11 Must-See Museum Exhibitions This Summer
Fabian Guerrero, Jose in Front of Laundromat, Lynwood, CA, from the series “Queer Brown Ranchero”, 2017. © Fabian Guerrero. Courtesy of Getty Center.
With summer time kicking off and holiday plans brewing, the art world is laying down its cards to entice museum visitors from all around the world. In Europe, there are major events taking place: most notably the Venice Architecture Biennale, where over 300 exhibitors are exploring climate change in architecture. Opening later in June, biennials in Berlin and Ljubljana, Slovenia, also present cutting-edge contemporary art that’s worth traveling for.
In museums, meanwhile, an overarching theme of the upcoming exhibitions is women artists receiving overdue acclaim, from the 18th-century court painter Rachel Ruysch to the late artist Emily Kam Kngwarray. Takako Yamaguchi, who’s been seeing new success in her seventies, is another big name getting her due this year.
From a Wolfgang Tillmans show that will mark the end of an era of Centre Pompidou, to an exhibition of queer photography at the Getty, here are 11 museum exhibitions worth looking forward to this summer.
Melissa Joseph. Tender , 2025. Photo by Daniel Greer. © Melissa Joseph. Courtesy of the artist.
Melissa Joseph has been on a meteoric rise recently. After being featured in The Artsy Vanguard last year, she has exhibited works at Charles Moffett’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach and Public Gallery in London, and recently received the Brooklyn Museum’s UOVO Prize for Brooklyn-based artists. This summer, Joseph will show a site-specific installation inspired by Renaissance imagery outside the Brooklyn Museum.
Reproductions of her soft, needle-felted portraits will be shown through the entire summer at the Brooklyn Museum’s outdoor plaza. These portrayals of sweet moments between family members and friends highlight the significant role of public art in fostering human connection.
Enlarged photographs capture the fuzzy textile details of the portraits, as well as their materials (wool, recycled sari, and industrial felt). These vinyl works will frame the plaza’s steps in hexagonal arrangements, inspired by the floors of Santa Maria Assunta Cathedral in Siena, Italy, that Joseph encountered as a student.
Rachel Ruysch, Still Life with Fruits and Flowers, 1714 © Kunstsammlungen und Museen Augsburg Photo by Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Nicole Wilhelms.Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
During her lifetime, 18th-century Dutch still life painter Rachel Ruysch sold her paintings at even higher prices than the master Rembrandt did. As a young child, she had access to the private museum that her botanist father created, which contained a vast collection of zoological and botanical specimens. Her father had a secret embalming formula, which enabled young Ruysch to observe the specimens in life-like states. Her lively depictions of plants and insects show that she had a clear advantage over her contemporaries, who mostly had to study from pressed forms.
The MFA Boston’s exhibition is the first comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to Ruysch. It brings together 35 of her paintings from the United States and Europe, alongside works of other female artists from the same period, such as Maria Sibylla Merian and Ruysch’s younger sister, Anna. Also on view are plant and insect specimens, including many that, at the time, were new to Europe, emphasizing the expanding global trade routes of the 17th century. Ruysch’s lively paintings served to introduce these new species in action; in front of a backdrop of lush flowers and ripe fruits, a lizard cracks open an unhatched egg or extends its tongue to trap a bee.
Tomashi Jackson, I see Fields of Green (Put the Ball Through the Hoop) , 2022. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery.
“My family is a product of the Great Migration route from Texas to California,” wrote artist Tomashi Jackson in a recent Instagram post. Jackson’s multidisciplinary practice is influenced by California murals, as well as her own personal experience of the movement of Black people from the American South to other parts of the U.S. between the 1950s and the 1990s. In this major mid-career survey, the Houston-born artist returns to her birthplace to present nearly a decade’s worth of work.
The most notable features of Jackson’s works are her use of color, influenced by artist and educator Josef Albers. In I see Fields of Green (Put the Ball Through the Hoop) (2022), she brings together archival images from three pivotal scenes in American history of the 1960s: a speech given by the former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a meeting he had with Black organizers over voting rights legislation, and a Nina Simone performance. Crosshatched lines run throughout the photographic images, and magenta PVC layers hang against the green background. The work pushes against a canonical representation of history. For Jackson, social progress is not simply linear, and her work considers moments in civic and legal history in a circular relationship with the present.
“Queer Lens: A History of Photography”
Getty Center, L.A.
June 17–Sept. 28, 2025
Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Juan Dubois, 1983. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the Getty Center.
Francesco Scavullo, Divine, Actor, 1978. © International Center of Photography and Francesco Scavullo Trust Beneficiaries. Courtesy of the Getty Center.
Since the camera became common in the mid-19th century, there have been photos of queer peoples’ lives. Now, in a new exhibition during Pride month, the Getty Center will open an exhibition celebrating queer history captured by the lens across time. The show also coincides with the reopening of the Getty Villa, which was forced to close during the Los Angeles wildfires in early 2025.
The exhibition includes a range of portraits of familiar historical faces. These photos include, for example, Keith Haring shot by Andy Warhol; Josephine Baker shot by Adolf de Meyer; Rrose Sélavy (an alter ego of Marcel Duchamp) shot by Man Ray. Also featured are works by contemporary artists like Catherine Opie, who is well-known for documenting queer lives through photographs. Opie is also part of the talk “Queer Lens on Los Angeles: Artists’ POV” on August 17th.
Another significant thread in the exhibition is scenes from pivotal moments in LGBTQ+ rights movements. New York photographers such as Arthur Tress and Diana Davies captured the first iterations of the gay liberation march and Pride parade, for instance. And, a couple of years earlier, before The Stonewall Riots, photojournalist Fred W. McDarrah captured the infamous “Sip-In” at Julius’ Bar. It was a moment that defied the discriminatory law against homosexuals drinking and resulted in a court case ruling allowing gay people to legally drink in a bar. The works on view create a kaleidoscopic snapshot of the enduring legacy of queer history, both in representation and legislation, written, in part, by the camera lens.
Takako Yamaguchi, Procession, 2024. Courtesy of the artist; Ortuzar, New York; and as-is.la, Los Angeles.
Takako Yamaguchi made headlines early last year, when her Art Deco–esque painting, Catherine and Midnight (1994), broke the artist’s auction record at Sotheby’s London. The work was sold for more than double its estimate ($1.1 million, including fees, on an estimate of $500,000 to $750,000). Since then, she has been featured in a group show at MOCA, “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968.” Now, she’s getting her first major solo show at the institution, at the age of 72.
On view at the MOCA exhibition are the series of stylised seascapes with geometric shapes that depict rain, crashing waves, clouds and mountains. Her zigzags, spirals, and braids are based on the patterns of both Japanese visual culture and 19th-century European Romanticism. Painted with oil and metal leaf, they are serene and at times hypnotizing depictions of sunsets and low tides.
Originally from Japan, Yamaguchi moved to the United States in the early 1970s and has since developed a repertoire of motifs reminiscent of decorative screens, woodblock prints, and kimono patterns. Yamaguchi dryly acknowledges her motifs as “self-orientalizing.” However, she is also influenced by other visual traditions such as Mexican Socialist murals and Art Nouveau. These styles—which she calls “the trash-heap of discarded ideals” left behind by Modernism—have been deemed outdated and often ridiculed. A culmination of her dedicated obsession, these motifs developed in the last 40 years have now become subversive.
Emily Kam Kngwarray, Kam 1991. © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS 2025. Courtesy of Tate Modern
Another recipient of long-overdue recognition is Emily Kam Kngwarray. A senior member of the Anmatyerr people of the Utopia region of Australia’s Northern Territory, she began her artistic practice in earnest in her late seventies. In the 1970s, she painted on silk and cotton in batik style, which involves wax patterns on dyed fabrics, with a community of other makers. In the late 1980s, she then shifted to painting on canvases which allowed for more spontaneity. She created tirelessly, painting roughly one work a day for eight years until her death. In collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia, Tate Modern will present the first large-scale exhibition of Kngwarray’s work in Europe. Pace Gallery in London will also hold a solo exhibition that overlaps with the Tate Modern’s, from June 6th to August 8th.
Kngwarray’s works center on Indigenous beliefs around responsibilities to ancestral lands, portrayed through images of her homeland. These images are often visualised as a root system or botanical life cycle. For example, in Untitled (Alhalker) (1989), named after her birthplace, the canvas is filled with red, white and brown “dots within dots,” as her works are often described. Although seemingly abstract, the dots, as in many of her works, represent seeds native to her land. In another work on view, Kam (1991)—named after her kin name meaning “yam seed” in Anmatyerre—brilliant yellows and white dots expand and group in lines and circles, evoking cells that make up the stems, leaves and roots. These marks dominate the canvas entirely. In Kngwarray’s paintings, lands, vegetation, and animals are not mere elements of a landscape: They represent Kngwarray’s identity, relationships and responsibilities within the community.
Read more about contemporary artists reimagining Pointillism, painting with tiny dots.
Wolfgang Tillmans
“Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us”
Centre Pompidou , Paris
June 13–Sept. 22, 2025
Wolfgang Tillmans, Echo Beach, 2017 Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York
Wolfgang Tillmans, its only love give it away, 2005 Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York
For the final show before the museum closes for renovation until 2030, Centre Pompidou invites German artist Wolfgang Tillmans to take over its library space. According to the museum, he will be given a “free rein” to transform and present his own work in the 6000-square-meter library space. Boldly introduced as “a curatorial experiment,” the exhibition is designed entirely by Tillmans. This retrospective will cover the last 35 years of the artist’s work, as well as works created specifically for the venue.
Since receiving the Turner Prize in 2000 (as the first non-British artist to have done so), Tillmans has had major exhibitions at the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By now, he has created a cult following for his intimate depictions of youth and club culture, sparking collaborations with musicians (most notably with Frank Ocean for the 2016 album Blonde, as well as Tillmans’s own 2021 album Moon in Earthlight). True to his dynamic body of work, the exhibition will include music, performance art and photography by Tillmans. Expect the artist’s take on how the European world has changed, especially regarding the themes he’s often focused on such as freedom, community, popular culture, and dissemination of information.
Jenny Saville, Propped, 1992. © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.
Jenny Saville, Stare, 2004-5. The Board Art Foundation © Jenny Saville. Courtesy Gagosian.
The reinvigoration of figurative painting in contemporary art is often credited to Jenny Saville and her colourful paintings of female nude. After beginning her career in her early twenties, Saville studied human flesh up close by following a plastic surgeon in New York City in 1994. This experience was formative to her visceral depictions of the human form, revealing both its fragility and resilience. She channels this experience through thick layers of viscous paint: “I started to think about not just the anatomy of the body, but about the anatomy of painting,” she said in preview materials for her new show.
The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition will display her three-decades-long body of work chronologically and will be the largest major museum exhibition dedicated to Saville. Included in the 50 works are charcoal drawings and large-scale oil paintings that challenge historical beauty standards, as well as new works on display here for the first time. Audiences can expect to observe the evolution of her practice, through paintings such as Propped (1992)—which, until recently, was the most expensive painting by a living woman artist—where the subject’s bulging flesh seems to burst out of canvas. In others, such as Pieta I (2019–21) and Aleppo (2017–18), she portrays nude bodies collapsing on one another, softly and tragically.
Pamela Rosenkranz, Our Product, 2015. Courtesy of Stedelijk Museum.
When she represented Switzerland at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, Pamela Rosenkranz showed Our Product (2015), a pool filled with liquid silicone tinted to match the “standardised Central European” skin tone. Our Product, alongside a new body of work, will be shown again in “Liquid Body,” the conceptual artist’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands.
Working with a strand of philosophy known as speculative realism, Rosenkranz casts doubt on the human-centric worldview through works that play with human presence and the physical absence. “Firm Being”, for instance, is a series of water bottle sculptures filled with smooth, synthetic material that seems to recall Caucasian skin. Here, she satirizes the commercial tactics used by water brands such as Fiji, Evian, and SmartWater that promise purity and self-optimisation, by interpreting them literally.
One of the first iterations of “Water Drops” by Kim Tschang-Yeul, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea (MMCA), was painted in 1971. This series of abstract canvases defined the artist’s practice until his death in 2021. Raw and monochromatic canvases are adorned with photorealistic depictions of transparent liquid droplets, about to give into gravity and fall, reminding the viewer of clear morning dew.
Marking the first major museum exhibition of his works since his passing, the MMCA will hold a retrospective of his work just before Frieze Seoul 2025 opens. The exhibition will follow the artist’s career trajectory beginning from the 1950s, when he formed part of the Modern Artists’ Association in South Korea and joined the Art Informel movement. Other works, from his New York and Paris periods in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as later periods, will also be on view. The exhibition will also shine light on the tragedies of modern Korean history and interpret Kim’s “Water Drops” as well as his other bodies of work—taking inspiration from mid-century movements like Op Art—in that historical context.
Trevor Yeung, detail of Rolling Gold Fountain, 2024. © Trevor Yeung. Photo © South Ho. Courtesy of M
Trevor Yeung’s fascination with aquatic life began as a teenager, when he had his first aquarium. He ended up with seven fish tanks in the small bedroom that he shared with his sister. At the time, keeping plants and pet fish was an outlet for the artist, a distraction from reality. Now, these fish tanks pop up everywhere in his installation-based artwork. Originally shown at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, Yeung’s presentation is now coming to the museum setting of M+.
In his mixed-media works featuring staged objects, photographs, animals, and plants, he explores the logic and dynamics of “closed systems,” often meaning fish tanks or the exhibition space itself. Yeung is known to use his exhibition layout to cunningly mirror the interconnected nature of our world. For example, at a previous show at M+, he made the location of two of his artworks only accessible to those who queued up for the artwork titled The Queue (2023).
As Yeung later explained, this choice reflects his interest in individual elements (including humans) as part of a whole ecosystem. In one installation piece which will be shown at M+, Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours) (2024), a large fish tank with a one-way mirror inside, the viewer can’t help but see the reflection of themselves at the same time as the work itself. “Visitors can only look at themselves or project themselves into the empty fish tanks … I hope to change the intimacy and relationship between caregiver (human) and receiver (non-human),” he said in an interview with Frieze.
Clarification: A previous version of this article described Melissa Joseph’s Brooklyn Museum presentation as her first solo museum exhibition; it has been updated to reflect that this is her first public installation at a museum.
