This Summer’s Must-See Exhibitions

The LVH Art Guide to Summer 2026 brings together the exhibitions worth travelling for in the months ahead. The selection spans museums, foundations, historic houses, and landscapes where art, architecture, and setting are intrinsically connected, providing a thoughtful guide to keeping your summer culturally engaged.

United Kingdom

Claydon House, Buckinghamshire
White Cube at Claydon
6 June – 14 September 2026

Hosted by The National Trust, White Cube present a major group exhibition across the eighteenth-century interiors and grounds of Claydon House. More than forty works by over twenty artists are installed throughout the property, including Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Cai Guo-Qiang, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Wall, Mona Hatoum, Raqib Shaw and Theaster Gates. Curated in response to Claydon’s Rococo, Palladian and Chinoiserie interiors, the project places contemporary painting, sculpture, photography and installation within rooms shaped by the Verney family’s history of collecting.

Hayward Gallery, London
Anish Kapoor
16 June – 18 October 2026

Curated by Ralph Rugoff, Anish Kapoor’s exhibition brings together new and earlier works across the Hayward Gallery and its three outdoor terraces. Monumental installations, mirrored steel sculptures, pigment works, voids and recent paintings fill the building, marking Kapoor’s return almost three decades after his 1998 survey at the gallery. Three large new installations form the centre of the presentation: an inflated PVC membrane that fills a six-metre-high gallery, a dark sculptural threshold set within a red landscape, and Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022), suspended just above the floor. Mirrored works placed outside extend the exhibition onto the terraces, while sculptures using Vantablack and viscous red silicone test perception, scale and material presence.

Houghton Hall, Norfolk
Lynn Chadwick at Houghton Hall
2 May – 4 October 2026

More than thirty sculptures by Lynn Chadwick are installed across Houghton Hall’s Neo-Palladian interiors and parkland. Spanning four decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s, the presentation brings well-known figures together with early pieces, dynamic animal forms, kinetic sculptures and rarely shown works. Chadwick’s welded constructions are often associated with the post-war British sculpture that emerged after the Second World War. At Houghton, his angular silhouettes, paired figures and abstracted beasts are set against the formality of the house and its grounds, giving the material force of the sculptures a particularly strong setting.

France

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Calder. Rêver en équilibre
15 April – 16 August 2026

Conceived in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, Calder. Rêver en équilibre brings together nearly 300 works spanning half a century of Alexander Calder’s career. The exhibition includes mobiles, stabiles, wire portraits, carved wooden figures, paintings, drawings, jewellery and works connected to Cirque Calder, the miniature circus first performed in Paris during the late 1920s. The presentation also includes works by Calder’s friends and contemporaries, among them Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Jean Hélion, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, placing his work within the wider Parisian avant-garde.

Grand Palais, Paris
Matisse, 1941–1954
24 March – 26 July 2026

This substantial survey concentrates on the final thirteen years of Henri Matisse’s life, a period in which illness altered the conditions of his practice without limiting its ambition. More than 300 paintings, drawings, illustrated books, textiles and cut-outs trace his move towards a radically simplified vocabulary of line, colour and form. The celebrated paper cut-outs are central, but the presentation also places them alongside lesser-known works from the same years. Rather than treating the late period as a conclusion, the Grand Palais positions it as a moment of renewed experimentation in which Matisse developed one of the most recognisable visual languages of the twentieth century.

Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence
Ellsworth Kelly: At the Edge of Water
27 June – 15 November 2026

Curated by Éric de Chassey, this presentation offers a new reading of Ellsworth Kelly through the role of water in his work. Coastlines, reflections, riverbanks and horizon lines become points of departure for an artist more commonly associated with pure form, sharp contours and decisive colour.

Fondation CAB, Saint-Paul-de-Vence
Jean Prouvé: Inventor of Houses
14 March – 31 October 2026

Housed in a Mediterranean modernist villa in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation CAB is dedicated to minimal and conceptual art alongside exceptional examples of 20th-century design. The foundation is also home to one of Jean Prouvé’s rare 6×6 demountable houses, making it the ideal setting for this exhibition, organised in collaboration with François Laffanour / Galerie Downtown, which traces the evolution of Prouvé’s approach to construction.

A pioneering French designer, engineer and self-described constructeur, Prouvé (1901–1984) believed architecture should be shaped by engineering, prefabrication and social utility. Archival photographs from the 1930s to the 1970s are shown alongside rare architectural components—including panels, doors and brise-soleil—and iconic furniture such as the Cité bed, Compas table and Standard chair, revealing the shared structural logic behind his work at every scale. As Fondation CAB founder Hubert Bonnet observes, “In Jean Prouvé’s work, the structure never hides; it becomes the very language of the object or the architecture.”

Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade
Rashid Johnson
5 July 2026 – 31 January 2027

Rashid Johnson presents paintings, sculpture and film throughout the Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium at Château La Coste. The display includes new bronze works made specifically for the estate, as well as a film installed within the auditorium itself. Johnson’s practice draws on personal history, Black intellectual traditions, music, literature and collective experience. In Niemeyer’s fluid concrete structure, his works take on a new architectural dimension, connecting questions of intimacy and community with the openness of the Provençal landscape.

Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles
S U S P E C T S – Van Gogh, Tricksters & Co.
22 May – 18 October 2026

S U S P E C T S – Van Gogh, Tricksters & Co. places Vincent van Gogh alongside modern and contemporary artists whose work has challenged established ideas of behaviour, identity and artistic authorship. Pablo Picasso, Cindy Sherman, Maurizio Cattelan, Bruce Nauman and Andy Warhol are among the artists included in the exhibition. Bringing together around 120 works, the presentation considers the figure of the artist as an outsider, provocateur or performer. Van Gogh’s work is shown within a wider history of artists who have used humour, disguise, transgression and self-invention to question social conventions.

Monaco

Hauser & Wirth, Monaco
Mise-en-scène
9 April – 31 August 2026

For its Monaco space, Hauser & Wirth collaborates with Paulin, Paulin, Paulin, the studio dedicated to the legacy of designer Pierre Paulin. Furniture and design objects establish an immersive interior in which artworks are encountered as part of a staged domestic environment rather than as isolated objects. Pablo Picasso, Louise Bourgeois, Jean Arp, Lucio Fontana and Andy Warhol are presented with works by Rashid Johnson, Henry Taylor and Paul McCarthy. The project tests the boundaries between art, design, display and performance, while a parallel programme of music activations extends the gallery beyond the conventional format of a viewing room.

Greece

The George Economou Collection, Athens
The Way We Live Now
20 June 2026 – March 2027

Co-curated by Hilton Als and Ann Philbin, The Way We Live Now is the George Economou Collection’s first contemporary group presentation. Works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Lucas Arruda, Louise Bourgeois, Lisa Brice, David Hammons, David Hockney, Jenny Saville, Lorna Simpson and Henry Taylor are drawn entirely from the collection. Taking its title from Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel, the presentation is structured around Intimacy, Politics and Being. These three loose sections consider desire, power, vulnerability and the ways individuals understand themselves within the social structures of the present.

Belgium

KMSKA, Antwerp
Antony Gormley: Geestgrond
23 May – 20 September 2026

Created for KMSKA and curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Geestgrond brings together more than one hundred works by Antony Gormley, made over four decades. Sculptures in clay, stone, wood, glass, bread, iron, lead and steel are shown alongside recent works, tracing the development of his use of the human body as a measure of space. Rather than occupying a separate temporary display, Gormley’s sculptures are placed throughout the renovated museum, in dialogue with works from KMSKA’s permanent collection by artists including Auguste Rodin, James Ensor and Julio González. The presentation continues beyond the galleries onto the roof, across the museum square and towards the quays, extending the relationship between body, architecture and the city.

Germany

Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Brancusi
20 March – 9 August 2026

Organised with Centre Pompidou, Paris, this is the first comprehensive Brancusi exhibition in Germany for more than fifty years. Over 150 sculptures, photographs, films, drawings and archival materials present the Romanian-born French artist as one of the decisive figures in the development of modern sculpture. Key works including The Kiss, Bird in Space and Sleeping Muse are shown alongside a partial reconstruction of Brancusi’s Paris studio. The inclusion of photographs is particularly important: he used the camera not simply to document finished objects, but to refine their placement, scale and relationship to light.

Netherlands

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam
Danh Vo, πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα)
14 February – 2 August 2026

Curated by Rein Wolfs and Claire van Els in close collaboration with the artist, πνεῦμα (Ἔλισσα) is Danh Vo’s first major presentation at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam since 2008. The exhibition brings together sculptures, found objects, archival material and works by other artists, arranged as a series of shifting constellations rather than a chronological survey. Its title combines pneuma, the Greek word for breath or spirit, with Elissa, the Phoenician queen better known as Dido, the founder of Carthage. These references frame an exhibition concerned with transmission: how histories are carried between people, places and objects, and how meaning changes through display and association.

Italy

Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and satellite sites, Florence
Rothko in Florence
14 March – 23 August 2026

Curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, Rothko in Florence brings together more than seventy works spanning the artist’s career, from early figurative paintings of the 1930s to the large colour-field canvases of the 1950s and 1960s. Major loans come from institutions including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, Centre Pompidou and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The project reaches beyond Palazzo Strozzi into two locations with particular importance to Rothko’s understanding of Florence. Works are placed beside Fra Angelico’s frescoes at the Museo di San Marco, while preparatory studies for the Seagram murals appear in Michelangelo’s vestibule at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. Together, these sites position Rothko’s paintings within his sustained engagement with Renaissance architecture, sacred interiors and the experience of colour in space.

Vincenzo De Cotiis Foundation, Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, Venice
Minimal Legends
6 May – 3 October 2026

Co-curated by Claudia Rose De Cotiis and Lawrence van Hagen, Minimal Legends brings seventeen significant works by artists associated with Minimalism and its wider legacy into Palazzo Giustinian Lolin. Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin and Richard Serra appear alongside the functional works of Vincenzo De Cotiis. The exhibition is not arranged as a chronological account of a movement. Instead, it considers Minimalism as an active language, placing sculpture, painting and light in direct relation to De Cotiis’s material practice and the palazzo’s layered interiors overlooking the Grand Canal.

For the full list of exhibitions to visit in Venice, access the LVH Art Guide to Venice here.

Spain

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
19 March – 13 September 2026

This retrospective follows Ruth Asawa’s six-decade career across suspended wire sculptures, drawings, paper folds, cast objects, public commissions and educational projects. Her hanging forms, made through an intricate technique of looped wire, are among the most distinctive sculptural achievements of post-war American art. The Bilbao presentation also gives due attention to Asawa’s work as a teacher and advocate for arts education in San Francisco. It offers a wider account of an artist whose practice moved between domestic scale, civic ambition, experimental craft and public life.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao
Jasper Johns: Night Driver
29 May – 12 October 2026

Bringing together around 140 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, an artist’s book and material connected to stage design, Night Driver surveys Jasper Johns’s long career. Familiar motifs such as flags, targets, numbers and maps appear alongside later works that complicate their own imagery through repetition, layering and quotation. Johns is often positioned at the point where Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop, Conceptualism and a new engagement with signs from everyday culture. The Bilbao project makes visible how he repeatedly returned to the same visual devices, not to settle their meaning, but to keep it unstable.

Hauser & Wirth Menorca, Illa del Rei, Mahón
Directionless
21 June – 25 October 2026

Organised by Rashid Johnson, Directionless is a group project developed in response to a moment marked by uncertainty, shifting identities and fragile systems of meaning. It brings together contemporary artists whose work considers what happens when inherited narratives no longer offer a stable way of understanding the present. Set on Illa del Rei, a small island in Mahón harbour, the presentation is accompanied by sculpture installed outdoors across the site. The setting gives the project an added sense of distance and reflection, linking the works to the restored military hospital, the harbour and Menorca’s wider landscape.

United States

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Carol Bove
5 March – 2 August 2026

Carol Bove’s first museum survey is also her largest presentation to date, unfolding throughout Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda. Early drawings and collages are shown alongside the monumental steel compositions for which she is now best known, tracing a practice that has moved between found materials, historical references and industrial fabrication. Bove has often drawn upon the visual languages of the 1960s and 1970s while resisting straightforward nostalgia. Within the Guggenheim’s spiral, her works are positioned to make the architecture an active part of the viewing experience, connecting scale, movement and the changing perspectives created by the ramp.