Six artists having a museum moment: Basquiat, Hockney, Bove, Brown, Wylie and Goldin

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)

Basquiat’s Untitled (Spoon), which shows the artist’s own head, was created just months before his tragic death in August 1988 aged 27. It’s an oilstick on offset lithograph: on top of a poster he had designed for his solo exhibition that year at Galerie Hans Mayer in Düsseldorf, the artist mapped out his own image and name, as well as a spoon that hovers before him, which is annotated in struck-through text. The combination of his inscription, gaunt face and bow-tie is simultaneously deeply introspective and hauntingly prophetic.

In January 2026, Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art opened Basquiat — Headstrong, a show of 49 works on paper that analyses the artist’s obsession with heads, ranging from depictions of his own likeness to skulls and totems. They reveal an enduring fascination with identity, anatomy, caricature, symbolic abstraction and the space between the spirit and the flesh.

It’s the most recent in a string of major Basquiat shows, including Basquiat: Boom for Real at the Barbican Centre in London, 2017-18; Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2018-19; Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2019; and Basquiat: The Retrospective, held at the Albertina in Vienna between 2022 and 2023.

Untitled (Spoon) was last seen in public as part of another recent major exhibition: Jean-Michel Basquiat: Royalty, Heroism and the Streets, which was held at the Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul between 2020 and 2021. The title comes from an exchange between Basquiat and the curator Henry Geldzahler that took place in 1982, when Basquiat revealed his three key artistic themes. The show, which contained around 150 works made during his thunderclap of a career, was his first in South Korea.

David Hockney (b. 1937)

David Hockney spent a large portion of the second half of the 1960s living in California. Swapping the grey skies of his native Yorkshire for the sunshine of Los Angeles, he quickly became fascinated by the city’s swimming pools — to him, symbols of leisurely pursuits and sexual openness.

The technical challenge of painting water also became an obsession. ‘It can be anything. It can be any colour and has no set visual description,’ Hockney once said. His attempts at rendering ripples and spray formed some of his most celebrated early works, including A Bigger Splash, which was painted in 1967 and chosen for the cover of the catalogue accompanying his first major retrospective, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1970.

That same year, Hockney was one of 28 artists commissioned to design a poster for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Naturally, Hockney turned to the subject of swimming, drawing an athletic torso at the moment it shatters the water’s surface into a mosaic of blues.

Hockney’s pool pictures remain a cornerstone of his major exhibitions. His 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain included Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), which realised just over $90 million at Christie’s in 2018, setting a record price for a living artist at the time.

In 2025, Hockney opened no fewer than 12 shows. The largest was David Hockney 25 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which included more than 400 of his works, making it his biggest ever exhibition. From 12 March 2026, Hockney will present A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting at Serpentine North in London. It’s slated to include at least 10 new works by the artist, who shows little sign of slowing despite the fact that he will be turning 90 next year.

Carol Bove (b. 1971)

Constructed from stainless steel, Carol Bove’s Melty Legs appears to defy elemental laws, as the beams fold and crumple in on themselves like plasticine.

Bove began working with stainless steel, known for its high tensile strength, in 2014, industrially fabricating assemblages that can be as heavy as 600 kilograms — but appear weightless. She often sources materials from scrapyards, then contorts them with the help of a hydraulic press in her studio in New York. The forms of the works are never pre-planned, but are instead a response to what the steel is capable of generating — an approach that she says is influenced by the improvisation of Abstract Expressionism.

Melty Legs was created in 2018. The following year, Bove’s work was exhibited alongside John Chamberlain’s in a two-person show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she was selected to participate in the 58th Venice Biennale. Prior to this, Bove had opened solo shows at MoMA in New York, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Kunsthalle Zürich, the ICA Boston and Tate St Ives in Cornwall, England. She had also participated in the 57th and 54th editions of the Venice Biennale, as well as Documenta 13 and the Whitney Biennial.

On 5 March 2026, New York’s Guggenheim is opening Bove’s biggest presentation to date — as well as her first major museum survey, marking a landmark point in her career. Set to fill the museum’s rotunda, more than 100 works will trace her 25-year career, from early drawings and assemblages made of shells and driftwood, to the later steel pieces, which she calls ‘collage sculptures’. Several new examples have been created especially for the show in response to Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic building.

Cecily Brown (b. 1969)

Cecily Brown’s Shadow Burn could be described as a dance between abstraction and figuration, played out on a two-and-a-half-metre-wide stage. The dazzling work was unveiled in 2006, at the artist’s show Cecily Brown: Paintings 2003-2006 at Gagosian in London.

By then, Brown had earned widespread critical recognition: only in her mid-thirties, she had already mounted solo shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, and the Reina Sofía, Madrid.

A few months after the Gagosian exhibition, Shadow Burn travelled to Osaka for the group show Essential Painting at the National Museum of Art. The painting also went on to feature in two of Brown’s most important European retrospectives — at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2009, and at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 2018-19, which is when the picture was last seen in public. That latter show helped ignite a stellar run of solo shows for Brown across the following decade, in Naples, Munich, New York, Florence and Dallas, among other locations.

Yet Brown has never had an institutional show in London until now. Opening at the capital’s Serpentine South gallery on 27 March 2026, Cecily Brown: Picture Making will include a number of her key landscapes made since 2000, as well as a new body of work inspired by the gallery’s location in Kensington Gardens. It’s also the artist’s first solo presentation in the UK since her 2005 show at Modern Art Oxford — making it something of a homecoming for the British painter who has worked in New York for the past 30 years.

Rose Wylie (b. 1934)

Typical of Rose Wylie’s most celebrated works, Tube Girl is painted with flat perspective and impasto brushwork across three-and-a-half metres of unprimed canvas, and combines text with an intentionally raw character marked out in oils and graphite.

Wylie was born in 1934, but it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that she fully devoted herself to painting — then it took another 30 years for the establishment to recognise her.

As she enters her 92nd year, London’s Royal Academy is hosting her largest career survey to date (until 19 April 2026), featuring some 90 works, including several new paintings. It’s the latest in a string of almost annual solo museum shows over the past decade or so — at the Jerwood Gallery in East Sussex in 2012; Tate Britain in 2013; Turner Contemporary in Margate in 2016; Serpentine North in 2017; the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in 2018; the Aspen Art Museum in 2020; and the Museum Langmatt in Switzerland in 2021.

Since 2017, Wylie has been represented by David Zwirner, which is where Tube Girl was purchased by the present owner in 2018, as part of her commercial show Lolita’s House. Between 2022 and 2023 it was lent to the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent for the show Rose Wylie: picky people notice… — her first solo show at a museum in Belgium.

Nan Goldin (b. 1953)

Following the first publication of her groundbreaking work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022), Nan Goldin travelled to Sorrento, Italy, which is where she shot Cookie in the pool, Sorrento, 1986. Number one from an edition of 25 and more than a metre wide, the image depicts the writer and actress Cookie Mueller. Three years later, Goldin photographed Mueller standing over the casket of her husband, the Italian artist Vittorio Scarpati, and just two months after that, Mueller in her own casket. The young couple had both succumbed to AIDS-related illnesses at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City.

Goldin’s photographs have come to define an era, but a different aspect of her work is explored in Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well, which opens on 18 March 2026 at Paris’s Grand Palais. It is the artist’s first retrospective to concentrate primarily on her role as a filmmaker, focusing on her slideshows.

Goldin first experimented with the format in the 1980s, displaying 700 candid photographs of New York and Boston’s queer scene set to a soundtrack of records by the Velvet Underground, James Brown and Nina Simone in Manhattan nightclubs.

This is the final showing of the exhibition following a four-year-long tour of Europe, stopping at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.

Other artists with works offered in the 20th/21st Century Art sales alongside major exhibitions include Tracey Emin, at Tate Modern, London (until 31 August 2026); Lucian Freud, at the National Portrait Gallery, London (until 4 May); Gerhard Richter, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (until 2 March) and Chiharu Shiota, at the Hayward Gallery, London (until 3 May)

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online, until 19 March 2026. Explore the preview exhibition and sales