Swerve January’s bleaker connotations by indulging in a wholesome dose of inspiring tradition, and the slower tempo in the beginning of the 12 months is the proper time to atone for the exhibitions you will have missed within the pre-Christmas rush. From spotlights on rising and established artists, to work throughout mediums, there is a flurry of thrilling exhibits to see.
Exhibitions to see in January 2026
Wes Anderson on the Design Museum, London, till 26 July
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Twentieth Century Studios, Inc. All rights reserved)
Margot Tenenbaum’s Fendi mink coat is among the most immediately recognisable items of clothes in up to date movie. Worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in 2001 film basic The Royal Tenenbaums, the coat now sits in an expansive exploration of US director Wes Anderson on the Design Museum in London. The exhibition additionally includes a set of bespoke Louis Vuitton suitcases, stamped with miniature safari animals and featured in 2007’s The Darjeeling Restricted. In one other area, an intimately scaled puppet used to carry George Clooney’s titular character to life within the 2009 stop-motion animation Improbable Mr Fox is on show. The present is an in-depth ode to hands-on filmmaking, and a welcome antidote to our CGI and AI age.
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Yayoi Kusama at Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland, till 25 January
(Picture credit score: Yusuke Miyazaki. © Yayoi Kusama)
The Fondation Beyeler present is the primary dedicated to the artist in Switzerland and the staff is anticipating over half 1,000,000 guests who will marvel on the sheer vary of her work, which spans from small delicate watercolours to a totally immersive set up that includes large inflated black and yellow tentacles, entitled The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity Will Eternally Cowl the Universe (2019/2024). The dots and mirrors are delightfully discombobulating, like peering into an abyss. That sense of teetering, of reaching into the cosmos, is threaded all through all Kusama’s unbelievably prolific output.
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‘La Salle de Health club des Femmes Arab’ at Aga Khan Park, Toronto, till Could 31,
(Picture credit score: © Hassan Hajjaj. Courtesy of the artist and Vigo Gallery, London UK)
At Aga Khan Park, outdoors Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum, a run of low billboards presents girls in boldly colored tracksuits and floral coats, hijabs tucked beneath boxing gloves as they strike sparring poses. The set up attracts from Hassan Hajjaj’s long-running La Salle de Health club des Femmes Arab (The Arab Ladies’s Health club), shot over roughly a decade and a half. On this collection, Hajjaj locations girls on the centre of the usually male-dominated world of sports activities. Capturing them actively taking part in sports activities like soccer, boxing, and browsing.
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‘Peter Doig: Home of Music’, at Serpentine South, London, till 8 February
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist)
Peter Doig is among the best-known up to date artists of our instances. His work could also be beloved, fetching stratospheric costs, however Doig has persistently risen above art-world elitism. Now, his ‘Home of Music’ exhibition at Serpentine Galleries strikes a blow for cultural democracy by giving the art-loving public an opportunity to expertise his work as in the event that they had been at house.
The artist has introduced a novel and really uncommon sound system into the gallery, put in acoustic curtains, and arrange lounge areas. Individuals can sit within the area for lengthy durations of time, and benefit from the work with a bespoke soundtrack of 300 vinyl information which are performed repeatedly all through the day.
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‘Monument to the Unimportant’ at Tempo, London till 14 February
(Picture credit score: Tempo Gallery)
The objects and issues that fill our day by day lives are sometimes ones we solely discover in the event that they cease working, or in the event that they inconvenience us ultimately. The desserts that haven’t risen, the cables that don’t join or the weeds rising via the crack within the path – all will obtain our full consideration solely after they change into a nuisance.
However at the moment at Tempo, London, this stuff and extra are celebrated as issues of magnificence in their very own proper, with the group exhibition ‘Monument to the Unimportant’ spotlighting the enjoyment in mundanity. Artists together with Henni Alftan, Genesis Belanger, Elmgreen & Dragset, Urs Fischer, Sylvie Fleury, David Hockney and Rachel Whiteread recontextualise the quotidian to create one thing wholly new.
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VIVONO. Arts and Emotions, HIV-AIDS in Italy, 1982-1996′ at Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, till March 1, 2026
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Luma Basis)
In one of many closing rooms of ‘Vivono: Artwork and Emotions, HIV-AIDS in Italy. 1982-1996’, at Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato (via 10 Could 2026), a delicate military of off-white sofas invitations guests to sit down and soak up the phrases of Nino Gennaro, the artist, activist and poet whose writing is projected onto the encompassing partitions (previous pictures moreover seem on a few of the furnishings through a slide present). The area is loosely modelled after Gennaro’s personal dwelling association, within the house he shared together with his chosen household of community-minded artists till his demise, from AIDS in 1995, which he described in private notes from the Nineteen Eighties as ‘a spot to make errors but additionally to get issues proper, a spot to heal but additionally to get sick…to die but additionally be reborn, a spot the place every thing is allowed…’
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Zofia Rydet: Sociological Document is at The Photographers’ Gallery London, till 22 February 2026
(Picture credit score: From Sociological Document © Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Basis)
In 1978, Zofia Rydet launched into a colossal process: photographing the within of each family in Poland. The 67 year-old had already produced a significant physique of labor with Little Man – a examine on youngsters, revealed as a guide in 1965 – whereas her collection of photomontages, The World of Feeling and Creativeness, had been in improvement since 1975. What grew to become Sociological Document would finally take Rydet into the Nineteen Nineties, culminating in additional than 20,000 photos, solely a fraction of which had been ever printed (by the collection’ finish her efforts had been solely centered on ensuring there was a document, versus sharing it).
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Pleasure Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey is at Whitechapel Gallery till 1st March 2026
(Picture credit score: © Pleasure Gregory)
It’s apt that Pleasure Gregory’s first main survey present on the Whitechapel Gallery ought to take its title from a proverb mentioned by her mom. In each room, her phrases – ‘you catch extra flies with honey than vinegar’ – ring true. Right here, these honeyed pictures maintain a pertinent political message that sticks. Utilizing nineteenth-century photographic processes to discover points similar to race, gender and colonialism, Gregory’s works pack a punch, rendering all of them the sweeter for it.
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‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ is on the Brooklyn Museum till 8 March 2026
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of The Jean Pigozzi African Artwork Assortment)
In April 2024, curator and creator Catherine E McKinley travelled to Mali to fulfill the household of legendary photographer Seydou Keïta, to debate an upcoming exhibition and to ask for his or her participation.
Celebrated as some of the excellent Twentieth-century photographers, Keïta ran a pictures studio within the Malian capital, Bamako, between the late Forties and early Nineteen Sixties, the place he shot black and white portraits of fashionably dressed folks, with the patterned backdrops that he’s maybe greatest recognized for. He additionally documented the social and political panorama in pre- and post-independence Mali. That work was launched to the West within the early Nineteen Nineties, first anonymously in New York after which later recognized, in group and solo exhibitions at galleries, museums, and foundations all over the world.
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Yuko Mohri, ‘Entanglements’, at Pirelli HangarBicocca till 11 January 2026
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Picture Agostino Osio)
Yuko Mohri’s dwelling, respiration installations are feats of innovation. On the 2024 Venice Biennale, her work Compose on the Japan pavilion featured rotting fruit, kinetic sculpture and a number of vessels related by skinny tubes, filling the area with scent, sound, and light-weight. Her inspiration comes from moments of on a regular basis ingenuity; for instance, the resourceful do-it-yourself water-catching units used in opposition to leaks all through Tokyo’s subway system. ‘Entanglements’, her new present at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca, presents seven current works throughout the 4,000 sq m area, exploring how seemingly disconnected items react to at least one one other throughout the identical setting. This displays extra broadly on the invisible hyperlinks and interactions between dwelling and inanimate issues on this planet.
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Chantal Joffe is at Victoria Miro London till 17 January 2026
(Picture credit score: © Chantal Joffe. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro)
Chantal Joffe offers in reminiscence. Within the thick, tangible brushstrokes of her work and within the beneficiant sizes of her canvases, we’re invited to find Joffe’s girls – as a result of it’s usually girls she paints, these she admires, or these she is near.
Joffe has a completely distinctive figurative type of portray, eschewing a neat formality for gorgeously expressive brushwork, with the palpability of the paint permitting for a larger freedom within the depictions of the ladies she is portray. Her complicated, multifaceted topics can solely come alive in Joffe’s thickly-drawn sweeps of paint, their nuances and quirks and options recognisably theirs, with out being completely or realistically rendered.
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Unveiled Wishes: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–At present’, at Richard Saltoun London, half 2 till 14 February 2026
(Picture credit score: Penny Slinger. Courtesy Richard Saltoun)
‘What fascinates me about surrealism within the context of the erotic is the way it transforms want right into a language of liberation,’ says Maudji Mendel of RAW (Rediscovering Artwork by Ladies) on the eve of her exhibition opening.
It’s a matter she has been contemplating, within the context of ignored girls artists of the Twentieth century, for the exhibition ‘Unveiled Wishes: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–At present’, opening at Richard Saltoun gallery throughout London’s Frieze Week. Organised into two elements, the primary operating till November 2025 and the second till February 2026, it explores want and fetish as a uncared for a part of the surrealist motion.
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‘Nigerian Modernism’ is at Tate Trendy, London till 10 Could 2026
(Picture credit score: © reserved. Tate)
Moving into Tate Trendy, the proposition is speedy: modernism is plural and Nigeria is one in all its centres. ‘Nigerian Modernism’ opens as a dialog, not a line. Media and generations collide. Ceramics reply portray. Print meets sculpture. Osei Bonsu and Bilal Akkouche curate with a choreography that mirrors the experimental drive of the work itself. Opening tomorrow, the exhibition brings collectively greater than 250 works by over 50 artists, spanning the Forties via to the late Twentieth century. What emerges just isn’t a tidy lineage however a stressed dialogue – a testing floor for freedom, creativeness, and wrestle.
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Lee Miller at Tate Britain till 15 February
(Picture credit score: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.)
Not lengthy earlier than Tate Britain opened photographer Lee Miller’s largest retrospective so far (2 October 2025-15 February 2026), I travelled to her former house, Farleys Home, tucked away within the Sussex countryside. Miller and husband Roland Penrose created a surrealist haven upon shifting there in 1949, spending the subsequent 35 years filling the house and gardens with up to date artwork. Associates and artists Pablo Picasso, Man Ray and Leonora Carrington had been frequent guests, leaving their mark. Picasso daubed a smiley face on the tiles above the Aga, whereas Joan Miró absent-mindedly twiddled wine-bottle wrapping right into a sculpture, which sits within the eating room.
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Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, The Delusion, at Serpentine North till 18 January 2026
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Gallery)
Historically, artwork galleries will be solitary experiences, with guests avoiding eye contact on a stroll round an exhibition. It’s a customized Berlin-based British artist and recreation designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is eager to problem, with the artist’s immersive new exhibition at The Serpentine encouraging guests to work together – with one another.
The online game fee, The Delusion, is a multiplayer expertise, inviting viewers to nearly enter digital portals. Inside every one there are dialog starters, reflecting on each the digital world and its usually vitriolic and harmful real-life penalties. Gamers observe prompts, and are inspired to interact in trustworthy conversations with themselves and one another.
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‘Visualizing the Supernatural’ at Kunstmuseum Basel till 8 March 2026
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Denis Pellerin © Denis Pellerin)
As a tradition, we’ve all the time liked a superb ghost. From a white sheet with black holes for eyes that haunts the pages of a youngsters’s story guide, to the Romantic and the Gothic, through spirit pictures, ouija boards and Patrick Swayze, the attraction is plain. And why not? The query of the place we go after we die, if wherever, is knitted into the that means of what it means to be human.
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Supply: Wallpaper
