This summer, museums across Europe have lined up a stellar programme of exhibitions to dive into once the appeal of sun and sea begins to fade. From Amsterdam and Athens, to Basel, Cologne, and Oslo, institutions are presenting shows that unfold across entire buildings, spill into historic sites, and place contemporary works in dialogue with their collections.
A number of these are major travelling exhibitions, stopping in Europe over the summer months, including Cecilia Vicuña at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Yayoi Kusama at Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Ruth Asawa at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Others coincide with key moments in the art calendar: in Venice, Marina Abramović’s exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia opens during the Venice Biennale, while in Basel, presentations by Pierre Huyghe at Fondation Beyeler and Helen Frankenthaler at Kunstmuseum Basel run alongside Art Basel.
Heading to the continent? Here are 18 must-see exhibitions to catch across Europe this summer.
Cecilia Vicuna at Irish Museum of Modern Art (until 5 July 2026)
Cecilia Vicuña, Llaverito (Blue) (2019, after the lost original 1979 work)
The first solo exhibition in Ireland by Chilean artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña – now in her late seventies – brings together decades of work alongside a major new commission.
Reverse Migration, a Poetic Journey centres on Vicuña’s exploration of ancestry, ecology, and interconnectedness, rooted in her 2006 return to Ireland with her partner, the poet James O’Hern. Born in Santiago in 1948 into a family of artists, Vicuña was studying at the Slade School of Fine Art when the 1973 military coup led by Augusto Pinochet forced her into exile. Many of her early works were lost or destroyed during this period. The breadth of work she has produced since reflects the resilience and adaptability of her practice.
At the core of the exhibition is Aran Quipu (2025), a monumental, site-specific installation created with local makers using wool from Irish sheep. Thick, knotted strands hang from the ceiling, drawing on the ancient Andean quipu system while echoing the symbolic patterns of Aran knitwear. The work anchors the exhibition as a meditation on survival, craft, and shared histories. Elsewhere, Vicuña presents a wide range of works, including paintings, poetry, film, and sound.
Following its Dublin presentation, the exhibition will travel to Whitechapel Gallery, where it will be on view from 7 October 2026 to 14 February 2027.
Danh Vo at Stedelijk, Amsterdam (14 February – 2 August)
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα), a major solo exhibition by Danh Vo, marking the artist’s return to the museum following one of his first institutional shows there in 2008.
The exhibition brings together sculptures made from materials such as wood, marble, and copper with fragments of antiques, religious relics, and architectural elements. These include sections of larger monuments and devotional objects that Vo reworks or repositions, often combining them with archival photographs, letters, and personal documents. Many of the works draw on histories linked to the Vietnam War, Catholicism, and his family’s departure from Vietnam in 1979, using these materials to trace how political and cultural forces shape individual lives.
Born in Vietnam in 1975 and raised in Denmark, Vo’s work draws on personal history, weaving together references to the Vietnam War, his family’s departure from Vietnam in 1979, and his formative years as an art student through archival material and found objects. His practice moves between personal experience and broader historical narratives, and in this exhibition unfolds through carefully staged relationships between objects, where connections between memory, belief, and power take shape.
In September, Vo returns to New York with an exhibition at White Cube, his first in the city since Take My Breath Away at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2018.
Yayoi Kusama at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1 March – 2 August 2026)
Kusama's yellow and black tenatacles
To mark its 50th anniversary, Museum Ludwig presents a major survey of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.
Spanning more than 300 works, the exhibition traces Kusama’s seven-decade career, from her early childhood drawings made around 1934 to newly commissioned Infinity Mirror Room created for the museum’s largest gallery. While the show follows earlier presentations at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, and precedes its next stop at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Cologne’s version introduces several new elements and large-scale installations. These include Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963), Kusama’s first immersive installation, and I’m Here but Nothing (2000–), a domestic interior transformed by fluorescent dots under black light. On the museum’s roof terrace, brightly painted bronze flowers make their exhibition debut.
Across painting, sculpture, installation, and archival material, the show brings together Kusama’s defining motifs – polka dots, pumpkins, and infinity nets – while also revisiting lesser-seen works from the 1950s. The exhibition continues at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from 11 September 2026 to 17 January 2027.
Rothko in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (14 March – 23 August 2026)
A master of American modern art, Mark Rothko is the subject of a major exhibition in Florence, curated by his son Christopher Rothko, and curator Elena Guena.
Bringing together more than 70 works from leading international institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, alongside Tate and Centre Pompidou, the exhibition traces Rothko’s career from early figurative paintings to his signature colour-field works. Drawings and studies for major commissions, including the Seagram Murals, are also on view.
At its core is Rothko’s relationship to Florence. He first visited the city in 1950 and was deeply affected by Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco and Michelangelo’s architecture at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana - -encounters that would shape his later work.
That dialogue is brought into the present through two satellite installations across the city. At San Marco, a small group of paintings is shown in conversation with Angelico’s frescos inside the monks’ cells. At the Laurentian Library, works are installed in Michelangelo’s dramatic vestibule, a space that had a lasting impact on Rothko and informed the emotional intensity he pursued in his own paintings.
The exhibition continues Palazzo Strozzi’s programme under director Arturo Galasino, which has brought major contemporary figures such as Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor and Olafur Eliasson to Florence.
Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective at Guggenheim, Bilbao (19 March – 13 September 2026)
Artist Ruth Asawa making wire sculptures, California, United States, November 1954; image: Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock; artwork: © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner.
A pioneering figure in postwar American art, Ruth Asawa is the subject of a major retrospective at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, tracing a six-decade …
Bringing together around 300 works, the exhibition spans the full breadth of Asawa’s practice, from her signature suspended looped-wire sculptures to nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, as well as clay and bronze cast sculptures, paper-folded works, and a wide selection of paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints. At the core of the exhibition are the intricate wire forms for which she is best known – delicate, hanging forms made from looped wire, often shaped into bulbous, nested structures that cast shifting shadows across the walls and floor.
Born in California in 1926 to Japanese immigrant parents, Asawa was forcibly incarcerated during the Second World War. She later studied at Black Mountain College, where its experimental ethos shaped her practice. Based in San Francisco from 1949, she became a leading advocate for arts education and public art.
Organised in partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Modern Art in New York, this is the first major posthumous survey of her work.
Simon Fujiwara at Mudam Luxembourg (20 March – 23 August 2026)
Exhibition view, Simon Fujiwara: A Whole New World, Mudam Luxembourg.
Japanese-British artist Simon Fujiwara presents his largest exhibition to date at Mudam Luxembourg, a mid-career survey spanning nearly two decades of work. Developed over more than two years, the exhibition brings together key projects from across his practice alongside recent works.
A Whole New World transforms the museum into an immersive environment inspired by the scenography of theme parks, reflecting Fujiwara’s interest in spectacle, identity, and contemporary image culture. Working across painting, film, performance, animation, and storytelling, the exhibition offers a broad view of his multifaceted approach.
Highlights include early works that probe the construction of identity, as well as large-scale installations such as Hope House, which explores the legacy of Anne Frank. More recent projects introduce Who the Bær, a cartoon character without a fixed identity, used to examine authorship, branding, and the fluid nature of the self.
A central work in the exhibition is Joanne (2016–21), a video portrait of Fujiwara’s former schoolteacher, who resigned after private images of her were circulated without consent. Revisited years later through a collaborative process, the project uses the language of marketing and media to reframe her story, shifting it from scandal to one of agency and self-representation.
Across the exhibition, Fujiwara draws on the aesthetics of entertainment and advertising to reflect on a fast-moving, image-driven world.
Niki Kanagini at EMΣΤ, Athens (2 April – 8 November 2026)
Portrait of the Artist in Her Studio, c. 1975
A key figure in post-war Greek art, Niki Kanagini is the subject of a major retrospective at National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣΤ), offering a renewed look at her four-decade career.
Spanning work from the 1970s onwards, the exhibition brings together a wide range of media, from large-scale tapestries – first shown at the Lausanne Biennale in 1971 – to immersive, participatory installations. The Athens show reintroduces the critical dimensions of her practice, including her early engagement with modernism, her interest in the relationship between applied and fine arts, and her use of writing as a visual and structural element.
Born in Alexandroupouli in northern Greece in 1933, Kanagani studied at the École Cantoale de Dessin et d’Art Appliqué in Lausanne and the Athens School of Fine Art before continuing her training at London’s Central School of Arts and Design. Her early work drew on Bauhaus principles and abstraction, before she turned to tapestry-making, which became central to her practice.
Alexander Calder at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (15 April – 16 July 2026)
Alexander Calder, Dispersed Objects with Brass Gong, 1948. Brass, sheet metal, wire, and paint. 48.3 x 167.6 cm
The Fondation Louis Vuitton celebrates the centenary of Alexander Calder’s arrival in France with one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever dedicated to the American sculptor, known for his hanging mobiles and kinetic works.
Spanning nearly half a century, Rêver en Équilibre traces Calder’s career from the late 1920 – beginning with his Cirque Calder performances – to the monumental works of the 1960s and 1970s that expanded his practice into the public space. Bringing together around 300 works, the exhibition includes his iconic mobiles and stabiles, alongside wire portraits, carved wooden figures, paintings, drawings, and jewellery conceived as small-scale sculptures.
One of the most exceptional works on view is Cirque Calder, returning to Paris for the first time in 15 years thanks to a major loan from the Whitney Museum of Art. Developed after the artist’s arrival in Paris, it comprises more than 100 small figures made from wire, cork, and wood – acrobats, animals, ringmasters – which Calder would perform himself in front of live audiences. Among those lucky enough to have watched this spectacle were leading figures of the avant-garde, including Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian.
Occupying the entire museum – and, for the first time, its surrounding grounds – the exhibition places Calder’s works within the wider avant-garde, his friends Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, while photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, and others capture the artist at work and in life.
Helen Frankenthaler at Kunstmuseum Basel (18 April – 23 August 2026)
Frankenthaler in her studio on East 83rd Street, New York, 1974;
Helen Frankenthaler, whose innovations reshaped postwar abstract painting, is the subject of a comprehensive survey at Kunstmuseum Basel. Spanning more than six decades of work, the exhibition marks the largest presentation of her work in Europe to date and her first institutional solo show in Switzerland.
Central to the exhibition is her development of the soak-stained technique, in which thinned paint is poured directly onto unprimed canvas, allowing colour to spread and soak into the surface. The approach produced expansive, fluid compositions and played a key role in the emergence of what became known as Color Field painting in the United States.
For the first time, her paintings are hung in direct dialogue with works that shaped her thinking, from the Renaissance through to modernism. As a student at Bennington College, Vermont, Frankenthaler closely studied artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Henri Matisse, later deepening this engagement through travels to Europe, where she encountered painters such as Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, and Claude Monet.
The exhibition runs alongside Art Basel, held in the Swiss city from 18–21 June 2026.
Summer Programme at LUMA Arles, including Verena Paravel, Gerhard Richter, Camille Henrot, among others
Each summer, LUMA Arles – the arts centre founded by Swiss collector Maya Hoffmann – presents a wide-ranging programme of exhibitions across its campus, bringing together contemporary art, film, and architecture. For 2026, a new cycle opens on 1 May, followed by a second sequence on 4 July.
Among the highlights is Delta, a major new film commission by Verena Paravel, developed as part of her ongoing project Cosmofonia. Filmed in the Rhône river delta, the work focuses on the fragile ecosystem of the Camargue, tracing the often unseen lives of the species that inhabit its wetlands.
Also on view is a presentation of Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs, a key body of work in which the artist applies layers of oil paint directly onto snapshots, disrupting the image and blurring the line between representation and abstraction. Alongside this, LUMA presents the European premiere of In the Veins, a new film by Camille Henrot, exploring the emotional and cultural systems that shape individual experience.
Further exhibitions include the sixth chapter of the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives, dedicated to Zaha Hadid, bringing together her early paintings and notebooks, as well as a new commission by Julianknxx.
Marina Abramovich at Gallerie dell' Accademia, Venice (6 May – 19 October 2026)
Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović presents a major exhibition at the Gallerie dell’ Accademie, marking her 80th birthday and coinciding with the 61st Venice Biennale.
Transforming Energy is a landmark project, with Abramović becoming the first living woman artist to be honoured with a solo exhibition at the institution. It also marks the first time a contemporary show extends into the museum’s permanent collection, placing her work in dialogue with Venetian Renaissance masterpieces.
The exhibition brings together iconic works from across Abramović’s career, including Rhythm 0 (1974), her six-hour endurance performance, and Balkan Baroque (1997), the work that earned her the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, in which she spent days scrubbing piles of bloodied animal bones in response to the violence of the Yugoslav wars.
At the centre of the show are Abramović’s ‘Transitory Objects’, sculptural installations made from stone and crystals that invite visitors to sit, lie, or stand, activating what she describes as ‘energy transmission.’ Elsewhere, Pietà (with Ulay) (1983), a photograph of Abramović cradling the body of her former partner Ulay in her lap, in dialogue with Titian’s Pietà (c. 1575–76), marking the 450th anniversary of the Renaissance painting.
Mrinalini Mukherjee at Hepworth Wakefield, Leeds (23 May – 1 November 2026)
A major retrospective at The Hepworth Wakefield celebrates the work of Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, bringing together sculpture, drawing, and works on paper from across a four-decade career.
The exhibition places Mukherjee’s work alongside that of an early generation of modern Indian and Bangladeshi sculptors, including her mother Leela Mukherjee, Meera Mukherjee, Novera Ahmed, and Pilloo Pochkhanawala, foregrounding a shared history of modernism that has often been overlooked in Western narratives.
At the centre of the exhibition are her monumental fibre sculptures, such as larger-than-life forms made by twisting, knotting, and weaving dyed hemp into dense, bodily structures. Using the traditional technique of macramé, Mukherjee transformed an unconventional material into sculptural works that suggest both plant-like and bodily forms.
The exhibition also includes her later works in ceramic and bronze, alongside drawings, etchings, and watercolours, tracing the evolution of a practice shaped by nature, Indian sculptural traditions, and modernist experimentation.
Pierre Huyghe at Fondation Beyeler, Basel (24 May – 13 September 2026)
The work of French artist Pierre Huyghe demands space and production – conditions well suited to the Fondation Beyeler – widely regarded as one of the leading museums for contemporary art.
Conceived specifically for the museum, the exhibition invites visitors into Huyghe’s shifting and often unpredictable universe, where fiction and reality continuously blur. Working across film, sculpture, and installation, he creates environments that evolve over time, bringing together newly commissioned works alongside key pieces from recent years.
His recent work, including his transformation of Punta della Dogana during the 2024 Venice Biennale, where visitors moved through darkened, labyrinthine spaces where pathways were unclear and moving images appeared unexpectedly, creating a sense of displacement and uncertainty.
One such example is Human Mask (2014), a film set in post-disaster Fukushima, in which a macaque dressed as a young girl moves through an abandoned restaurant. Moving between human and animal behaviour, the figure produces an unsettling effect, echoing Huyghe’s interest in unstable realities and shifting identities.
Coinciding with Art Basel, the exhibition is presented within the Renzo Piano-designed Fondation, home to a world-renowned collection including works by Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Ewa Juszkiewicz at Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (26 May – 6 September 2026)
The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presents a solo exhibition of works by Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz, organised as part of its programme devoted to the collection of Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Bringing together just over 20 paintings – many drawn from recent bodies of work – the exhibition focuses on her reinterpretation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European portraiture, reframing the visual language of classical painting and its ideals of feminine beauty.
Juszkiewicz, born in 1984 in Gdańsk, works from portraits of female sitters, keeping their compositions intact while removing the face and replacing it with dense arrangements of braided hair, fabric, or organic forms. By altering these images, she reveals how representations of women in European painting have been shaped by ideals of beauty and decorum, recasting them in a contemporary context.
Also on view is a major exhibition of the Sevillian painter and sculptor Carmen Laffón, and following that a presentation of Kenny Scharf, a central figure in the New York art scene of the 1980s.
Nari Ward at DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece (23 June – 31 October 2026)
Each summer, the DESTE Foundation Project Space Slaughterhouse on the Greek island of Hydra invites a single artist to create a site-specific exhibition. For 2026, Jamaican-American artist Nari Ward presents Until That Day.
Known for his large-scale sculptural installations from discarded materials gathered throughout his neighbourhood of Harlem, Ward reworks everyday objects into compositions that address questions of race, consumer culture, and community. For this exhibition, he turns his attention to the African diaspora in Greece, exploring histories of displacement alongside the cultural contributions of Afro-Greek communities.
Developed specifically for the Slaughterhouse, the project includes a new performance featuring musician Aggelos Aggelou and other Afro-Greek artists, responding to Haile Selassie I (Emperor of Ethiopia, 1930–1974) and his 1963 address to the United Nations. The exhibition’s title is drawn from the speech, later echoed in Bob Marley’s song ‘War’ (1976), which reflects its call for solidarity across national and racial boundaries.
Set within the former slaughterhouse overlooking the Aegean Sea, the exhibition continues DESTE Foundation’s long-running summer programme on Hydra, established by the Greek Cypriot industrialist and art collector Dakis Joannou. Since 2009, the Slaughterhouse has hosted a series of site-specific projects by leading contemporary artists, including Andra Ursuţa (2025), George Condo (2024), and Maurizio Cattelan (2010).
Lucian Freud - Drawing into Painting at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (11 June – 27 September 2026)
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents Drawing into Painting, an exhibition of Lucian Freud that explores the relationship between his works on paper and his paintings, organised in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery.
Spanning from the 1930s onwards, the exhibition opens with a rare group of early material, including childhood drawings, sketchbooks, letters, and unfinished works, many of which are shown publicly for the first time. Early works on paper include Portrait of a Young Man (1944), drawn in black crayon and chalk. In total, the display brings together 48 sketchbooks alongside preparatory studies and more familiar paintings.
The exhibition places particular emphasis on Freud’s practice as a draughtsman. Working in pencil, pen, ink, charcoal, and etching, his drawings return repeatedly to the same faces and bodies, testing and refining his way of seeing.
By showing drawings alongside paintings, the exhibition reveals how Freud returned to drawing as a way of studying and reworking his subjects over time.
Beatriz Gonzalez at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (12 June – 11 October 2026)
The Astrup Fearnley Museet presents a major retrospective of Colombian artist Beatriz González (1932–2026), bringing together more than 150 works spanning six decades. The exhibition arrives in Oslo following its presentation at the Barbican Centre.
Drawing on an extensive archive of images – from Old Master reproductions to newspaper photographs of crime, conflict, and political life – González examined how such images shape perceptions of power and violence in Colombia. Moving between art history and mass media, she reworked familiar visual material to reflect how these images are circulated and understood.
Born in Bucaramanga in 1932, González developed her practice in Colombia from the 1960s, working across painting, printmaking, furniture, and installation. Known in Colombia as la maestra for her influence as both an artist and teacher, she died in Bogotá in 2026, shortly before the retrospective opened at the Barbican Centre.
Across the exhibition are works based on Colombian press imagery, including her repeated paintings of the couple who died at the Sisga dam. These are shown alongside prints of violent deaths and painted furniture – beds, tables, and cabinets – featuring religious and political figures. Later works include projects such as Auras Anónimas (2007–09), where repeated silhouettes of figures carrying bodies reflect on the long aftermath of political violence.
Ana Mendieta at Tate Modern, London (15 July 2026 – 17 January 2027)
The Tate Modern presents a major exhibition of Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), bringing together more than 150 works and marking the first large-scale survey of her practice in the UK in over a decade.
Working across sculpture, film, and photography, Mendieta is best known for her ‘earth-body’ works, in which she traced the outline of her own body into the landscape using elemental materials such as earth, fire, water, and vegetation. These interventions explored the relationship between the body and the natural world, as well as ideas of presence, absence, and impermanence.
Born in Havana, Mendieta was sent to the United States at the age of 12 following the Cuban Revolution, an experience of displacement that shaped her work. Throughout her career, she returned to sites across the Americas and Europe, drawing on archaeology, ritual, and pre-Columbian cultures to reconnect with place and origin.
At the centre of the exhibition is the Silueta Series (1973–80), in which Mendieta carved, burned, or assembled her body’s outline into landscapes, documented through photographs and film. These are shown alongside a group of newly remastered films, many presented in the UK for the first time, early performances, and later sculptural works made in Rome, including earth-based floor pieces and her tree-trunk installation La Jungla (Totem Grove) (1985), as well as restaged installations that bring her ephemeral works into the gallery.