designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this january

january exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

January opens with exhibitions that reflect on perception, memory, and the structures shaping contemporary life. From Paul Cézanne’s late paintings at Fondation Beyeler to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s intimate drawings at Louisiana, the month foregrounds practices grounded in sustained looking and material intensity. Survey presentations of Sol LeWitt in Japan and Lee Miller at Tate Britain revisit figures who reshaped artistic authorship, image-making, and the terms of modern art.

Across institutions, artists probe space and experience in distinct ways. Olafur Eliasson invites heightened awareness at Museum MACAN, while Katharina Grosse expands painting into architecture through saturated fields of colour. Anne Imhof’s first solo exhibition in Portugal unfolds at Serralves, Erwin Wurm occupies the full Pantin space at Thaddaeus Ropac, and Dan Flavin’s light-based grids return at David Zwirner. Elsewhere, Martin Parr’s photography surveys leisure and consumption, and Pierre Huyghe’s new commission at Halle am Berghain translates uncertainty into a sensory environment.

Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and listings on our dedicated events guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them around the globe.

Louise Nevelson: Mrs. N’s Palace

Louise Nevelson is widely recognised as a defining sculptor of the 20th century, yet this exhibition situates her work beyond the familiar narratives of Cubism, Constructivism, and Dada. It places dance and performance at the center of her practice, tracing how decades of movement training and her fascination with Martha Graham shaped a spatial language grounded in bodily experience. Travels to Mexico and Guatemala in 1950 further expanded her sense of scale and symbolism, steering her assemblages toward environments that feel monumental and immersive.

From her first large installations in the late 1950s, Nevelson conceived sculpture as a total space assembled from salvaged wood, unified through monochrome surfaces and shaped by light and shadow. The Centre Pompidou-Metz exhibition reconstructs these environments alongside works from across her career, presenting them as interconnected atmospheres rather than isolated objects. Together, they reflect her sustained interest in theatricality, movement, and the viewer’s physical presence within space.

name: Louise Nevelson: Mrs. N’s Palace
artist: Louise Nevelson
museum: Centre Pompidou-Metz
location: Metz, France
dates: January 24th — August 31st, 2026

Louise Nevelson, Rain Forest Wall, 1967, image courtesy Centre Pompidou-Metz

Cézanne

For the first time in its history, the Fondation Beyeler will present an exhibition devoted to Paul Cézanne, focusing on the final and most consequential phase of his career. Drawing from one of the museum’s strongest holdings, the exhibition centers on the subjects that defined Cézanne’s later years, including still-lifes, portraits, landscapes, and bathers.

Bringing together around 80 oil paintings and watercolors, the exhibition traces Cézanne’s sustained investigation of form, light, and color. Seen together, these works articulate the structural rigor and perceptual intensity that positioned Cézanne as a foundational figure of modern art and continue to shape artistic practice today.

name: Cézanne
artist: Cézanne
museum: Fondation Beyeler
location: Riehen, Switzerland 
dates: January 25th — May 26th, 2025

Paul Cezanne, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves, 1902–06, image courtesy Fondation Beyeler

Basquiat – Headstrong

Louisiana presents Basquiat – Headstrong, a major exhibition devoted to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s works on paper, with a focused examination of the human head as a recurring motif. Bringing together drawings in oilstick on paper primarily from 1981 to 1983, the exhibition marks the first comprehensive institutional presentation of this body of work and the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Scandinavia. Many of the works were kept private during Basquiat’s lifetime, remaining largely unseen and separate from his better-known painted output.

These drawings move between structure and dissolution, ranging from skull-like forms to stylised faces whose eyes and mouths suggest interior spaces charged with emotional intensity. Largely absent of the text and symbols that define much of Basquiat’s practice, the heads stand as autonomous works rather than studies, revealing a quieter, more introspective dimension of his process.

name: Basquiat – Headstrong
artist: Jean-Michel Basquiat
museum: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
location: Humlebaek, Denmark
dates: January 30th — May 17th, 2026

Mosquito Coil, 1982. private collection. artwork © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. licensed by Artestar, New York

MARTIN PARR: GLOBAL WARNING

This exhibition revisits the work of Martin Parr, tracing five decades of photography that observe the contradictions and excesses of contemporary life. From the late 1970s to the present, and across locations worldwide, Parr has assembled a body of work that offers a sharply observed portrait of inequality, consumption, and everyday behavior shaped by modern lifestyles.

Bringing together around 180 works, from early black-and-white photographs to recent color series, the exhibition unfolds through thematic sections that reflect Parr’s recurring concerns. His images examine mass tourism, car culture, technological dependence, consumer excess, and shifting relationships with the natural world, often with an offbeat visual language that blends humor with critique. Over time, the apparent lightness of these scenes gives way to a more pointed reading, situating Parr’s practice within a tradition of British irony. 

name: Martin Parr: Global Warning
artist: Martin Parr
museum: Jeu de Paume
location: Paris, France
dates: January 30th — May 24th, 2026

Japan. Miyazaki. The Artificial beach inside the Ocean Dome. 1996. Japan. Miyazaki. The Artificial beach inside the Ocean Dome. 1996

Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse is widely regarded as one of the most influential painters working today, known for a practice that treats color as both material and action. Since the late 1990s, her use of industrial spray techniques has expanded painting beyond the canvas, carrying saturated color across walls, floors, ceilings, and constructed forms. These works position space itself as an active surface, where color operates with physical force and immediacy, shaping perception through scale, speed, and intensity.

Alongside these in-situ interventions, Grosse continues to develop studio paintings that compress this sense of movement onto the canvas. In her recent works, loops of vivid color hover against white ground, creating the impression of suspended motion and layered depth. Balancing chance with control, these paintings explore density, velocity, and the instability of form, remaining resistant to narrative interpretation while sustaining a heightened, immersive visual experience.

name: Katharina Grosse
artist: Katharina Grosse
museum: Galerie Max Hetzler
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: January 15th — February 28th, 2026

Katharina Grosse, psychylustro, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2014

Pierre Huyghe at Halle am Berghain

In a new commission at Berlin’s Halle am Berghain, Pierre Huyghe presents a large-scale environment that draws on quantum experiments to examine uncertainty and unstable perception. Composed of film, sound, vibration, dust, and light, the work centers on a mythic film following a faceless human figure that Huyghe describes as a hybrid presence shaped by absence. The environment frames perception as a shifting condition, where multiple states coexist before resolving into a single experience.

Developed in collaboration with scientist Tommaso Calarco through LAS and the Hartwig Art Foundation, the project treats the logic of quantum systems as raw material rather than metaphor. Data and experimental processes inform sound, moving images, and stills, allowing indeterminacy to guide both form and production. The installation translates quantum principles into sensory terms, creating an experience shaped by fluctuation, overlap, and continual transformation.

name: Pierre Huyghe at Halle am Berghain
artist: Pierre Huyghe
museum: LAS Art Foundation
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: January 23rd — March 8th, 2026

Lee Miller

Tate Britain presents the most extensive UK retrospective to date of Lee Miller, positioning her as one of the 20th century’s most urgent photographic voices. First encountering the medium as a model in the late 1920s, Miller quickly moved behind the camera, establishing herself within avant-garde circles in New York, Paris, London, and Cairo.

Bringing together around 250 vintage and modern prints, including works never previously exhibited, the exhibition traces the full scope of Miller’s career, from her role within French surrealism to fashion and war photography. It also foregrounds lesser-known chapters of her practice, including photographs made in Egypt during the 1930s, revealing a body of work shaped by formal invention, independence, and a sustained refusal of fixed roles.

name: Lee Miller
artist: Lee Miller
museum: Tate Britain
location: London, UK
dates: October 2nd, 2025 — February 15th, 2026

Lee Miller, Model with lightbulb, Vogue Studio, London, England c.1943 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024

Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey

Museum MACAN presents Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey, an exhibition tracing key themes from the Icelandic-Danish artist’s practice over the past three decades. Marking Eliasson’s first major solo exhibition in Southeast Asia, the presentation brings together installations, paintings, and sculptures that reflect the breadth of his approach across media.

Eliasson’s works draw on light, color, movement, and natural phenomena to heighten awareness of perception and environment, often activated through the presence and movement of visitors. Alongside works from the Museum MACAN collection, the exhibition arrives in Jakarta following presentations at the Singapore Art Museum, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, before concluding its Asia-Pacific tour in Manila.

name: Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey
artist: Olafur Eliasson
museum: Museum MACAN
location: Jakarta, Indonesia
dates: November 29th, 2025 — April 12th, 2026

Design and Disability

Design and Disability presents a wide-ranging survey of the ways Disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people have shaped contemporary design and culture from the 1940s to the present. Bringing together 170 objects across three sections, Visibility, Tools, and Living, the exhibition traces how design emerges from lived experience and political agency rather than accommodation alone. Spanning design, art, architecture, fashion, and photography, it positions Disabled practitioners as active producers who have shaped everyday life and representation.

The exhibition moves from practices of self-representation and DIY publishing to adaptive technologies and speculative forms of living. Works range from hacked prosthetics and landmark tools such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller to photographs, protest-led design, and environments conceived for rest and sensory regulation. Together, these objects foreground inventiveness, resistance to ableist norms, and collective imagination.

name: Design and Disability
museum: V&A South Kensington
location: London, UK
dates: until February 15th, 2026

‘The best lovers are good with their hands’ by Harry McAuslan, issued by AIDS Ahead part of the British Deaf Association, 1992

Anne Imhof

Fun ist ein Stahlbad (Fun is a steel bath) is Anne Imhof’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, presenting a group of largely new works made for the Museu de Serralves. A large-scale sculpture installed in the Pátio do Ulmeiro engages directly with Álvaro Siza’s architecture and leads into the galleries, where sculptures, paintings, and moving-image works evoke fragility, abandonment, and the unsettled conditions of contemporary life.

The exhibition takes the idea of a ‘steel bath’ as a material and conceptual thread, reflecting Imhof’s sustained interest in bodies, endurance, and exposure. Drawing on the affective charge of queer and youth culture, the works echo the intensity of her performances, attentive to desire, visibility, and vulnerability. The title references Adorno and Horkheimer’s writing on fun as discipline, a tension that quietly runs through the project.

name: Fun ist ein Stahlbad
artist: Anne Imhof
museum: Serralves
location: Porto, Portugal
dates: December 12th, 2025 — April 19th, 2026

courtesy Nvstudio, Serralves Foundation

Erwin Wurm: Tomorrow: Yes

Tomorrow: Yes presents Erwin Wurm’s first solo exhibition to occupy the full Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin space. The exhibition is structured around two monumental installations: a compressed schoolhouse that visitors can enter, first shown in Wurm’s 2024 retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna, and a six-meter-tall bent sailing boat installed at full scale.

Spanning the past fifteen years of the artist’s practice, the exhibition brings together works in materials ranging from marble and bronze to aluminum, including several shown for the first time. Seen collectively, they articulate a sculptural language attuned to the abstract and intangible, reflecting Wurm’s ongoing rethinking of scale, form, and the conventions of sculpture.

name: Tomorrow: Yes
artist: Erwin Wurm
gallery: Thaddaeus Ropac
location: Paris, France
dates: January 17th — April 19th, 2026

Tomorrow: Yes Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Pantin, France, photo: Markus Gradwohl

Dan Flavin: Grids

David Zwirner presents an exhibition devoted to Dan Flavin’s grid works, a pivotal body of work the artist began in 1976. This focused presentation revisits the grids through re-creations of their original installation formats, alongside loans from major public collections and the Estate of Dan Flavin.

From his early use of a single fluorescent tube in the diagonal of May 25th, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) to the complex installations developed over the following decades, Flavin pursued a rigorous exploration of light as structure. Working exclusively with commercially available fluorescent lamps, he conceived his installations as spatial situations, using color and illumination to define, measure, and transform architectural space.

name: Dan Flavin: Grids
artist: Dan Flavin
gallery: David Zwirner
location: New York, USA
dates: January 15th — February 21st, 2026

Devon Turnbull: HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3

New York’s Cooper Hewitt exhibits the experimental sound art of designer Devon Turnbull with its newly opened installation, HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3. The show sees a gallery within the museum’s historic Carnegie Library transformed into a dedicated space for deep listening. On view through July 19th, 2026, Turnbull’s large-scale, handmade audio system signals the museum’s broader engagement with sound through Art of Noise, an exhibition organized by SFMOMA.

Turnbull, known under the name OJAS, approaches audio engineering as a design practice grounded in craft and long-term experimentation. His systems appear as monolithic objects that express their weight and invite attention even in silence. Here, sound fills the gallery evenly, and encourage stillness and sustained focus among visitors.

name: HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3
artist: Devon Turnbull
museum: Cooper Hewitt
location: New York, USA
dates: December 12th, 2025 — July 19th, 2026

Devon Turnbull, HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2025; courtesy Devon Turnbull/Lisson Gallery; photo: Mark Waldhauser

Democratic Design: Space for Cooperation, Collaboration und Compromise

Democratic Design – Space for Cooperation, Collaboration and Compromise is a program presented by Aedes that examines how architecture, planning processes, and public space can support democratic engagement and social cohesion. Developed in response to growing social uncertainty, the initiative brings together an exhibition, a series of Lab Talks, and a publication featuring contributions from practitioners across Berlin, Germany, and Europe.

At its core, the program focuses on participatory planning and the spaces that emerge from democratic processes. The projects on view foreground inclusion, amplify marginalised voices, and propose spatial frameworks for dialogue, exchange, and shared decision-making. Presented at Aedes in Berlin, the exhibition reflects on architecture’s capacity to encourage cooperation and compromise at a moment when public trust in civic participation is under strain.

name: Democratic Design: Space for Cooperation, Collaboration und Compromise
museum: Aedes Architecture Forum
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: December 13th, 2025 — January 28th, 2026

Mont Réel, CA, 2017 © Gupta Ashutosh

Sol LeWitt: Open Structure

Sol LeWitt is widely regarded as a defining figure of late twentieth-century American art, known for positioning ideas as the foundation of artistic practice. This exhibition, the first major public museum survey of his work in Japan, presents wall drawings, structures, works on paper, and artist’s books that demonstrate how plans, systems, and instructions shape form.

At the center of the exhibition is LeWitt’s concept of open structure, visible in modular cube works and wall drawings executed by others. By exposing frameworks, allowing variation, and accepting change over time, his work challenges fixed notions of authorship, permanence, and originality. Together, the works reflect a practice grounded in shared ideas and continual reinterpretation.

name: Sol LeWitt: Open Structure
artist: Sol LeWitt
museum: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
location: Tokyo Japan
dates: until April 2nd, 2026

Sol Lewitt, Structure (One, Two, Three, Four, Five as a Square), 1978-80. Collection of Shiga Museum of Art © 2025 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery

Shared Ground: Sarita Westrup & Lewis Prosser

Superhouse presents Shared Ground, a two-artist exhibition bringing together the sculptural basketry of Sarita Westrup and Lewis Prosser. The exhibition stages a transatlantic dialogue between South Texas and South Wales, examining how inherited craft traditions are reworked as contemporary practices shaped by place, memory, and environment.

Westrup and Prosser each approach basketry as a living language rather than a fixed form. Westrup’s woven structures draw on the material cultures of the Rio Grande Valley to reflect on border, belonging, and transformation, while Prosser’s practice engages British craft traditions through sculptural form and performance, emphasizing ritual, humour, and social exchange. Seen together, their works frame weaving as a knowledge system that carries history while remaining open to reinvention, positioning craft as a means of connection across geography and time.

name: Shared Ground: Sarita Westrup & Lewis Prosser
artist: Sarita Westrup, Lewis Prosser
museum: Superhouse
location: New York, USA
dates: January 8th, 2025 — February 21st, 2026

Shared Ground: Sarita Westrup & Lewis Prosser, Superhouse, image courtesy Superhouse

Robert Wilson. Mother

Mother is a multidisciplinary project combining theater, art, and music, inspired by Michelangelo’s unfinished Pietà. Conceived as the final work by American director and playwright Robert Wilson before his death in July 2025, the piece offers an immersive experience that moves beyond religious narrative to address the universal theme of maternal grief and mercy.

At its center is a historic plaster cast of the Pietà, commissioned in 1953 from conservator Cesare Gariboldi, staged within a precisely composed environment of light, sound, and space. The sculpture is enveloped by a score of string music and Arvo Pärt’s Stabat Mater, alongside Wilson’s own drawings made in response to the work. Installed within a fully darkened gallery, the project reconstructs the atmosphere of the former Spanish Hospital at Milan’s Castello Sforzesco, framing an experience that sits between performance, installation, and sound, and foregrounds sustained attention and emotional presence.

name: Robert Wilson. Mother
artist: Robert Wilson
museum: Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo
location: Rome, Italy
dates: December 12th, 2025 —  January 18th 2026

Robert Wilson. Mother, image courtesy MAXXI