{"id":6933,"date":"2025-04-10T05:53:14","date_gmt":"2025-04-10T05:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/6933\/"},"modified":"2025-04-10T05:53:14","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T05:53:14","slug":"10-must-see-international-museum-exhibitions-in-spring-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/6933\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Must-See International Museum Exhibitions in Spring 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Catherine Bennett<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n

Tracey Emin, installation view of \u201cSex and Solitude\u201d at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2025. Photo by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio \u00a9 Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy of Palazzo Strozzi.<\/p>\n

2025 has got off to a strong start for museum exhibitions internationally. \u201cParis Noir\u201d at the Centre Pompidou in Paris has brought the influence of Black artists in the French capital into the mainstream. Anselm Kiefer<\/a> is juxtaposed with Van Gogh<\/a> in an unprecedented exhibition at both the Stedelijk Museum<\/a> and Van Gogh Museum<\/a> in Amsterdam, and Leigh Bowery<\/a> has taken over London\u2019s Tate Modern with his boundary-pushing installations. <\/p>\n

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

Here are the best shows to see at museums across the globe in spring 2025. <\/p>\n

Fondation Louis Vuitton<\/a>, ParisThrough Aug. 31\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

David Hockney, A Bigger Splash , 1967 \u00a9 David Hockney Courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton.<\/p>\n

David Hockney, Self Portrait IV, 25th March 2012, 2012. \u00a9 David Hockney. Courtesy Fondation Louis Vuitton.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s going to be very good.\u201d So said<\/a> David Hockney himself of this exhibition in Paris\u2014which is just as well, as he\u2019s apparently been closely involved in its curation. With more than 400 works, it\u2019s the biggest exhibition the 87-year-old painter has ever had, trumping even his gigantic 2014 show at the de Young Museum<\/a> in San Francisco. The Fondation Louis Vuitton<\/a> is devoting all of its galleries\u201411 rooms\u2014to the lauded British painter\u2019s work, representing the breadth of his career but with a particular focus on the last 25 years. <\/p>\n

The exhibition also serves as a map, charting Hockney\u2019s peripatetic career. The artist has portrayed a variety of locales across his decades of work, from his hometown of Bradford, England, to the swimming pools and pastel villas of Los Angeles. Later, Hockney returned to painting stark, leafless trees in Yorkshire, England, then London, and then Normandy, France, where he now lives. Breadth is the name of the game here, and this show is set to be as close to exhaustive as you can get, including a variety of media (one room will be devoted to digital landscapes drawn on an iPad<\/a>). It\u2019s both a look back at Hockney\u2019s extraordinary career and an exploration of his current artistic practice: Excitingly, some of the pieces he\u2019s working on right now will be displayed. <\/p>\n

Rosa Barba<\/a>, \u201cThe Ocean of One\u2019s Pause\u201dMuseum of Modern Art<\/a>, New York CityMay 3\u2013July 6\"\"<\/p>\n

Rosa Barba, Charge, 2025. Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art, New York.<\/p>\n

The center of MoMA<\/a>\u2019s sweeping exhibition of Rosa Barba<\/a>\u2019s work is the newly commissioned work Charge (2025), which considers light as both a source of scientific innovation and an enabler of ecological change. Climate change is also a theme of her film Aggregate States of Matter (2019). The work, which was added to MoMA\u2019s collection last year, examines how celluloid film\u2014temporary, degradable\u2014can be used to record and echo the fragility of the natural landscape. \u201cThe Ocean of One\u2019s Pause\u201d displays 15 years of Barba\u2019s art, across video art, kinetic sculpture, and sound. Added to various performances by Barba is a soundtrack by percussionist Chad Taylor and singer Alicia Hall Moran, which the artist describes as an \u201cexploded poem.\u201d <\/p>\n

Tate Britain<\/a>, LondonThrough Aug. 25\"\"<\/p>\n

Ed Atkins, Hisser, 2015. \u00a9 Ed Atkins. Courtesy of Tate.<\/p>\n

Where does the person end and the avatar begin? Ed Atkins<\/a>\u2019s body of work looks at the gap between technology and the self, and this Tate Britain<\/a> show\u2014the largest U.K. survey exhibition of Atkins\u2019s works to date\u2014has a solipsistic bent. The vast show, taking Atkins\u2019s own body, experiences, and feelings as his subject, will combine his digital art with paintings, drawings, and even embroidery. The artist\u2019s computer-generated video art is provocative and sometimes absurd\u2014Hisser (2015) follows a person who \u201capologises, masturbates, and falls into a sinkhole,\u201d according to the show notes. <\/p>\n

To reduce Atkins\u2019s work to the mess, bodily substances, and sordidness of his avatars is to miss his poetry. His pieces often originate from or are linked to his writing; the scripts behind his videos are sometimes later published as standalone poems. There is hope and a raw expression of love among the grimy self-pathologizing: A central part of the show displays a mass of Post-It notes with drawings made for his children, tiny missives of emotion.<\/p>\n

The Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/a>, New York CityMay 19\u2013Nov. 2\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Lorna Simpson, Night Fall 2023. Photo by James Wang \u00a9 Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.<\/p>\n

Lorna Simpson, Mind Reader 2019. \u00a9 Lorna Simpson. photo by James Wang. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.<\/p>\n

This exhibition veers away from the pioneering conceptual photography that American artist Lorna Simpson<\/a> is known for. Instead, the show focuses more on her evolving painting practice over the last 10 years. In May, The Met<\/a> will open the first major exhibition of Simpson\u2019s paintings, which draw on the same themes that she has come back to again and again over her career: race, gender, and identity. <\/p>\n

Many are portraits, whose subjects stare\u2014almost accusingly\u2014at the viewer from a nebulous wash of cobalt blue or gray. Other faces share the canvas with collaged photography or magazine cut-outs. Simpson first exhibited her paintings at the 2015 Venice Biennale<\/a>; \u201cSource Notes\u201d takes some of her paintings from that debut. Other works are from her ongoing \u201cSpecial Characters\u201d series, which uses found images\u2014often the faces of Black women taken from beauty or wig advertisements in Ebony magazine\u2014and steeps them in bright colors, reminding us of the repetitive, capitalistic imagery we consume. <\/p>\n

Edvard Munch<\/a>, \u201cEdvard Munch Portraits\u201dNational Portrait Gallery<\/a>, LondonMar. 13\u2013June 15\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Edvard Munch, Thor L\u00fctken, 1892. Photo: Munchmuseet \/ Sidsel de Jong. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery. <\/p>\n

Edvard Munch, Dr Daniel Jacobson, 1908. \u00a9 SMK, National Gallery of Denmark. Photo by Jakob Skou-Hansen. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.<\/p>\n

This spring, the National Portrait Gallery<\/a> gives a welcome overview of Edvard Munch<\/a>\u2019s body of work beyond The Scream<\/a> (1893). The show \u201cEdvard Munch Portraits\u201d seeks to depict the Norwegian artist as a \u201csocial being,\u201d not just as a talented but troubled painter who struggled with poor mental health all his life. The show follows Munch chronologically through his adolescence and early adulthood with his family, to his period mixing with the bohemian groups of Kristiania (as Oslo was previously known). The works then trace his formative trip to Paris and the four years he spent in Berlin, where he met collectors and patrons, and lastly, his return to Norway, where he was surrounded by friends and supporters he dubbed his \u201cGuardians.\u201d He used his piercing style of portraiture to capture his sister Laura\u2019s melancholic stare and the anarchist writer Hans Jaeger\u2019s jutting, defiant chin. The works are deft introductions to the people with whom he surrounded himself, and reveal his relationships with them. <\/p>\n

This is the first U.K. exhibition to focus exclusively on his portraits, and it features many that have never been shown in the U.K. before. One such example is a mysterious portrait of Munch\u2019s friend Thor L\u00fctken, painted in 1892, which contains a painting within a painting: two small, ghostly figures hidden on the man\u2019s sleeve. <\/p>\n

Serpentine Galleries<\/a>, London, UKThrough July 27\"\"<\/p>\n

Arpita Singh, installation view of Searching Sita through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels , 2015, in \u201cRemembering\u201d at Serpentine North, 2025. \u00a9 Photo Jo Underhill. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine.<\/p>\n

It only took 60 years for the prolific Indian artist Arpita Singh<\/a> to finally get a solo museum exhibition<\/a> outside of India. London\u2019s Serpentine Galleries<\/a> is known for seeking out under-acknowledged artists and bringing them into the limelight, and this exhibition is certainly doing the city a favor. Singh is a figurative artist who came of age in post-independence India at a time of social upheaval. Her painstakingly detailed works\u2014often playing on several layers of perspective and meaning\u2014are an evocative mix of the personal and the public: using domestic images alongside political references and real-life events. <\/p>\n

On display are a number of Singh\u2019s large-scale oil paintings in her signature, candy-colored palette, as well as more intimate watercolors, etchings, and ink drawings that explore femininity and family. As Singh said in the show notes, \u201c\u2018Remembering\u2019 draws from old memories from which these works emerged. Whether I am aware or not, there is something happening at my core. It is how my life flows.\u201d Her work borrows elements from Indian miniature paintings and folk art, weaving in subtle symbols of violence: One painting depicts the goddess Kali, surrounded by fruit and flowers, holding a tiny, perfectly-formed gun. <\/p>\n

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

\u201cCity of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s\u201dNational Gallery Singapore<\/a>Apr. 2\u2013Aug. 17\"\"<\/p>\n

Installation view, City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s\u20131940s, National Gallery Singapore, 2025. Courtesy of National Gallery Singa<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to imagine the Parisian district of Montparnasse as a hub for expat artists and intellectuals in the 1920s, with people like Ernest Hemingway hobnobbing with Pablo Picasso<\/a>, Amedeo Modigliani<\/a>, and Josephine Baker on Left Bank caf\u00e9 terraces. However, Asian artists are strangely left out of that picture. <\/p>\n

The National Gallery Singapore is seeking to correct this image, with its large exhibition exploring Paris as a \u201cCity of Others\u201d\u2014a crossroads for migrants from around the world, particularly as a source of fertile creativity for Asian artists. The show runs concurrently with the Centre Pompidou<\/a>\u2019s exhibition, \u201cParis Noir,\u201d in the French capital itself, which casts a light on the African, Caribbean and Afro American artists who lived and worked in Paris after the Second World War. \u201cCity of Others\u201d instead focuses on the interwar years, displaying works by artists such as Foujita Tsuguharu<\/a>, Georgette Chen<\/a>, L\u00ea Ph\u1ed5<\/a>, and Liu Kang<\/a>, alongside archival images from the city. The show also goes beyond the visual arts (and a section on the influence of Asian artisans on the Art Deco<\/a> movement) to explore Asian artists\u2019 work across different art forms like theater and dance. <\/p>\n

Museum of Arts and Design<\/a>, New York CityApr. 12\u2013Sept. 7\"\"<\/p>\n

Installation view, \u201cSaya Woolfalk: Expedition to the ChimaCloud,\u201d Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 2019. Photo by Dana Anderson. Courtesy Nelson-Atkins Digital Production & Preservation, <\/p>\n

Multimedia artist Saya Woolfalk<\/a> is known for creating an entire body of work based on an imagined world. She has invented a race of women, known as \u201cEmpathics,\u201d drawing on cultural symbolism and folklore from international art, craft, and storytelling, including African American, Brazilian, and Japanese myths. This show is novelistic in scope\u2014or perhaps more like a series of sci-fi novels\u2014as it invites the visitor to discover the lore of this new race of people and how they use a blend of technological innovation and the magic of their universe to transform themselves and their future. <\/p>\n

The exhibition straddles textiles (through the design of elaborate costumes for the Empathics), digital projections, narrative videos, glass sculpture, and even dance performance, in a collaboration with the Alvin Ailey\/Fordham University BFA Dance Program. Woolfalk\u2019s boundary-pushing art presents neither a dystopia nor a utopia, instead forcing us to ask questions about capitalism, colonialism, and the use of technology that are painfully relevant to today\u2019s world. This is both Woolfalk\u2019s first retrospective and first major exhibition in New York, drawing on two decades of her practice. <\/p>\n

Tracey Emin<\/a>, \u201cSex and Solitude\u201dPalazzo Strozzi, Florence, ItalyMar. 16\u2013July 20\"\"<\/p>\n

Tracey Emin, installation view of \u201cSex and Solitude\u201d at Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2025. Photo by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio \u00a9 Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy of Palazzo Strozzi.<\/p>\n

The provocative, blood-and-entrails work of artist Tracey Emin<\/a> may seem incongruous with a Renaissance palace in the heart of Florence. \u201cSex and Solitude\u201d marks the first major exhibition at a museum in Italy for the artist, and it covers more than 60 works from across her career. This is Emin at her grotesque, confrontational, and confessional best. The show features the installation work Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), an internal room filled with paintings and supplies. The work refers to the \u201990s performance piece, when she locked herself inside a room in a Stockholm gallery for three and a half weeks\u2014the time between periods of menstruation. Here, the artist tried to force herself to reckon with the medium of painting, which she had become disgusted by after two traumatic abortions. <\/p>\n

The show also includes painting, neon, film, and sculpture works, including her recent huge bronze sculpture I Followed You To The End (2024) in the museum\u2019s courtyard, which shows the lower half of a woman\u2019s body on her knees, legs sprawled, in a submissive, sexual pose also evocative of birth, the carnal functions of the female-coded body. As ever with Emin, those with delicate constitutions should abstain.<\/p>\n

Ai Weiwei<\/a>, \u201cAi, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei\u201dSeattle Art Museum<\/a>, SeattleThrough Sept. 7\"\"<\/p>\n

Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995. \u00a9 Ai Weiwei. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.<\/p>\n

Ai Weiwei<\/a> needs space\u2014and Seattle Art Museum<\/a> is going to give it to him, devoting all three of its locations across the city to a single artist for the first time in its 90-year history. It is the artist and dissident\u2019s largest-ever exhibition in the U.S., and it features over 130 works created over four decades, from the 1980s to the 2020s. The show has also been extended for six months longer than the museum\u2019s usual runs to enable as many people as possible to see it. All of the artist\u2019s most famous works will be there, like Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Illumination (2019), and Sunflower Seeds (2010)\u2014with which he took over Tate Modern\u2019s Turbine Hall\u2014as well as new pieces that have never been exhibited before. <\/p>\n

As the exhibition shows, Ai is capable of creating large-scale works, like his 15-meter-long reimagining of a Claude Monet<\/a>\u2019s Water Lilies<\/a> painting (in 650,000 LEGO bricks). However, the work also includes small but powerful works that skewer globalization and American capitalism, like Neolithic Vase with Coca Cola Logo (gold) (2015). In the exhibition\u2019s show notes, curator Foong Ping writes that Ai\u2019s work is a reminder \u201cof our own agency for collective resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Catherine Bennett Tracey Emin, installation view of \u201cSex and Solitude\u201d at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2025. Photo by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4084,4090,4021,4020,4024,4022,4089,4088,77,4083,4085,4087,4086,4091,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-6933","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-anselm-kiefer","9":"tag-arpita-singh","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-david-hockney","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-ed-atkins","15":"tag-edvard-munch","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-exhibition-roundups","18":"tag-leigh-bowery","19":"tag-lorna-simpson","20":"tag-rosa-barba","21":"tag-saya-woolfalk","22":"tag-uk","23":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114312118399022439","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}