As the busy fall season begins, museums worldwide are rolling out some of their most anticipated shows of the year. The coming months promise a mix of landmark retrospectives and monumental exhibitions on art historical movements from Symbolism to Nigerian modernism.
Here are 11 museum shows to see across the globe in fall 2025.
Ayoung Kim
MoMA PS1, New York
Nov. 6, 2025–Mar. 16, 2026
Working across video, installation, and gaming, Korean artist Ayoung Kim invites viewers into a world where gig work is a parable of power. At MoMA PS1 this fall, her “Delivery Dancer” video trilogy will be shown in its entirety for the first time in the United States, alongside a major new project. Together, these works explore how data and labor are entangled, addressing themes including biopolitics, queerness, xenophobia, and climate anxiety.
The “Delivery Dancer” films follow two women avatars named En Storm and Ernst Mo (anagrams of “monster”) through a series of algorithmically generated landscapes. Initially appearing as drivers navigating endless delivery routes, they later begin to deliver time itself, moving through fractured multiverses. In the latest chapters, En Storm and Ernst Mo are tasked with recovering lost cultural artifacts. The films examine the systems of control created by the gig economy, providing a critique on the capitalist exploitation of workers.
Kerry James Marshall
“The Histories”
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Sep. 20, 2025–Jan. 18, 2026
“Black people occupy a space, even mundane spaces, in the most fascinating ways,” American artist Kerry James Marshall said in a 1998 interview with BOMB. That conviction animates “The Histories” at London’s Royal Academy, the largest survey of Marshall’s work ever held in the United Kingdom. Bringing together 70 paintings, drawings, and murals, the exhibition highlights how the artist places Black life at the center of the art historical narratives that once excluded it.
Featured works range from intimate portraits to monumental mural-like compositions. In School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), Marshall depicts the lively atmosphere of a salon, with dancing children and women getting their hair done. Elsewhere, he examines singular figures, like in Untitled (Policeman) (2015), in which a contemplative Black police officer sits on the hood of his car. Perhaps most notably, the show will include his commission for the Chicago Public Library, Knowledge and Wonder (1995), showing a group of children looking out into a fantastical landscape—a celebration of the library as a space for curiosity and creativity. The work has never before been loaned.
“Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination”
Art Institute of Chicago
Oct. 4, 2025–Jan. 5, 2026
Symbolism started as a literary movement in France in the 1880s, but it soon expanded into visual art across Europe, from Belgium and Germany to Scandinavia. The writers and artists affiliated with the movement rejected the rationalism of science and the ephemerality of Impressionism. Instead, they turned inward, seeking to give form to emotions and psychological states. The resulting paintings and works on paper were often lush or hallucinatory, intending to visualize the invisible parts of the human experience.
This exhibition brings together more than 200 works, featuring influential Symbolist figures like Edvard Munch and Odilon Redon alongside lesser-known but equally compelling artists, including Emilie Mediz-Pelikan, Léon Spilliaert, and Gustav Adolf Mossa. A highlight is Jean Delville’s massive painting Medusa (1893), which depicts the expressionless and deeply haunting mythological figure as she feeds her head of snakes. Across the exhibition, dreamlike landscapes are filled with mythical and historical allegories, including Georges Dorignac’s Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices (1913–23), while macabre portraits like Munch’s Self-Portrait in Moonlight (1904–06) reflect early 20th-century anxieties about urban alienation.
Lee Bul
“From 1998 to Now”
Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul
Through Jan. 4, 2026
Featuring sci-fi cyborgs, sleek karaoke pods, and monumental crystalline structures made from raw material, Lee Bul’s installation art probes the tension between humans and technology. These experimental works placed the Korean artist at the forefront of the international art world in the 1990s, when she became the torchbearer for a new generation of artists in her home country.
At Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, a landmark exhibition brings together about 150 of Lee’s works. Among them are her gender-probing “Cyborg” figures, made from cast silicone, and her interactive “Karaoke” series, which invites visitors to sing in soundproof enclosures, blurring the line between the public and private. The exhibition also includes large-scale architectural installations alongside drawings, models, and new sculptures that trace how Lee continually reimagines the future while reflecting on history. Co-organized with Hong Kong museum M+, the exhibition will travel internationally after its debut in Seoul.
Gerhard Richter
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Oct. 10, 2025–Mar. 2, 2026
Few artists have reinvented themselves as relentlessly as Gerhard Richter. This monumental retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton brings together 270 works made from 1962 to 2024, offering the most comprehensive view of the artist’s six-decade career to date. Oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, glass and steel sculptures, and overpainted photographs will be presented in chronological order, with each gallery tracing a chapter in Richter’s restless practice. The show presents everything from paintings based on rare family photographs created in the 1960s, such as Uncle Rudi and Aunt Marianne (both 1965), to his digitally generated “Strip” images—abstract color fields comprising horizontal stripes that the artist has created over the last 15 years.
Other notable bodies of work included in the exhibition include 48 Portraits, a group of photorealistic paintings of famous historical figures created for the 1972 Venice Biennale, and the somber “October 18, 1977” series, which explores the political radicalism of the Baader-Meinhof group. Together, these works underscore the artist’s ability to continually rupture and rebuild his practice. As Richter once remarked, “I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”
Tom Lloyd
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
Nov. 1, 2025–TBA
When The Studio Museum in Harlem opened its doors in 1968, its very first exhibition, “Electronic Refractions II,” was devoted to the pioneering light sculptures of Tom Lloyd. Nearly six decades later, the museum will come full circle, reopening after a seven-year renovation with another Lloyd solo show highlighting both his sculptural practice and his community work.
In particular, the exhibition examines the radical nature of Lloyd’s experiments with electronic light. When the Studio Museum first decided to exhibit these works, it was met with skepticism from audiences. At the time, the flashing, multicolored light fixtures created a stark contrast to other contemporary artworks on display, which often focused on social issues or figurative representations.
The show also foregrounds Lloyd’s political and social commitments in New York, from his activism with the Art Workers’ Coalition to his founding of the Store Front Museum, the first art museum in Queens.
“Robert Rauschenberg and Asia”
M+, Hong Kong
Nov. 22, 2025–TBA
What does it mean to stage cultural exchanges through art? In the 1980s and early ’90s, Robert Rauschenberg intended to answer this question with his ambitious ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange) project. Funded largely by the artist himself, ROCI traveled to sites from Beijing and Lhasa, Tibet, to Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur, gathering ideas and facilitating collaborations with local artists. In each location, Rauschenberg produced works—often monumental in scale—that combined silkscreened photographs with site-specific found materials.
“Robert Rauschenberg and Asia” at Hong Kong’s M+ revisits the initiative, which unfolded across 10 countries from 1984 to 1991 and culminated in Washington, D.C. Featured works include images of Tibetan landscapes layered onto fabric and photographs of Chinese street life embedded in sprawling paintings, all of them reflecting Rauschenberg’s belief that cultural dialogue is simultaneously generative and fraught. The exhibition also coincides with the artist’s centennial.
Uman
“After all the things…”
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Oct. 19, 2025–May 10, 2026
Uman’s first solo museum exhibition, “After all the things …,” will fill the first floor of Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum with a vivid new body of work. The Somali-born, New York–based artist moves fluidly between painting, drawing, video, and sculpture, creating work influenced by her memories of East Africa and diasporic experience across Europe and the U.S.
Working with oil, acrylic, spray paint, collage, and sewn elements, Uman depicts spirals, grids, eyes, stars, and hybrid creatures in bold palettes. The results are phantasmagoric fields of symbols and geometric forms. Much of her imagery begins from personal experience, but she often experiments with how much of herself to reveal. As she once explained, “I want to push and continue to grow, and that means I have to take myself out of the work. It’s something I’m interested in, how much to add or remove myself.”
Tavares Strachan
“The Day Tomorrow Began”
LACMA, Los Angeles
Oct. 12, 2025–Mar. 29, 2026
Tavares Strachan builds installations and text-based sculptures that bring overlooked stories and people into view. His upcoming exhibition at LACMA, featuring 20 new works, will transform galleries into environments as varied as a barbershop, a laundromat, and a field of Indian rice grass.
The artist is not skimping when it comes to scale: Among the new works on view is his most expansive neon piece to date, which draws on quotes from James Baldwin and Mark Twain. Additionally, he will unveil a colossal new resin sculpture titled Flip Monument (Christophe x Napoleon) (2025), which towers at over 16 feet tall. Taken together, Strachan’s exhibition considers how history is constructed, asking whose stories we choose to elevate—and why they matter now.
“Nigerian Modernism”
Tate Modern, London
Oct. 8, 2025–May 10, 2026
Modernism in Nigeria was the product of decolonization and cultural reinvention. “Nigerian Modernism” at Tate Modern, the first exhibition in the U.K. to chart this history, presents more than 250 works made between the 1940s and the end of the 20th century. This showcase features figures such as Aina Onabolu and Akinola Lasekan, who used Western techniques to paint Lagos society and Yoruba legends. Other artists looked to their own cultural traditions for inspiration: Ben Enwonwu studied the forms of Igbo sculpture, while Ladi Kwali incorporated the techniques of Gwari pottery. By blending these local practices with current ideas, they created new ways of making art that carried Nigerian tradition into a modern context.
The exhibition also highlights communities that contributed to these developments. Collectives like the Zaria Arts Society and the Mbari Club sought to define what modern Nigerian art could look like in dialogue with other creatives, from writers to dramatists.
Over time, this vision was also reshaped by conflict and spiritual revolution. Featuring examples of sacred art movements that revitalized Yoruba ritual practice and postwar adaptations of uli, the curvilinear designs of the Igbo people, the exhibition emphasizes how modernism in Nigeria was never static.
Sandra Mujinga, “Skin to Skin”
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Sep. 13, 2025–Jan. 11, 2026
Norwegian artist Sandra Mujinga will conjure an eerie, futuristic world in “Skin to Skin” at the Stedelijk Museum, filling the lower-level gallery with 55 near-identical humanoid figures. Bathed in shifting green light and surrounded by mirrors, the ghostlike figures will be perched on pedestals throughout the space. Some loom like guardians while others recede into shadow, their forms multiplied into an uncanny crowd. Their repetition suggests avatars, or an imagined new species.
The installation is meant to feel protective and unsettling at once, pointing to how Black bodies are often watched and scrutinized but seldom truly seen. An enveloping soundscape, a recurring element in Mujinga’s practice, will intensify the mood.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/o1jgaF6
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