The global art exhibitions I am planning my 2026 travels around

At the start of every January, as I sketch out my plans and research the must-visit destinations for the year ahead, I first make a list of the most important exhibitions around the world, then later connect their chosen coordinates like a constellation. For the art world, 2026 will be monumental: the most prestigious galleries and museums are leaning on major names, and what makes me especially happy is the fact that women are (finally) in the spotlight. Tate Modern stands out in particular, first and foremost with a major exhibition devoted to Tracey Emin’s forty-year career, then an exploration of the life and work of Frida Kahlo, as well as an exhibition examining Ana Mendieta’s influence. The singular, surreal vision of Elsa Schiaparelli will be presented in full at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, Marina Abramović will make history as the first living artist to be given a major solo exhibition there. And that is only the beginning. Art is more than enough reason to pack our bags, buy a one-way ticket, and let our thoughts drift into the clouds. Below, I reveal the most important exhibitions in 2026 that are worth visiting.

Related: 13 artists I discovered in 2025 that truly blew me away

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Nightclubs, unfamiliar bedrooms, and strangers’ sofas: that is New York from a time long past, yet still resonating powerfully in culture. Captured 40 years ago through the lens of photographer Nan Goldin in the photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, these iconic photographs will now be shown in full in the United Kingdom for the first time, in an exhibition at Gagosian on Davies Street in London. The title itself, inspired by a song from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, suggests a kind of opera of the downtown scene. Its protagonists, including the artist herself, are recorded in intimate moments of love and loss. They experience ecstasy and pain through sex and drug use; they spend nights in clubs, then try to build a relationship with their children at home; they confront domestic violence and the devastating consequences of AIDS. This series of 126 portraits, made between 1973 and 1986, pushed the boundaries of what society deemed acceptable, bringing taboo subjects from the margins into the center of the contemporary art scene. Gender, intimacy, and the dance floor are explored through utterly unvarnished settings, with subjects who seem unaware of the camera’s presence, illuminating the harsh reality of the LGBTQ+ community of the time. In a way, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is Nan Goldin’s diary that she allowed others to read. “I don’t choose people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life. These photographs are an invitation into my world, but over time they have become a record of a lost generation,” says Nan.

WHERE? Gagosian, London
WHEN? January 13 to March 21, 2026

Cortesy of Nan Goldin

David Lynch

Three years have passed since Pace Gallery signed an agreement with the celebrated artist and filmmaker David Lynch and hosted his most recent exhibition in New York. If the strong success of the recent sale of his estate is any indication, Lynch’s death last January has done nothing to diminish his enigma. Fortunately, the director of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet also left behind a rich body of equally unsettling visual art. At the end of January, Pace will present several previously unseen works by Lynch as part of his second solo exhibition at the gallery. The Berlin presentation continues an idea that Lynch was actively developing in the year he died. In its new space, on the site of a former gas station, and in collaboration with Galerie Judin, Pace plans to offer an overview of Lynch’s practice, with never-before-seen mixed-media paintings, watercolors in frames Lynch made by hand, lamps, and some of his earliest works as well, such as black-and-white photographs in which he recorded Berlin’s distinctive industrial scenes. All of this is only a prelude to what comes next. In the fall, Pace is planning a significantly larger, more comprehensive retrospective of Lynch’s life’s work at its Los Angeles gallery, the city Lynch called home for more than half a century.

WHERE? Pace Gallery, Berlin
WHEN? January 29 to March 22, 2026

Tracey Emin: A Second Life

Once a rebel whose uncompromisingly frank works, especially the Turner Prize-winning My Bed, shocked audiences, Emin is today a member of the Royal Academy (RA) and a recipient of one of the highest British honors (Dame). Her upcoming exhibition A Second Life explores 40 years of wide-ranging practice across sculpture, drawing, painting, video, and textiles. Among the works on view are the video Why I Never Became a Dancer, as well as the aforementioned famous work My Bed. The exhibition, as the title suggests, is divided between the period before the cancer diagnosis she received and the time after it, marked by a strong commitment to painting. These newer works remain just as direct and brutally honest: I Followed You To The End depicts a figure literally leaking in a deep red, a shade that has become something of Emin’s signature, while beneath it lies a hand-written, confessional text.

WHERE? Victoria and Albert Museum, London
WHEN? February 27, 2026 to August 31, 2026

My Bed, 1998 Tate. Photo by The Duerchheim Collection 2015, courtesy of Tracey Emin

Matisse: 1941–1954

In the early 1940s, Henri Matisse was diagnosed with a serious illness and underwent surgery that left him weakened and with limited mobility. At the time, the artist was already in his seventies, with decades of successful work behind him. Rather than withdraw, Matisse used his significant physical limitations to find new ways of expressing himself. It is well known that he developed the technique of cut-out gouaches then, which preserved the color, energy, and decorative elements of his earlier work. When Matisse died in 1954 at the age of 80, he left behind the final chapter of his career, which included paintings, drawings, illustrated books, textiles, and stained glass.

Grand Palais, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, will present more than 230 of these works, created between 1941 and 1954. Among the highlights, according to the promotional materials, are monumental panels, brush-and-ink drawings, the artist’s book Jazz, and some of his most extraordinary gouache cut-outs: La Tristesse du roi, Zulma, La Danseuse créole, and Nus bleus. The installation emphasizes that, despite all the changes in the final period of Matisse’s work, painting remained “at the heart of his approach.”

WHERE? Grand Palais, Paris
WHEN? March 24 to July 26, 2026

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art

The Victoria and Albert Museum is preparing an exhibition that spans an entire century of the Schiaparelli house’s work, the first time this fashion brand has been the sole subject of a museum exhibition in the United Kingdom. The exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, opening on March 28, traces the brand’s development from its beginnings in the 1920s to today, exploring Elsa Schiaparelli as a personality, an innovator, and a key figure in interwar fashion. The exhibition follows Schiaparelli around the world, from Paris to New York and London, with a particular focus on London, that is, the house’s British clients and the founder’s relationship with the city. More than 200 objects will make up the display, including archival clothing, accessories, jewelry, paintings, photographs, sculptures, furniture, and perfumes. Some of Schiaparelli’s most unusual designs, such as the Tears dress and the famous hat shaped like an upside-down shoe, will be shown alongside works by contemporaries like Pablo Picasso and Man Ray. The museum collaborated with the Schiaparelli house and its current creative director Daniel Roseberry, whose work will also be presented.

WHERE? Victoria and Albert Museum, London
WHEN? March 28 to November 8, 2026

Vogue 1940; Designer Elsa Schiaparelli in a black silk dress with a crocheted collar of her own design and a turban, photo by Fredrich Baker/Condé Nast via Getty Images

Raphael: Sublime Poetry

Raphael: Sublime Poetry will be the first comprehensive international exhibition of loaned works by the Italian master ever held in the United States. Today considered one of the greatest artists of all time, Raphael, who worked in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, became renowned for his unparalleled ability to convey stories, intellectual ideas, and emotion on canvas. The exhibition, prepared over as many as seven years, will present more than 200 of his most important drawings, paintings, tapestries, and works of applied art, loaned from private and public collections worldwide. Many of them have never before been shown together. Among the jewels of the display is The Virgin and Child with Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna) (c. 1510) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which will be reunited for the first time with preparatory drawings from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille. Also on view will be the Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione (c. 1514–1515) from the Louvre, often regarded as one of the greatest portraits of the High Renaissance.

WHERE? The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
WHEN? March 29 to June 29, 2026

Marcel Duchamp

Best known for his so-called Readymades, everyday objects presented like sculptures in galleries, Marcel Duchamp, perhaps more than any other artist, called into question established ideas of what art is today. For that very reason, this exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art marks a major moment for the French American artist and the first North American retrospective of his work in more than 50 years. Conceived chronologically, the exhibition spans painting, sculpture, film, drawing, and printed material across six decades of Duchamp’s career. Key works include the Cubist masterpiece Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), as well as the monumental glass composition The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–1923).

A special section is devoted to Duchamp’s relationship to New York Dada in the 1920s, including L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa that the artist intervened on by adding a beard and mustache. An entire gallery will be dedicated to Box in a Valise (1935–1941), for which Duchamp reproduced his entire oeuvre in miniature. It is important to note that many of Duchamp’s Readymades have been lost since the moment they were made, including the scandalous Fountain (1917), the porcelain urinal that shocked visitors at the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Still, this exhibition will bring together their replicas, further underscoring Duchamp’s enduring obsession with erasing the boundaries between original and copy.

WHERE? Museum of Modern Art, New York
WHEN? April 12 to August 22, 2026

Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art, New York

Helen Frankenthaler

This spring, Kunstmuseum Basel is presenting the largest European exhibition to date of works by the abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler. It is her first solo exhibition in a Swiss museum. Helen is best known for her revolutionary soak-stain technique: she applied thinned paint to unprimed canvas, creating watery, wave-like fields of color. As part of the “second generation” of Abstract Expressionists, she built on artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, then found ways to push the movement forward, in both technique and content. She poured the experience of mid-century femininity, along with many other aspects of her life, into her expansive canvases. Her work laid the groundwork for Color Field painters like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who came after her.

WHERE? Kunstmuseum Basel
WHEN? April 18 to August 23, 2026

Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy

Before heading to Venice this spring for Marina’s exhibition, it is worth recalling the one currently on view in Ljubljana. For more than four decades, Marina Abramović has pushed the limits of her own body and mind, establishing herself as one of the key pioneers of contemporary performance art. Her radical performances have included, among other things, rhythmically stabbing knives between splayed fingers and inviting the audience to use 72 objects of their choice on her nude body. At 79, Abramović shows no signs of slowing down. In 2023, she became the first woman to have a major solo exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, and at the end of 2025 she premiered Balkan Erotic Epic at Aviva Studios in Manchester. That monumental four-hour performance, her largest to date, draws on Balkan myths to explore eroticism, spirituality, and ritual. However, that is not the only milestone on her 2026 calendar. In May, she will become the first living artist to be given a major solo exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice.

The exhibition coincides with the Bijenalom u Veneciji 2026. godine, where Marina became the first woman to win the Golden Lion for best artist in 1997, as well as with her 80th birthday. Transforming Energy will bring together new and earlier works with classic paintings from the museum’s permanent collection. Visitors can expect new performances of iconic works, as well as a presentation of her interactive Transitory Objects. A special highlight will be the opportunity to see Abramović’s photographic work inspired by the Christian iconographic motif of the Pietà, Pietà (with Ulay) (1983), exhibited alongside Titian’s Pietà (c. 1575–1576). Titian’s work, also his last, unfinished painting, marks 450 years since its creation this year. Must-visit.

WHERE? Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice
WHEN? May 6 to October 19, 2026

Photo by Yu Jieyu

Björk: Echolalia

Audiences will have the chance to encounter a different side of the eternal musical enigma Björk when she returns to her native Iceland to present a new art exhibition at the National Gallery of Iceland. The exhibition, titled Echolalia, consists of three immersive installations, the first of which will offer a glimpse into the artist’s forthcoming album. The remaining two works, Ancestress and Sorrowful Soil, are dedicated to Björk’s mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who died in 2018.

Although these works were originally released alongside Björk’s 2022 album Fossora, their presentation in a museum setting enables a far more theatrical experience. Ancestress stands out in particular, featuring a film set in a remote valley in Iceland where a ritual procession unfolds. The film stars Björk and her son Sindri Eldon, with contributions from director Andrew Thomas Huang and James Merry, Björk’s co-creative director and the designer of the masks and ritual objects that appear in the video.

WHERE? National Gallery, Iceland
WHEN? May 30 to September 19, 2026

Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait

Marilyn Monroe had many faces. Unimaginably famous, she was one of the most photographed people in the world, yet mysterious and tragic. She once said, “I’m always alone, no matter what.” Staged in honor of the 100th anniversary of her birth, the exhibition brings together portraits by some of the greatest painters and photographers of all time. From Andy Warhol and his pop art of intense contrasts and explosive color, to the candid photographs of her close friend Sam Shaw. Early images from the 1940s, when she was a teenage pin-up model, show a seductive blend of innocence and ambition. The final frames of Monroe, smiling and relaxed, wrapped in a green towel on a Malibu beach in 1962, the same year she sang “Happy Birthday” to President JFK a few months before her death, reveal very little of the inner turmoil brought on by a divorce under the glare of public scrutiny. Seeing her so different and yet so unmistakably herself is a unique opportunity, both for devoted admirers and for those just beginning to discover her life and story.

WHERE? National Portrait Gallery, London
WHEN? June 4 to September 6, 2026

Marilyn Monroe by Cecil Beaton, bromide print (1956), Collection of the National Portrait Gallery

Frida: The Making of an Icon

The title “icon” is often used too casually today, but in Frida Kahlo’s case it is entirely justified. Despite serious health problems, she became one of the most influential artists of all time, a political activist, and a pioneer of feminism. The upcoming exhibition Frida: The Making of an Icon will include not only 130 of her paintings, but also personal photographs and memorabilia. Around 80 works by painters who worked alongside Kahlo, as well as artists she inspired, will also be presented. The exhibition will also address Frida Kahlo as a cultural phenomenon with an instantly recognizable visual identity shaped by both her vivid fashion style and her many self-portraits.

WHERE? Tate Modern, London
WHEN? June 25, 2026 to January 3, 2027

Mariko Mori: Retrospective

Japanese artist Mariko Mori works with leading scientists and engineers to develop large-scale installations, sculptures, video works, photographs, drawings, and performances. She draws inspiration not only from quantum field theory, astrophysics, and neuroscience, but also from the aesthetics of Japanese anime, Buddhism, and the prehistoric cultures of the Jōmon and the Celts. As a result, her works form a true “mix of influences,” positioned at the intersection of art and science, the old and the modern, the East and the West.

This fall, the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi, Tokyo, opens Mori’s first exhibition in her home country since 2002. A major retrospective of her artistic oeuvre will present iconic works on loan from international museums and collections, along with drawings and archival materials, some of which will be shown for the first time.

WHERE? Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
WHEN? October 31, 2026 to August 28, 2027

Mariko Mori, Wave UFO
1999-2002, Photo by Richard Learoyd