20 must-see exhibitions to visit in 2024

The Harlem Renaissance was an African-American intellectual, social and artistic movement that arose in the 1920s and 1940s in the United States, and exploded particularly in New York’s Harlem district. “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” is the first exhibition on this theme in a museum institution in New York since the late 1980s, and will aim to recount through photography, painting and sculpture the complexity of a period that was fundamental to modernism and the contemporary.

The largest and richest retrospective of Joan Jonas’s art in the United States, ‘Good Night Good Morning: Joan Jonas,’ will open to the public on March 17, 2024, at MoMA New York. Drawings, photographs, writings, short stories, film screenings, performances and a selection of installations by the artist will trace the evolution of Jonas’ career, from the works of the 1960s and 1970s on the relationship between technology and ritual to more recent works on ecology and landscape. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by another work, “Out Takes”, a performance that will include new materials created exclusively for the occasion by the artist, who will be joined by performer Lucy Mullican, with live music by composer Ikue Mori.

The presence of artificial intelligence is growing and becoming harder to ignore in our day-to-day activities, sparking much discussion in the art community. The Whitney Museum in New York will host the exhibition “Harold Cohen: AARON”, which traces an artistic history of the first artificial intelligence software for art production developed by Harold Cohen starting in the 1960s at the University of California San Diego and developed until 2016. 

The Whitney is the first and only museum to collect many versions of this software from different decades and will present works produced by AARON, highlighting its live drawing process for the first time since the 1990s.

The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo is hosting the first major exhibition in Japan dedicated to the American artist Theaster Gates from April 24, 2024. In addition to previous works that show his creative and artistic journey, new works created for the occasion and related to Japan will be presented: from the projects in Tokoname, Aichi Prefecture, to ‘Afro-Mingei’, a philosophy proposed by Gates, which discovers its roots in the cultural possibilities of uniting the Japanese Mingei traditional art movement with those centered on beauty and black aesthetics.

“Life is Architecture” is the title of the Hong Kong M+ Museum’s retrospective dedicated to one of the great masters of modernist architecture, Ieoh Ming Pei. A rich selection of drawings, sketches, videos, models, photographs and other archival materials will chronicle the iconic architecture designed around the world by the naturalized Chinese-American architect. The exhibition will also feature photographic contributions from international photographers of the new generation, who have made Ieoh Ming Pei’s architectural model the subject of their shots.

This summer at the Tate Modern in London will be marked by the luminous experiments of British artist Anthony McCall. Moving between the nuances that separate sculpture, film and drawing, McCall became world-famous in the 1970s with his ‘solid light’ installations, such as the work ‘Line Describing a Cone’. This exhibition will be a special opportunity to explore the projected light spaces and forms that the artist creates, in a seamless evolution of sculptural intersections.

After more than twenty-five years of activity, in the summer of 2024 the Fondation Beyeler will open for the first time its entire museum and its green park to new experiments in contemporary art, which together will form an exhibition conceived as a ‘living organism’, constantly changing over the course of the months. Site-specific and adaptations of existing works by international artists will also create an interesting exchange with works from the in-house collection. The project is curated by Precious Okoyomon and Philippe Parreno, together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and Sam Keller, Mouna Mekouar and Isabela Mora of the Fondation Beyeler.

Photographer, but also militant activist and nomadic spirit, Tina Modotti and her photography are celebrated in an impressive retrospective hosted by the Jeu de Paume in Paris from 13 February to 26 May 2024. More than two hundred shots, as well as various archive materials, trace the events of her eventful life.

Largely influenced by her mentor Edward Weston, Tina Modotti immediately developed a recognizable and distinctive style that is the key to her posthumous popularity in cultural institutions all over the world.

The title of the exhibition at the Friche La Belle de Mai in Marseille recalls a phrase uttered by Charles De Gaulle while flying over the Caribbean, which appeared to his eyes as “grains of dust on the sea”. Overturning this paternalistic and colonial perspective of last century’s France is the goal that has brought together in this exhibition twenty-six artists from Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Haiti, in which the variety of possible approaches to sculpture testifies to the network of ideas around the heritage, history, art and identity of these cultures.

The expressive potential of textile materials has been explored by many artists over the decades, and the exhibition that will be hosted next fall by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam aims to map this potential. Issues related to gender, colonialism, traditions and major migrations are addressed in more than one hundred works by international artists who have used textiles and fabrics to tell stories of resistance and healing.

From March 22, 2024, the Hamburger Bahnof in Berlin will be presenting the collection of works by Joseph Beuys acquired through a donation from collector Erich Marx, which occurred after his death in 2020. Fifteen works will be exhibited in the Kleihueshalle for the first time, exploring the legacy of this great master of contemporary art. 

These works, which become part of the permanent collection of the Berlin institution, will interact over the years with artists of the new generation, creating a link between today and the insights of Joseph Beuys.

After the fall of the Wall in 1989, Berlin experienced a decade of political and social turmoil and controversy, but it also saw the birth of a new generation that came to rediscover the city’s spaces. In the 1990s, photographers from East Germany founded the photographic agency OSTKREUZ, and the exhibition at C/O Berlin will chronicle their activity through the works of the agency’s co-founders Sibylle Bergemann, Harald Hauswald, Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler and other members who joined the group afterward.

Anne Imhof joins the Kunsthaus Bregenz for the summer of 2024 with a solo exhibition in which she will focus on painting and sculpture as the core of her artistic practice, which parallels the evolution of her approach to performance. 

The austerityof the exhibition space is a perfect setting for the new experience of the German artist, who in this project looks at the human figure as an allegorical presence, accentuating certain aspects of the human condition and activating the ambiguity of the place, rendered at the same time barricade and proscenium.

The Serpentine South Gallery reopens in 2024 with a solo exhibition of one of the most influential artists of our time, Barbara Kruger. “Thinking of you. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” is the title of Kruger’s first solo institutional exhibition in London in over twenty years. On view from 1 February to 17 March, the exhibition explores Kruger’s digital productions of the past two decades: her distinctive paste-ups of text and images, large-scale vinyl wall and floor installations, multi-channel films and soundscapes, in which visitors can immerse dive into. 
This autumn, thanks to a collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, Kruger’s work will also be on show at Aros Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark, in an exhibition entitled “No comment”, on view from 30 November to 21 April 2025.

During the winter and spring of 2024, the architect Alvar Aalto and his two life companions Aino Marsio and Elissa, will be the leading figures at MAXXI in Rome, presenting the Aalto studio idea of architecture and design, based on a principle of harmony with nature and man. 

Eleven projects realized by the Aalto studio over several decades are on display, presented with an experimental layout curated by Space Caviar that enriches the visitor’s experience, offering additional elements and cues to fully understand, as the title of the exhibition anticipates, the human dimension of the project.

In 2024, Triennale Milano continues the story of Italy’s most important figures in design and architecture with monographic exhibitions that promise to be unmissable. In addition to the shows dedicated to Alessandro Mendini and Roberto Sambonet, the Milan institution will host from May to October the first major retrospective focusing on Gae Aulenti, one of the most significant personalities in contemporary design and architecture, with an exhibition that will feature a sequence of rooms reproduced on a 1:1 scale, thanks to great work on archive materials, some of which will be rediscovered and made accessible to visitors.

In partnership with the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Pirelli HangarBicocca will be showing an extraordinary retrospective dedicated to Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, the largest to be held in Italy since his death in 1991. More than thirty fundamental works by the artist, from the 1950s to the 1980s, will compose a sound and visual backdrop of kinetic works of monumental dimensions, flanked by cacophonous machines, and musical and colorful works, in what promises to be a surprising dialogue with the industrial architecture of the Navate.

Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice from April 16, 2024, in conjunction with the opening of the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, will host the works of American painter and sculptor Willem de Kooning. At the center of the curatorial discourse is the influence that the Italian experiences of 1959 and 1969 had on the artist’s production, which has never before been fully considered. The role of Italy in de Kooning’s art will be recounted through a careful selection of works from the late 1950s to the 1980s.

“What are the benefits of a donated architectural work and how might this cause harm?” This question is the jumping-off point for the exhibition “The Gift. Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture”, which can be seen from 29 February at the Architekturmuseum in Munich. 

Through collaboration with researchers and local communities on different continents, the exhibition recounts some case studies of architectural projects that originated in a generosity-violence dynamic, in which donated architecture has played and continues to play the role of external agents shaping and influencing the urbanization processes of local realities around the world.

Invited by Punta della Dogana together with curator Anne Stenne, from March 17 to November 24, 2024 Pierre Huyge will present his largest solo exhibition to date, with a significant body of works exploring the conditions of coexistence and hybridization of different entities, inhuman, human, natural and artificial phenomena. 

Visitors are invited to step into the vision of the French artist, who sees the context of the exhibition is part of a ritual, where new possibilities of connection between the constituent elements can arise.