The new year is the perfect time to focus on New Year’s resolutions. The classics? Taking care of oneself, reducing stress, spending more time with family, friends, and pleasures, learning something new, and why not, traveling even more. Whether solo or with company, in your own city or exploring new ones, visiting exhibitions is an activity that can encompass all of these goals. Between art, design, history, or contemporary works, it’s the ideal way to start the year on the right foot, stimulating curiosity and opening oneself to new perspectives.
For this reason, we have prepared a guide to unmissable exhibitions to discover around the world throughout the new year.
We begin with exhibitions that opened toward the end of 2024, which, like modern Charon, will carry us into the new year. Among these is the unmissable first major European retrospective of Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, a key figure in Fiber Art, currently on view at the Fondation Cartier in Paris until March 16, 2025.
From France, we move to Miami, where once again the exhibitions of two artists of great interest to the international contemporary scene kick off the last edition of Art Basel Miami. At the Rubell Museum, from December 2, 2024, Vanessa Raw's works, known for painting bucolic scenes imbued with a distinctly feminine sensuality, are on display. Simultaneously, the ICA Miami hosts, until March 30, 2025, the biomorphic and post-human sculptures of French artist Marguerite Humeau. A tribute to future worlds, imagined by the artist as "grands récits" of the contemporary.
Among the most anticipated international events this year are the 19th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, curated by architect and engineer Carlo Ratti (from May 10 to November 23, 2025), and the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, curated by Zasha Colah, opening in the summer (from June 14 to September 14, 2025).
Speaking of Berlin, sound and installation artist Christine Sun Kim, a Berlin resident originally from California, will be featured in her first major museum retrospective, organized and hosted by the Whitney Museum in New York in collaboration with the Walker Art Center.
In Italy, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo continues to distinguish itself for its focus on emerging international artists. From April 8 to October 12, 2025, it will host the first institutional solo show of Jem Perucchini. Paintings and ceramic works – both new productions and pre-existing pieces, some of which were presented in the artist's solo exhibition at Corvi-Mora in London during Frieze 2024 – transport visitors into a universe suspended in time and space, referencing early Italian Renaissance and intricate textile motifs.
Also featured are major retrospectives dedicated to masters of contemporary art: Noah Davis at the Barbican in London, Giuseppe Penone at the Serpentine, Pipilotti Rist at the UCCA Museum in Beijing, and Tracey Emin at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.
Highly anticipated toward the end of the year are the Nan Goldin exhibition at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, that comes after her major show in Berlin, and the major retrospective dedicated to the painting of a pioneer, Gabriele Münter, at the Guggenheim in New York.