10 artists having major museum moments in 2025

There are no shortage of exhibitions dedicated to renowned American artist Helen Frankenthaler. After debuting at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in fall 2024, Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules has travelled to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, where it is on view through 28 September. Organised by the Italian and Spanish institutions in collaboration with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York, this blockbuster show features 30 of the artist’s poetic abstractions alongside synergistic works by her contemporaries.

In spring 2025 museumgoers are also able to experience the Abstract Expressionist’s signature soak-stained canvases and more at the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque; Museum Reinhard Ernst in Wiesbaden, Germany; and North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. Subsequent shows opening this fall at the Syracuse University Art Museum in New York; the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art in Bloomington, Indiana; and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois, will focus on Frankenthaler’s printmaking practice.

On the heels of her first major UK public gallery survey at Whitechapel Gallery, Lygia Clark continues stopping European audiences in their tracks with two more major shows. From 23 May to 12 October, the pioneering Brazilian artist, whose work ranges from geometric paintings to participatory sculptures, will have her first German retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. From 14 November 2025 through 8 March 2026, the retrospective will travel to Kunsthaus Zürich where Swiss audiences can delve further into her boundary-pushing practice, which spanned from the late 1940s to the 1980s.

The highly anticipated exhibition, Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art, opened this spring at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum, shining a light on the artist’s engagement with art history. After the show closes on 17 August, admirers of the artist will have another opportunity to view his sublime confections, eye-catching portraits and dizzying landscapes with Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life. Open 10 October 2025 through 18 January 2026 at the Courtauld Gallery, this marks the artist’s first museum show in the United Kingdom.

This March for its inaugural presentation at TEFAF Maastricht, Marianne Boesky Gallery presented new paintings by Danielle Mckinney in conversation with the work of Edward Hopper. Based in Jersey City, Mckinney is known for her ambient, art history-inspired interior scenes in which her stylish female subject is often lounging or caught in a contemplative gaze. From 20 August 2025 through 4 January 2026, the artist will make her American museum debut at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. Danielle Mckinney: Tell me More is the culmination of the artist’s yearlong residency with the museum.

Mark Rothko’s immeasurable legacy will be felt across the globe this year, from Daugavpils, Latvia, where the Abstract Expressionist was born, to Portland, Oregon, where he spent his childhood. From 12-27 September the Rothko Museum in Daugavpils will host the ‘Mark Rothko 2025’ International Painting Symposium, which coincides with the artist’s birthday. On 20 November, the Portland Art Museum will be unveiling its campus transformation. The centrepiece of the museum’s $111-million renovation is the nearly 22,000-square-foot glass Mark Rothko Pavilion, which will provide a dynamic entrance point to the institution where the artist had his first solo show in 1933.

This year Jenny Saville is the star of two exhibitions being staged at major European institutions this year. For her first solo show in Austria, Jenny Saville: Gaze (open through 29 June), the Albertina Museum presents works from across two decades of the intrepid figurative painter’s career. Meanwhile in London at the National Portrait Gallery, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting (20 June-7 September) will be the artist’s largest-ever UK exhibition with 50 works, including her monumental nudes and arresting portraits. Both retrospectives will also debut new works to the public.

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and France, 79 works by Alberto Giacometti were recently exhibited in Guangzhou in a show jointly curated by ChunYangTai Art and Cultural Center and Fondation Giacometti. Titled Figure as monument - Alberto Giacometti in Langtou, the show examined the architectural aspects of the Swiss artist’s oeuvre by setting his monumental sculptures against the backdrop of Langtou’s 700-year-old buildings.

From 8 May 2025 through 24 May 2026, the Fondation Giacometti and London’s Barbican Centre will present the Encounters: Giacometti exhibition series, in which historic works by the artist will be in conversation with those by contemporary artists, Huma Bhabha, Mona Hatoum and Lynda Benglis. From 31 May through 21 September, the National Gallery of Australia will present Cézanne to Giacometti Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, marking the first time works from the renowned Berggruen collection will be seen in the continent.

While millions of art enthusiasts frequent the Musée d’Orsay each year to see legendary paintings by the likes of Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, this spring visitors can witness firsthand how the Impressionists continue inspiring the latest generation of artists. On view through 20 July, Lucas Arruda. Qu’importe le paysage is the first French museum exhibition to spotlight the Brazilian artist known for his small-format Deserto-Modelo (Models of Desert) paintings. For the exhibition, 30 of Arruda’s imaginary landscapes are shown alongside some 30 Impressionist works from the museum’s collection. A monographic presentation, Lucas Arruda, Deserto-Modelo, is simultaneously running at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes.

For the first time, Parisian museumgoers have the chance to watch three films by Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa that belong to the Pinault Collection. On view through 25 August at the collection’s Bourse de Commerce outpost, the films are part of the collection’s Corps et âmes exhibition exploring the representation of the body in contemporary art. (Earlier this spring, the Pinault Collection presented a non-selling exhibition related to this vast subject at Christie’s Beverly Hills galleries.) Jafa’s powerful montaged films, which often examine the complexity of the Black-American experience, are situated across the museum’s rotunda, Gallery 2 and studio.

During November 2024, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum kicked off its Collection in Focus series with Piet Mondrian: Ever further. The show explored the indelible legacy of the Dutch painter who revolutionised abstraction with his geometric compositions in primary colours — a style he’d coin as Neo-Plasticism. Following his career from the Netherlands to Paris and New York, the exhibition conveyed Mondrian’s endless experimentation within his minimalist painterly vocabulary.