8  Sensational Summer Art Exhibitions Worth Traveling to See

Showcasing the best art exhibitions in some of the world’s leading destinations, Galerie has curated a list of exceptional shows in popular locales. From Alexander Calder’s celebrated sculptures, paintings, and works on paper at Paris’ dynamic Fondation Louis Vuitton and a lively group show tracing Frida Kahlo’s rise from a relatively unknown painter to a worldwide cultural phenomenon at London’s Tate Modern to Ewa Juszkiewicz’s first museum solo exhibition featuring her wildly feminist takes on Neoclassical masterpieces at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid and Damián Ortega’s playful deconstruction of everyday objects, including a Volkswagen Beetle disassembled and suspended in mid-air, at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, these are cultural escapes to enjoy this summer and beyond.

1. Alexander Calder | Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

A pioneering 20th-century American sculptor, Alexander Calder is widely celebrated for his suspended mobiles, stationary stabiles, monumental public artworks, handcrafted jewelry, and tiny 3D wire caricatures—creating a vast body of more than 22,000 works in his lifetime. The exhibition “Calder. Rever en Équilibre,” conceived in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, features hundreds of notable sculptures, paintings, works on paper, and jewelry by the artist, along with more than 30 photographs of him at work and at play, as well as artworks in variety of media by some of his modernist friends, including Léger, Kandinsky, Miró, Mondrian, and Picasso. The expansive exhibition commemorates the centenary of Calder’s 1926 arrival in France and the 50th anniversary of his death, offering a retrospective that explores all facets of his colorful career.

Through August 16

2. Frida Kahlo | Tate Modern, London

A global icon and a major influence on a generation of artists, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is renowned for her vivid, candid self-portraits, rich in bold color. As a prominent figure in modern art, she blended traditional Mexican folk art, pre-Columbian symbols, and Catholic references to explore themes of identity, postcolonial issues, gender, and the human form. Through the lens of the artists she influenced and her own extraordinary work, the survey “Frida: The Making of an Icon” traces Kahlo’s rise from a relatively unknown painter to a worldwide cultural phenomenon. Kahlo’s work is paired with artists such as Kiki Smith, Judy Chicago, and Ana Mendieta, fostering compelling visual conversations about identity, violence, and the body as a natural entity. Other artists borrow her iconography and embody her image to explore themes of race, gender, and sexuality, as in Mary McCartney’s striking portrait of Tracey Emin—the subject of a concurrent Tate exhibition—dressed as Frida in bed.

Through January 3

3. Camille Henrot | Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen

A contemporary French artist working across media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, film, and large-scale installations, Camille Henrot is widely known for her multidisciplinary approach that combines anthropological research, mythology, and digital culture. Her largest solo exhibition in Scandinavia to date, “Paper Planes,” features significant installations from the past decade, a selection of new sculptures and drawings, and the Scandinavian debut of her new film about the loss of wildlife, In the Veins, which Art in America called “an instant classic.” The survey also highlights the European debut of two significant bronze sculptures from the 2013 Venice Biennale Silver Lion winner’s latest Abacus series. These sculptures feature curved rods and movable beads shaped into organic, almost bodily forms, challenging the notion that the systems we use to organize the world are as fixed as we believe.

Through December 31

4. Derrick Adams | ICA/Boston, Boston

Derrick Adams is a critically acclaimed American artist, educator, and community leader known for a multidisciplinary approach that celebrates Black life, joy, and culture. Working across a dizzying array of media, Adams’s signature aesthetic is defined by bold colors, clean lines, and fragmented geometric shapes that blend pop-culture influences with modernist Cubism. Spanning 25 years of the artist’s practice, the “View Master” exhibition showcases new pieces debuting at the ICA, exclusive works from Adams’s personal archive, and an immersive exhibition design crafted by the artist. Over this period, Adams’s diverse artworks—including paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects—have highlighted the richness and complexity of everyday Black American life, transforming these moments into a distinctive visual language. At the ICA, the artist’s work will extend beyond the galleries with the museum’s first large-scale facade project—a massive installation colorfully covering the building’s exterior.

Through September 7

5. Ron Mueck | Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

Ron Mueck, an acclaimed Australian-born sculptor living in the UK, is known for his hyper-realistic, emotionally powerful human figures. Rather than working at life-size, he distorts scale—creating either gigantic or tiny figures—to explore themes such as vulnerability, birth, aging, and death. A son of toymakers, he spent over 20 years as a model-maker, puppeteer, and effects animator for TV and film, with no formal art training, before rocketing to global fame in 1997 with his breakthrough piece, Dead Dad, at the Royal Academy’s legendary “Sensation” exhibition. The museum’s exhibition presents eleven works that trace the artist’s development from early masterpieces to newer pieces, highlighting key works such as the large-scale installation Mass, which features 100 giant, individually sculpted human skulls stacked within a gallery space, and Young Couple, which depicts a teenage boy and girl dressed in casual street clothing locked in an awkward embrace.

Through September 23

6. The Only True Protest Is Beauty | Palazzo Pisani Moretta, Venice

Renowned for creating poetic, trend-defying clothing that blends expert tailoring with vibrant, unexpected prints, Dries Van Noten is a celebrated Belgian fashion designer and a founding member of the Antwerp Six, an avant-garde group that reshaped the global fashion landscape. The inaugural exhibition of the Fondazione Dries Van Noten in Venice, “The Only True Protest Is Beauty,” marks the designer’s first major cultural project following his retirement from his eponymous brand in 2024.

The exhibition, inspired by American political activist Phil Ochs’s quote, “In such an ugly time, the only true protest is beauty,” presents beauty as a disruptive force and a form of human defiance in a chaotic, digital world—emphasizing slow, deliberate craftsmanship amid automated technology and AI. Hosted across 20 rooms in a breathtaking 15th-century Venetian Gothic palace along the Grand Canal, the presentation brings together more than 200 objects by over 50 international makers, including avant-garde fashion from Comme des Garçons and Christian Lacroix, and contemporary fine art by artists such as Steven Shearer and Peter Buggenhout, staged in direct conversation with the palace’s ancient, unrenovated frescoes, Rococo stucco, and Murano glass chandeliers.

Through October 4

7. Ewa Juszkiewicz | Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid

Celebrated for her captivating female portraits inspired by classic 18th- and 19th-century paintings, Ewa Juszkiewicz creatively reimagines feminist takes on Neoclassical masterpieces. Concealing her elegant women’s faces with everything from bunches of flowers and mushrooms to twisted dress fabrics and hair, the popular Polish painter dramatically transforms her subjects, challenging traditional depictions of women in the skillful style of the male—and sometimes female—artists she subverts. For more than a decade, the Warsaw-based artist has reimagined European portrait-painting traditions, investigating how distortion and transformation can challenge established visual norms. Marking the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, it features over 20 paintings from 2013 to today, with a focus on recent works, including a notable group made specifically for this show.

Through September 6

8. Damián Ortega | Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo

Celebrated for deconstructing everyday objects to reveal their complex social, political, and physical systems, Damián Ortega is a prominent Mexican artist best known for his work Cosmic Thing, which features a Volkswagen Beetle disassembled and suspended in mid-air, with each part arranged like a 3D mechanic’s manual or diagram. A former political cartoonist, Ortega creates sculptures, installations, and films distinguished by playful humor and an incisive critique of consumer culture. “Matter and Energy,” the artist’s first major survey exhibition in South America, invites viewers to reevaluate their daily lives and the objects around them, exploring themes such as labor, consumption, time, and language. With 35 pieces on display, the exhibition welcomes visitors into a world where gravity appears to be defied, and objects are broken down and reimagined.

Through September 13