Best art exhibitions of 2026 in Europe: summer and beyond

Established in 2013 by Maja Hoffmann, LUMA Arles has earned a reputation as one of the world’s leading centres of contemporary artistic creation and experimentation. Each year, it stages exhibitions by both established and emerging contemporary artists, alongside site-specific works, new commissions and presentations from a range of art, photography and film archives.

The 2026 programme features a wide range of work that addresses contemporary issues, from technological transformation and ecological instability to questions of identity, memory and collective futures. Highlights include solo exhibitions by Gerhard Richter, Camille Henrot, Stan Douglas and Saodat Ismailova. Also on show is Correspondences, an immersive installation conceived by Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective’s Stephan Crasneanscki, which incorporates field recordings, moving images and poetry.

Elsewhere in Arles, at the Grand Hôtel Nord-Pinus until 17 July, is an exhibition of photographs from the collection of Roger Therond, former editor-in-chief of Paris Match, ahead of its sale in November at Christie’s in Paris under the title Collection Roger Therond, une passion française. On display is a selection of around 30 images of the south of France captured by such celebrated figures as Gustave Le Gray, Eugène Atget, Man Ray, Dora Maar and Jacques Henri Lartigue. ‘This collection offers an emotional journey through the history of photography,’ says Elodie Morel-Bazin, European head of Photographs at Christie’s, noting the ‘unique, passionate and deeply felt vision’ of Therond. ‘Never before has a collection of this calibre been presented in Paris.’

The Fondation Maeght’s major summer show sheds new light on the practice and vision of Ellsworth Kelly, one of America’s most influential abstract artists. Curated by Eric de Chassey in close collaboration with the Ellsworth Kelly Studio, the exhibition explores, for the first time, the central role that water played in Kelly’s work throughout his career. It traces how his encounters with coastlines, rivers and the sea — from Belle-Ile and the Côte d’Azur to New York and the Caribbean — inspired drawings, collages, paintings and sculptures. Rather than creating literal depictions, however, Kelly explored the perception of water, notably its shifting colours and the play of light on its surface.

The exhibition also celebrates Kelly’s longstanding relationship with the Maeght family and Saint-Paul de Vence. The artist exhibited regularly at Galerie Maeght in Paris and stayed with the family in Saint-Paul de Vence on numerous occasions, forging a lifelong friendship with Adrien Maeght.

The George Economou Collection is an impressive private holding of works from the early 20th century through to today. Housed in Athens, it is currently showing its first contemporary group exhibition, taking its title from Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel The Way We Live Now, in which the author attacked what he saw as the moral bankruptcy of mid-Victorian England.

Solely featuring works from the collection, by artists such as David Hockney, Jenny Saville, Henry Taylor and Louise Bourgeois, the show comprises powerful artistic statements about the way we live in the modern day, long since Trollope put pen to paper. These statements range widely in outlook and medium, broadly exploring three overarching themes: Intimacy, Politics and Being. Fundamental ideas about love are examined, as are questions of freedom and the nature of our individual and collective existence.

The exhibition is co-curated by Hilton Als and Ann Philbin in close collaboration with Skarlet Smatana, director of the George Economou Collection. Als, the Pulitzer Prize-winning theatre critic for The New Yorker, has previously curated or co-curated shows on Alice Neel (in New York and London) and James Baldwin (at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.), while Philbin was director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from 1999 to 2024.

More than two decades have passed since The New Yorker crowned Maurizio Cattelan the art world’s prankster-in-chief. In that time, he’s managed to take his title to new heights, most notably announcing his retirement in 2011 by suspending every work he’d ever made from the rotunda of the Guggenheim in New York, then, five years later, ostentatiously returning with America, a solid-gold toilet plumbed into the same museum. The work was subsequently stolen from Blenheim Palace in England and never recovered.

Last November, he was named the recipient of the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie, awarded by a jury including Emma Lavigne, director of the Pinault Collection; Sam Keller, director of the Fondation Beyeler; and Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie.

The award comes with a major solo show — the artist’s first in Germany. A journey through some of his most seminal and controversial works, it includes his praying Hitler statue Him (2001), and Novecento (1997), the preserved body of a horse that hangs from the ceiling. A new site-specific commission, created in response to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic building, will also be unveiled.

Mary Magdalene travelled with Jesus Christ while he preached, wept at his feet during his crucifixion, and was the first to witness the miracle of his resurrection. Yet despite this prominent role, she remains elusive in the scriptures, and as a result has been cast in many, often dubious roles — from celibate nun to sinful prostitute, from devoted wife to matriarch of a secret holy dynasty.

Mary Magdalene. Sin. Pray. Love. traces the ways in which artists have projected their ideas about gender, faith, love, sex and the female experience onto this complex character. It includes more than 100 works, spanning the Middle Ages to today, by artists including Guercino, Claude Lorrain, Auguste Rodin and Max Beckmann. The show places a special emphasis on how women artists — from Lavinia Fontana to Marlene Dumas — have chosen to portray Mary Magdalene, often as a feminist icon.

When Remedios Varo died in 1963, aged 54, André Breton declared that ‘the sorceress has left us too soon’. Breton was the de facto leader of Surrealism, and he lamented the loss of one of the movement’s great talents. Born in Spain, Varo had settled in Mexico — for good — at the start of the Second World War.

Working in a Surrealist idiom, yet with a fondness for rendering her subjects in the meticulous tradition of Italy’s early Renaissance, Varo took inspiration from myriad sources. These ranged from chivalric romance, ecology and Kabbalah, to Goya, quantum physics and Aztec lore.

Featuring some 60 paintings, this new exhibition at Louisiana will be Varo’s first major museum exhibition on the continent of her birth.

Absinthe-fuelled deliriums and ecstatic visions on sunlit hills inspired Edvard Munch’s revelatory ideas about colour, articulated in his ‘Saint-Cloud Manifesto’ of 1890. The Norwegian artist came to see colour as an active force rather than merely descriptive, using it to express his innermost feelings. This approach culminated in his most famous image, The Scream, with its blood-red sky.

Born more than 50 years later, the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig developed an equally idiosyncratic understanding of colour and sensation. She coined the term Körpergefühl (‘body feeling’) to describe the way colour could register physical experience, writing: ‘colours for pain and agony, nerve colours, colours for pressure and fullness, colours for stretching and strain, colours for crushing and burning, colours for death and decay, colours for the fear of cancer — these are the colours of reality’.

Currently on show at the Hamburger Kunsthalle until 30 August 2026, and transferring to the Kunsthaus Zürich in October, this exhibition brings together two singular artistic voices, exploring how each transformed acid greens, burning yellows and shimmering reds into a visual language of vital experience.

It is 100 years since Willem de Kooning set sail for New York from Europe — and he might never have made it, had a friend on Rotterdam’s docks not spotted that the first boat he boarded was bound for South America. It is one of modern art’s great counterfactuals: had he stayed aboard, perhaps Buenos Aires rather than New York would have become the centre of a radical new art.

De Kooning is often credited with changing painting forever by showing that abstraction need not abandon the human figure. The result was a body of sinuous, flesh-toned pictures that shocked the art world and led the critic Harold Rosenberg to call him ‘the outstanding artist of the ideological epoch in American art’. Such bombastic statements tended to follow de Kooning around, and he seemed to invite them: the bravado with which he wrestled paint around the canvas gave him the fiendish swagger of a prize fighter.

This landmark retrospective brings the Dutch-born master home to Amsterdam. Featuring around 120 artworks, including paintings from his seismic ‘Woman’ series, it reveals why this exceptional artist held America in his sway.

Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum shares a special bond with the Netherlands. Opened in 1992, it was built to house the art collection of industrialist Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who was born and raised in The Hague. He went on to amass more than 1,600 pictures — the second largest trove in private hands behind the British royal family — a significant portion of which comprised 17th-century Dutch paintings. In the 1990s, he also helped The Hague’s Mauritshuis museum, which houses the bulk of the former Dutch royal art collection, to acquire Jan Davidsz de Heem’s Vase of Flowers and Meindert Hobbema’s Wooded Landscape with Cottages.

To celebrate this connection, from October the two museums are loaning 25 of their most important works to one another. Among those travelling from Holland are Rembrandt’s Simeon’s Song of Praise; Van Honthorst’s The Violin Player; Vermeer’s View of Delft; and Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens’s collaboration The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man. Making the journey from Spain are Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man as Saint Sebastian; El Greco’s The Annunciation; Dürer’s Jesus Among the Doctors; Piero della Francesca’s Portrait of a Boy; and Van Eyck’s Annunciation Diptych. Remarkably, there are no paintings by these five artists in any Dutch museum, making the group’s display a rare occurrence.

It was on a glacier in Switzerland in 1949 that Wilhelmina Barns-Graham experienced a decisive shock to the system. Gazing through layers of blue ice, she saw a ferocious living world, and it utterly transformed her perception of art. She later translated this experience into crystalline impressions of light, movement and water — works of such luminous austerity that they seemed to shimmer with a primeval hostility.

The ‘Glacier’ series is at the heart of the Scottish modernist’s long-overdue retrospective at Tate St Ives, which traces her extraordinary career from the wild teenage defiance of her landed-gentry upbringing to the international acclaim she finally received in the last decade of her life. Across more than 170 artworks, we see how Barns-Graham fused representation with abstraction to create visions of the natural world. As she grew older, her paintings became fiercer and more expressive, leading to her final ‘Scorpio’ series in the early 2000s: urgent layers of radiant colour that captured her wilful grasping for life.

This is the first major exhibition to consist solely of works by Frans Hals and Rembrandt van Rijn — which seems remarkable, given the significance of both artists and the similarities between them. Both were 17th-century Dutchmen, renowned for their lifelike portraits and loose painting style.

The show will feature 11 works by Hals and eight by Rembrandt. The former worked predominantly in the city of Haarlem, the latter mainly in Amsterdam, though the curators will argue that each artist was likely aware of the other’s work, such was the extent of their fame.

Did awareness extend to influence? The exhibition will explore the potential impact that Hals and Rembrandt had on one another (and on their contemporaries) through portraits of regents, musicians, children and more.

Dan Flavin was moonlighting as a security guard at New York’s American Museum of Natural History when he had the idea to make art from electric light. The year was 1961, and he was part of a new generation of artists using found materials and assemblage to challenge the prevailing Abstract Expressionists.

Flavin’s fluorescent ‘icons’ came to dominate the rest of a career lasting more than 35 years, and in November 1996 he completed the design for his most ambitious work: the illumination an entire church interior in Milan. He died two days later, hailed as a pioneer of Minimalism. The following year, the Fondazione Prada realised his vision by installing the work in Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, bathing the building in a celestial glow.

From November, Spain’s Guggenheim Bilbao is devoting seven of its gallery spaces to a show of Flavin’s work ranging from the 1960s to the 1980s. A number of key pieces are coming from its sister museum in New York, which houses no fewer than seven of the artist’s major works.

This winter, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna presents a landmark exhibition centred on Portrait of an Old Man, a previously unattributed work from its collection that is now believed to be by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The most important artist of the Italian Baroque, Bernini is best known as a sculptor and as the designer of Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. But he also painted, though rarely, and mainly for personal pleasure. Of the 200 or so paintings mentioned by contemporary sources — mostly spontaneous portraits or studies closely connected to his sculptural practice — fewer than 20 are currently accepted as autograph works, making this rediscovery all the more significant.

This exhibition brings together 10 major international loans to explore Bernini’s portraiture across painting, sculpture and drawing. By offering visitors an insight into a little-known aspect of Bernini’s work, it reveals the virtuosity and artistic versatility of one of the 17th century’s greatest masters.

On view at Centro Botín in the Spanish city of Santander until 25 October 2026, this exhibition of the Venezuelan-American artist’s drawings transfers to Lisbon in December. Featuring more than 100 works, it confirms that Marisol’s career amounted to far more than the Pop art sculptures from the 1960s for which she is best known.

Made across several decades — up until her death in 2016, aged 85 — these drawings showcase the artist’s global concerns, private discomforts and gift for imaginative fiction.

Marisol lamented the way that critics tended to focus on her Latin American looks and roots rather than on her art. Appreciation of her work has risen in recent years, however: she was the subject of a major touring retrospective held at four venues across the US and Canada from 2023 to 2025.

Main image, clockwise from top left: at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Naturaleza muerta resucitando (Still Life Reviving), 1963. Oil on canvas. 43¼ x 31½ in (109.9 x 80.1 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Joseph Winterbotham Collection. © 2026 Remedios Varo / VISDA. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY / Scala, Florence. At the Frans Hals Museum, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669), De Staalmeesters (The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild, Known as ’The Syndics’), 1662 (detail). Oil on canvas. 191.5 x 279 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, on loan from the City of Amsterdam. At the Mauritshuis, Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), Portrait of a Young Man as Saint Sebastian, circa 1533 (detail). Oil on panel. 87 x 76.5 cm. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Photo: © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. At LUMA, Arles, Soundwalk Collective & Patti Smith, The Melting, 2026 (still). Two-channel video. Courtesy of Stephan Crasneanscki. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, Dan Flavin (1933-1996), untitled (to Barbara Nüsse), 1971. Blue and pink fluorescent light. 2 ft x 2 ft (122 x 122 cm). Edition 8/50. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection, Gift, 1992. © Stephen Flavin, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2025