11 artists taking over the globe in 2024 and 2025

With 2024 marking the centennial of Surrealism and 150th anniversary of Impressionism, it’s no surprise that many institutions are shining a light on the movements’ legendary leaders, from René Magritte to Claude Monet. Women artists, past and present, star in standout shows around the globe that bring new perspectives to their work and expand their legacies. Georgia O’Keeffe and Cecily Brown are amongst those making a splash in the United States, while in Europe and Asia respectively, solo shows dedicated to Roni Horn and Louise Bourgeois spotlight their groundbreaking practices. Here, discover a thrilling mix of international exhibitions featuring artists who also have remarkable works coming up for auction in Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art week in New York.

René Magritte

On view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney through 9 February 2025, Magritte is Australia’s first retrospective of the Belgian artist. Magritte’s most iconic subjects — think clouds and top hats — will feature in more than 100 works, most which have never been exhibited in Australia.

The exhibition has been organised in cooperation with the Menil Collection, Houston, and the Magritte Foundation, Brussels, where the Magritte Museum is currently exhibiting Emily Mae Smith x René Magritte. On view through 2 March 2025, the show places the Surrealist’s work in dialogue with Smith, an Austin-born, New York-based contemporary painter who shares Magritte’s dark humour, visual trickery and preoccupation with making everyday objects extraordinary.

Cecily Brown

This fall is a prime time for Cecily Brown fans across the United States to see the artist’s mesmerising work. At the Dallas Museum of Art through 9 February 2025, Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations is the British-born, New York-based artist’s largest-ever US retrospective. The sprawling show traces her 30-year career brilliantly walking the line between figuration and abstraction through nearly 30 monumental canvases. Featuring art historical tropes from the reclining female nude to vanitas, the works will further resonate when staged at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, where they will travel in March 2025.

In New York through 7 December, Paula Cooper Gallery presents the artist’s latest body of work in Cecily Brown: The 5 Senses. Featuring new paintings and works on paper, the show is a meditation on Brown’s 2023 exhibition, Death and The Maid at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while also referencing art history, most significantly The Five Senses (1617-18), a collaborative series of paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens.

Roni Horn

With two Hauser & Wirth exhibitions and two major museum surveys, Roni Horn is having her busiest year yet. From March to August 2024, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, presented Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, an expansive show of more than 100 works by the New York artist known for her minimalist sculpture, photography, drawings, artist books and installations. Uniting these disciplines are three recurring themes: nature, identity and language.

From 2 May to 1 September, Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art exhibited Roni Horn: The Detour of Identity, the artist’s first major solo presentation in the Nordics. The show paired Horn’s work with clips from classic films by the Alfred Hitchcock, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer and more to illustrate the influence of cinema on Horn’s practice. The artist’s longtime gallery Hauser & Wirth first exhibited new cast-glass pieces and works on paper by the artist in New York in April through July, followed by a show on the Spanish island of Menorca from 11 May to 27 October.

Louise Bourgeois

For more than two decades, visitors to Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills have been greeted by Louise Bourgeois’s towering spider sculpture displayed at the base of Mori Tower. Now through 19 January 2025, locals and tourists alike can venture inside the Mori Art Museum to view the French-American artist’s first major solo show in Japan since 1997.

Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful. features more than 100 works organised into three chapters based on her complex relationship with her family, a key source of inspiration for her wide-ranging oeuvre.

Claude Monet

The 150th anniversary of Impressionism has spawned countless shows dedicated to the dawn of the movement and its leading figures, such as Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC this past summer. With his revolutionary approach to depicting light in nature, Monet has become an emblem of Impressionism, and his breakthroughs at Argentuil in the 1870s had a profound impact on the development of Impressionist painting. Over more than 60 years, the artist built an enduring legacy across a wide-ranging oeuvre.

While Monet’s luminous canvases can be seen in top institutions across the globe, Monet and London. Views of the Thames, which focusses on one of his most beloved subjects, is well worth the trip to the English capital, where it is now on view at the Courtauld Gallery.

Thomas Schütte

This September the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened Thomas Schütte, the most comprehensive exhibition of the German artist’s career in the United States. On view through 18 January 2025, the show aims to expose American audiences to one of Europe’s most significant living artists, who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Gerhard Richter and went on to win the Golden Lion at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

The exhibition’s contents range from watercolours and ceramics to architectural models, monumental bronzes, and installations. With Schütte signatures — seemingly melting busts and figures as well as oversized fruit — scattered across the entirety of the museum’s sixth floor, surprises await around every corner. Surveying five decades of his work, the exhibition demonstrates Schütte’s ever-evolving practice that bridges the conceptual and the political, such as in his ongoing United Enemies series, in which pairs of figures are forcibly bound together in sheaths of fabric secured with ropes.

Georgia O’Keeffe & Henry Moore

For the first time, the works of 20th-century titans Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore are in dialogue, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In this exhibition, organised by the San Diego Museum of Art in collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation, more than 150 paintings, sculptures and works of paper explore how both artists’ produced art informed by their surroundings — O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Moore in Hertfordshire, England.

On view through 20 January 2025, Georgia O’Keeffe & Henry Moore also includes recreations of each artist’s studio, complete with their tools and found objects that inspired them. The MFA Boston’s iteration of this travelling show additionally weaves the works of other mid-20th-century artists — Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp and more — to further expand the conversation between the American painter and British sculptor.

Nicolas Party

Swiss painter and sculptor Nicolas Party has made international waves in 2024. In addition to his current solo presentation Nicolas Party: Ewe in the Field at The Warehouse (collectors Cindy and Howard Rachofsky’s contemporary art space in Dallas), the artist was also the 2024 honoree of TWO x TWO, the Rachofskys’ annual contemporary art auction benefiting the Dallas Museum of Art and amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research.

Across the globe, Party is concurrently showing his first solo exhibition in Korea at the Hoam Museum of Art. On view through 19 January 25, Nicolas Party: Dust is the artist’s largest survey to date, with 48 existing paintings and sculptures, 20 new paintings and five large-scale site-specific pastel murals. Complementing Party’s myriad art historical references are works from the traditional art and antiquities collection of the Leeum Museum of Art (the Hoam’s sister museum in Seoul). The maze-like layout of the exhibition expands on art historical and architectural motifs, such as arched doorways and faux marble, making exhibitiongoers feel as if they have stepped into Party’s fantastical landscapes.

Ellsworth Kelly

In 2023 the Glenstone Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum and more institutions honoured the centennial of the American artist Ellsworth Kelly’s birth. The US celebrations have continued into 2024 with additional major shows, including the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ellsworth Kelly: Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance, which ran from 22 June through 9 September. This exhibition highlighted a 1951 series of eight large-scale collages, featuring coloured paper cut into squares and randomly arranged — a milestone in Kelly’s experiments with change and constructive use of colour.

At Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris from May through September this year, Ellsworth Kelly. Shapes and Colors, 1949-2015 was the first exhibition in France to offer a broad overview of Kelly’s work, both in terms of its chronology and media. Organised with Glenstone and in collaboration with the Ellsworth Kelly Studio, the exhibition brought together more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and collages to demonstrate Kelly’s immense contribution to abstraction.

Rashid Johnson

In late 2023, the Whitney Museum of American Art debuted Rashid Johnson’s New Poetry, a site-specific, steel-grid sculpture extending from within the museum out onto its plaza. Conceived like a shelving system, the sculpture houses everything from potted plants to poetry books and shea butter, referencing how the brain simultaneously channels disparate thoughts and functions. New Yorkers will have another special opportunity to dive into the American artist’s multidisciplinary oeuvre in spring 2025 when Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers opens at the Guggenheim.

This highly anticipated solo exhibition will present nearly 90 works, ranging from Johnson’s black-soap paintings to large-scale sculptures and video across the museum’s iconic rotunda. A monumental site-specific work on the building’s top ramp will include an embedded piano for musical performances, reflecting Johnson’s interests in not just history, philosophy, literature and Black popular culture, but also music.