The best exhibitions of summer 2025: southern Europe and the Mediterranean

Some 70 works by the Portuguese-born French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, who died in 1992 aged 83, are going on show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

Da Silva was a pioneering painter, active between the 1930s and 1980s, making avant-garde, abstract work that straddled Cubism, Futurism and Art Informel. In 1943, she was one of the artists Peggy Guggenheim selected for the landmark Exhibition by 31 Women at her gallery in New York.

In 1961, she was garlanded at the São Paulo Biennial, then five years later became the first woman to receive the French government’s Grand Prix National des Arts. In 1979, she was also named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. Yet today she isn’t as well known as many of her peers.

This show is the latest stage in a resurrection of sorts: in 2021, her work was included in Women in Abstraction at the Pompidou in Paris; then, in 2023, it was part of Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

It is curated by Flavia Frigeri, curatorial and collections director at the National Portrait Gallery in London. She has secured loans from the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, the Pompidou in Paris and Tate Modern in London. After Venice, the show travels to the Guggenheim Bilbao, where it will be on view from 15 October until 22 February 2026.

A few years ago, the Portuguese artist Paula Rego and her Brazilian counterpart Adriana Varejão agreed to put on a show together. The former’s death in 2022, however, meant that the latter ended up carrying much of the organisational load. The result is an 80-work exhibition, which Varejão describes as ‘a dialogue between two women unafraid to confront the world with intensity and imagination’. Typically, Rego’s confrontation is more subtle and Varejão’s more visceral.

The pair were born a generation apart (Rego in 1935, Varejão in 1964), yet their work shares many interests and themes — notable among them the oppressive dynamics of power, especially between the sexes. ‘There’s a raw, fearless energy in Paula’s work [which] resonates with my own concerns,’ the Brazilian says.

The exhibition also finds parallels in the fact that both women grew up under dictatorial regimes, and came to art partly as a way of expressing dissent through visual storytelling.

Athens’s Museum of Cycladic Art, which opened in 1986, is home to more than 3,000 ancient works of art. Its best-known artefacts, though, are the beguiling marble female figures that were made on the islands of the central and southern Aegean around 5,000 years ago.

The museum is also home to a temporary exhibition space, which displays work by artists who have been inspired by these ancient abstract forms. So far, it has exhibited Picasso, Louise Bourgeois, Ugo Rondinone, Cy Twombly, George Condo and Cindy Sherman.

This summer, it’s the turn of South African artist Marlene Dumas. Her show is in direct response to the museum’s collection, which she has spent time studying. It presents 14 archaeological objects that date from the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Classical periods, in dialogue with around 40 of her own works made across some 30 years — including two new monumental paintings made especially for the show. The result is an unusual pairing that invites visitors to ponder on the timelessness of Dumas’s interest in what makes us human, as well as the mysteries that we don’t fully understand in these evocative creations of the past.

In 2018, the Fondation Carmignac, which oversees the modern and contemporary art collection belonging to financier Edouard Carmignac, opened Villa Carmignac, an exhibition centre on the island of Porquerolles, near Toulon.

This summer, it is staging a show on the theme of vertigo and its links to art made after 1950. It includes around 50 dizzying works, spanning Kinetic art, Nouveau Réalisme, Abstract Expressionism, Environmental art and Op Art, by artists including Yves Klein, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Helen Frankenthaler, Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell, Jesús Rafael Soto, Gerhard Richter, Frank Bowling, Alexander Calder, Bridget Riley and Otto Piene. While some pieces are from the foundation’s own holdings, others are being loaned by museums, institutions and private collectors. There are also several new works commissioned especially for the show.

June marks the beginning of Cezanne 2025, a season of cultural events taking place across Aix-en-Provence, where the artist was born. A highlight of the festivities is the phased unveiling of the newly restored country house, Jas de Bouffan, which the artist’s family owned for 40 years from 1859, and where he painted some of his most iconic images.

To mark the occasion, the city’s Musée Granet has gathered together more than 130 of Cezanne’s paintings, drawings and watercolours to explore the artist’s ties with the property. Among them are a series of works representing the four seasons that the artist made between 1862 and 1864, while still in his early twenties, which were painted directly onto the plaster walls of the house’s Grand Salon. After his death in 1906, they were eventually transferred to canvas, and now form part of the permanent collection of Paris’s Petit Palais.

Elsewhere, there are portraits of Cezanne’s friends and family painted around the home — including a depiction of his father reading a newspaper, on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; landscapes that show the house’s 14-hectare estate, coming from the National Gallery of Ottawa and the Courtauld in London; and still lifes that he developed in the second-floor studio, from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Arguably the biggest loan, however, is the Musée d’Orsay’s The Card Players, one of just five works from the series. The sitters were in fact Jas de Bouffan’s farmhands.

Located just outside Saint-Paul de Vence, the Fondation Maeght was France’s first independent modern art foundation when it opened in 1964 to house the collection of art dealers Aimé and Marguerite Maeght. Today, its constantly evolving collection totals more than 13,000 works.

This summer, the foundation is paying homage to the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The exhibition maps some of her biggest influences, including the landscape of her native Yorkshire; the time she spent in Paris in the studios of Picasso, Brancusi and Arp; the birth of her triplets; music and dance; and the 1969 moon landing.

A rare chance to enjoy such a substantial body of Hepworth’s work on the continent, the show is curated by Eleanor Clayton, head of collection and exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield. In 2021, Clayton published Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, which accompanied a show of the same name to celebrate the Hepworth Wakefield’s 10th anniversary.

By the time Pierre Soulages died aged 102 in 2022, his black, abstract paintings had made him one of the most celebrated European artists of the post-war era, as well as France’s most expensive living artist.

In 2005, he donated 20 of his works to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the city where he studied and met his wife. This summer, the museum is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the gift by borrowing around 100 more of his works, including paintings on paper, copper and bronze, from museums and private collections across Europe for the first major show since the artist’s death.

It is curated around six themes that resonate throughout his work, including his approach to raw materials and the exploration of light through his use of black. Within each section there are also works by other artists that Soulages admired, including Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian, Hans Hartung, Claude Lorrain, Zurbarán and Rembrandt.

Perasma is an Istanbul-based contemporary art foundation that organises site-specific shows in dialogue with unconventional spaces. Headed up by the curator duo of Burcu Fikretoglu and Gizem Naz Kudunoglu, it has since 2023 been taking over various sites on the Greek island of Leros for an annual summer exhibition.

The 2025 edition features artworks by 28 artists — including Lucio Fontana, Giorgio de Chirico, William Kentridge and Dora Maar — which have been hung around a Neoclassical mansion overlooking a marina, and a modernist primary school built during the Italian occupation.

The aim of the show is to inspire reflection on the notions of time, memory and identity. It’s also designed to foster participation from local communities as well as holidaymakers, serving as a platform for conversation and experimentation. To help achieve this goal, throughout the season there will be a programme of talks, workshops, film screenings and performances.

It’s been 56 years since Les Rencontres d’Arles was established. Since then, it has become one of the leading photography festivals worldwide, drawing north of 150,000 visitors to the south of France each summer.

The festival is known for honouring the biggest names in the industry and as a springboard for new talent. This year’s edition has around 40 different exhibitions spread across the city’s heritage sites, and nearly the same number of satellite shows taking place across the wider region.

Some of the highlights include solo shows of the work of Nan Goldin, Caroline Monnet and Diana Markosian. Group shows are paying special attention to the photography of Australia, by both First Nations and non-indigenous artists, as well the contemporary photography scene in Brazil.

Another highlight is a show of work from the celebrated collection of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. The display features nearly 300 images and archival objects that explore the designer’s relationships with some of the most revered photographers of the 20th century.

More than 100 works from the Centre Pompidou in Paris retell the history of art in the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of colour.

The exhibition centre’s space has been conceived as a vast colour wheel. An outer ring is filled with multicoloured works. In the middle, seven monochromatic, wedge-shaped rooms each focus on blue, red, pink, white, green, yellow or black.

Alongside work by the man who famously invented his own colour, Yves Klein, are paintings by Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns, Jean Dubuffet, Andy Warhol, Tamara de Lempicka, René Magritte, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Kazimir Malevich, Henri Matisse, Philip Guston, Gerhard Richter, and more.

These are complemented by pieces of iconic design from the likes of Ron Arad, Jean Prouvé, Ettore Sottsass and Philippe Starck, as well as sound creations by the Chilean composer Roque Rivas. There will even be olfactory atmospheres developed by the perfumer Alexis Dadier.

The ambitious show is the vision of Didier Ottinger, the Pompidou’s deputy director. He has issued a warning to visitors: the exhibition will ‘likely raise more questions than it provides answers’.