Observer’s Must-See Museum Shows of 2026
2025 was not an easy year for museums, particularly in the U.S., as budget cuts and intensifying scrutiny of financial models, governance and programming collided with an increasingly polarized public debate. At the same time, many institutions were forced to confront their own vulnerabilities, from governance scandals to a troubling rise in art thefts, culminating in the clamorous Louvre case in October. A new report from the Mapping Museums Lab at Birkbeck College, University of London—the first comprehensive study of the U.K. museum sector—underscored just how fragile the landscape has become, documenting the closure of 524 museums between 2000 and 2025.
Yet even as the headlines remain bleak, many institutions are treating this moment as a catalyst, testing new fundraising models, corporate partnerships and membership structures while embracing digital and analog strategies to grow audiences and stabilize revenue. Others are looking outward, forging international partnerships and organizing traveling exhibitions that make ambitious programming possible by sharing both labor and cost. What that means is that there is no shortage of major museum shows set to open around the world in 2026. Here are 10 worth traveling for:
“Frida: The Making of an Icon”
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH)
- January 18 – May 17, 2026
- Tate Modern, London
- June 25 – January 3, 2026
The legendary Mexican artist’s 1940 self-portrait El sueño (La cama) (The Dream (The Bed)) recently became the most expensive work by a woman ever sold at auction when it fetched $54.7 million at Sotheby’s, stealing the scene during November’s multibillion-dollar marquee sales. The result sets the stage for Kahlo’s survey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH)—where the record-breaking masterpiece will also appear—before the exhibition travels to Tate Modern in London. Focusing on her enigmatic and densely symbolic self-portraits, the show examines “the making of an icon,” tracing how Frida Kahlo’s singular personality and potent visual imagination forged an aura and legend that continue to surround her. By fearlessly confronting the darker reaches of her psyche and the emotional intensity with which she experienced the world, Kahlo shaped a mythology that has only deepened over time. Featuring more than 130 works, including many of her best-known paintings, the exhibition will also present documents, photographs and memorabilia from her archives, alongside work by more than 80 of her contemporaries and artists she later inspired.
“Noah Davis”
- Philadelphia Art Museum
- January 24 – April 26, 2026
Marking the final stop on an international tour organized with DAS MINSK in Potsdam, the Barbican in London and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, this highly anticipated Noah Davis survey will arrive on the East Coast at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Charting Davis’s practice across painting, curating and community-building, the exhibition brings together more than 60 works that reveal his rare ability to capture the humanity of his subjects in moments that feel unfiltered yet are dense with emotional and narrative force. Linking personal and collective experiences, Davis offers an empathetic portrait of contemporary urban life, tracing the internal and external conflicts individuals navigate within the societal, political and economic structures that shape their existence. Organized chronologically, the exhibition will feature work made from 2007 until his death in 2015 at the age of 32. Paintings that move fluidly between styles and techniques—depicting dreamlike, joyful and melancholic scenes—will appear alongside experimental sculptures and works on paper that illuminate the conceptual foundations of his career.
“Marcel Duchamp”
- MoMA, New York
- April 12 – August 22, 2026
- Philadelphia Art Museum
- October 10, 2026 – January 31, 2027
At a moment when technologies like A.I. are forcing a fundamental reexamination of creativity and authorship and further collapsing the already blurred boundary between digital and physical production, Duchamp’s elevation of the “idea” as the true locus of art feels more resonant than ever. His insistence that the concept could precede or even eclipse the crafted object has become a crucial lens for understanding many contemporary practices today, a legacy that will be underscored in 2026 with the first major North American retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work in more than 50 years. Offering audiences a rare chance to see the full sweep of his output and its enduring relevance, the exhibition will debut at MoMA in the spring before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the fall. Tracing six decades of Duchamp’s career across painting, sculpture, film, photography, drawing and printed matter, it will highlight works that reshaped the course of modern art, including Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) with its fragmentation of the body, the scandalous readymade Fountain signed “R. Mutt,” the monumental glass construction The Large Glass and the miniature “portable museum” Box in a Valise. The show’s central argument is that Duchamp did not merely expand the definition of art but detonated it, completely reconceiving its terms. The last retrospective of comparable scale was the 1973 survey co-organized by MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which now holds the world’s largest repository of his work, including the mysterious and iconic Grand Verre. A version of the exhibition, organized by Jeanne Brun, deputy director at the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne, in collaboration with Pauline Creteur, research assistant to the deputy director, will be presented at the Grand Palais in Paris in spring 2027, co-produced by the Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais.
“Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now”
- M+ Museum, Hong Kong
- March 14 – August 9, 2026
After emerging as one of the standout highlights of Seoul Art Week in September, Lee Bul’s major survey travels next to M+ in Hong Kong, serving as the marquee institutional show during the city’s buzzing Art Basel week. Working across performance, sculpture, installation, architecture, printmaking and media art, Bul has spent more than four decades engaged in a restless act of world-building, reflecting on technological innovation, interrogating the shifting relationships between humanity, nature and machine and imagining dystopian themes alongside the possibility of alternative futures. From her beginnings in the late 1980s, when her confrontational body-based performances scandalized South Korea’s patriarchal respectability, Bul established herself as one of the country’s most provocative artists, with those early raw political gestures soon expanding into the futuristic soft sculptures and cyborg forms of the 1990s, works that fused eroticism, technology and critique into a visionary and often cryptic multimedia lexicon seemingly projected from a future dimension. Yet her first major survey is conceived less as a chronological overview than as a spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk that choreographs disparate works into a spatial experience deliberately resistant to logical sequence and script. The exhibition instead unfolds as a “Mannerist labyrinth,” a path of paradoxes and open-ended interpretations structured according to what the artist calls “Via Negativa,” a nonlinear, multilayered architecture that rejects fixed hierarchies of center and periphery.
“Roy Lichtenstein”
- The Whitney, New York
- Fall 2026
The Pop artist has seen a renewed surge in market interest after the Lichtenstein estate, working with Sotheby’s, placed a significant group of works strategically across the season’s major auctions, with more than $60 million in material sold so far—often meeting or exceeding expectations. Further fueling this momentum, the Whitney will stage a highly anticipated and expansive survey that recontextualizes and foregrounds Lichtenstein’s semiotic and critical investigation of mass-produced and mass-printed visual storytelling. Spanning major paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures across six decades, the retrospective will offer a comprehensive re-examination of his contributions to Pop Art at a moment when his exploration of mechanical reproduction feels newly urgent in light of contemporary anxieties around endless image replication and automated creation through A.I. Looking ahead to 2026 and 2027, the estate is also preparing a dedicated sculpture exhibition for the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Dallas Museum of Art, along with two additional solo presentations at Kunstmuseum Basel and the British Museum in London.
“Ana Mendieta”
- Tate Modern, London
- July 15, 2026 – January 17, 2027
Ana Mendieta is best known for her unforgettable “Silueta” series, which positioned her as a pioneer of ecofeminism by blending ancestral rituals of connection to the land with a dense personal symbology shaped by her heightened and often painful sensitivity to her surroundings. Exploring presence and absence through the imprint of the human body, she used natural materials such as fire, water and flowers to create ephemeral works that survive today only through photographs and film, later becoming a haunting premonition of her own tragic and premature disappearance. Active in the 1970s and early ’80s, the Cuban-born American artist posed profound questions about displacement and identity, connection and rupture with the land and the physical and spiritual essence of our existence as vibrating bodies in the world—questions that feel urgent amid the ecological and societal crises we are living through today. Organized in collaboration with the artist’s estate, this exhibition marks the first in-depth U.K. presentation of her work in more than a decade, reaffirming Mendieta’s status as one of the most important artists of the 20th Century.
“Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy”
- Gallerie Dell’Accademia, Venice
- May 6 – October 19, 2026
Marina Abramović is one of those artists who has never stopped giving the art world something to talk about, from the early provocative performances that pushed the limits of endurance and transformed visceral traumatic catharsis into art to her later shift toward more spiritual and energetic rituals aimed at collective healing and reconnection. Over the decades, she has continued to reinvent the possibilities of performance, turning the body, her own and the audience’s, into a site of vulnerability, transformation and shared experience, in the process becoming both an icon of contemporary art and, in many ways, a shamanic healer for a troubled collectivity. In 2026, Abramović will make history as the first woman to receive a major exhibition at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, which opens at the height of the art calendar during the 61st Venice Biennale. Marking the artist’s 80th birthday, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy” will stage a resonant dialogue between her pioneering performance practice and the Renaissance masterpieces that have shaped Venice’s cultural identity. Iconic works such as Imponderabilia (1977), Rhythm 0 (1974), Light/Dark (1977), Balkan Baroque (1997) and Carrying the Skeleton (2008) will appear alongside projections of early performances. One of the central highlights will be Abramović and Ulay’s Pietà (1983) shown in direct dialogue with Titian’s final unfinished Pietà (c. 1575-76), an unprecedented historic pairing that reframes Renaissance themes of grief, transcendence and redemption through a contemporary lens while underscoring the body’s enduring role as a site of suffering and spiritual elevation. Curated by Shai Baitel, artistic director of the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition will unfold across both the museum’s permanent collection galleries and its temporary exhibition spaces, a first in the institution’s history, embedding Abramović’s work deep within the city’s artistic patrimony. At its core, “Transforming Energy” is an encounter between past and present, material and immaterial, body and spirit, revealing how Abramović’s lifelong exploration of endurance, presence and transformation resonates powerfully within Venice’s centuries-old visual language.
“Carol Bove”
- The Guggenheim, New York
- March 5 – August 2, 2026
In 2026, American sculptor Carol Bove will take over the iconic rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York with her first and most extensive museum survey to date. Spanning more than two decades of risk-taking and formal exploration, the exhibition foregrounds Bove’s singular ability to reshape space, material and perception, improvising playfully while also precisely engineering the relationships between form, scale, color and architectural setting. Engaging directly with the legacies of modernist sculpture—from Constructivism to Minimalism—Bove subverts those histories through unexpected combinations of surface, color and structure, reframing canonical vocabularies without repeating them and creating a charged dialogue between historical abstraction and contemporary sensibility. Working across steel, stone, mirror, neon and found objects, she reconfigures art-historical references and architectural forms into dynamic environments that test the boundaries of abstraction and the physical presence of sculpture, with works that operate as phenomena of matter and energy, complicating the viewer’s multisensorial experience and their relationship to the surrounding space.
“Cézanne”
- Fondation Beyeler, Basel
- January 25 – May 25, 2026
For the first time in its history, Fondation Beyeler will present a monographic exhibition dedicated to Paul Cézanne, drawing on its significant holdings and major international loans to focus on the modernist pioneer’s late and most consequential period, when he reached the height of his synthesis of time, space and perception. Through the methodical layering of his distinctive plastic brushstrokes, Cézanne created enigmatic portraits, idyllic scenes of bathers, evocative landscapes of his native Provence and endlessly inventive reinterpretations of his favored motif, the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Seeking to translate “the immensity, the torrent of the world, in a tiny thumb’s worth of matter,” as he once described it, Cézanne adopted an analytical approach, “constructing” a picture rather than merely painting it, through long repeated sessions aimed at capturing a unified synthesis of spatial and temporal experience. In his mature works, even a simple apple assumes a sculptural presence, with each object, whether still life, landscape or figure, appearing to be observed not from a single viewpoint but from several, its material properties reassembled into what he famously called “a harmony parallel to nature.” It was precisely this analytical and time-based practice that led the future Cubists to claim Cézanne as their foundational mentor, opening new conceptual and abstract paths toward contemporary artistic representations of reality.
“Paulo Nazareth”
- Gallerie Dell’Accademia, Venice
- March 29 – November 22, 2026
Turning his artistic practice into a nomadic lifelong performance, Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth has spent more than 15 years methodically traveling across continents—walking barefoot from the Americas to Africa. This act of endurance and survival operates as both a personal and collective ritual, retracing ancestral routes and honoring enslaved forebears who were stripped of footwear as a sign of subjugation. Through this ongoing performance, Nazareth exposes how colonial cartography and systemic racism have shaped the landscapes of modernity, with his slow and deliberate journeys becoming a form of storytelling that reveals how movement inscribes histories into bodies, languages and borders. Although much of his practice resists categorization and the art world’s dynamics of objectification and commodification, Nazareth’s finished works often crystallize from precise and decisive actions designed to confront urgent questions of immigration, racialization, globalization and colonialism, and their impact on the production and circulation of art in Brazil and across the Global South. Unfolding on the upper level of Punta della Dogana in Venice, the exhibition draws on an exceptional group of works by the artist held in the Pinault Collection and is set to be another standout must-see during the Venice Biennale.