{"id":2122394,"date":"2026-08-31T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2122394"},"modified":"2026-08-31T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T05:00:00","slug":"83-must-see-exhibitions-and-biennials-to-see-in-fall-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2122394","title":{"rendered":"83 Must-See Exhibitions and Biennials to See in Fall 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tWant to know which way the winds of the artistic moment are blowing? A reliable way to answer that question is to look at what museums are exhibiting. In the shows on tap for the fall, there\u2019s a clear interest in how best to survive the turbulence and violence in much of the world. \u201cThe World-Chaos\u201d is the subtitle given this season to a Kurt Schwitters retrospective at Paris\u2019s Mus\u00e9e Picasso, but it could just as well be applied to shows for Inji Efflatoun, Annemirl Bauer, Marion Wagschal, Ali Cherri, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, and Amar Kanwar, all of whom have responded to disturbing displays of power in their own singular ways.<\/p>\n
\n\tOther artists have sought visual pleasure in the face of so much chaos. London\u2019s Royal Academy of Arts is mounting a survey of artists\u2019 responses to the French Riviera in the 19th and 20th centuries, Switzerland\u2019s Kunstmuseum Bern is surveying European artist colonies during an overlapping time period, and Helsinki\u2019s Ateneum Art Museum is exhibiting Nordic women\u2019s spiritualist art of the era. But sometimes, rich colors and extravagant abstraction are not enough; the career of Franz Marc, a German Expressionist who was killed in battle during World War I, proves as much. His work is being given the retrospective treatment at the K20 museum in D\u00fcsseldorf.<\/p>\n
\n\tPerhaps the dour mood of the present is what has caused so many shows to turn to the past, often with a revisionist gaze. The S\u00e3o Paulo Museum of Art is continuing its wonderful \u201cHistori\u00e1s\u201d series, this time with a focus on Latin America, and Oslo\u2019s National Museum is bringing to the fore female Old Masters whom the canon has largely ignored. MUDAM in Luxembourg is taking a look at Japanese women artists from the postwar era, Milan\u2019s Fondazione Prada will view antiquity through a globalist lens, and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence has an exhibition of broken artworks from years past. Fragmentary though they may be, these pieces are a lot of fun to view.<\/p>\n
\n\tBelow, a look at 83 museum exhibitions and biennials to see this fall.<\/p>\n
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\u201cRagnar Kjartansson: Politics of the Obvious\u201d at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist; Luhring Augustine, New York; and i8, Reykjavik\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe art world tends not to agree on much, but few would disparage Ragnar Kjartansson\u2019s The Visitors<\/em> (2012), a video installation in which a troupe of musicians play their somber song together, each from a different room in a dilapidated house. Upon its debut, the work was immediately celebrated as a powerful piece about the frailty of human relations; it is now considered a classic. The Visitors<\/em> will appear in this survey of the Icelandic artist\u2019s work, which frequently takes the form of slow-paced videos in which banal acts take place over prolonged periods. The latest work to continue that theme is Sundays Without Love<\/em> (2025), which brings to life a postcard of a countryside scene that Kjartansson keeps on his fridge.<\/p>\n
September 3\u2013January 31, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cLatin American Histories\u201d at S\u00e3o Paulo Museum of Art<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy MASP\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThis institution\u2019s \u201cHistori\u00e1s\u201d exhibition series has lived up to its name by drawing under-recognized art histories into the canon. Having previously tackled subjects such as Black Atlantic culture, indigenous rights, and environmentalism, the series is now turning its focus local, relatively speaking. \u201cLatin American Histories\u201d directs its attention to the entire region of which Brazil is a part, examining topics from Baroque art to the oppression of indigenous people to the Zapatista movement. Curators Amanda Carneiro and Julieta Gonz\u00e1lez have deliberately cast a wide net, viewing the region\u2019s history as a collision of many narratives rather than a single cohesive story.<\/p>\n
September 4\u2013January 13, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Gwangju Biennale at Various venues, Gwangju, South Korea<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Jung Yeon-Je\/AFP via Getty Images\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tRainer Maria Rilke concluded one famed poem with the line \u201cYou must change your life,\u201d but he didn\u2019t exactly provide an instructional manual for how to fulfill his directive. Taking that line as its inspiration, this edition of Asia\u2019s top biennial suggests that there are infinite ways to meet Rilke\u2019s demand, which is really about the many means by which one can reimagine oneself for the better. Artist Ho Tzu Nyen, the biennial\u2019s curator, has amassed a list of 43 participants whose work can be seen as bearing this out. Those artists include an array of stars\u2014among them the Indian photographer Sohrab Hura, a current participant in the Venice Biennale\u2014as well as other, more mysterious participants, including one billed only as the Volcanoes of Jeju, a reference to the natural fissures off the coast of a South Korean island.<\/p>\n
September 5\u2013November 15<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cKoo Jeong A: OUSSSMOS\u201d at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Koo Jeong A\/Kunsthaus Bregenz\/Photo Markus Tretter\/Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tA few years ago, Koo Jeong A put out a query that was disseminated widely: \u201cWhat is your scent memory of Korea?\u201d On the basis of the 600 responses they received, Koo created a \u201cscent landscape\u201d for the Venice Biennale\u2019s Korean Pavilion; it smelled woody, perhaps also a bit like mothballs. For Koo, the project was about trying to visualize the invisible, a theme they have considered in many sleek installations, and one they will continue to mull with this Leeum Museum show, which continues their \u201cOUSSSMOS\u201d installation series. Included here will be a newly commissioned work called [MOBIOUSSS]<\/em>, which a press release enigmatically describes as a \u201cmonumental luminous structure that evokes both the symbol of infinity and a skatepark.\u201d<\/p>\n
September 5\u2013December 27<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cAli Cherri: Soul Witness\u201d at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAli Cherri has referred to his films contemplating wartime carnage and traumatic memories as \u201clandscapes of violence.\u201d Born in Lebanon and based in Paris and Beirut, Cherri infuses these films with surrealism, drifting in and out of dreams and often obscuring whether these works are set in the past or present. (To further the confusion, he makes sculptures that appear to have been created by bygone empires of the Middle East and Egypt.) The winner of the 2022 Venice Biennale\u2019s award for a promising young artist, Cherri will here display an array of these films, including The Sentinel<\/em> (2026), in which a French soldier shoots himself somewhere along the northern edge of Cyprus, then drifts around a set of ruins.<\/p>\n
September 5\u2013January 3, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Ismael Nery at Pinacoteca de S\u00e3o Paulo<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Isabella Matheus\/Pinacoteca de S\u00e3o Paulo\/Collection of the Jos\u00e9 and Paulina Nemirovsky Foundation, on loan to the Pinacoteca do Estado de S\u00e3o Paulo\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tUnlike many other Brazilian modernists, Ismael Nery never entirely abandoned the human figure. But his people did not look like those you might see on the street: Nery\u2019s sometimes had multiple faces and mismatched eyes. Occasionally, it wasn\u2019t easy to tell where these people ended and the backgrounds behind them began, and frequently, Nery made their gender ambiguous\u2014a gesture that feels particularly au courant today. Having appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale, which was that year organized by the celebrated Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, Nery is now getting an expansive survey in his homeland.<\/p>\n
September 5\u2013January 31, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cAnnemirl Bauer: A Rapture in the World\u201d at Das Minsk, Potsdam, Germany<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a92025 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn\/Annemirl Bauer Archive\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAnnemirl Bauer\u2019s name is likely to be unfamiliar to most people, even within Germany, and there are clear reasons why. During the 1980s, while working in East Germany, she spoke out against the requirement that women serve in the military; she also agitated for citizens of the GDR to be allowed to travel without restrictions. These protests gained Bauer the attention of the authorities, who began to surveil her. She died at the age of 50 in 1989, less than two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall; by that point she had built up a significant oeuvre of paintings and drawings that explicitly critiqued the constraints placed on East Germans like herself. At long last, she is getting a proper retrospective within Germany.<\/p>\n
September 5\u2013February 7, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cMaverick Kings: Three Visionary Pharaohs of Egypt\u2019s Golden Age\u201d at Museum of Fine Arts Boston<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Museum of Fine Arts Boston\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe question of how art can be used to enhance power is one that occupies rulers, presidents, and prime ministers today, but in fact that query is thousands of years old. While it did not begin in ancient Egypt, it was certainly in play during the 18th Dynasty (ca. 1550\u20131292 BCE), when three pharaohs\u2014Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III, and Akhenaten\u2014grew increasingly adept at using sculpture to impress their authority upon the masses. This show centers on that trio and includes a range of statues of Akenhaten, who had a predilection for objects that portrayed him with almond-shaped eyes and an elongated head. These reliefs and statues are otherworldly, off-putting, and undeniably singular.<\/p>\n
September 6\u2013December 6<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cHikmah\u201d at Center for Contemporary Arts Tashkent, Uzbekistan<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Christopher Snee\/\u00a9Art Gallery of New South Wales\/Courtesy Kimsooja Studio\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tCentral Asia\u2019s art scene has experienced a seismic shift in the past couple of years, thanks to the introduction of a new biennial in Bukhara and a range of new art spaces in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The newest of these institutions is the Centre for Contemporary Art Tashkent, whose inaugural show is \u201cHikmah,\u201d a group exhibition whose name means \u201cwisdom\u201d in Uzbek. Mulling the transmission of ideas and the acquisition of knowledge, the show will feature an array of international artists, among them Tarik Kiswanson, a Paris-based sculptor whose work has explored his family\u2019s Palestinian heritage and the movements of people across the globe.<\/p>\n
September 6\u2013January 31, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Counterpublic at Various Venues, St. Louis, Missouri<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Izaiah Johnson\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tPrior editions of this triennial, launched in 2019, appear to have made a lasting impact on St. Louis, where some of their commissions remain viewable today. That makes Counterpublic one of the few biennial-style shows to be more than a parachute-in exhibition and offers a reason to keep tabs on the second edition, curated by Jordan Carter, Raphael Fonseca, Stefanie Hessler, Nora N. Khan, and Wanda Nanibush. Under the theme of \u201cCoyote Time,\u201d the exhibition is devoted to the notion of uncertainty and features artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Li Yi-Fan, and Ximena Garrido-Lecca. One of its more exciting offerings is a show within a show: a multi-museum survey for Juanita McNeely, whose figurative paintings examine misogynistic violence in all its grotesqueness.<\/p>\n
September 10\u2013December 13<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cKreuzberg: Art and Migration Since 1960\u201d at Gropius Bau, Berlin<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Hafid Lhachmi\/Courtesy the Estate; Kalfayan Galleries, Athens and Thessaloniki; and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAy\u015fe Erkmen\u2019s Am Haus<\/em> (1994), a set of 40 Turkish-language suffixes that are permanently arrayed across the facade of a building in Berlin\u2019s Kreuzberg district, is a gesture both subtle and impactful. Erkmen has noted that the work is legible only to those who speak Turkish, so that \u201cthe so-called outsider in German society becomes the insider.\u201d Indeed, Kreuzberg is an artist-friendly neighborhood with a history of acting as a home to a large immigrant community. This exhibition, a celebration of Kreuzberg\u2019s ability to turn outsiders into insiders, will present 100 works by migrants who have passed through the district, among them artists Colette Lumiere, Aykan Safo\u011flu, and Eduardo Arroyo.<\/p>\n
September 10\u2013January 17, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cAyana Evans: Nobody\u2019s Gonna Love You the Way I Do\u201d at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Dominique Durouseau and Nyugen Smith\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tWhen she appears in public, Ayana Evans often wears a bright green catsuit that is hard to miss. Such a gesture is of a piece with her performances, which are about drawing attention to Black womanhood and all the ideas attached to it. \u201cShe makes herself hypervisible,\u201d the critic Seph Rodney once wrote. \u201cHer black body cannot, and will not, be ignored or brushed aside.\u201d Having staged memorable works that have variously involved doing jumping jacks for hours on end and wearing a sign that read \u201cI JUST CAME HERE TO FIND A HUSBAND,\u201d Evans will now bring her practice within museum walls in a show billed as her first survey. Included will be video and photographic documentation as well as eye-catching clothes that can be donned by attendees wishing to make themselves hypervisible as well.<\/p>\n
September 10\u2013February 7, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cMaurizio Cattelan: NIGHT\u201d at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Paolo Pellion di Persona\/Courtesy Castello di Rivoli\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe Preis der Nationalgalerie, one of Berlin\u2019s top art awards, typically goes to an artist under the age of 40 based in the German capital. It was a surprise, then, when Maurizio Cattelan, a prankster artist in his mid-60s who was neither born nor based in Berlin, won the prize in 2025. Maybe that\u2019s why the Neue Nationalgalerie has gone to great lengths to attribute a vague sense of Germanness to the Italian Cattelan, whom the institution notes has curated one edition of the Berlin Biennale and created one unforgettable Germany-themed sculpture: Him<\/em> (2001), a tiny, penitent Adolf Hitler. Him<\/em> is one of the artworks featured in this exhibition, which will also feature a new piece that the museum has called \u201ca far-reaching intervention into the museum\u2019s spatial framework.\u201d That\u2019s a pretty anodyne description for work by an artist known for duct-taping a banana to a wall and calling it art.<\/p>\n
September 10\u2013March 7, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cThe Bayeux Tapestry\u201d at British Museum, London<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Loic Venance\/AFP via Getty Images\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tSometimes, one work is enough to be an exhibition unto itself. Such is the case here, in this once-in-a-lifetime presentation of the Bayeux Tapestry, a 230-foot-long embroidered textile made between 1070 and 1082 that narrates the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England. Typically housed at the Mus\u00e9e de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in France, the work has not visited the United Kingdom in roughly a millennium. That makes the loan extraordinary. It\u2019s also extraordinarily valuable\u2014insured at $1.5 million\u2014because of its historical significance: The tapestry pioneered a new way of telling history by serializing its embroidered images, each of which is remarkably detailed.<\/p>\n
September 10\u2013July 11, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cMarion Wagschal: Cyclops and Other Tales\u201d at National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Marion Wagschal\/Courtesy the artist\/Private collection\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn her 1980\u20132013 painting Tales from the Schwarzwald as Told by My Mother<\/em>, Marion Wagschal renders a cascade of translucent figures interrupted by a thronelike chair, a mushroom, and leafy trees. Though it may seem to be Wagschal\u2019s fantastical invention, the painting is meant to depict stories about Germany\u2019s Black Forest that were imparted to the artist by her parents, who survived the Holocaust and moved to Trinidad and Tobago, where Wagschal was born in 1943. The painting demonstrates Wagschal\u2019s acute ability to show how history morphs, growing stranger as it is told and retold. Having gained a cult following in Canada, where she has been based since the 1950s, Wagschal will now have a retrospective that examines the role of secondhand trauma in her art.<\/p>\n
September 11\u2013January 17, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cFranz Marc: The Quest for a Better World\u201d at K20, D\u00fcsseldorf<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe German modernist painter Franz Marc assigned meaning to each of the bright hues he used in his landscapes. \u201cBlue is the male principle, astringent and spiritual,\u201d he once said. \u201cYellow is the female principle, gentle, gay and spiritual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the color to be opposed and overcome by the other two.\u201d The artist combined those colors in pastoral scenes that exhibited a unique sense of harmony; they made him one of the primary artists of the Blaue Reiter movement of the 1910s. How Marc achieved that harmony before his untimely demise\u2014he died at 36 while fighting in the Battle of Verdun\u2014is the subject of this retrospective, billed as the first significant show devoted to the artist in two decades.<\/p>\n
September 12\u2013January 24, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cThe Technologies of Peace: Art and Transition in Contemporary Europe\u202f(1989 \u2013 2026)\u201d at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tProtests in support of liberation are often accompanied by calls for solidarity, which is likely why this show includes artists from Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece, Catalonia, Slovenia, and other European locales that have faced periods of turmoil in the past 35 years. But rather than lingering on the trauma associated with upheaval, this show focuses on peacetime and the way artists have envisioned it. With an artist list spanning artists as diverse as Kosovar sculptor Petrit Halilaj and the Eurasian art collective Slavs and Tatars, the exhibition implicitly shows that one community\u2019s afflictions are never meant to be solved alone.<\/p>\n
September 12\u2013May 9, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cRemedios Varo: Painting Magic\u201d at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Colecci\u00f3n FEMSA\/\u00a92026 Remedios Varo\/VISDA \n\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThere\u2019s a tendency to call Surrealist art \u201cdreamlike.\u201d But that word would probably not have pleased Remedios Varo, the Spanish-born Mexican artist whose paintings of witchy figures conspiring in settings recalling cloisters and laboratories stand as some of the weirdest works of the 20th century. \u201cThe dream world and the real world are the same,\u201d she once said of these paintings, which conjure rituals that exist outside the realm of reason. Once an obscure figure at the fringes of Surrealism studies, Varo has gained a large following over the past decade, and that is likely to make this retrospective, the biggest devoted to her in some time, a hit with scholars and new initiates alike.<\/p>\n
September 18\u2013January 10, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cSimone Fattal: From Cities at the Bottom of the Lake\u201d at Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne de Paris<\/h2>\n
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\n\tBorn in Syria and based for much of her career in the United States and France, Simone Fattal is known for sculptures that obliquely evoke the distant past: Adam and Eve<\/em> (2021), a work that appeared at the 2022 Venice Biennale, depicted the biblical couple by way of two leggy figures without arms or facial features. While sculptures like these have in recent years been exhibited internationally, the rest of Fattal\u2019s practice remains less widely known. This 100-work retrospective aims to remedy that with landscape paintings from early in her career, when she was still based in Beirut; writings published through her now-defunct Post-Apollo Press; and objects related to collaborations with Etel Adnan, the late painter and poet who was Fattal\u2019s romantic partner.<\/p>\n
September 18\u2013January 24, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cPicasso \u2013 Bacon: What It Feels Like to Be Human\u201d at Albertina Museum, Vienna<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9The Estate of Francis Bacon, All rights reserved\/Bildrecht, Vienna und DACS, London 2026\/Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\t\u201cFlesh and meat are life,\u201d the painter Francis Bacon once said. This view certainly showed in his art, which often featured people posed among carcasses; at times, his sitters themselves resembled raw meat, their faces appearing battered or carved. The tendency to view humans in this way also extended to one of Bacon\u2019s main inspirations, Pablo Picasso, who gained fame\u2014and, in some feminist corners, notoriety\u2014for paintings that render bodies so abstract that they appear not to even belong to people. This 70-work show of Picasso and Bacon paintings elucidates a violent tendency running across their oeuvres that has been both hard to pin down and tough to swallow.<\/p>\n
September 18\u2013January 31, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cClare Rojas: Returning\u201d at Colombus Museum of Art, Ohio<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist, Jessica Silverman Gallery, and Andrew Kreps Gallery\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThis exhibition is aptly titled, since painter Clare Rojas recently came back to her home state of Ohio after a prolonged period in California\u2019s Bay Area, where she achieved fame during the 1990s. (The show\u2019s city is also fitting: Rojas was born in Columbus.) Her art is, in a way, about how individuals relate to the environments that produce them, with abstracted birds and flowers recurring throughout her lush paintings. Perhaps somewhat relatedly, the release for the show notes that Rojas recently planted California poppies in the garden of her Ohio home.<\/p>\n
September 18\u2013February 7, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cTaryn Simon: FATHER COUNTRY I DO LOVE YOU\u201d at Guggenheim Museum, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a92026 Taryn Simon\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever enjoyed the making of my work,\u201d Taryn Simon once said. \u201cIt\u2019s a labor.\u201d It\u2019s no surprise she feels this way, given that her work has addressed topics such as wrongful incarceration, genocide, grief, and the fragility of democracy, often with a rigor that is rare among artists, even in a time when research-oriented art is widely exhibited. Using photography as her primary medium, she has frequently directed her attention toward America\u2019s hidden histories, which may be one reason the Guggenheim chose Simon to fill its rotunda as the nation\u2019s 250th anniversary year draws to a close. The 42-work exhibition, which together constitutes the project that lends this show its title, centers around Simon\u2019s father, an American State Department employee who lived an international existence, residing in countries ranging from China to Korea.<\/p>\n
September 18\u2013March 14, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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John Baldessari at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: John Baldessari Family Foundation\/Courtesy Estate of John Baldessari and Spr\u00fcth Magers\/Private Collection\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn 1968, John Baldessari, a painter by training, finished a work called What Is a Painting?<\/em> that featured nothing more than text. That text concluded, \u201cArt is a creation for the eye and can only be hinted at with words.\u201d The painting is perhaps the most emblematic work Baldessari ever produced. Like others in the Conceptualist movement of the 1960s and \u201970s, Baldessari used his practice to reflect on the very nature of art, showing it was not simply enough to see an object\u2014one also had to read about it to fully consider it. Baldessari\u2019s efforts to get at the true meaning of art, and in particular his vexed relationship to painting, guide this retrospective, which UCCA says is the first significant one for Baldessari in China.<\/p>\n
September 19\u2013January 3, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cVan Gogh, Hodler, and a Cabriolet: The Collector and Pioneer Gertrud D\u00fcbi-M\u00fcller\u201d at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Kunstmuseum Solothurn\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tSwitzerland is a country so dense with art collectors that individuals of note continue to emerge from the depths of history with some degree of regularity. The latest to be considered is Gertrud D\u00fcbi-M\u00fcller (1888\u20131980), who was a pioneer in more sense than one. She collected Vincent van Gogh\u2019s work in depth, modeled for Ferdinand Hodler (whose work she also bought), and traveled widely, sometimes in a car known as a Pic-Pic, which was not in widespread use when she began driving it in the early 20th century. In tribute to her, the Kunstmuseum Basel will survey both her life and her art collecting\u2014and will even display her photographs, one of which shows her behind the wheel of her prized Pic-Pic, ready to go wherever the road might take her. September 19\u2013February 7, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cNoguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America\u201d at Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a92026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.\/Courtesy David Zwirner\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tWhile some in power attempt to exclude immigrants from U.S. history, this exhibition highlights artists of Asian descent and suggests that postwar America would have looked much different without them. Some of the subjects of this show are best known for works that cleanly fit the traditional notion of art: Isamu Noguchi and Ruth Asawa, for example, are typically recognized for their sculptures. But in placing the focus on design objects, the show argues that these artists developed lamps, tables, and furniture with a fresh look by drawing on the aesthetics of modernist art. Many artists in this show experienced forms of displacement: The Taiwan-born sculptor Leo Amino remained in the United States after emigrating from Japan, the nation where he was raised, because he disagreed with the swell of nationalism taking place there.<\/p>\n
September 20\u2013January 10, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cSpectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor\u201d at Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a92026 Wyeth Foundation for \nAmerican Art\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Wyeth Foundation for American Art Collection\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThis exhibition uses a formula that is increasingly prominent at major museums in the United States: Take a well-known painter, and turn the focus to their works on paper. The subject this time around is Andrew Wyeth, the artist known for his American landscapes permeated by a palpable sense of alienation. As with his oil paintings, his watercolors depict locales in Pennsylvania and Maine, imaging fishermen at work, mourners burying a loved one in a hilly graveyard, and more. Many of the 75 works in the exhibition have never been shown before, according to the museum.<\/p>\n
September 20\u2013January 18, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Opening of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Pedro Ramirez\/\u00a92025 Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, All Rights Reserved\/Courtesy Hathaway Dinwiddie\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tNo new museum this year is quite as ambitious as the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, an institution founded by collectors George Lucas and Mellody Hobson at a cost of more than $1 billion. Its titular focus is admittedly vague; the institution\u2019s website notes that it is a museum about the \u201cpower of visual storytelling.\u201d But the Lucas Museum has steadily acquired such an exciting array of works, from masterpieces by Robert Colescott and Norman Rockwell to an expansive archive related to Black cinema, that the elusiveness of its central premise matters little. What form the museum\u2019s presentations will ultimately take\u2014and how they will be mounted without several high-ranking curators who resigned in the run-up to the opening\u2014remain to be seen.<\/p>\n
Opens September 22<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Amar Kanwar at Serpentine Galleries, London<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAmar Kanwar was born in New Delhi more than a decade and a half after the partition of India, but the devastating division of the nation into two countries is encoded in his lineage: Both of his parents fled the state of Punjab because of it. The trauma of the partition continues to inform Kanwar\u2019s poetic film installations, which approach notions of separation and alienation in ways both metaphorical and not. This exhibition collects several of those installations, including Such a Morning <\/em>(2017), which premiered to acclaim at Documenta 14. There\u2019s also the debut of a new work called The Charcoal Man<\/em>, an installation combining disparate moving images and texts that find \u201ccoherence from disintegration, insight from fusion, and stories from within stories,\u201d as Kanwar has put it.<\/p>\n
September 23\u2013January 31, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cArthur Jafa: I Am Tony\u201d at New Museum, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist and Gladstone\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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