Here is every exhibition, opening and biennial worth rearranging your diary for
There are years in which the art world ticks along pleasantly, a good show here, a solid retrospective there, and then there are years when everything seems to arrive at once, when the museums and galleries of the world collectively decide to outdo themselves and each other in a way that makes your wish list look less like a cultural itinerary and more like a full-time occupation. 2026 is emphatically the latter.
From the long-awaited opening of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to a Marcel Duchamp retrospective at MoMA that promises to reframe everything you thought you knew about the 20th century, from a Venice Biennale that arrives under the quietly radical theme of In Minor Keys to a year of wall-to-wall Matisse that stretches from Paris to San Francisco to Baltimore, 2026 is the kind of art year that demands to be met with intention. Here, we have done the planning for you.
The Biennials. Where the Conversation Begins
Venice Biennale: In Minor Keys · 9 May – 22 November
Every two years, Venice becomes the centre of the art world’s universe, and the 2026 edition — themed In Minor Keys — announces itself as something more introspective and more politically attuned than recent iterations. The title alone suggests a departure from spectacle toward something quieter and more consequential, an art world reckoning with uncertainty through restraint rather than volume. Run alongside the main event, the Fondazione Prada’s co-presentation of Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince under the charged title Helter Skelter promises to be among the most discussed shows of the entire year, two artists whose work circles race, image, power and American mythology placed in direct, uncomfortable conversation. Meanwhile, Marina Abramović takes up residence at the Gallerie dell’Accademia for Transforming Energy (6 May – 19 Oct), reminding everyone that, after five decades, she remains the most physically committed artist alive.
Whitney Biennial, New York · Opens 8 March
The Whitney Biennial remains the most reliable barometer of where American art is heading — and in 2026, with the political and cultural temperature running at its current intensity, the expectation is that this edition will not be taking the temperature quietly.
Greater New York 2026, MoMA PS1 · 16 April – 17 August
The essential corrective to the Whitney’s institutional weight, scrappier, more urgent, more interested in what is being made right now in the boroughs and beyond.
The Retrospectives. Masters Old and Overlooked
The Year of Matisse
If 2026 belongs to any single artist, it belongs to Henri Matisse — and the sheer ambition of the programming around his work this year is staggering. The Grand Palais in Paris leads with two separate investigations: Hilma af Klint (6 May – 30 Aug), which, in a magnificent piece of programming, places the Swedish mystic alongside the French colourist to examine what it meant to paint from the inside out, and Matisse 1941–1954 (24 Mar – 26 Jul), the definitive examination of his final, incandescent decade: the cut-outs, the chapel at Vence, the last great sustained act of creative reinvention in modern art history. Barcelona’s CaixaForum picks up the thread with Chez Matisse: The Legacy of a New Painting (27 Mar – 16 Aug), examining the long shadow his practice has cast over everything that followed. In San Francisco, SFMOMA’s Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau: A Modern Scandal (16 May – 7 Sep) returns to the single painting that made him notorious, and the Baltimore Museum of Art brings together Matisse and the Italian painter Loris Cecchini Fratino in To See This Light Again (11 Mar – 6 Sep), one of the more unexpected pairings of the year.
Marcel Duchamp, MoMA, New York · 12 April – 22 August
This is the show that the art world has been anticipating with something between excitement and mild dread. MoMA’s retrospective of Marcel Duchamp — the artist who, depending on your position, either liberated contemporary art from the tyranny of craft or destroyed it — promises to be the most argued-about exhibition of the year. Duchamp matters now not because his work is beautiful, but because the questions it raised about authorship, intention and the institutional frame of art have never felt more alive. Do not miss it.
Raphael: Sublime Poetry, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · 29 March – 28 June
The Met doing Raphael is never less than extraordinary, and this exhibition — focused on the lyrical, almost impossibly graceful quality of his draughtsmanship — arrives as a reminder that formal mastery and emotional depth are not in competition with each other.
James McNeill Whistler, Tate Britain · 21 May – 27 September
Whistler is perhaps the most underrated major figure in Western art — too American for the British establishment, too European for the Americans, too aestheticist for everyone else. Tate Britain’s major retrospective, which then travels to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (16 Oct – 10 Jan 2027), makes the case for his total rehabilitation.
Hilma af Klint, Grand Palais, Paris · 6 May – 30 August
The Swedish painter who made abstract art before abstraction had a name continues her remarkable posthumous rise. This Grand Palais presentation is the largest and most ambitious exhibition of her work yet mounted in France — and for those who have not yet encountered her extraordinary, spiritually charged canvases, it will be one of the most quietly overwhelming experiences the art world has to offer in 2026.
Leonor Fini, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt · 22 October – 28 February 2027
One of the most blazingly original figures associated with Surrealism — though she always resisted the label — Fini is long overdue a major institutional reassessment. Fantastical, erotic, fiercely independent and utterly unlike anyone else, her work feels startlingly contemporary.
Zurbarán, National Gallery, London · 2 May – 23 August
The Spanish Golden Age master whose still lives and devotional paintings achieve a stillness so absolute it borders on the metaphysical. The National Gallery’s show promises to be one of the quieter revelations of the London art calendar.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life · 26 February – 31 August
Raw, unflinching and entirely herself, Emin’s new body of work, made in the shadow of serious illness, is reportedly the most personally searching thing she has produced. That is saying something.
Ana Mendieta, Tate Modern · 9 July – 10 January 2027
One of the most important retrospectives of the year, and one of the most overdue. The Cuban-American artist who made land art, performance and body art from a place of radical vulnerability and political fury deserves every inch of Tate Modern’s walls.
On the Radar. Shows to Seek Out
Mary Cassatt gets the double treatment she deserves — the National Gallery of Art in Washington leads with An American in Paris (14 Feb – 30 Aug), while the Art Institute of Chicago picks up the story post-Impressionism (6 Sep – 3 Jan 2027). The Frick Collection’s Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture (12 Feb – 11 May) promises to reframe the great society portraitist as something considerably more subversive than his reputation suggests. And Spectrosynthesis Seoul at the Art Sonje Center (20 Mar – 28 Jun), exploring LGBTQ+ identity through the lens of Asian contemporary art, is one of the most important shows anywhere in the world this year, full stop.
The Museum Openings. The New Buildings Changing Everything
If the exhibitions make 2026 remarkable, the museum openings make it historic.
The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry and years in the making, finally opens its doors, a building of such extraordinary scale and architectural ambition that it will almost certainly become the defining cultural image of the Gulf for a generation. Its programme, with a commitment to global contemporary art and a particular emphasis on voices from the Global South, will be watched with intense interest.
In London, the V&A East opens on 18 April in Stratford, a new kind of V&A for a new kind of audience, with a live programme of making, performance and design research sitting alongside the permanent collection. It is the most significant new museum opening in London in years.
In Los Angeles, 2026 is a landmark year. The rebuilt LACMA, designed by Peter Zumthor and controversially long in gestation, finally opens in April, a building that has been argued about so fiercely for so long that the physical reality of it will be genuinely startling. And George Lucas’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in September, dedicating itself to the art of storytelling in all its forms, from Norman Rockwell to digital animation.
Also in Los Angeles, Dataland, a new institution devoted entirely to data-driven and computational art, opens in spring, signalling something about where culture is heading that no one has quite fully reckoned with yet.
