designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this october

October exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

Porcelain bowls drift across pools in Athens, paintings change with the temperature in London, and dense webs of thread fill galleries in Montreal. October’s exhibitions radar takes us through spaces where the artwork changes how we move and what we notice, alongside shows that revisit the images and objects of everyday life. From the domestic futures once promised to American households to the creative exchanges behind 1990s British fashion, designboom rounds up exhibitions to visit around the world this month. 

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.

home of the future, 1925–1985: designing domestic utopias

Self-cleaning kitchens and houses assembled from plastic promised Americans a different domestic life during the twentieth century. At LACMA, Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias follows the ways these visions were imagined and sold, from the scale of a household appliance to an entire living environment.

Architectural models and films appear alongside domestic objects, showing how technology entered the image of tomorrow’s home. The exhibition also asks who these futures were intended to serve and who was excluded from their promises. Alternative visions widen the account beyond the versions of domestic progress promoted to consumers.

name: Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias
museum: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
location: Los Angeles, USA
dates: September 27th, 2026 — March 14th, 2027

geoffrey bawa: architecture for the senses

Geoffrey Bawa’s buildings make room for the landscape around them. At the Vitra Design Museum, Architecture for the Senses traces the Sri Lankan architect’s work through projects in which existing trees and rocks become part of the plan, and gardens carry the experience beyond the walls. The exhibition spans a career of more than fifty years, with buildings ranging from private houses to Sri Lanka’s parliament.

Archival drawings and models sit alongside newly commissioned photographs and films that convey how these spaces feel today. The presentation also examines Bawa’s collaborations with artists and craftspeople, whose textiles and artworks became integral parts of his architecture. Exhibition design is by Lina Ghotmeh Architects.

name: Geoffrey Bawa: Architecture for the Senses
architect: Geoffrey Bawa
museum: Vitra Design Museum
location: Weil am Rhein, Germany
dates: September 26th, 2026 — February 28th, 2027

krasner and pollock: past continuous

Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock met in New York in 1941, then moved to Springs, Long Island, after marrying four years later. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Past Continuous follows their careers together through more than 120 works, giving each artist’s practice space while examining the exchanges between them.

The exhibition takes its title from a 1976 painting by Krasner. Pollock’s poured and dripped compositions appear within a longer artistic trajectory, while Krasner’s changing approaches to abstraction reveal her sustained interest in nature and color. Their shared life runs through the exhibition, followed by the years in which Krasner continued working after Pollock’s death.

name: Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous
artists: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock
museum: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
location: New York, USA
dates: October 4th, 2026 — January 31st, 2027

this is still not a pipe: the afterlife of magritte

Apples and bowler hats return at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery, where René Magritte’s familiar images meet works by more than forty artists. Organized with the Fondation Magritte, This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte brings together paintings and sculpture alongside works on paper from across the Belgian artist’s career.

The exhibition follows the continuing reach of Magritte’s visual puzzles through different generations of artists. Several works were made specifically for the presentation, placing his questions about images and the things they represent within contemporary practice. The installation allows these exchanges to happen across the room, with Magritte’s paintings interspersed among later responses.

name: This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte
artists: René Magritte and more than forty participating artists
gallery: Gagosian
location: London, UK
dates: September 24th — December 12th, 2026

clinamen

White porcelain bowls drift across three circular pools at Onassis Mandra in Athens. As they meet, their edges produce delicate sounds, forming a changing composition within Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installation clinamen.

First developed in 1997, the work takes its title from the unpredictable deviation of atoms described in Epicurean philosophy. This outdoor presentation allows the surrounding weather to enter the composition, with rain adding another sound to the bowls’ movements. Set within a historic open-air theater, the installation gives visitors a place to pause and listen to a work whose arrangement changes from moment to moment.

name: clinamen
artist: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot
venue: Onassis Mandra
location: Athens, Greece
dates: September 26th — December 5th, 2026

chiharu shiota: the soul trembles

Thread stretches through the galleries of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Chiharu Shiota’s The Soul Trembles. Making its North American debut, the touring exhibition covers more than thirty years of the Berlin-based Japanese artist’s career, including installations built by hand in response to the rooms they occupy.

The Montreal presentation includes Uncertain Journey and In Silence, with sculptures and performance documentation extending the account of her practice. Ordinary objects become caught within dense networks of thread, giving physical form to the memories and relationships they carry. Each installation is remade for its setting, continuing Shiota’s interest in the impermanence of both the work and the experiences behind it.

name: Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles
artist: Chiharu Shiota
museum: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
location: Montreal, Canada
dates: September 26th, 2026 — February 14th, 2027

chasing clouds

Early photographers could record a landscape yet struggle to capture the sky above it. Chasing Clouds at The Metropolitan Museum of Art follows the ways artists worked around this problem, from painting skies into photographs to combining separate negatives.

The exhibition begins with nineteenth-century oil sketches, made as painters studied changing weather outdoors and meteorologists developed systems for classifying clouds. Later photographic advances brought the sky within reach of the camera. The presentation ends with Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents from the 1920s, in which cloud formations become images capable of carrying feeling as well as recording nature.

name: Chasing Clouds
museum: Metropolitan Museum of Art
location: New York, USA
dates: through February 28th, 2027

ann veronica janssens: 5 chome 4-1 ginza, tokyo

A pink star made from intersecting beams of light changes the atmosphere of Hermès Maison Ginza Le Forum in Ann Veronica Janssens’s first solo exhibition in Japan. Titled after the gallery’s street address, 5 Chome 4-1 Ginza, Tokyo brings together around a dozen works that respond to the space and the visitor’s perception of it.

The selection includes Rose, formed from seven spotlights, and Swing, whose seat is sensitive to temperature. Across the exhibition, Janssens introduces subtle changes in light and physical sensation, drawing attention to the conditions through which a room is experienced. Curated by Reiko Setsuda, the presentation takes a retrospective view of her practice.

name: 5 Chome 4-1 Ginza, Tokyo
artist: Ann Veronica Janssens
gallery: Hermès Maison Ginza Le Forum
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: September 11th, 2026 — January 11th, 2027

broken: the power of the fragment

A broken sculpture carries traces of what happened to it. At Palazzo Strozzi, Broken: The Power of the Fragment examines how damaged and incomplete works have held viewers’ attention across cultures and centuries, inviting them to imagine the missing whole or consider the fragment on its own terms.

Organized with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the exhibition follows the forces that alter sculpture, including war and iconoclasm. It also examines the artistic possibilities of incompleteness, extending to works conceived as fragments from the outset. Across this history, a surviving piece can preserve evidence of destruction while taking on a new life as an artwork.

name: Broken: The Power of the Fragment
venue: Palazzo Strozzi
location: Florence, Italy
dates: September 25th, 2026 — January 24th, 2027

luciano fabro: abitare lo spazio. inhabiting space

Luciano Fabro’s sculptures ask viewers to consider the room around them. At Pirelli HangarBicocca, Abitare lo spazio. Inhabiting Space gathers around fifty sculptures and installations in the first museum retrospective dedicated to the artist in Italy since his death in 2007.

The exhibition follows his spatial experiments from early works with reflective surfaces to the architectural environments he called ‘habitats.’ Several are reconstructed in the Navate using his original plans and instructions. These environments house other works while shaping the routes and viewpoints through which visitors encounter them, extending sculpture into the experience of moving through a space.

name: Luciano Fabro: Abitare lo spazio. Inhabiting Space
artist: Luciano Fabro
venue: Pirelli HangarBicocca
location: Milan, Italy
dates: October 8th, 2026 — February 21st, 2027

arthur jafa: i am tony

Arthur Jafa occupies two floors of the expanded New Museum with I Am Tony, a survey spanning nearly forty years of his practice. Named after jazz drummer Tony Williams, the exhibition follows the development of a filmic language shaped by the rhythms and textures of Black music.

Celebrated works including Love is the Message, The Message is Death and The White Album appear alongside new work and recent paintings. Sculptural and photographic objects extend the presentation beyond the screen, while large-scale film installations examine how images carry the history and contemporary realities of Black life in America.

name: Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony
artist: Arthur Jafa
museum: New Museum
location: New York, USA
dates: September 24th, 2026 — January 3rd, 2027

kenny scharf

Kenny Scharf’s brightly colored creatures arrive at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in an exhibition presented through its program devoted to the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The Los Angeles-born artist emerged within New York’s East Village scene during the 1980s, developing a visual language he calls ‘Pop Surrealism.’

His fantastical figures draw on popular culture while taking on human expressions and personalities. The exhibition introduces a practice that moves beyond painting into everyday and public settings, reflecting Scharf’s longstanding interest in bringing art into contact with a wider audience. His saturated palette carries the same energy across these different forms.

name: Kenny Scharf
artist: Kenny Scharf
museum: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
location: Madrid, Spain
dates: September 29th, 2026 — January 17th, 2027

trop mignon! l’art du bonheur

An ancient toy hedgehog and contemporary pink figures share the wider history examined in Trop mignon! L’art du bonheur at Louvre-Lens. Bringing together nearly 300 works, the exhibition asks how images and objects produce affection, and why certain forms make people feel comforted.

The presentation moves from antiquity to contemporary ideas of cute and kawaii, exploring the emotional pull of animals alongside the associations of pink. Works by artists including Rosa Bonheur and William Wegman reveal the place of animal companionship within art, while other pieces expose the more ambiguous feelings that can sit beneath an adorable surface.

name: Trop mignon! L’art du bonheur

museum: Louvre-Lens
location: Lens, France
dates: September 23rd, 2026 — January 18th, 2027

justin caguiat: change ringing

Paintings change with the temperature at Serpentine South, where Justin Caguiat uses heat-sensitive pigments in Change Ringing. As conditions shift, forms emerge and disappear across their surfaces, bringing the gallery’s atmosphere into the work.

Bronze bells cast in the shapes of flowers and plant seeds sound in changing sequences throughout the exhibition. Their score, composed by Lily Pickett, draws on English change ringing, while the gallery walls gather and amplify the chimes. Caguiat brings these elements together in an installation that considers buildings as places shaped by repeated actions and accumulated memory.

name: Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing
artist: Justin Caguiat
gallery: Serpentine South
location: London, UK
dates: October 8th, 2026 — January 10th, 2027

remember me

Around 700 works fill the Bourse de Commerce for Remember Me, an exhibition marking the bicentenary of photography’s invention. Drawn from the Pinault Collection, the presentation brings together more than seventy artists, moving between historical photographs and contemporary images.

Curators Matthieu Humery and Lola Regard arrange the works without a chronological sequence, allowing connections to form across different periods and photographic approaches. The title comes from a work by Barbara Kruger, who also presents an installation in the museum’s rotunda and display cases. Throughout the exhibition, photography’s ability to preserve a face or a passing moment provides a shared point of departure.

name: Remember Me
artists: More than seventy participating artists
museum: Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
location: Paris, France
dates: From October 7th, 2026 (closing date unpublished)

myths and monsters: the art of fantasy in asia

Fantasy connects Japanese woodblock prints with the worlds of manga and anime at M+ in Hong Kong. Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia follows these connections from the nineteenth century to the present, examining how imagined characters and environments respond to the circumstances in which they are made.

The exhibition begins with earlier traditions, including Chinese shadow puppetry and Tibetan Buddhist scrolls, before tracing Surrealism’s circulation through Asia and the rise of Japanese manga. Its final chapter follows fantastical anime aesthetics into contemporary design and digital culture, revealing how these images travel between disciplines and across regions.

name: Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia
museum: M+
location: Hong Kong
dates: October 17th, 2026 — April 4th, 2027

solange pessoa: of day or night

Organic and mineral materials connect Solange Pessoa’s work to the landscape of Minas Gerais, the Brazilian region where she lives and works. Of Day or Night at Centro Botín brings early investigations from the 1990s into conversation with recent work, following forms that move between the bodily and the imagined.

Curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Pessoa’s first exhibition in Spain includes two installations made specifically for the building and its setting. References to Brazilian modernism and Indigenous cosmologies run through a practice shaped by the textures of matter, where changes in a material can suggest changes in a body or landscape.

name: Solange Pessoa: Of Day or Night
artist: Solange Pessoa
venue: Centro Botín
location: Santander, Spain
dates: October 10th, 2026 — March 28th, 2027

adam pendleton: some wild kind of language

Adam Pendleton brings eleven paintings and eight large-scale drawings into the historic spaces of the Stedelijk Museum for Some Wild Kind of Language. Many are newly made, extending his work with abstraction and fragmented language onto an architectural scale.

The presentation also changes the museum’s central staircase, turning its white interior into a black environment. Nearby, paintings enter into conversation with the collection and the histories of abstraction associated with the building. Pendleton’s layered surfaces invite the eye to move between a mark and a letter, carrying the act of reading into the experience of looking. 

name: Adam Pendleton: Some Wild Kind of Language
artist: Adam Pendleton
museum: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
dates: October 10th, 2026 — January 17th, 2027

the 90s: art and fashion

Tate Britain returns to a decade when British art and fashion moved through closely connected creative circles. Curated by Edward Enninful, The 90s: Art and Fashion brings artworks into conversation with photographs and clothing, following the exchanges that shaped the period’s public image.

Works by Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst appear alongside photography by Juergen Teller and David Sims, with fashion by Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. The exhibition moves between the DIY sensibility of magazines such as i-D and Dazed and the growing visibility of British contemporary art, recalling a period when experimental work reached an expanding audience.

name: The 90s: Art and Fashion
museum: Tate Britain
location: London, UK
dates: October 8th, 2026 — February 14th, 2027

nike: form follows motion

Experimental prototypes and original design studies offer a view into the development of Nike footwear at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. Form Follows Motion draws primarily from the Department of Nike Archives, tracing five decades of work from the company’s beginnings in Oregon.

Rare designs and one-off pieces appear alongside well-known shoe collaborations, allowing visitors to see the research behind familiar products. Organized by the Vitra Design Museum and curated by Glenn Adamson with assistant curator Marcella Hanika, the exhibition follows the relationship between athletic movement and design. JA Projects designed the exhibition, with graphics by Daniel Streat of Visual Fields.

name: Nike: Form Follows Motion
design company: Nike
museum: Museum of Arts and Design
location: New York, USA
dates: through March 7th, 2027

tracey emin: a second life

Tracey Emin’s unmade bed returns within a wider account of the artist’s life and work at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. A Second Life traces almost forty years of a practice in which personal experiences become material for artworks, from early installations to her continuing commitment to painting.

Developed in close collaboration with Emin and organized by Tate Modern, the exhibition includes works being shown for the first time. Recent paintings sit within a longer history of using the female body to explore pain and recovery. Across the presentation, making art remains closely connected to the artist’s experiences of survival.

name: Tracey Emin: A Second Life
artist: Tracey Emin
museum: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
location: Humlebæk, Denmark
dates: October 8th, 2026 — April 18th, 2027

ibrahim mahama: le temps des récoltes

Parts of a former Ghanaian glass-bottle factory enter Fondation Cartier in Le Temps des récoltes, Ibrahim Mahama’s first Paris exhibition. His installation Things Fall Apart reconstructs the industrial building using its original materials, carrying its history into the institution’s Palais-Royal spaces.

Mahama works with associated artists and collectives across the exhibition, extending the exchanges behind his art centers in Tamale. A new version of Parliament of Ghosts uses traditional wooden Ashanti stools to form a parliamentary chamber where visitors can sit. During the exhibition, this space also hosts performances and discussions, bringing collective activity into the installation itself.

name: Ibrahim Mahama: Le Temps des récoltes
artists: Ibrahim Mahama with associated artists and collectives
venue: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
location: Paris, France
dates: October 22nd, 2026 — February 28th, 2027

penn & fashion

Irving Penn’s photographs give the shape of a garment room to speak. At the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Penn & Fashion follows his career from 1947 to 2008, beginning with Parisian haute couture and continuing through decades of changing fashion.

The exhibition pays particular attention to his collaboration with Issey Miyake, whose sculptural clothing met Penn’s spare photographic approach. Later images retain this attention to volume and texture even as the garments become more elaborate. 

name: Penn & Fashion
artist: Irving Penn
museum: Maison Européenne de la Photographie
location: Paris, France
dates: September 30th, 2026 — January 17th, 2027

kerry james marshall: the histories

Beauty salons and outdoor gathering places become the settings for large-scale paintings in Kerry James Marshall: The Histories. At the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the exhibition follows more than four decades of Marshall’s practice through seventy works, including eight paintings made especially for the exhibition.

His compositions place Black figures within pictorial traditions that have often excluded them, drawing on the history of Western painting and popular culture. Everyday scenes sit alongside imagined portraits of historical figures and works addressing the Middle Passage. The presentation follows these different bodies of work as Marshall develops ways to represent lives and histories within painting.

name: Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
artist: Kerry James Marshall
museum: Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
location: Paris, France
dates: September 18th, 2026 — January 24th, 2027

teamlab: everything exists in infinite continuity

Digital images move across the galleries of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art in Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity, teamLab’s first exhibition in the Midwest. The presentation follows twenty-five years of the Tokyo-based collective’s work, bringing established installations together with new pieces developed for the museum.

The exhibition considers how technology changes the relationship between a viewer and an image. Historical East Asian approaches to perspective inform many of the works, while interactive installations place individual perception within a shared environment. New presentations include Sea of Darkness, Memory Shines from the Depths and works from the collective’s Dissipative Figures series.

name: teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity
artist: teamLab
museum: Smart Museum of Art
location: Chicago, USA
dates: September 22nd, 2026 — February 21st, 2027

metamorphoses: hats by maison michel

A hat begins well before it reaches the head. At la Galerie du 19M, Metamorphoses: Hats by Maison Michel follows the materials and workshop gestures behind the Parisian house’s headwear, moving from the origins of a material to the form it takes when worn.

Founded in 1936, Maison Michel brings its archives into conversation with new works and collaborations with young designers. The wider program gives visitors opportunities to work with straw and felt, including a collaborative weaving workshop by Emma Bruschi. Michel Gondry’s Home Movie Factory also invites participants to make a short film within a setting inspired by an early twentieth-century hat shop.

name: Metamorphoses: Hats by Maison Michel
design house: Maison Michel
gallery: la Galerie du 19M
location: Paris/Aubervilliers, France
dates: September 23rd — December 13th, 2026