jasper Sharp that reimagines the artist’s legendary workspace in Queens, New York. Marking Cornell’s first solo presentation in Paris in more than forty years, the storefront gallery at 9 rue de Castiglione is transformed into a life-size, Anderson-designed shadow box — a time capsule built from more than three hundred objects and curiosities sourced from Cornell’s own ‘spare parts department.’

Cornell (1903–1972), a self-taught artist who never left the United States yet wandered Paris through books, postcards, and conversations with Marcel Duchamp, created some of the twentieth century’s most original collages and assemblages. His basement studio, lined with whitewashed boxes and jars of ephemera, provided the raw material for the poetic shadow boxes that would influence generations of artists.

name: The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson
artist: Wes Anderson
gallery: Gagosian
location: Paris, France
dates: December 16th, 2025 — March 14th, 2026

Joseph Cornell, Pharmacy (1943) © 2025 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/licensed byVAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: Dominique Uldry. courtesy Gagosian

Mark Leckey:And the City Stood in its Brightness

‘And the City Stood in Its Brightness,’ the second commission in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s in situ series, features a new site-specific installation by Mark Leckey, who explores how popular culture, technology, and memory shape collective identity. Drawing on his upbringing near Liverpool during the industrial decline of the 1970s and ’80s, Leckey examines how images and media become shared emotional landscapes.

For this project, he reimagines Sassetta’s City by the Sea (1424), one of the earliest Western cityscapes, translating its otherworldly geometry into sculptural form. The installation unfolds through a six-minute loop of sound and light — ambient audio, sudden bursts of speech, shifting illumination, and a climactic strobe — that transforms the sculpture from a physical structure into a flickering apparition.

name: Mark Leckey:And the City Stood in its Brightness
artist: Mark Leckey
museum: Museo Guggenheim Bilbao
location: Bilbao, Spain
dates: until December 4th, 2026

image courtesy Museo Guggenheim Bilbao

The post designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this december appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

November begins with exhibitions that transcend disciplines and generations, exploring the intersections of art, design, and architecture through material and memory. From Gerhard Richter’s sweeping retrospective in Paris to Ruth Asawa’s survey in New York, the month’s highlights trace how artists transform process into poetry.

In Milan, Alchimia. The Revolution of Italian Design revisits a radical era of experimentation, while Histories of Ecology at MASP in São Paulo redefines our relationship with the natural world. Janet Echelman’s Radical Softness reveals the quiet power of form and light, and Jeff Koons’s Porcelain Series transforms myth into modern art.

Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and listings on our dedicated events guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them around the globe.

kaws Family

KAWS: FAMILY invites visitors into the artist’s vibrant and emotionally charged world. Presented as the artist’s first major museum exhibition on the West Coast, the show spans three decades of work, tracing his ability to tap into shared feelings and collective culture.

Paintings, drawings, sculptures, and interventions, from ad takeovers to collaborations and toys, show the breadth of KAWS’s evolving visual language, built around recurring figures and reimagined pop imagery.

At its center stands FAMILY (2021), a monumental bronze sculpture that gathers KAWS’s well-known characters together. Their gestures of tenderness and fragility mirror our own experiences of care and connection. By reframing familiar animated icons through his own lens, KAWS turns nostalgia into reflection, creating space for empathy and shared cultural memory.

name: KAWS Family
artist: KAWS
museum: SFMOMA
location: San Francisco, USA
dates: November 15th, 2025 — May 3rd, 2026

KAWS Family, 2021, courtesy the artist © KAWS

Meriem Bennani: sole crushing

For her solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, Meriem Bennani transforms the Fondation into a vast resonant instrument with Sole Crushing, a multi-floor sound installation where more than two hundred flip-flops perform a composition blending orchestral harmony with the energy of collective noise.

As they strike surrounding surfaces, the flip-flops evoke the pulse of crowds — protests, stadiums, or dakka marrakchia gatherings — turning a simple, familiar sound into a meditation on community and individuality.

Reimagined from its 2024–25 presentation at Fondazione Prada, this version features a new soundtrack by Reda Senhaji (Cheb Runner) and a site-specific design attuned to Lafayette Anticipations’ architecture.

name: Meriem Bennani: Sole Crushing
artist: Meriem Bennani
gallery: Lafayette Anticipations
location: Paris, France
dates: until February 8th, 2026

view of Meriem Bennani’s exhibition Sole Crushing at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery (LA), Lodovico Corsini Gallery (Brussels), and Sadie Coles Gallery (London) © Aurélien Mole

shigeru ban: architecture and social contributions

Opening at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków, the exhibition devoted to Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban will span two floors of the Europe-Far East Gallery and remain on view for six months.

Showcasing Ban’s inventive use of materials — especially wood and cardboard — the exhibition traces his work across diverse contexts, from private residences and corporate buildings to public institutions and humanitarian projects responding to crises such as earthquakes and wars.

Original models arriving from Japan, France, and Ukraine, along with reconstructions, drawings, photographs, and diagrams, will illuminate Ban’s balance of structural experimentation, spatial clarity, and social purpose.

name: Shigeru Ban: Architecture and Social Contributions
architect: Shigeru Ban
museum: Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology
location: Kraków, Poland
dates: until May 3rd, 2026

Mount Fuji World Heritage Centre, Japan, 2017, image by Hiroyuki Hirai, © Shigeru Ban

paola pivi: I Don’t Like It, I Love It

At the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Paola Pivi — I Don’t Like It, I Love It transforms AGWA’s Brutalist spaces into a vivid, imaginative world where humor and gravity meet. Known for her surreal scenarios — feathered polar bears, inverted airplanes, zebras in snow — Pivi explores coexistence, empathy, and environmental fragility.

The exhibition features new commissions, including a giant inflatable comic cell made with Big Nate creator Lincoln Peirce, three new polar bears, and a rooftop installation of suspended trays filled with colored liquid that play with light and space. Pivi blends joy with reflection, and invites viewers to experience art as a space of connection and wonder.

name: Paola Pivi: I don’t like it, I love it
artist: Paola Pivi
gallery: AGWA
location: Perth, Australia
dates: November 8th, 2025 — April 26th, 2026

‘Paola Pivi: I don’t like it, I love it,’ image courtesy AGWA

strates

To mark its tenth anniversary, Philia presents STRATES, a major exhibition staged across two brutalist icons in Noisy-le-Grand — Jacques Kalisz’s iconic Mont d’Est parking structure and Ricardo Bofill’s Espaces Abraxas. Bringing together one emblematic work from each Philia artist, the exhibition retraces a decade of dialogue between art, design, and architecture.

Set within the sculptural concrete spirals of Kalisz and the theatrical facades of Bofill, STRATES explores how memory and projection shape both objects and place. Extending Philia’s commitment to architecture as context and community as medium, the project activates Mont d’Est’s evolving public realm through installations and workshops with artists.

name: Strates
gallery: Galerie Philia
location: Paris, France
dates: until November 30th, 2025

Espaces Abraxas by Ricardo Bofill, image © Studio Brinth, courtesy Galerie Philia

wes anderson: The Archives

The Design Museum presents a landmark exhibition offering rare access to Wes Anderson’s personal archives, revealing over thirty years of the filmmaker’s creative world. For the first time in Britain, more than 600 objects — from storyboards and polaroids to puppets, costumes, and miniature sets — trace the evolution of Anderson’s craft and collaborations.

Visitors can explore highlights like the pink model of The Grand Budapest Hotel, vending machines from Asteroid City, Margot Tenenbaum’s FENDI fur coat, and the stop-motion puppets from Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. These artifacts all together illuminate Anderson’s devotion to detail and design, and show how his handmade sensibility and visual precision have shaped a whimsical and deeply human cinematic universe.

name: Wes Anderson: The Archives
artist: Wes Anderson
museum: Design Museum
location: London, UK
dates: November 21st, 2025 — July 26th, 2026

Wes Anderson © Searchlight Pictures, image by Charlie Gray

juergen teller: you are invited

The inaugural exhibition at the Onassis Foundation’s new Athens space, ‘you are invited,’ offers a wide-ranging view of Juergen Teller’s evolving practice. Bringing together photographs, videos, and new, previously unseen images from the 1990s to today, the exhibition traces Teller’s distinctive blend of intimacy and irony across portraits, still lifes, and personal scenes.

Alongside his iconic images of figures like Iggy Pop, Kate Moss, and Charlotte Rampling, the show reflects a deepened emotional register shaped by recent experiences — photographing Pope Francis at a women’s prison during the Venice Biennale, documenting Auschwitz’s 80th liberation anniversary, and ongoing collaborations with his wife, Dovile Drizyte. Balancing humor and gravity, Teller’s work here takes on a renewed sense of purpose, exploring faith and fragility with an openness that’s at once personal and universal.

name: Juergen Teller: you are invited
artist: Juergen Teller
gallery: Onassis
location: Athens, Greece
dates: until December 30th, 2025

Leg, Snails And Peaches No.43, London, 2017, image courtesy Juergen Teller

Learning from design Maestros

21_21 DESIGN SIGHT presents Learning from Design Maestros, an exhibition directed by Noriko Kawakami and Kaoru Tashiro that reflects on six visionary figures whose ideas continue to shape the way we think about design and life: Bruno Munari, Max Bill, Achille Castiglioni, Otl Aicher, Enzo Mari, and Dieter Rams.

Through films, archival materials, and key works, the exhibition reveals how these designers fused creativity, teaching, and social awareness to redefine their disciplines. It also highlights the perspective of Shutaro Mukai, whose friendships with Bill and Aicher helped establish Japan’s Science of Design.

By revisiting these masters’ lessons in an era of rapid change, the exhibition invites visitors to consider how design remains a vital means of understanding and shaping the world.

name: Learning From Design Maestros
gallery: 21_21 Design Sight

location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: November 21st, 2025 — March 8th, 2026

Enzo Mari, Timor, 1967, image courtesy Danese Milano

Jeff Koons: Porcelain Series

Gagosian presents Porcelain Series, an exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by Jeff Koons, marking the first show devoted entirely to this body of work. Drawing on imagery that ranges from the everyday to the mythological, Koons transforms familiar forms into radiant, reflective icons that explore beauty, desire, and cultural memory.

His mirror-polished stainless-steel sculptures, crafted through advanced digital and mechanical processes, invite viewers into their gleaming surfaces, blurring the line between object and observer.

The accompanying paintings layer natural landscapes, gestural brushwork, and metallic leafing with motifs from art history, creating luminous compositions that bridge centuries of visual tradition. Across both mediums, the artist reflects on humanity’s enduring pursuit of transcendence through art.

name: Jeff Koons: Porcelain Series
artist: Jeff Koons
gallery: Gagosian
location: New York, USA
dates: November 13th, 2025 — February 28th, 2026

Jeff Koons, Three Graces, 2016-22 (detail), image courtesy Gagosian

petersen automotive

The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles opens a new exhibition, Performance and Prestige: A History of Aston Martin, tracing the British company’s evolution from its 1913 origins. Installed in the Meyers Gallery, the presentation gathers more than a dozen vehicles that embody the changing language of speed and craftsmanship that has defined Aston Martin for over a century.

The Aston Martin exhibition is the first in the museum’s history. The collection of models is organized to convey the shifting priorities of automotive design, which evolved from the pragmatic, streamlined sculpting of post-war racing prototypes to the expressive surfaces of contemporary hypercars. 

name: Performance and Prestige: A History of Aston Martin
museum: Petersen Museum | @petersenmuseum

location: Los Angeles, California
dates: October 30th, 2025 — October 2026

1979 Aston Martin Bulldog, image courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum

Gerhard richter

Fondation Louis Vuitton presents a sweeping retrospective dedicated to Gerhard Richter, one of the most influential artists of the past century. Bringing together 275 works spanning more than six decades, the exhibition offers an unparalleled view of Richter’s practice — from early photo-based paintings to his final abstractions, as well as glass and steel sculptures, works on paper, and overpainted photographs.

Tracing his lifelong engagement with both image and material, the exhibition reveals how Richter continually redefined painting’s possibilities, filtering reality through photography, memory, and abstraction. Organized chronologically, it highlights the artist’s restless experimentation and his enduring fascination with perception, history, and the act of making.

Continuing the Fondation’s tradition of major monographic exhibitions, this presentation stands as the most comprehensive exploration to date of Richter’s vision, and demonstrate his deep impact on contemporary art.

name: Gerhard Richter
artist: Gerhard Richter
museum: Fondation Louis Vuitton
location: Paris, France
dates: until March 2nd, 2026

Gerhard Richter, 4900 Farben, 2007. laquer on Alu Dibond, 196 panels, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris © Gerhard Richter 2025, image © Primae / Louis Bourjac

fungi: Anarchist Designers

FUNGI: Anarchist Designers reimagines mushrooms not as materials for human use but as autonomous collaborators in shaping the world. Curated by anthropologist Anna Tsing and architect-artist Feifei Zhou, the exhibition at Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Instituut challenges the human-centered narratives of ‘sustainable design,’ and positions fungi as unruly co-designers that flourish in the margins and ruins of capitalism.

Through installations, sculptures, sound, and multimedia works — many created in collaboration with scientists — the exhibition explores how fungi connect species, environments, and economies, from decaying forests to nuclear fallout zones.

Rejecting polished notions of eco-innovation, FUNGI embraces decay and unpredictability as creative forces, inviting visitors to reconsider design as a shared, anarchic process among humans and other living beings.

name: FUNGI: Anarchist Designers
museum: Nieuwe Instituut
location: Rotterdam, Netherlands
dates: November 21st, 2025 — August 9th, 2026

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Fungi Anarchist Designers, n.d. digital photograph. courtesy the artist. from the 2025 grant to Nieuwe Instituut for the exhibition FUNGI: Anarchist Designers. image courtesy Graham Foundation

ruth asawa: A retrospective

‘I’m not so interested in the expression of something. I’m more interested in what the material can do,’ said Ruth Asawa, whose six-decade career is celebrated in Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective at MoMA. Gathering nearly 300 works across mediums — wire and bronze sculptures, drawings, prints, and public commissions — the exhibition traces the artist’s lifelong fascination with material transformation and spatial tension.

From her early studies at Black Mountain College to her San Francisco studio, Asawa pursued the possibilities of humble materials like paper and wire, creating forms that merge abstraction and representation.

Deeply committed to community and arts education, she approached making as an extension of living, seeing creativity in every act. This retrospective honors that vision, inviting viewers to experience the quiet radicalism of an artist who found infinite variation in the simplest of means.

name: Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
artist: Ruth Asawa
museum: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
location: New York, USA
dates: until February 7th, 2026

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, installation view, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. digital image © 2025 The Museum of Modern Art, photo by Jonathan Dorado

Inez & Vinoodh: THINK LOVE.

India Mahdavi’s Project Room #21 presents new works from CAN LOVE BE A PHOTOGRAPH. 40 Years of Inez & Vinoodh, ahead of the duo’s 2026 retrospective at Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Pioneers of digital image-making since the 1990s, Inez & Vinoodh have long blurred the boundaries between art and fashion, merging technical innovation with emotional storytelling.

Shot in Marfa, Texas, with the iPhone 17 Pro Max, the featured series forms part of Joy, In 3 Parts, curated by Kathy Ryan with Apple. At its center, THINK LOVE. portrays artists Charles Matadin and Natalie Brumley locked in a kiss beneath a red veil, an emblem of passion and connection that continues the duo’s exploration of intimacy and visual experimentation.

name: Inez & Vinoodh: THINK LOVE.

artist: Inez & Vinoodh
gallery: India Mahdavi’s Project Room #21
location: Paris, France
dates: November 13th — December 12th, 2025

Think Love © Inez & Vinoodh, Inez & Vinoodh portrait © Stephane Feugere Photography

alchimia

Alchimia. The Revolution of Italian Design is the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to the Milanese collective founded by Alessandro and Adriana Guerriero in 1976. Following its debut in Berlin, the exhibition returns to Milan in an expanded form with a new display conceived by Alessandro Guerriero himself — a poetic ‘carpet-raft’ that invites visitors into the group’s imaginative, utopian world.

Active until 1992, Alchimia emerged during a time of social transformation, fusing design, architecture, art, fashion, and performance into a free-spirited laboratory of experimentation. Rejecting the constraints of functionalism through their concept of ‘banal design,’ the collective reasserted design’s emotional and symbolic potential.

Featuring over 150 works, from furniture and objects to paintings and films, the exhibition traces Alchimia’s radical redefinition of design as a space for irony, storytelling, and visionary thought.

name: Alchimia: The Revolution of Italian Design
gallery: ADI Design Museum
location: Milan, Italy
dates: November 11th, 2025 — January 22nd, 2026

image courtesy ADI Design Museum

cerith wyn Evans: forms in Space… Through light (in time)

Forms in Space… by Light (in Time) presents a monumental installation by Cerith Wyn Evans, composed of an intricate network of white neon suspended in the Oval Gallery. The work unfolds as both sculpture and choreography of light, tracing rhythm and motion through space.

Joined by sound pieces, installations, and videos, the exhibition reveals the conceptual depth and sensory precision that define Wyn Evans’s practice. The Welsh artist’s work originated with experimental cinema, and has since expanded with influences from music, literature, and philosophy to create experiences that are cerebral and atmospheric.

name: Cerith Wyn Evans — Forms in Space… through Light (in Time)
artist: Cerith Wyn Evans
museum: MAAT: Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology
location: Lisbon, Portugal
dates: until February 16th, 2026

image by Bruno Lopes, courtesy MAAT

adam pendleton: Who owns Geometry Anyway?

Friedman Benda presents Who Owns Geometry Anyway?, an exhibition by Adam Pendleton marking the artist’s first collaboration with the gallery and his debut exploration of furniture as form. Known for weaving together expressionism, minimalism, and conceptual rigor, Pendleton reimagines geometry as both language and structure.

Circles, squares, and triangles — recurring motifs in his paintings and sculptures — reappear here in wood, onyx, and granite, transformed into functional objects that merge precision with poetics. The works engage the surrounding architecture through painted geometric interventions, creating a total environment that blurs the line between art and design.

Evoking Isamu Noguchi’s belief that art should be inseparable from its setting, Pendleton’s installation reflects on form, tension, and openness—suggesting that geometry, like meaning, is always contingent, shifting, and shared.

name: Adam Pendleton: Who Owns Geometry Anyway?
designer: Adam Pendleton
gallery: Friedman Benda
location: New York, USA
dates: November 7th — December 19th, 2025

Adam Pendleton, EXTENDED FORM ONE, 2025, image courtesy Friedman Benda

Histories of Ecology

In the year Brazil hosts COP30 in Belém, MASP presents Histories of Ecology, an exhibition that broadens the idea of ecology beyond the climate crisis to encompass the intertwined relationships between human and more-than-human worlds.

Bringing together works by 116 artists — many from the Global South — the exhibition examines how colonialism, environmental racism, and capitalism have shaped contemporary ecological realities while foregrounding resilience, solidarity, and interconnectedness. Rejecting the notion of ‘nature’ as something separate from society, it instead proposes ecology as a living network of forces — fluid, relational, and constantly transforming.

Organized into five thematic sections, Histories of Ecology traverses spiritual, territorial, and planetary dimensions, inviting viewers to imagine more inclusive ways of inhabiting the world and to see the future as a shared, collective endeavor.

name: Histories of Ecology
museum: MASP
location: São Paulo, Brazil
dates: until February 1st, 2026

Aycoobo Wilson Rodríguez, Calendário, 2024, image courtesy MASP

janet echelman: Radical Softness

Radical Softness offers an intimate view of Janet Echelman’s remarkable career, tracing her evolution from early experiments in drawing, painting, and textiles to the monumental net sculptures that have transformed cityscapes worldwide.

Known for using ancient fishing-net techniques together with advanced engineering, Echelman creates vast, floating forms that render wind, light, and motion visible — poetic expressions of humanity’s connection to the natural world.

The exhibition explores her use of softness as both material and philosophy, revealing how pliancy, transparency, and suspension become acts of strength and empathy. Featuring works from across four decades, alongside new cyanotypes, Radical Softness reflects on the power of art to unite people and invite stillness within the rhythms of contemporary life.

name: Janet Echelman: Radical Softness
artist: Janet Echelman
gallery: Sarasota Art Museum
location: Sarasota, Florida, USA
dates: November 16th, 2025 — April 26th, 2026

Janet Echelman (American), Enfold, Hill House Montecito, CA, 2022, image by Joe Fletcher, courtesy the artist

The post designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this november appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

October brings a new set of exhibitions that open conversations across art, design, and architecture, with museums and galleries presenting projects that look back through history and forward into the future. Among them are Virgil Abloh: The Codes at the Grand Palais in Paris, and Dream Rooms at M+ in Hong Kong. The aptly-timed show, Ghosts: On the Trail of the Supernatural opens in Switzerland, and the Museum of Wisconsin Art debuts a survey of Frank Lloyd Wright’s furniture practice. Meanwhile in Kyoto, teamLab unveils its first permanent Biovortex installation.

Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and our dedicated event guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them in their travels. On the whole, the broad list of exhibitions shows the range of themes taken by both designers and galleries across the world. 

virgil Abloh: The Codes

The Virgil Abloh Archive, in partnership with Nike, announces Virgil Abloh: The Codes, the first major European exhibition dedicated to the late designer’s work. Opening on September 30th, 2025 — Abloh’s birthday — and running through October 9th at the Grand Palais in Paris, the show draws from the 20,000-object Virgil Abloh Archive to chart nearly two decades of his multidisciplinary practice.

Curated by Chloe Sultan and Mahfuz Sultan, the exhibition expands on the 2022 edition of The Codes, presenting hundreds of objects, prototypes, sketches, and images alongside pieces from Abloh’s personal collections and library. The installation traces the ‘codes’ that defined his approach to apparel, footwear, architecture, music, and beyond, while spotlighting the collaborations and collective spirit that shaped his influential career.

name: The Codes
artist: Virgil Abloh
gallery: Grand Palais
location: Paris, France
dates: September 30th – October 9th, 2025

image courtesy of Grand Palais

Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design

Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design highlights the architect’s overlooked contributions to furniture, presenting forty chairs alongside drawings and photographs that chart his evolution from Prairie School to Taliesin West. The show emphasizes how Wright used his homes and studios as laboratories, experimenting with form, materials, and the role of furniture in 20th century domestic life.

In addition to historic pieces, the show debuts newly fabricated works based on Wright’s unrealized designs, created from archival sources and exhibited for the first time. Produced in partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Taliesin Institute, these reconstructions are framed as explorations of Wright’s process and philosophy, offering a deeper view of his design legacy.

name: Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design
designer: Frank Lloyd Wright
gallery: Museum of Wisconsin Art
location: Wisconsin, USA
dates: October 4th, 2025 — January 5th, 2026

image courtesy of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ

teamlab: Biovortex

teamLab will debut Biovortex Kyoto on October 7th, 2025, establishing its first permanent museum in the city and the collective’s largest venue in Japan. Set just east of Kyoto Station, the 10,000-square-meter space is designed as a fully immersive environment where the art responds to the presence of each visitor.

More than fifty works will unfold across multiple floors, combining new commissions with well-known installations such as the Forest of Resonating Lamps and the soap bubble-formed Massless Amorphous Sculpture. Each work reacts to movement and sound to generate an experience that is never the same twice. The exhibition emphasizes the idea that the artwork exists in the interaction between people and space, and with shifting light, color, and form to shape a fluid landscape.

name: teamLab: Biovortex
artist: teamLab
location: Kyoto, Japan
dates: October 7th, 2025 (permanent)

image © teamLab

leandro erlich

Amos Rex in Helsinki presents the first Finnish exhibition of Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich, known for immersive works that subvert everyday experience. Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Erlich has built an international reputation for creating large-scale installations that invite audiences to question the reliability of perception and the stability of familiar environments.

The exhibition includes signature pieces that transform ordinary settings into disorienting encounters: a climbable Helsinki facade, a classroom which seems to be abandoned to ghosts, and an elevator lobby without a destination. Erlich overturns physical logic and visual certainty, and stages situations that are playful and unsettling.

name: Leandro Erlich
artist: Leandro Erlich
gallery: Amos Rex
location: Helsinki, Finland
dates: October 8th, 2025 – April 6th, 2026

Leandro Erlich, Bâtiment, 2004, courtesy of Leandro Erlich Studio 2004, France, Nuit Blanche, Paris

Ronan Bouroullec – Inchiostri

Ronan Bouroullec — Inchiostri presents a new series of Murano glass vases created in collaboration with Maestro Simone Cenedese. Each piece is composed of four distinct elements — blocks of cast glass, a blown glass tube, and a shallow dish — arranged in shifting combinations of size, thickness, height, and color. From a near-infinite range of possibilities, Bouroullec has selected twenty compositions that continue his long-standing interest in modularity, balance, and the reversibility of assemblage.

The works sit between sculpture and vessel, their layered transparencies and unpolished surfaces emphasizing color, light, and depth. With Inchiostri, Bouroullec extends a career-long exploration of form and function, highlighting how simple elements can be joined, reconfigured, and reimagined to probe questions of utility, fragility, and transformation.

name: Ronan Bouroullec — Inchiostri
artist: Ronan Bouroullec
gallery: Giorgio Mastinu Fine Art Gallery
location: Venice, Italy
dates: September 13th – October 30th, 2025

Ronan Bouroullec x Giorgio mastinu, image © Giorgio Mastinu

Robert Rauschenberg Guggenheim

This exhibition marks the centenary of Robert Rauschenberg with a focused presentation of key works from the Guggenheim’s collection, alongside significant loans from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Together, they trace the artist’s experimental approach to materials and media, underscoring his role as a pivotal figure in shaping the trajectory of contemporary art. The selection situates Rauschenberg’s work within a broader global tribute, celebrating a practice defined by risk, invention, and cross-disciplinary exchange.

At the center of the exhibition is Barge (1962–63), a 32-foot-long silkscreen painting executed largely in a single day. The largest in a series of roughly 80 works created between 1962 and 1964, Barge exemplifies Rauschenberg’s embrace of scale, immediacy, and image-based experimentation. The work returns to New York for the first time in nearly twenty-five years.

name: Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped
artist: Robert Rauschenberg
gallery: Guggenheim New York
location: New York, USA
dates: October 10th, 2025 – May 3rd, 2026

Robert Rauschenberg, Yellow Body (1968) © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/ARS, New York

Diagrams by AMO/OMA

Diagrams: An Exhibition by AMO/OMA at the Fondazione Prada in Venice brings together more than 300 works, ranging from medieval manuscripts to contemporary digital media. Installed across the ground and first floors of the Palazzo Ca’ Corner della Regina, the exhibition assembles documents, publications, images, and videos that trace the diagram as both a historical tool and a contemporary mode of communication.

Organized thematically, the display situates diagrams within pressing global contexts while also highlighting their long and varied lineage. By presenting material that spans centuries and cultures, the show demonstrates the capacity of the diagram to bridge disciplines and eras, showing how visual systems continue to shape design and collective understanding.

name: Diagrams: An Exhibition by AMO/OMA
architect: AMO/OMA
gallery: Fondazione Prada
location: Venice, Italy
dates: until November 24th, 2025

image by Marco Cappelletti, courtesy of Fondazione Prada

Precious Okoyomon – it’s important to have ur fangs out at the end of the world

Precious Okoyomon creates large-scale sculptural environments that confront the ways racial histories are inscribed in the natural world. Working with organic materials, their practice foregrounds cycles of rot, decay, and rebirth as both subject and process, challenging cultural denials of decomposition while emphasizing nature’s resilience in the face of human-made crises. The installations serve as a reminder of violence and a celebration of survival, urging audiences to recognize the stakes of neglecting ecological and social entanglements.

Born in London in 1993 and based in Brooklyn, Okoyomon approaches their work as an ongoing experiment in ‘unthinking’ invisibility, using living matter to generate forms that adapt and resist permanence. Through this perspective, their practice asks viewers to listen closely to the natural world while considering the consequences of failing to act.

name: Precious Okoyomon – it’s important to have ur fangs out at the end of the world
artist: Precious Okoyomon
gallery: Mendes Wood DM
location: Paris, France
dates: October 20th, 2025 – December 6th, 2025

image courtesy of Mendes Wood DM

Lucas Samaras – Master of the Uncanny

Pace Gallery and The Intermission present a survey of Lucas Samaras in Piraeus, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in Greece in two decades. Bringing together works from the 1960s through the 2010s, the exhibition highlights the breadth of Samaras’s practice, spanning sculpture, painting, photography, digital media, and wearable art, while also celebrating his nearly sixty-year relationship with Pace, which has represented him exclusively since 1965.

Born in Kastoria in 1936 and immigrating to the United States in 1948, Samaras became a central figure in New York’s postwar avant-garde, shaped by his early involvement in the Happenings. The exhibition features Auto Polaroids, Photo-Transformations, Mosaic Paintings, Reconstructions, pastels, and jewelry, alongside sculptures from the Box series and other transformed objects. Together, these works illustrate his lifelong exploration of selfhood and transformation.

name: Lucas Samaras – Master of the Uncanny
artist: Lucas Samaras
gallery: Pace Gallery and The Intermission
location: Piraeus, Greece
dates: until December 20th, 2025

image courtesy of Pace Gallery

dream rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now

Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now traces the overlooked history of immersive environments through the work of pioneering women artists across multiple generations and continents. Featuring full-scale reconstructions developed with experts and the artists themselves, the exhibition restores works that were often destroyed after their initial presentation, foregrounding women’s contributions to a form central to contemporary art.

Originally conceived by Haus der Kunst München in 2023, the exhibition arrives at M+ Hong Kong with an expanded focus that includes environments by Asian women artists. By revisiting these landmark works and situating them within a global perspective, Dream Rooms both recovers a vital history and demonstrates how immersive practice continues to shape the future of visual art.

name: Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now
museum: M+
location: M+ Hong Kong
dates: until January 18th, 2026

Aleksandra Kasuba: Spectral Passage, 1975, image by Agostino Osio, courtesy of M+

Yayoi Kusama

Fondation Beyeler is set to present the first major retrospective of Yayoi Kusama in Switzerland, tracing more than seventy years of her practice. Organized in collaboration with Kusama’s studio, the exhibition spans early drawings and lesser-known works through to her best-known installations and mirror rooms. New productions will stand alongside works that have never before been displayed in Europe, and one of her celebrated Infinity Mirror Rooms will feature in the presentation.

The show will emphasize the multiplicity of her media — painting, sculpture, installation, collage, fashion, performance, and literature — and the persistence of her signature visual vocabulary, including polka dots, repetition, and infinite environments.

Following its run in Switzerland, the show will continue on to Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

name: Yayoi Kusama
artist: Yayoi Kusama
gallery: Beyeler Foundation
location: Riehen, Switzerland
dates: October 12th, 2025 — January 25th, 2026

image courtesy of Fondation Beyeler

Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well

Pirelli HangarBicocca presents This Will Not End Well, the first exhibition devoted to Nan Goldin’s work as a filmmaker, uniting her most extensive body of slideshows ever shown together with new works and a specially commissioned sound installation. Installed in a series of architecturally distinct structures designed by Hala Wardé, the exhibition unfolds as a symbolic village, each building conceived in dialogue with a specific piece. While the title carries a note of foreboding, it also captures Goldin’s characteristic blend of candor, humor, and resilience, affirming the life force that animates her art.

The retrospective offers an immersive journey through Goldin’s four decades of practice, from intimate portraits of friends and communities to explorations of trauma and ecstasy. Her use of the slideshow format remains at the heart of her work and combines photography, film, and performance. In Milan, these installations come together on an unprecedented scale.

name: Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well
artist: Nan Goldin
gallery: Pirelli HangarBicocca
location: Milan, Italy
dates: October 11th, 2025 – February 15th, 2026

Nan Goldin, The Other Side (1994-2019). image courtesy of Pirelli HangarBicocca

Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show

Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show at the Vitra Design Museum traces the evolution of the fashion show from exclusive Parisian salons of the early 1900s to today’s global multimedia spectacles. Bringing together original garments, films, photographs, stage sets, and archival invitations, the exhibition examines how the catwalk became a site where fashion, architecture, choreography, sound, and scenography merge into a cultural performance. 

Organized in four chapters, the exhibition emphasizes the role of models, designers, and collaborators in shaping new narratives — whether through the rise of the supermodel, the deconstruction of fashion’s formats, or performances engaging directly with politics and identity. The exhibition positions the fashion show as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art,’ and demonstrates how this short-lived format continues to serve as a stage for storytelling.

name: Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show
gallery: Vitra Design Museum
location: Weil am Rhein, Germany
dates: October 8th, 2025 — February 15th, 2026

image courtesy of Vitra Design Museum

HOOKS BROTHERS STUDIO: FRAMING MEMPHIS’S BLACK SOUND

The Memphis Art Museum, opening in 2026, has announced a new partnership with Arts Council Korea (ARKO), launching with ‘Hooks Brothers Studio: Framing Memphis’s Black Sound’ at the ARKO Art Center Open Space in Seoul from October 16th — 31st, 2025. The exhibition marks the first international presentation of works from the Hooks Brothers Studio archive — 75,000 photographs that document Black life and music in Memphis between 1920 and 1979.

Featuring portraits of artists such as Billie Holiday, B.B. King, and Al Green, the show is joined by a curated soundtrack from the Memphis Listening Lab. The archive, a promised gift to the Memphis Art Museum and the National Civil Rights Museum, will form part of the museum’s inaugural exhibitions when it opens in late 2026.

name: Hooks Brothers Studio: Framing Memphis’s Black Sound

gallery: ARKO Art Center Open Space

location: Seoul, Korea

dates: October 16th — 31st, 2025

Hooks Brothers Studio, Nat D. Williams On-Air at WDIA, ca. 1950. Archival inkjet print, 50.8 x 40.64 cm. The Hooks Brothers Photography Archive belongs to Rodney and Andrea Herenton and is a promised gift to the Memphis Art Museum and the National Civil Rights Museum

yoko ono: Music of the mind

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at the MCA offers one of the most extensive surveys of the artist’s career ever presented in the United States, tracing over seven decades of work across performance, film, music, installation, and participatory art. Featuring more than 200 pieces, the exhibition highlights Ono’s pioneering role in conceptual art and her lasting influence on contemporary practice, from her 1960s involvement with Fluxus and landmark works such as Cut Piece (1964) to ongoing projects like Wish Tree (1996–present).

The exhibition underscores Ono’s ability to merge poetic instruction, humor, and activism into art that demands audience engagement. Early films like Fly (1970–71) and Film No.4 (Bottoms) (1966–67) will show alongside collaborative projects with John Cage, Ornette Coleman, and John Lennon. Meanwhile, interactive installations such as My Mommy is Beautiful (2004) and public works like Imagine Peace (2003) and Peace is Power (2017) reflect her dreams of peace and collective imagination.

name: Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind
artist: Yoko Ono
gallery: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
location: Chicago, USA
dates: October 18th, 2025 — February 22nd, 2026

image © Yoko Ono. photo © Oliver Cowling, courtesy of Tate

Erwin Olaf – Freedom

Erwin Olaf – Freedom is the first museum retrospective since the Dutch artist’s passing two years ago, offering a comprehensive view of his multifaceted career. The exhibition traces his evolution from candid black-and-white reportages of the early 1980s, centered on social movements and LGBTQ+ rights, to his staged studio photography, where themes of diversity, identity, and freedom remained central. Alongside iconic series, visitors encounter Olaf’s lesser-known works, including videos, sculptures, commercial campaigns, and archival material that illuminate the scope of his creative process.

The presentation culminates with his most recent series, each addressing pressing social and cultural themes through Olaf’s precise lens. The exhibition concludes with his final, unfinished video For Life, a meditation on mortality symbolized through recurring motifs of flowers in bloom and decay. 

name: Erwin Olaf – Freedom
artist: Erwin Olaf
museum: Stedelijk Museum
location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
dates: October 11th, 2025 — March 1st, 2026

Erwin Olaf, Ice Cream Parlour from Rain, 2004. image courtesy of Stedelijk Museum

Ghosts: On the trail of the supernatural

The Kunstmuseum Basel’s Ghosts: On the Trail of the Supernatural explores the enduring presence of ghosts in Western visual culture. With over 160 works spanning 250 years, the exhibition focuses on the 19th century as a pivotal moment when spiritualism, psychology, and new technologies like Pepper’s Ghost converged to fuel fascination with apparitions despite the era’s emphasis on science and rationality.

Positioning ghosts as mediators between life and death, visibility and invisibility, the exhibition highlights their persistent role across art, literature, theater, and film. By tracing how these figures have shaped imagination and belief from Romanticism to the present, Ghosts reveals why spirits remain powerful symbols in both cultural history and contemporary consciousness.

name: Ghosts: On the trail of the supernatural
gallery: Kunstmuseum Basel
location: Basel, Switzerland
dates: until March 8th, 2026

image courtesy of Kunstmuseum Basel

Marie Antoinette Style

London’s V&A South Kensington presents Marie Antoinette Style, an exhibition that examines of one of history’s most recognizable figures. Bringing together over 250 years of design, fashion, film, and art, the show explores how the queen’s image has been continually reinterpreted, from 18th-century court dress to contemporary cultural references.

Framed by her youth, elegance, and demise, Marie Antoinette emerges as a style icon as well as a complex symbol of power and excess. The exhibition traces her lasting influence across centuries and shows how her persona continues to shape visual culture today.

name: Marie Antoinette Style
museum: V&A South Kensington
location: London, UK
dates: until March 22nd, 2026

image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

exposition générale

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is entering a new chapter with its move to a landmark building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. Rising on the historic Place du Palais-Royal in Paris, this new home marks a decisive moment in the foundation’s history, reinforcing its commitment to artistic creation and public dialogue. To inaugurate the space, the Fondation presents Exposition Générale, running from October 25th, 2025, to August 23rd, 2026.

Gathering nearly six hundred works by more than one hundred artists, Exposition Générale retraces the foundation’s identity from its beginnings in 1984 to today. Shaped by four decades of exhibitions, the show spans art, architecture, technology, and science, offering a portrait of a collection built through curatorial dialogue. Its title, drawn from the historic Expositions Générales once held at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, connects the foundation’s mission to a broader lineage of cultural exchange and experimentation in the heart of Paris.

name: Exposition Générale
gallery: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
location: Paris, France
dates: October 25th, 2025 — August 23rd, 2026

photo © Luc Boegly

From the Functional to the Fabulous: 600 Years of Decorative Design

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presents a newly reimagined installation of its renowned decorative arts and design collection, one of the largest in North America. Spanning two levels of the pavilion designed by Fred David Lebensold, the display brings together collection highlights, recent acquisitions, and objects shown for the first time in a space that emphasizes history and innovation together.

Occupying nearly 2,000 square meters, the installation features over 800 works by more than 400 designers, artists, and artisans. Silverware, ceramics, furniture, jewelry, textiles, glass, and industrial design objects reflect the scope of the collection. In Montreal, visitors will witness a near-complete overview of craft and design practices across cultures and centuries.

name: From the Functional to the Fabulous: 600 Years of Decorative Design
gallery: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
location: Montreal, Canada
dates: September 13th — ongoing

the decorative arts and design collection in the Liliane and David M. Stewart Pavilion. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. bhoto MMFA, Jean-François Brière

The post designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this october appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

September brings a wide range of major exhibitions across art, design, and architecture, with museums and galleries unveiling new collections across the world. designboom radar highlights this month include the 40-year celebration of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Pont-Neuf in Paris, a survey of wedge-era automotive design at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, the long-anticipated U.S. debut of Richard Serra’s Running Arcs (For John Cage) at Gagosian in New York, and Ai Weiwei’s first commission in Ukraine. Explore our picks of what shows to see around the globe below, and check out our dedicated event guide for more listings.

beach ruins

Beach Ruins, a site-specific installation by Greek artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis, is currently on view at the Galeria Municipal do Porto. Drawing on ideas of the ruin, Angelidakis stages a set of fragmented columns that appear to have traveled across Europe, coming to rest in Porto. The installation references the ‘Grand Tour’ tradition of the 17th to 19th centuries, when European elites sought out ancient sites, but here the ruins themselves become the travelers, embodying a playful inversion of history and cultural expectation.

By pairing stone-like columns with parasols, Angelidakis transforms markers of heritage into interactive urban furniture. The pieces function as oversized poufs that invite rest and social gathering. As the inaugural edition of the gallery’s new outdoor commission, the installation sets a precedent for works that activate Porto’s public realm through seasonal, experimental interventions.

name: Beach Ruins
artist: Andreas Angelidakis
gallery: Galeria Municipal do Porto
location: Porto, Portugal
dates: May 10th — October 12th, 2025

Andreas Angelidakis, Beach Ruins, Porto, 2025, image courtesy Galeria Municipal do Porto

Jean Jullien: JUJU’s Castle

The Nanzuka Art Institute in Shanghai presents JUJU’s Castle, the first solo exhibition in China by French artist Jean Jullien. Spread across multiple gallery spaces, the show comprises painting, sculpture, and installation into a spatial experience that unfolds like an imagined fortress. The presentation includes over eighty new paintings created during Jullien’s time in Tokyo, joined by three-dimensional works and a large-scale installation that turns the institute into a multi-room narrative environment.

Each room is conceived as a ‘dungeon’ within the castle, referencing the level-based structure of role-playing games. Visitors are positioned as protagonists — warrior, elf, mage, or hero — encountering fantastical creatures and settings. This transformation of the gallery into an architectural sequence gives the exhibition the pacing of an exploratory journey, moving from one immersive space to another.

name: JUJU’s Castle

artist: Jean Jullien

gallery: Nanzuka Art Institute

location: Shanghai, China

dates: July 12th — October 26th, 2025

image © Nanzuka Art Institute

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years

Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) becomes a vast landscape for Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, the artist’s largest indoor exhibition to date. Organized by the National Galleries of Scotland, the show spans five decades and over two hundred photographic works, transforming the historic galleries into an environment of cracked clay walls, windfallen oak branches, suspended reeds, and stones from over one hundred graveyards in Dumfriesshire.

The exhibition is designed as one continuous, site-specific work that responds directly to the RSA’s architecture, using its spaces, light, and materials as active elements. In doing so, it extends Goldsworthy’s long-term investigation into how people, buildings, and the land are bound together and where they are held apart.

name: Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years

artist: Andy Goldsworthy 

gallery: Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), National Galleries of Scotland

location: Edinburgh, Scotland

dates: July 26th — November 2nd, 2025

Andy Goldsworthy, Edges made by finding leaves the same size. Tearing one in two. Spitting underneath and pressing flat on to another. Brough, Cumbria. Cherry patch. 4 November 1984, 1984 Cibachrome photograph | all images courtesy the artist, unless stated otherwise

The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge

Petersen Automotive Museum shows some of the iconic wedge cars from the 60s and 70s in an exhibition, from the 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero to the 1974 Lamborghini Countach LP400 Periscopio. Titled The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge, the show spotlights wedge-shaped automotive design that features angular silhouettes, faceted planes, and even bold geometric forms. These are some of the car concepts and designs that defined the era from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, with their forward-looking, and quite literally, styles.

Some of the vehicles include models from Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Lamborghini, and Lancia. The exhibition takes the chance to showcase the wedge‑car design movement that emerged as a stray from the curvaceous, chrome-laden styling of earlier eras, visibly favoring a futuristic aesthetic instead of the typical aerodynamic-focused production. Designers such as Marcello Gandini, Giorgetto Giugiaro, Sergio Coggiola, William Towns, and Jerry Palmer played a central role in this visual revolution, and their names appear in the exhibition, a rightful recognition for their progressive wedge-car works.

name: The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge

museum: Petersen Automotive Museum 

location: Los Angeles, CA

dates: August 2nd, 2025 — September 2026

side profile of the 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero | image courtesy of Petersen Automotive Museum

Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities

The Seoul Museum of Art presents ‘Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities,’ a new site-specific installation by the Brazilian artist that transforms the Korean museum’s Seosomun Main Branch lobby into a sensory environment. Commissioned as part of the 2025 SeMA Public Space Project, the woven artwork expands Ernesto Neto‘s longstanding interest in the relationships between body, space, and collective experience.

The installation is composed of expansive crochet structures woven from industrial cotton fabrics in shades of brown and pink. These colors, chosen to evoke tree trunks and night alongside flowers and day, establish a dialogue between natural rhythms and architectural structure. Suspended and filled with dried guava leaves and locally sourced tea leaves, the artist‘s forms invite a multi-sensory encounter that engages smell both texture together.

name: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities (Ba Ka Ba, uma dança das eternas polaridades)

artist: Ernesto Neto

museum: Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)

location: Seoul, Korea

dates: August 13th, 2025 — December 31st, 2026

image courtesy SeMA, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

falling from the sky

Unit, the contemporary art gallery in London, welcomes artist Sho Shibuya with the exhibition Falling from the Sky. Since 2020, the artist has greeted each morning with a painting, translating the day’s sky onto the front page of a newspaper. While his series of daily rituals primarily captures the sunrise, Falling from the Sky turns to the quieter subject of rain. Rendered from photographs of water streaking across glass, the works reflect on ephemerality and the meditative patterns formed by droplets in motion.

For Shibuya, rain carries both intimacy and tension. It recalls both personal memories and stark contrasts in how skies are experienced across the world. Where he finds comfort in gray clouds, others may see smoke or destruction. This duality infuses the series with a sense of fragility, transforming depictions of rain into reminders of peace’s vulnerability. Falling from the Sky asks viewers to linger with these moments, considering what endures after the storm has passed.

name: Falling from the Sky
artist: Sho Shibuya
gallery: Unit
location: London, UK
dates: August 20th — September 17th, 2025

Sho Shibuya, Falling from the Sky, Unit, London | image courtesy Unit

Rocking to Infinity

Kukje Gallery hosts Louise Bourgeois: Rocking to Infinity, focusing on the final two decades of the artist’s career. The exhibition gathers sculptures, drawings, and fabric suites that meditate on intimacy, memory, and time. The title, drawn from Bourgeois’s own writing, evokes the image of a mother rocking a child to sleep. This gesture of security and tenderness resonates throughout the works on view.

Immersive wall installations pair gouaches and watercolors that revisit themes of the self, the couple, family, and the spiral. The gallery’s center hosts major sculptures which explore emotional bonds and the passage of time. The Hanok space introduces a rarer body of drawings on coffee filters, made in 1994, where circular compositions bridge domestic material with reflections on cycles, abstraction, and organic form. All together, the works reveal Bourgeois’s late practice as both intimate and monumental.

name: Rocking to Infinity
artist: Louise Bourgeois
gallery: Kukje Gallery
location: Seoul, South Korea
dates: September 2nd — October 26th, 2025

installation view, Louise Bourgeois: Rocking to Infinity, image courtesy Kukje Gallery

GABRIEL CHAILE: ESTO ES AMÉRICA, O QUAL É O LIMITE?

Gabriel Chaile’s debut New York solo exhibition, Esto es América, o qual é o limite?, presents new adobe sculptures created on site at Marianne Boesky Gallery, alongside drawings and photographs. Drawing from the artist’s ongoing exploration of what he calls the ‘genealogy of form,’ the works draw from the material and formal traditions of Indigenous communities in northeast Argentina while linking them to broader histories across the Americas. The sculptures are at once monumental and anthropomorphic. Their surfaces are covered with dense networks of line drawings, resist straightforward interpretation while holding onto layers of cultural memory.

The exhibition incorporates influences from Chaile’s time in Montana, where he observed a No Kings Day protest that shaped the atmosphere of the new works. Charcoal drawings on canvas echo the markings on the sculptures, while photographs from the protest offer a documentary counterpart. The title itself, half in Spanish and half in Portuguese, reflects Chaile’s negotiation between statement and question, declaration and doubt: ‘This is America’ followed by ‘What is the limit?’

name: Esto es América, o qual é o limite?

artist: Gabriel Chaile

gallery: Marianne Boesky Gallery

location: New York, NY

dates: September 4th — October 18th, 2025

image © Macy Rajacich, courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

lee bul: from 1998 to now

The Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art presents Lee Bul: After 1998, a large-scale survey tracing nearly three decades of work by one of Korea’s most influential contemporary artists. Bringing together around 150 pieces, the exhibition spans performance, sculpture, installation, and drawing, examining Lee Bul’s sustained inquiry into the body’s entanglement with society, technology, and systems of power. Together, a range of works illuminate her engagement with utopian modernity’s ideals and contradictions, and the recurring human pursuit of perfection.

Organized in collaboration with M+ Hong Kong, the exhibition unfolds as a landscape where individual memory and historical fragments intersect with broader sociopolitical references. The show charts the evolution of Lee Bul’s practice, and highlights her role in expanding conversations around humanity’s past and imagined futures.

name: Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now

artist: Lee Bul

museum: Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art

location: Seoul, South Korea

dates: September 4th, 2025 — January 4th, 2026

installation views, ‘Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now’, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025. courtesy of the artist and BB&M © Lee Bul, photo by Jeon Byung-cheol

Design Disco Club

During Paris Design Week 2025, Pli Office presents DESIGN DISCO CLUB, an exhibition dedicated to a new generation of designers and architects reshaping contemporary practice. Drawing on the collective energy of disco, the project frames design as a space of freedom, emotion, and shared experience, while questioning the balance between industrial and human rhythms. With scenography by Paf atelier, the exhibition stages a diverse spectrum of works that reflect the shifting temporalities of production and the commitments that define today’s creative landscape.

The show features contributions from around 40 emerging creators alongside legendary fashion houses like Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Marine Serre, Marie-Ève Lecavalier, and Mugler. A range of objects are each presented as an example from a multifaceted moment in design. With a series of talks, DESIGN DISCO CLUB adopts the spirit of a club to become a gathering space for imagining the cultural forms of tomorrow.

name: DESIGN DISCO CLUB

gallery: Pli Office

location: Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, France

dates: September 6th — 12th, 2025

image courtesy Pli Office

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE: PARIS PROJECTS

This fall, Paris marks the 40th anniversary of The Pont Neuf Wrapped with a citywide tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, supported by the City of Paris, stages a free outdoor exhibition along the Seine. Titled Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Paris Projects, the installation highlights the couple’s close relationship with the French capital, where they lived, worked, and realized a series of landmark projects over several decades. The program also includes the naming of a public square in their honor, underscoring the city’s recognition of their enduring cultural impact.

Paris served as both the starting point and central site for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic collaborations. Their interventions included Wall of Oil Barrels — The Iron Curtain (1961–62), Wrapped Statue, Trocadero (1964), The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975–85), and L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (conceived in 1961, realized posthumously in 2021). Artist JR will revisit the Pont Neuf with a new project that will transform the iconic bridge into a stone-like cave in the summer of 2026.

name: Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Paris Projects

artist: Christo and Jeanne-Claude

location: Paris, France

dates: September 6th — October 30th, 2025

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-85 — image by Wolfgang Volz © 1985 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation

Sweets and Paradise

Bernhard Knaus Fine Art presents Sweets and Paradise, a new exhibition of photographic works by Ralf Peters. Recognized as a leading figure in conceptual photography in Germany, Peters uses digital manipulation to reframe everyday objects, landscapes, and environments, unsettling the line between reality and construction. His practice asks viewers to reflect critically on how images shape perception.

The exhibition brings together two recent series. In SWEETS, natural forms such as branches and leaves are digitally enhanced against vivid backgrounds, transforming them into visual compositions that waver between authenticity and invention. PARADISE introduces AI-generated gardens and architectural visions that draw from cultural and religious ideals, evoking both the desire for harmony and the unease of a digitally engineered utopia. Shown together, the works highlight the tension between nature’s fragility and technology’s promise of perfection, positioning photography as a space where beauty, illusion, and critique converge.

name: Sweets and Paradise

artist: Ralf Peters

gallery: Bernhard Knaus Fine Art Gallery

location: Frankfurt, Germany

dates: September 6th — November 22nd, 2025

Ralf Peters, Poppi Paradise, 2025, image courtesy Bernhard Knaus Fine Art Gallery

Lygia Pape. Tisser l’espace

The Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection unveils the first solo exhibition in France dedicated to Lygia Pape (1927–2004), a central figure of the Brazilian avant-garde. Serving as a prelude to the upcoming exhibition Minimal, Lygia Pape: Weaving Space is built around a major work from the collection, Ttéia 1, C (2003/2025). Formed from copper threads stretched across space, the installation immerses visitors in an environment where light and movement activate the work. This embodies Pape’s idea of ‘weaving space’ and redefines the viewer’s role in the artistic encounter.

The exhibition brings together key pieces from across Pape’s career, from her early abstract engravings to her monumental Livro Noite e Dia III (Book of Night and Day III, 1963–1976), as well as a selection of experimental films. Deeply informed by Brazil’s sociopolitical context, her work reflects a commitment to social transformation, dissolving the boundaries between art and life. The show highlights Pape’s place alongside Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica as one of the defining voices of Brazil’s postwar avant-garde.

name: Lygia Pape. Tisser l’espace

artist: Lygia Pape

gallery: Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection

location: Paris, France

dates: September 10th, 2025 — January 26th, 2026

LLygia Pape, Ttéia 1, C (2003/2025), image courtesy Pinault Collection

Max Lamb: Crockery

Gallery FUMI opens Crockery, a new exhibition by Max Lamb in collaboration with ceramics manufacturer 1882 Ltd., on September 11, 2025. The series features slip-cast earthenware pieces produced from plaster models hand-carved by Lamb, extending his ongoing investigation into material possibilities. Made in Stoke-on-Trent, the works embody the technical rigor of 1882 Ltd. and the designer’s experimental approach, rethinking the role of ceramics in contemporary design.

With Crockery, Lamb turns to a medium traditionally associated with fragility and transforms it into functional forms that challenge assumptions about strength and durability. His interest lies in pushing ceramic beyond its conventional uses, exploring its viability as both a sculptural surface and as a material capable of bearing weight and shaping furniture. In doing so, the project reframes ceramic as both resilient and versatile, opening new ground for its role in design.

name: Crockery

artist: Max Lamb with 1882 Ltd.

gallery: Gallery FUMI

location: London, UK

dates: September 11th — 30th, 2025

image courtesy Penguins Egg Studio (Tom Wright) for Gallery FUMI

Carmen d’Apollonio: Salut, ça va, c’est moi

Friedman Benda New York hosts Salut, Ça va, c’est moi, the fourth solo exhibition by Carmen D’Apollonio, on September 11th. Known for her playful and idiosyncratic approach, the Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based artist expands her practice here with new materials and sculpted glass lampshades, pushing her work toward greater dimensionality and narrative depth.

The exhibition unfolds like a theatrical set, populated by personified lamps that perform across the gallery space — leaning, dripping, suspending, and wandering. D’Apollonio’s new glass elements amplify the dialogue between form, light, and shadow, revealing more of what was once hidden behind linen shades. Titles such as Why fall in love when you can’t fall asleep and If you ever have forever highlight her use of language as a candid, humorous, and empathetic extension of her practice, drawing viewers into a direct conversation that is both intimate and universal.

name: Salut, Ça va, c’est moi

artist: Carmen D’Apollonio

gallery: Friedman Benda

location: 515 W 26th St 1st Floor, New York, NY

dates: September 11th — October 16th, 2025

image © Friedman Benda

Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

Gagosian marks the U.S. debut of Richard Serra’s Running Arcs (For John Cage) (1992), opening September 12th, 2025, at the gallery’s West 21st Street space in New York. First shown more than three decades ago at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the large-scale steel work returns on the exact anniversary of its original unveiling and will remain on view through December 20th.

The sculpture consists of three massive conical steel segments, each inverted in relation to the others and set in a staggered arrangement. Measuring 52 feet in length and 13 feet in height, the monumental forms embody Serra’s enduring investigation into weight, balance, and spatial perception, while also honoring his longtime connection to composer John Cage.

name: Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

artist: Richard Serra

gallery: Gagosian

location: West 21st Street, New York, NY

dates: September 12th — December 20th, 2025

Richard Serra during the installation of Promenade (2008), artwork © Estate of Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. image by Raphael Gaillard/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET: THE ALICE IN WONDERLAND SYNDROME

Pace Gallery presents The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles by Elmgreen & Dragset, on view from September 13th through October 25th. Spanning the gallery’s main space and adjoining south gallery, the show explores shifts in perception through acts of doubling, resizing, and spatial reduplication.

The Berlin-based duo, known for sculptural interventions that probe identity and belonging, uses the gallery’s architecture as both stage and subject. Each artwork appears at full scale in the main hall, while exact half-size versions are replicated in a carefully constructed miniature of that same space.

name: The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

artist: Elmgreen & Dragset

gallery: Pace Gallery

location: 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California

dates: September 13th — October 25th, 2025

Elmgreen & Dragset, installation view, 2025 © Elmgreen & Dragset / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ai weiwei’s installation in ukraine

RIBBON International presents Ai Weiwei’s Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White at Pavilion 13, marking the artist’s first commission in Ukraine. Conceived as a site-specific installation, the work continues Ai’s investigation into the material and symbolic traces of conflict, transforming ideologically charged objects into reflections on contemporary struggles and shared human experience.

Referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s Divina Proportione, the piece engages with Enlightenment ideals of harmony and rational order while questioning their appropriation in contexts of war and concealment. By juxtaposing mathematical precision with objects tied to militarized histories, Ai underscores the fragile line between ideals of progress and the realities of violence, positioning the installation within his broader humanist and pacifist practice.

Ai WeiWei says: ‘That is the challenge, to build new works relating to what I feel, to me in the past and to the current situation. Art is more metaphysical. You cannot really give every description, but you can always suggest a gesture or attitude or some kind of symbolic meaning, more like a poetic gesture.’

name: Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White

artist: Ai WeiWei

location: Pavilion 13, Kyiv, Ukraine

commissioner: RIBBON International, FORMA Architects, Pavilion of Culture

dates: September 14th — November 30th 2025

image courtesy RIBBON International

Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Alejandro G. Iñárritu presents Sueño Perro at Fondazione Prada in Milan, an exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of his debut feature Amores Perros (2000). The installation resurrects previously unseen footage — abandoned during the film’s editing and preserved for decades in the archives of the National Autonomous University of Mexico — revealing fragments that speak to enduring themes of love, betrayal, and violence against the backdrop of Mexico City’s complex social realities. At its core, the work emphasizes the tactile presence of 35mm film, using its grain and flicker to evoke memory and immediacy.

name: Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu

artist: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

gallery: Fondazione Prada

location: Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Italy

dates: September 18th, 2025 — February 26th, 2026

Stills from Amores Perros (2000) by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, courtesy Rodrigo Prieto © Alta Vista Films

calder gardens

Calder Gardens, the new cultural destination designed by Herzog and de Meuron and Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, has announced its opening date for September 21st, 2025. Located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown  Philadelphia, the gallery space is set to showcase the art and ideas of Alexander Calder, one of the 20th century’s most influential artists and a Philadelphia native.

The institute has also appointed Juana Berrío as the Marsha Perelman Senior Director of Programs. A seasoned curator, educator, and arts programmer, Berrío will lead public programming that connects audiences to Calder’s work through performances, events, and wellness activities, fostering engagement and community in this innovative blend of art, nature, and architecture.

name: Calder Gardens

architect: Herzog & de Meuron

landscape designer: Piet Oudolf 

location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
opening: September 21st, 2025

image courtesy Calder Gardens

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