Shows, Museum Openings, and Biennials to Visit

Never before in the history of the Venice Biennale has a curator died during the production of their show, making the 2026 edition a first. That exhibition was conceived by Koyo Kouoh, a star curator of the African art scene who died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2025, having battled cancer in private. Kouoh did leave behind a framework for her show, which will be titled “In Minor Keys” and is now being seen through by a set of curators she had already appointed before her passing. Complementing her main exhibition will be the usual set of national pavilions bringing together artist emissaries from across the globe. Among those participating in the world’s biggest art festival for the first time is El Salvador, whose first pavilion will be done by J. Oscar Molina.

While the Venice Biennale may be the biggest recurring art exhibition held anywhere this year, it is hardly the only one. The Whitney Biennial, a once-every-two-years survey of American art the Whitney Museum in New York, kicks things off in March, followed by the Carnegie International at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art in May. Both of those shows cater mainly to US-based viewers, but neither are all-American; the Whitney Biennial this time features artists from the Philippines, Afghanistan, Japan, Palestine, and elsewhere. Internationally, there’s the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in January, the Biennale of Sydney in March, and the Gwangju Biennale in September. There’s also a new entrant to the biennial circuit: Rubaiya Qatar, a quadrennial staged across the titular country that makes its debut in November.

Despite the repeatedly voiced sentiment that fairs have grown prohibitively expensive for some galleries, these events just keep coming. This year, Art Basel and Frieze, the two leaders in the fair circuit, are both adding Middle Eastern editions to their respective portfolios. In February, Art Basel will launch a fair in Qatar. In an unusual move, Art Basel Qatar will be led not by a market expert but by an artist: Wael Shawky, whose past accomplishments include representing Egypt at the Venice Biennale, and who will now spearhead the presentations of around 50 galleries. Seven months later, in November, Frieze will kick off its first fair in Abu Dhabi, where a long-awaited Guggenheim museum is expected to finally open in 2026.

No new museum opening in 2026 is glitzier than Los Angeles’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a private institution founded by the married couple George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, both of whom appear on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. The museum has spent the past several years acquiring important works by Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, Robert Colescott, and others, and is now getting ready to unveil them in a new Ma Yansong–designed building. A series of delays and a cascade of departures by high-ranking staff have cast a pall over the opening, which is currently slated for September. Whether or not the museum is still facing turmoil behind the scenes by that point, the inauguration will be closely watched.

The year’s other big private museum is not in an art destination. The Muzej Lah will host the holdings of Slovenian philanthropists Igor and Mojca Lah, who both appear on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. Set in the Slovenian town of Bled, the David Chipperfield–designed museum may be located in a picturesque mountain range, but the art on view is not merely eye candy. Heady pieces by the likes of Hito Steyerl, Anselm Kiefer, Zoran Mušič, William Kentridge, Anne Imhof, and more will figure in the galleries, which Chipperfield has called “an ideal setting for the collection and give the visitor a strong sense of the surrounding landscape.”

Kanal, a long-awaited Brussels art museum, is set to become one of Europe’s biggest art spaces, surpassing both the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern—before its 2016 expansion, anyway—in scale. Set in a former Citroën garage, Kanal is years in the making and is now closer than ever to become a reality—if a complex arrangement with the Pompidou and a long-running Belgian government shutdown don’t unravel things. The plan, as it currently stands, is for the museum to open in November, kicking off a five-year-long partnership with the Pompidou that will see the Paris museum loan masterworks of modern art while it’s closed for renovation. (There will also be new commissions, including a playground designed by the Turner Prize–winning architecture collective Assembly.) Whether any of that will come to pass is an open question. Kazia Redzisz, the museum’s director, recently told the Guardian that she never expected the government to be shut down during Kanal’s opening, adding, “If there isn’t a decision on the budget, we risk having to stop construction, threatening the entire project’s future.”

Since 2017, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Peter Zumthor–designed expansion has polarized critics. The negativity hardly died down in 2024, when the expansion, officially titled the David Geffen Galleries, was first unveiled to journalists, who have variously termed Zumthor’s space an “amoebic pancake” and “the blob.” Blobby though it may be, Zumthor’s structure adds a whopping 110,000 square feet to a museum that is already quite grand, making the opening of David Geffen Galleries a major occasion. Those galleries will notable not just for Zumthor’s concrete walls but for what’s held within them: LACMA’s curators have promised an unconventional hang that breaks down the boundaries that typically separate curatorial departments. Outside those walls, there will be new commissions by Liz Glynn, Diana Thater, Thomas Houseago, and more.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art singlehandedly invented the blockbuster museum exhibition in 1978 with its monumental King Tut show; still today, no other institution does grandly scaled surveys like this one. But even by the Met’s own standards, its forthcoming Raphael retrospective is ambitious. Seven years in the making and opening in March, the show features some 200 works attesting the continued brilliance of this Renaissance master, whose paintings of antiquity and biblical scenes established rules of perspective that are still in use today. He is one of the most famous artists of all time, a fixture in college curricula in various disciplines and a pillar of art history. Astonishingly, he has never been the subject of a US retrospective until now.

In 2004, the Guardian reported that Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 readymade Fountain, a urinal turned on its side, was voted the most influential artwork of all time by 500 art professionals. There are no signs that Duchamp’s influence has dimmed in the years since, which makes it all the more surprising that the last retrospective for the Dada artist in the US, the country where he spent part of his career, was staged in 1973. The Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Art Museum are rectifying that in 2026. In April, MoMA will premiere the exhibition, which features nearly 300 works, including the Cubism-inspired painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1913). That painting is normally held in Philadelphia and has not visited New York—where it premiered in the US, at the 1913 Armory Show—since the last Duchamp retrospective.

Equally inspirational to many artists today is Frida Kahlo, the Surrealism-affiliated Mexican painter whose explorations of Latina identity and disability now seem way ahead of their time. Following a new record for her set at auction this past November, two Kahlo shows are alighting in the US. The bigger of the two, “Frida: The Making of an Icon,” opens on January 19 at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in Texas and will disentangle a number of myths about Kahlo’s persona that remain pervasive; the exhibition moves across the pond, to Tate Modern in London, in June. MoMA, meanwhile, is surveying Kahlo’s marriage to the painter Diego Rivera in March with a small show opening in tandem with a new opera about the two artists debuting at the Metropolitan Opera in May.

No longer an obscure figure of recent art history, Ana Mendieta is today considered a feminist art icon in the US, with her performances connecting her body to American and Cuban landscapes counted as some of the key works of the 1970s. Shockingly, no one has endeavored to give her a retrospective since 1987, when New York’s New Museum surveyed her work in full. Tate Modern will one-up that show with an even bigger retrospective due to open in July. While Mendieta’s widely seen photographs documenting performances about her body and sexual violence will be on display, the exhibition also aims to expose less often shown sides of her oeuvre, including her films, some of which have been newly remastered.

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo continues its canon-expanding “Historiás” series in 2026 with a slew of shows centered around the history of Latin American art. The shows are essentially a victory lap for Adriano Pedrosa, the museum’s artistic director, who curated the 2024 Venice Biennale and is now giving some of its participants solo exhibitions on his home turf, working in collaboration with others on staff the museum. La Chola Poblete, an Argentine painter who received a special mention at that Biennale for works that mapped histories of strife, will receive a one-person show here; Claudia Alarcón, a Wichí weaver whose work was a hit with critics in Venice, will also see her work with the all-female Silät collective surveyed. But ahead of the blowout “Latin American Histories” exhibition in September, Pedrosa and his team will stage exhibitions for Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Damián Ortega, and the Colectivo Acciones de Arte.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, who currently serves as the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, has published so many interviews with artists that it’s sometimes difficult to remember he has also occasionally written on a more easily accessible subject: himself. In 2026, he’s publishing his memoir, which roots his intense desire to curate in childhood trauma. As this book, titled Life in Progress, recounts, Obrist was hit by a car when he was just six years old. The incident induced an epiphany: “You must make every day great, I realized, and every day something has to happen—you can’t wait for tomorrow,” as Obrist told Frieze last year, when the book published in Europe. American readers now have the opportunity to find out how Obrist made good on that realization.

Obrist’s institution, the Serpentine Galleries, will also be in the news in the spring when it unveils a monumental David Hockney work depicting the changing seasons. The Hockney work is a direct response to the Bayeux Tapestry, which will be on view in London simultaneously at the British Museum. The 224-foot-long embroidered cloth, which depicts the events preceding the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, is typically housed in France, and has not visited England in over 900 years. The loan has been mired in controversy: art historians have warned that the cloth is too fragile for travel, and some in the UK have raised questions about the cost of bringing it home. Yet no one would deny that the loan is anything short of momentous.

Some blockbusters impress because of the length of their checklists; others stun because of the high quality of the few works on view. “Van Eyck: The Portraits,” opening at the National Gallery in London in November, will fall into the latter category. The exhibition is based around fewer than a dozen paintings, but those works are of huge significance, accounting for roughly half of all the portraits produced singlehandedly by Jan van Eyck in the Netherlands in the 15th century. Naturally, one of those is a jewel of the National Gallery collection: the Arnolfini Portrait (1434), which made innovative use of oil paint to achieve a level of detail that was previously impossible for painters to obtain. Surrounding it will be other intricate portraits from museums in Berlin, Bruges, and Vienna.

Some 650,000 people visited the Rijksmuseum’s 2023 Johannes Vermeer retrospective, but Vermeer mania did not end with when that show closed. If anything, the craze is likely to continue into 2026, which will see the release of a new biography. Titled Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found and releasing in April, it was written by Andrew Graham-Dixon, whose past books include the definitive biography of Caravaggio, and it ought to do a lot to clarify some missing details in the biography of Vermeer, a Dutch Old Master whose luminous paintings are world-famous, even as the details of his personal life remain elusive.

More so than other US Presidents, Barack Obama made visual art a fixture of his administration, at one point even hanging an Alma Thomas abstraction in the White House well before she had a big retrospective. Obama has continued supporting the arts since leaving office, and is now set to keep doing just that with his Barack Obama Presidential Library, a vast Chicago space that doubles as a museum and an educational space that’s set to open in June. Set to appear here are a range of newly commissioned artworks by artists such as Julie Mehretu, Aliza Nisenbaum, Kiki Smith, Idris Khan, Jenny Holzer, and more. The building will also showcase local talents such as Theaster Gates, who will debut an installation making use of material from the Ebony and Jet archives.

Though he died at 96 nearly a month ago, many are still assessing the legacy left behind by Frank Gehry, whose postmodern structures composed of pile-ups of steel forms changed architecture forever. Gehry may be most famous for the museums he designed, most notably the Guggenheim Bilbao. (And he died with yet one more museum in the offing: the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, whose opening has not yet been debated but appears to be in the near future.) It is fitting, then, that his biggest posthumous celebration will take place at an art institution. The Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, is feting Gehry with a retrospective in May that will feature documentation related to more than two dozen of his projects.

The World Cup returns in 2026, with the games split across venues in Canada, Mexico, and the US, and art museums are responding in kind. The most high-profile soccer-related exhibition of the year is set to take place in Mexico City at the Museo Jumex, which is staging “Fútbol y Arte. Esa misma emoción” (Football & Art. A Shared Emotion) in March. Among the works included in that show is Marta Minujín’s 1977 painting Mi Mundial, in which a giantess reclines atop a soccer stadium. Meanwhile, in February, LACMA is staging “Fútbol: The Beautiful Game,” which broadly explores the intersection of sports and politics through such works as Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon’s famed 2006 video installation Zidane, a 21st century portrait, about the titular French soccer phenom.

Dealers have sold a banana and pooping robots at past editions of Art Basel Miami Beach. How crazy is it to imagine a gallery peddling a dead body at the fair? That’s the premise of The Gallerist, a new film directed by Cathy Yan (of Birds of Prey fame) premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this month ahead of a theatrical release later in the year. Natalie Portman stars in the film, whose cast also includes Jenna Ortega, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Zach Galifianakis, and Charli XCX.