Swerve January's bleaker connotations by indulging in a healthy dose of inspiring culture, and the slower pace at the beginning of the year is the perfect time to catch up on the exhibitions you may have missed in the pre-Christmas rush. From spotlights on emerging and established artists, to work across mediums, there's a flurry of exciting shows to see.
Exhibitions to see in January 2026
Wes Anderson at the Design Museum, London, until 26 July
Margot Tenenbaum’s Fendi mink coat is one of the most instantly recognisable pieces of clothing in contemporary film. Worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in 2001 movie classic The Royal Tenenbaums, the coat now sits in an expansive exploration of US director Wes Anderson at the Design Museum in London. The exhibition also features a set of bespoke Louis Vuitton suitcases, stamped with miniature safari animals and featured in 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited. In another space, an intimately scaled puppet used to bring George Clooney’s titular character to life in the 2009 stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox is on display. The show is an in-depth ode to hands-on filmmaking, and a welcome antidote to our CGI and AI age.
Yayoi Kusama at Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland, until 25 January
The Fondation Beyeler show is the first devoted to the artist in Switzerland and the team is expecting over half a million visitors who will marvel at the sheer range of her work, which spans from small delicate watercolours to a fully immersive installation featuring giant inflated black and yellow tentacles, entitled The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cover the Universe (2019/2024). The dots and mirrors are delightfully discombobulating, like peering into an abyss. That sense of teetering, of reaching into the cosmos, is threaded throughout all Kusama’s unbelievably prolific output.
‘La Salle de Gym des Femmes Arab’ at Aga Khan Park, Toronto, until May 31,
At Aga Khan Park, outside Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum, a run of low billboards presents women in boldly coloured tracksuits and floral coats, hijabs tucked beneath boxing gloves as they strike sparring poses. The installation draws from Hassan Hajjaj’s long-running La Salle de Gym des Femmes Arab (The Arab Women’s Gym), shot over roughly a decade and a half. In this series, Hajjaj places women at the centre of the often male-dominated world of sports. Capturing them actively participating in sports like soccer, boxing, and surfing.
‘Peter Doig: House of Music’, at Serpentine South, London, until 8 February
Peter Doig is one of the best-known contemporary artists of our times. His paintings may be beloved, fetching stratospheric prices, but Doig has consistently risen above art-world elitism. Now, his ‘House of Music’ exhibition at Serpentine Galleries strikes a blow for cultural democracy by giving the art-loving public a chance to experience his paintings as if they were at home.
The artist has brought a unique and very rare sound system into the gallery, installed acoustic curtains, and set up lounge spaces. People can sit in the space for long periods of time, and enjoy the work with a bespoke soundtrack of 300 vinyl records that are played continuously throughout the day.
‘Monument to the Unimportant’ at Pace, London until 14 February
The objects and things that fill our daily lives are often ones we only notice if they stop working, or if they inconvenience us in some way. The cakes that haven’t risen, the cables that don’t connect or the weeds growing through the crack in the path – all will receive our full attention only when they become a nuisance.
But currently at Pace, London, these items and more are celebrated as things of beauty in their own right, with the group exhibition ‘Monument to the Unimportant’ spotlighting the joy in mundanity. Artists including Henni Alftan, Genesis Belanger, Elmgreen & Dragset, Urs Fischer, Sylvie Fleury, David Hockney and Rachel Whiteread recontextualise the quotidian to create something wholly new.
VIVONO. Arts and Feelings, HIV-AIDS in Italy, 1982-1996' at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, until March 1, 2026
In one of the final rooms of ‘Vivono: Art and Feelings, HIV-AIDS in Italy. 1982-1996’, at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato (through 10 May 2026), a gentle army of off-white sofas invites visitors to sit and absorb the words of Nino Gennaro, the artist, activist and poet whose writing is projected onto the surrounding walls (old photographs additionally appear on some of the furniture via a slide show). The space is loosely modelled after Gennaro’s own living arrangement, in the home he shared with his chosen family of community-minded artists until his death, from AIDS in 1995, which he described in personal notes from the 1980s as ‘a place to make mistakes but also to get things right, a place to heal but also to get sick…to die but also be reborn, a place where everything is allowed…’
Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record is at The Photographers’ Gallery London, until 22 February 2026
In 1978, Zofia Rydet embarked on a colossal task: photographing the inside of every household in Poland. The 67 year-old had already produced a major body of work with Little Man – a study on children, published as a book in 1965 – while her series of photomontages, The World of Feeling and Imagination, had been in development since 1975. What became Sociological Record would ultimately take Rydet into the 1990s, culminating in more than 20,000 images, only a fraction of which were ever printed (by the series’ end her efforts were solely focused on making sure there was a record, as opposed to sharing it).
Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey is at Whitechapel Gallery until 1st March 2026
It is apt that Joy Gregory’s first major survey show at the Whitechapel Gallery should take its title from a proverb said by her mother. In every room, her words – ‘you catch more flies with honey than vinegar’ – ring true. Here, these honeyed photographs hold a pertinent political message that sticks. Using nineteenth-century photographic processes to explore issues such as race, gender and colonialism, Gregory’s works pack a punch, rendering them all the sweeter for it.
‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ is at the Brooklyn Museum until 8 March 2026
In April 2024, curator and author Catherine E McKinley travelled to Mali to meet the family of legendary photographer Seydou Keïta, to discuss an upcoming exhibition and to ask for their participation.
Celebrated as one of the most outstanding 20th-century photographers, Keïta ran a photography studio in the Malian capital, Bamako, between the late 1940s and early 1960s, where he shot black and white portraits of fashionably dressed people, with the patterned backdrops that he is perhaps best known for. He also documented the social and political landscape in pre- and post-independence Mali. That work was introduced to the West in the early 1990s, first anonymously in New York and then later identified, in group and solo exhibitions at galleries, museums, and foundations around the world.
Yuko Mohri, ‘Entanglements’, at Pirelli HangarBicocca until 11 January 2026
Yuko Mohri’s living, breathing installations are feats of innovation. At the 2024 Venice Biennale, her work Compose at the Japan pavilion featured rotting fruit, kinetic sculpture and a host of vessels connected by thin tubes, filling the space with scent, sound, and light. Her inspiration comes from moments of everyday ingenuity; for example, the resourceful homemade water-catching devices used against leaks throughout Tokyo’s subway system. ‘Entanglements’, her new show at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca, presents seven existing works within the 4,000 sq m space, exploring how seemingly disconnected pieces react to one another within the same environment. This reflects more broadly on the invisible links and interactions between living and inanimate things in the world.
Chantal Joffe is at Victoria Miro London until 17 January 2026
Chantal Joffe deals in memory. In the thick, tangible brushstrokes of her paintings and in the generous sizes of her canvases, we are invited to discover Joffe’s women - because it is often women she paints, those she admires, or those she is close to.
Joffe has a wholly unique figurative style of painting, eschewing a neat formality for gorgeously expressive brushwork, with the palpability of the paint allowing for a greater freedom in the depictions of the women she is painting. Her complex, multifaceted subjects can only come alive in Joffe’s thickly-drawn sweeps of paint, their nuances and quirks and features recognisably theirs, without being perfectly or realistically rendered.
Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–Today’, at Richard Saltoun London, part 2 until 14 February 2026
‘What fascinates me about surrealism in the context of the erotic is how it transforms desire into a language of liberation,’ says Maudji Mendel of RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women) on the eve of her exhibition opening.
It is a topic she has been considering, in the context of overlooked women artists of the 20th century, for the exhibition ‘Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–Today’, opening at Richard Saltoun gallery during London’s Frieze Week. Organised into two parts, the first running until November 2025 and the second until February 2026, it explores desire and fetish as a neglected part of the surrealist movement.
‘Nigerian Modernism’ is at Tate Modern, London until 10 May 2026
Stepping into Tate Modern, the proposition is immediate: modernism is plural and Nigeria is one of its centres. ‘Nigerian Modernism’ opens as a conversation, not a line. Media and generations collide. Ceramics answer painting. Print meets sculpture. Osei Bonsu and Bilal Akkouche curate with a choreography that mirrors the experimental drive of the work itself. Opening tomorrow, the exhibition brings together more than 250 works by over 50 artists, spanning the 1940s through to the late 20th century. What emerges is not a tidy lineage but a restless dialogue – a testing ground for freedom, imagination, and struggle.
Lee Miller at Tate Britain until 15 February
Not long before Tate Britain opened photographer Lee Miller’s largest retrospective to date (2 October 2025-15 February 2026), I travelled to her former home, Farleys House, tucked away in the Sussex countryside. Miller and husband Roland Penrose created a surrealist haven upon moving there in 1949, spending the next 35 years filling the home and gardens with contemporary art. Friends and artists Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Leonora Carrington were frequent visitors, leaving their mark. Picasso daubed a smiley face on the tiles above the Aga, while Joan Miró absent-mindedly twiddled wine-bottle wrapping into a sculpture, which sits in the dining room.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, The Delusion, at Serpentine North until 18 January 2026
Traditionally, art galleries can be solitary experiences, with visitors avoiding eye contact on a stroll around an exhibition. It is a custom Berlin-based British artist and game designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is keen to challenge, with the artist’s immersive new exhibition at The Serpentine encouraging visitors to interact – with each other.
The video game commission, The Delusion, is a multiplayer experience, inviting viewers to virtually enter digital portals. Inside each one there are conversation starters, reflecting on both the digital world and its often vitriolic and dangerous real-life consequences. Players follow prompts, and are encouraged to engage in honest conversations with themselves and each other.
'Visualizing the Supernatural' at Kunstmuseum Basel until 8 March 2026
As a culture, we’ve always loved a good ghost. From a white sheet with black holes for eyes that haunts the pages of a children’s story book, to the Romantic and the Gothic, via spirit photography, ouija boards and Patrick Swayze, the attraction is undeniable. And why not? The question of where we go when we die, if anywhere, is knitted into the meaning of what it means to be human.
-
Unmissable fashion exhibitions to add to your calendar in 2026From a trip back to the 1990s at Tate Britain to retrospectives on Schiaparelli, Madame Grès and Vivienne Westwood, 2026 looks set to continue the renaissance of the fashion exhibition
-
Design studio Palma is a tale of twos, where art and architecture meetWallpaper* Future Icons: in São Paulo, artist Cleo Döbberthin and architect Lorenzo Lo Schiavo blur the lines between making and meaning. Through Palma, they explore a dialogue shaped by material, memory and touch.
-
This curved brick home by Flawk blends quiet sophistication and playful detailsDistilling developer Flawk’s belief that architecture can be joyful, precise and human, Runda brings a curving, sculptural form to a quiet corner of north London
