Insight Tribune

9 European Exhibitions Worth Traveling for in 2025

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9 European Exhibitions Worth Traveling for in 2025


Note the exclamation mark in the title: “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern (Feb. 27 through Aug. 31) is the first large-scale exhibition to present the multidisciplinary output that was the work and too-short-life of the boy from suburban Sunshine, Australia, who out-weirded the colorful 1980s London club scene. Bowery is best known for his fabulously outré costumes: oversized bulging eyes and painted smiles, wigs of inflated spikes, bedazzled masks, baroque bustiers, sky-high platforms, PVC, bondage gear, tulle, feathers … You name it, he wore it.

This avant-garde garb, which he wore to London’s chicest deviant venues (including the famously “polysexual” club Taboo, where he mingled with Boy George, John Galliano and George Michael), has influenced countless haute-couture runway shows since Bowery died from an AIDS-related-illness in 1994, at age 33. But Bowery was a brilliant polymath, whose work included performance, live art, dance, music, modeling, television and club promotion. His larger-than-life persona knew no confines; art and life were one and the same. The Tate Modern show will consider all these facets together and promises a beautiful, wild ride through Bowery’s eclectic, boundary-breaking oeuvre.

Before she shocked turn-of-the-century Paris audiences as the first European woman artist to present a full-length male nude, Suzanne Valadon waited tables, made funeral wreaths, sold vegetables, and flew through the air as a circus acrobat. A fall ended her trapeze career when she was just 15, leading her to the studios of Montmartre’s most prolific artists, where she found employment as a model for Impressionist luminaries including Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and more.

It was Degas who encouraged Valadon to pick up a brush and move to the other side of the canvas, and Toulouse-Lautrec who nicknamed her Suzanne (she was born Marie-Clémentine) after the bathing biblical maiden famously ogled by lecherous elders. Valadon made the name her own and became the author, rather than the subject, of hundreds of striking portraits. The most notable are her women: self-possessed and in casual repose, unidealized and unbothered by being beheld. The Pompidou Center is mounting a vast retrospective (Jan. 15 through May 26), including new archival material that paints a picture of Valadon’s plucky and pioneering personal life.

“Sag mir wo die Blumen sind” implores the poetic title of a sprawling Anselm Kiefer exhibition that will span two of Amsterdam’s most prestigious institutions: the Stedelijk Museum and the Van Gogh Museum (March 7 through June 9). The show takes its title from the German version of Pete Seeger’s antiwar folk ballad, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” — made popular by Marlene Dietrich at a UNICEF gala in 1962 — and presents work old and new by Kiefer, whose oeuvre reckons with memory, ruins, history, war, mythology and landscape.

A new, 80-foot site-specific installation of the same name will occupy the grand staircase of the Stedelijk, while its galleries present new and never-before-seen Kiefer works from the museum’s impressive collection alongside other highlights from the artist’s 60-year career. A two-minute walk away, the Van Gogh Museum will be focusing on Kiefer’s relationship with the Dutch painter van Gogh’s life and art, juxtaposing works by the two, including their many blooming offerings: sunflowers and more sunflowers, representing life and death, prospering and decay, with art as the eternal bridge between the two.

The Swiss artist Paul Klee painted many angels throughout his life. Angels ascending, angels descending, angels serving breakfast; weeping, forgetful, vigilant, doubting, full of hope. His most famous is the “Angelus Novus” (1920), now commonly known as the “Angel of History,” a name assigned to it by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who owned the unique print and considered it his most prized possession. Benjamin wrote of the angel — a curly-haired seraph in sepia tones, arms raised in excitement or alarm — as facing the past while being driven toward the future by a storm too strong for his wings to beat against: the storm of progress.

Klee and Benjamin both died in 1940: Klee, stateless, and who had scleroderma, a rare autoimmune disease, drew angels in his dying days; Benjamin died by suicide after fearing capture by the Nazis at France’s border with Spain. At the Bode Museum, “The Angel of History” (May 8 through July 13), places the “Angelus Novus” alongside other angels struck by damage and disaster, including a reproduction of Caravaggio’s 1602 “St. Matthew and the Angel,” destroyed in Berlin in 1945, and screenings of Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” (1987), whose pensive spirits look down on the divided city.

If you don’t think you’ll make it to James Turrell’s Roden Crater in the Arizona desert during this lifetime, you might still get to Aarhus, Denmark, just under three hours’ train journey from Copenhagen. There, the land artist known for his luminous works is unveiling “The Dome, a Skyspace,” a new, permanent installation at ARoS Museum that is set to open sometime in 2025.

The vast structure, 50 feet high by 130 feet wide, has been under construction for more than 10 years. When finished, it will be the most ambitious of Turrell’s “Skyspaces”: total environments that are simple in structure (containing only seating, lighting and a window to the sky above) but sublime in their perception-altering power. At ARoS, visitors will enter an enormous dome via a series of snaking corridors glowing with golden light. Ushered into the vaulted space, with its overhead oculus like a giant eye, you can stand, sit or lie on the ground and watch a beam of natural light pass around the space as the walls shift in hue, bathed in artificial light — pink, blue, green and white, each color introducing a new relationship to the sky outside. You’ll have to see it to believe it.

Hot on the heels of her announcement as curator of the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, Koyo Kouoh is bringing her exhibition “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting” to Bozar, Brussels (Feb. 7 through Aug. 10). The Cameroonian-born curator and her team at Zeitz MoCAA, the Cape Town museum that she has run since 2019, have put together a rich and varied exhibition that includes works by over 120 artists who address how people from Africa and its diaspora have been represented during the past century.

The show’s name riffs on Ava Duvernay’s 2019 Netflix series about the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers wrongfully accused of rape and assault in 1989. But where Duvernay’s title had “they” — “When They See Us” — Kouoh substitutes “We,” inviting the viewer to see this way, too. The show is organized around themes including sensuality, spirituality, joy, revelry and emancipation. Different names will be familiar to different viewers (I jump at any chance to see work by the Sudanese modernist innovator Ibrahim El-Salahi), but no doubt it’s the panoply, the many arrayed together, that will move most.

To the beautiful but sinking city, Carlo Ratti, the curator of Venice’s 19th International Architecture Biennale, brings “intelligens” (May 10 through Nov. 23), an exhibition that considers how architecture can harness natural, artificial and collective intelligence to combat climate change. “To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us,” Ratti said when he was announced in the role, adding that the building industry was one of the biggest contributors to atmospheric emissions and urgently needed to change.

Is it too late? Can we adapt? Alongside displays that will highlight some possible solutions — ranging from reviving traditional building practices to A.I. that saves instead of spends energy — the 2025 Architecture Biennale aims to live up to its own “circular economy manifesto,” reducing waste to focus on sustainability. Ratti’s show will be complemented by 29 national pavilions, only a few of which have been announced — but it’s safe to anticipate (or even to hope) that they will follow his lead and look to the future, whatever it may bring.

You’ve seen it, or some aspect, in dozens of paintings by Paul Cézanne, whether you know it or not: the Jas de Bouffan, a large country house and farm just outside Aix-en-Provence, which the artist’s father bought in 1859. The stately 18th-century house, with its cream-colored facade, blue shutters and sloping terra-cotta tiled roof, is where Cézanne worked for 40 years and it appears in many of his paintings — near, far, obscured by thickets of trees. Sometimes it’s a view from the house, of chestnut tree alleys, shady paths and golden fields. Other times, the house hosts friends for portraits, or its grounds give rise to imagined views, like bucolic gatherings of nude bathers.

This summer at the Musée Granet, the exhibition “Cézanne au Jas de Bouffan” (June 28 through Oct. 12) will gather 100 paintings, drawings and watercolors to show the special relationship the artist had with his family home and its environs in the south of France. As part of a citywide tribute to Cézanne taking place across Aix-en-Provence, you can also visit the newly renovated house itself and the painter’s final studio, Les Lauves, where he worked from 1901 until his death in 1906, and see what Cézanne saw.

After his death in 1455, they called the unassuming artist known as Fra Angelico “the Angelic Painter.” Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” describes this painter of impossibly delicate and luminous religious scenes as “a rare and perfect talent” who was “so humble and modest in all that he did and said, and whose pictures were painted with such facility and piety.”

As is so often the case with early-15th-century artists in Italy, only bits and pieces of Fra Angelico’s biography are known: Born Guido di Petro circa 1395, he joined the Dominican Order at a young age, possibly trained with an illuminator, and moved monasteries many times. But his output was prolific and he quickly acquired a reputation for his astonishing mastery of perspective, and for his ethereal figures limned with gold. “Angelico” (Sept. 26 through Jan. 25, 2026), a joint affair between the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco (which includes a still-operating Dominican monastery that houses Fra Angelico’s most famous frescoes), brings together pieces by the pious painter that have been dispersed for more than 200 years.

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