Exhibitions

‘The personal is political.’ This slogan from the 1970s feminist movement is quoted time and again. It takes on special significance in the work of Paula Rego (1935–2022), one of the most important Portuguese artists of our time. A major retrospective at the Folkwang Museum, featuring around 120 exhibits, now focuses on the political aspects of her visually powerful paintings. Her work, which is often surreal or fantastical, deals with themes such as political and sexual violence, abuse of power, social injustice, physical self-determination, and mental health. Even in her early paintings from the 1950s, before she emigrated to Great Britain, Rego addressed the impact of António de Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship on Portuguese society. A highlight of the exhibition is the 'Abortion Series', begun in 1998 in response to the failure to legalise abortion in Portugal. As with all of Rego's works, the rarely exhibited paintings in this series are highly relevant once again in light of the resurgence of totalitarian ideologies.

Image: 
Paula Rego
Celebration, 1953
Courtesy The Estate of Paula Rego and Victoria Miro

Following exhibitions at the Kunstverein Hannover (2007) and the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (2009), 'KAIROS / Hauntological Variations' at K21 is Julie Mehretu's first solo institutional exhibition in Germany in over 15 years. Spanning three decades, the exhibition showcases the artist's complete body of work. Born in Ethiopia in 1970, Mehretu emigrated to the United States with her family in 1977. Today, Mehretu, who lives in New York, is considered one of the most important painters of our time. Nearly 100 pieces trace her artistic development, from her early drawings in the 1990s to her most recent abstract paintings. Mehretu's personal history of migration has influenced her art, which deals with historical crises, upheavals, and conflicts. She uses media images and archival materials that mark central political events and historical locations in her works. Using techniques such as painting, drawing, airbrushing and screen printing, she transforms these once familiar images into abstract compositions. These abstractions depict and reflect on places and moments in recent history, ranging from the Grenfell Tower fire in London to the destroyed palace of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. In Düsseldorf, alongside previously unseen drawings and works on paper, the source material behind Mehretu's paintings are displayed for the first time.

Image: 
Julie Mehretu © George Etheredge/Plus Magazine

Petrit Halilaj's childhood and youth were shaped by war and displacement. Born in 1986 in Kosovo, the artist frequently returns to his homeland to visit significant places in his hometown and explore collective history, his own biography, fairy tales and legends. However, he also examines the non-human history of animals, plants and ecological systems, which has also been affected by humans. Halilaj's poetic installations provide a space for freedom, longing, intimacy and identity, even where there is otherwise none. To this end, he often collaborates with others. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Venice Biennale. His first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin is an opera that explores the possibilities of collective dreaming to bring forth open and emancipatory worlds. For this project, he has invited the Kosovo Philharmonic Orchestra, founded after the Kosovo War, which is celebrating its 25^th anniversary this year.

Image: 
Petrit Halilaj, RU (Aves Migrantis), 2017-22 (detail)Exhibition view New Museum, New
YorkInstallation consisting of 79 elements, wood, earth, glue, brass, resinInstalled dimensions
variableImage courtesy the artist and Chert Lüdde, BerlinPhoto by Dario Lasagni
Powered by

Hans Peter Feldmann, who passed away in 2023 aged over 80, was one of Germany's most important conceptual artists. The Guggenheim Museum in New York honoured his whimsical and subversive work, and he held major exhibitions in Germany and abroad. Nevertheless, the eccentric Düsseldorf native remained rather under the radar in terms of public awareness. This may be due to his almost austere reserve, or to the radicalism and whimsicality with which he questioned the lofty aura of art. His best-known works include a slightly deformed pink David loosely based on Michelangelo's original, a cross-eyed Nefertiti and Wilhelmine family portraits adorned with clown noses.

However, Feldmann was interested in much more than just humour. For him, art was a trivial, everyday phenomenon and form of communication — a democratic affair. Everyone is exposed to it, and everyone consumes it. Now, the first major retrospective since his death is on display in Düsseldorf. Showcasing the range of Feldmann's work, 120 pieces are on display, including his early photographs from the 1970s, sculptures made from everyday objects, expansive installations, and more recent pieces which are being exhibited here for the first time.

Image: 
Hans-Peter Feldmann, Familie mit roten Nasen, 2015, Ölgemälde, übermalt, 96 x 84 x 4 cm, Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

In her first solo institutional exhibition worldwide, Charmaine Poh — Deutsche Bank's “Artist of the Year” — explores themes of time travel, power structures, ecology, care and resistance. Based in Berlin and Singapore, Poh works with video, installation, sculpture, text and performance. Her multimedia narratives focus on identity, feminism and queerness in Southeast Asia. The story of the "Majie" is told in her 3-channel video installation The Moon is Wet (2025), created especially for this show. The "Majie" refers to migrant, mostly celibate domestic workers in Singapore who have worked as cooks and nannies in Singapore since the 1930s and formed their own communities in which they also entered same-sex intimate relationships. Singapore's economic rise is as closely linked to the flow of water as it is to the migration of labour. This retrospective exhibition advocates care for the threatened Earth, as well as protection for women and the LGBTQ+ community. Poh's work addresses the blurring of boundaries between the 'natural' and the 'artificial'. As in ecology, she advocates empathy when dealing with new technologies and in the digital space.

Image: 
Charmaine Poh
The Moon is Wet,Videostill, 2025
© Charmaine Poh

Gröting is a sculptor whose work encompasses not only physical materials, but also feelings, relationships, and inner worlds. She creates works that translate psychological and social relationships, as well as human and non-human history, into physical forms. She produces an ever-evolving 'lexicon' of videos and sculptures that draw our attention to absence, and to the physical and emotional gaps between humans, animals, façades, and other things. Key themes for the artist, who was born in 1961, include repressed traumas of the 20^(th) century and German history, as well as the complex relationship between civilisation and nature. She has been one of the most influential figures in contemporary German art since the 1990s. In her work, she renders the invisible visible by focusing on processes or interactions that often go unnoticed in everyday life. These may be the moulded, intimate space between two people during sexual intercourse, or the encounter between her dog and a wolf, as depicted in 'Wolf and Dog'. The Städel Museum is presenting a solo exhibition featuring eight films from 2015 to 2025. These include Gröting's latest video work, Matthias, Helge and Asta (2025), in which Matthias Brandt asks Helge Schneider and the artist the question, 'Have you failed?' We can already reveal that the answer is as astonishing and absurd as a Beckett play.

Image: 
Asta Gröting
Wolf and Dog, 2021
Videostill
4K UHD-Video, Farbe, Ton, 9:58 min
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

This multisensory exhibition, created by Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu, bridges the gap between cinema and visual art. To mark the 25th anniversary of his legendary debut film Amores Perros (2000), Iñárritu presents previously unseen footage revisiting the timeless themes of the film. Spanning three episodes, Iñárritu depicts love, hate, dreams, and death in Mexico City, where the lives of the characters intersect fatefully through a serious car accident. These haunting outtakes, stored in the film archive of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for a quarter of a century, capture the charged socio-political reality of Mexico City that remains relevant decades later. As part of Sueño Perro, Mexican writer and journalist Juan Villoro will design a visual and acoustic installation for the first floor of the building. Sueño Perro is the third collaboration between Fondazione Prada and Iñárritu.

Image: 
Still from Amores Perros (2000) by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Courtesy Rodrigo Prieto. © Alta Vista Films.

Now aged 90, New York artist Eleanor Antin is something of a godmother to Cindy Sherman. Sherman took the art world by storm with her pioneering photography series Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), in which she portrayed herself in stereotypical female roles from American popular culture, such as secretary, sixties-housewife, and film noir blonde. Antin, who was almost twenty years older than Sherman, had a background in conceptual art and had previously been a writer and an performer. After moving to San Diego in the early 1970s, she began integrating language, character, costume and voice into painting, sculpture and photography. She created various alter egos that appeared in her films and performances, including a disenfranchised king, two frustrated ballet dancers and a helpless nurse. Like Sherman, Antin was interested in showing how gender images are based on social hierarchies and power relations. However, she never achieved the same popularity as Sherman. This may be because her work is more poetic and playful. Alternatively, it could be since Antin was surrounded by a lively community of left-wing artists and writers in San Diego, where she taught at the university and took a more political stance on feminism. Antin is currently being re-evaluated, and this high-calibre exhibition will undoubtedly contribute to this.

Image: 
Eleanor Antin
Nurse Eleanor, R.N., 1976/2007
Courtesy the artist

Kerry James Marshall is one of the most eminent black artists of our time. Born in the southern United States in 1955, he later moved to Los Angeles. His family lived close to the headquarters of the Black Panther Party, which had a decisive influence on his sense of social responsibility and artistic career. Having studied painting at Otis College of Art and Design in LA in the 1970s, Marshall developed a distinctive style: a new form of history painting in which black, almost two-dimensional figures fill everyday and historical scenes alike. Inspired by the works of Bill Traylor, a self-taught artist born into slavery in Alabama, his paintings use elements of Western history painting, which primarily depict colonial and white power structures. Marshall contrasts these with a black perspective that challenges historical racist stereotypes.The Royal Academy of Arts is now presenting the largest exhibition of the American artist's work in Europe to date. To celebrate Marshall's 70th birthday, the exhibition 'The Histories' showcases over 70 of his works, including paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures, illuminating his long career. Marshall's powerful, large-format paintings address the legacy of the civil rights and Black Power movements. They portray historical figures such as Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Tubman and depict monumental scenes of contemporary Black life, elevating the everyday to the epic.

Image: 
Kerry James Marshall, De Style, 1993. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 264.2 x 309.9 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Purchased with funds provided by Ruth and Jacob Bloom. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

Sandra Mujinga is an artist, DJ and musician. Her interdisciplinary practice combines visual art, performance, music and online platforms. Her works include performances, sculptures, installations, films and sounds, through which she creates alternative realities that challenge our view of the world. Having won the Berlin National Gallery Prize in 2021 and achieved international recognition at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Mujinga presents her most ambitious work to date at the Stedelijk. Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1989, the Norwegian artist has transformed the basement gallery into a barren, otherworldly space. Sound, light, mirrors and sculptures conjure up a supernatural space populated by 55 identical figures. Are they humans, deep-sea creatures or aliens? Some ghostly figures tower on pedestals. Others are almost swallowed by shadows. All of the creatures are multiplied by mirrors, and as visitors move through the green, foggy landscape, the light and sound change, transforming the installation into an immersive, dystopian experience.

Image: 
Sandra Mujinga, Spectral Keepers , 2020. Mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Künstlerin und The Approach, London. Foto: Plastiques

She was a pioneer in more ways than one. As early as 1969, Miriam Schapiro was designing her monumental geometric abstractions on the computer. She would draw a simple shape by hand, then translate it into numbers and then into dots on a grid. Using special software, she was able to rotate the original shape three-dimensionally in space. The shapes she drew and painted were not just ordinary shapes. From the mid-1970s, the artist, who was born in 1923, was part of the 'Pattern and Decoration Movement', which focused on abstract forms in applied arts such as quilting, embroidery, metalwork and basketry, which had been marginalised as 'women's work' and 'arts and crafts'. In 1971, the Canadian artist, who was born in 1925, moved to Los Angeles to co-direct the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts with Judy Chicago. The following year, they opened 'Womanhouse' (1972), an art installation that was also a performance space and is considered a pioneering work of the feminist avant-garde. Sharpio's bold early work is on show at the ICA.

Image:
MSCHA308: Miriam Schapiro, "Docking #2," 1971. Acrylic on canvas. 72 x 80 in. © 2025 Estate of Miriam Schapiro / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery.

This exhibition consists of a single immersive work by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist: the 2001 video installation "Supersubjective", for which Rist transformed digital surveillance footage shot with a hand-held camera during a month-long trip to Japan into a dreamlike, contemplative space, complete with custom-made cushions and seating. The audience is invited to relax in the darkened gallery and listen to the electronic soundtrack, created in collaboration with composer Anders Guggisberg. It is based on the now anachronistic sounds of an internet dial-up modem, to which Rist sings her own lyrics. Her work looks at nature and the built environment with wonder, but also with ambivalent feelings. Created at the turn of the millennium, the installation reflects Rist's longing for connection in an increasingly digital and globalised world, as well as the alienation caused by new technologies.

Image:
Pipilotti Rist, Supersubjektiv, 2001. Installation view: Pipilotti Rist, Paço das Artes / MIS Museu da Imagem e do Som, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2009. © Pipilotti Rist, courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine / 2024 ProLitteris, Zurich / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Everton Baldin.

When they hear the title of the latest California Biennial, some might think of the political situation in the United States and around the world. However, the current biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art focuses on a different theme: late adolescence, a rollercoaster ride of hope and future potential, as well as fears and despair. The title is inspired by the eponymous album by Southern Californian punk rock band Emily's Sassy Lime, founded in 1993 by three Asian-American teenagers. The biennial explores young adulthood from various perspectives, featuring works by renowned Californian artists reflecting on their youth and collaborations between artists and their children. In an era of uncertainty, this exhibition pays tribute to teenagers, both past and present, who have fearlessly shaped their cultural landscape, and to the young individuals who will define tomorrow's world. International art stars such as Laura Owens and Miranda July are also taking part.

After touring London's Tate, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Berlin's Gropius Bau, 'Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is now making its way to the United States. Chicago is the only stop. Visitors will have the unique opportunity to experience one of the most comprehensive retrospectives on Yoko Ono, celebrating the life's work of the artist, musician and activist. Featuring over 200 pieces, including performance recordings, music and sound recordings, scores, films, photographs, installations, and archival materials, the exhibition traces Ono's entire career, from her beginnings in New York where she established herself as a pioneer of Fluxus and conceptual art through radical performances, to her later work. This includes the famous 'Cut Piece' (1964), in which Ono sat on stage and invited audience members, mostly male, to cut her dress with scissors – an act that is still shocking today. The exhibition also honours her collaborations with legendary musicians such as John Cage, Ornette Coleman and her late husband John Lennon. More recent works include Ono's ongoing ‘Wish Tree’ project (1996–present), as well as public artworks and actions that embody her commitment to peace, including ‘Imagine Peace’ (2003) and ‘Peace is Power’ (2017). This is a must-see exhibition.

Image: 
Yoko Ono, Apple, 1966. Installation view, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 2015. © Yoko Ono. Digital Image © 2015 MoMA, N.Y. Photo: Thomas Griesel.

Roppongi Crossing is the name of a series of thematic exhibitions held every three years at the Mori Art Museum. Launched in 2004, the series provides an overview of the contemporary art scene in Japan, offering a unique insight into the artistic themes and mood of each era. For the eighth edition, the Mori Art Museum curators are collaborating with two guest curators from Asia to showcase the work of 21 artists and artist groups under the theme ‘What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal'. The theme is transience and eternity. The exhibition includes not only painting, sculpture and video, but also crafts, handicrafts, zines and collective projects. These include the bowls and objects of renowned ceramist Kuwata Takuro, as well as the psychedelic-organic embroidery of Oki Junko on centuries-old fabrics. Also featured are the immersive installations by Studio A.A. Murakami, which combine influences from traditional Asian art with the latest technology. These installations include machines that produce giant, cell-shaped soap bubbles and fleeting, cloud-like sculptures made of steam.

Image: 
A.A.Murakami
New Spring
2017
nstallation view: Studio Swine x COS, New Spring, Salone del Mobile 2017, Milan