Van Eyck: The Portraits
National Gallery, London
You probably know the famously complex image: a man with a giant black hat and a mauve, fur-lined doublet, and a woman with a bright white veil and vivid green dress, who seem to be paused mid-ceremony. Who are they? And who is mysteriously reflected in the mirror on the back wall?
Jan van Eyck’s 1434 “The Arnolfini Portrait” is one of the National Gallery’s most popular paintings. You could spend hours trying to decipher its symbolism or marveling at the how the artist, who was famous for his innovations in oil painting, was able to produce such microscopic detail.
This year in London, it will be joined by eight of its brethren from collections across Europe. For the first time, these nine surviving portraits (half of van Eyck’s extant works worldwide) can be seen together. Not only are these works extraordinary in their precision and luminous hues, but they also represent an important shift in the genre, when portraitists first turned their attention to everyday people.
Björk
National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik
It has been a decade since the Icelandic polymath (what can’t she do, really) had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This spring, to coincide with the 2026 Reykjavik Arts Festival, the National Gallery of Iceland is mounting an exhibition of Björk’s ouevre in her hometown. If the MoMA show aimed to go behind the scenes of her work — props from music videos, stage costumes, objects and images related to albums, that swan dress — this exhibition promises a vaster view of Björk’s expanding multidisciplinary practice.
Titled “Echolalia,” which means the repetition of somebody else’s words or sounds, the show will offer three immersive installations in which viewers will be surrounded by different kinds of polyphony: in a film, an audio installation and an as yet undisclosed work currently in development, tied to an upcoming album.
Whether you’re a Björk superfan or new to her huge, astonishingly varied oeuvre, the trip will be worth it to see where her unique sensibility was shaped.
Brassaï
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Born Gyula Halász in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the photographer learned to speak French by reading Marcel Proust. At the end of the 20th century, he hobnobbed with the who’s who of interwar Paris and took black-and-white images that have come to define the city and its cultural elite. This spring, the Moderna Museet in Sweden will offer a major presentation of his work.
Like so many Europeans who emigrated to Paris in the 1920s, hoping to encounter the creative avant-garde, Brassaï was inspired by the city itself — its narrow alleys and grand boulevards, its dazzling night life and the hush that fell upon its streets once they were emptied of revellers and romantics.
Mentored by another famous Hungarian photographer, André Kertész, who was already established in the city, Brassaï first gained recognition for his “Paris by Night” photographs published in a 1933 volume that led the American expatriate writer Henry Miller to call him “the eye of Paris.”
To see Brassaï’s work outside Paris will be a welcome reminder of how the city was very much a European project.
Venice Biennale
Venice
Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian Swiss curator who was supposed to oversee the main exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale, died last May, but this year’s edition will still be very much hers. A team of her colleagues have been following the plan she left behind for the show, called “In Minor Keys.”
The participating artists and other specifics have yet to be announced, but her team has indicated that she show will be inspired by thinkers like Toni Morrison, Patrick Chamoiseau and James Baldwin, and based on loose themes including musical improvisation and “listening to the lower frequencies.” It looks set to re-envision the world in a way that defined much of Kouoh’s career, which frequently explored what she called “Black geographies” — a vision of Africa, its artists and citizens, beyond the borders of the continent itself.
Alongside the main Biennale, more than 80 countries will host artists in their national pavilions, and collateral events — from pop-up spaces to shows at major institutions like the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Palazzo Grassi — will run from May through November.
Louise Nevelson
Centre Pompidou-Metz; Metz, France
The show is called “Mrs. N’s Palace,” and a more fitting exhibition title is difficult to imagine. Louise Nevelson, the artist who was born in 1899 in the city of Pereiaslav in the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) and emigrated to the United States in 1905, is getting a retrospective at the Pompidou-Metz, roughly 200 miles east of Paris. It will be the first exhibition of her work in France since 1974.
Known for her intricate and imposing wall sculptures made of wood and painted in monochrome hues of black, gray and white, Nevelson was deeply influenced by the interdisciplinary arts. She studied with the modern dance instructor Ellen Kearns for 20 years, was a devoted follower of the pioneering American choreographer Martha Graham and was a lifelong friend of the composer John Cage.
In Metz, the museum will focus on the immersive quality of Nevelson’s work and her interest — before the term “installation” was in use — in creating worlds that involve the viewer’s whole body.
‘Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance’
Bozar, Brussels
They say it’s in the eye of the beholder, but you can be the judge — and the open-minded observer — in Bozar’s monumental Art Deco halls from February. The show charts how Italian and Northern European artists of the 15th and 16th centuries depicted the sliding scale from beauty to ugliness, from the openly grotesque to the elevated ethereal, as well as how and why aesthetic standards changed during the Renaissance.
The 16th century was a turning point in the importance of beauty as a societal interest — think alabaster complexions, ruby lips, fair locks, high hairlines and lots of exposed (mostly female) skin. At the same time, ugliness became a more prominent concern in art, but how the curators will handle this is less predictable. Will there be lustful satyrs? Intoxicated peasants? Diseased duchesses? Leering lotharios?
Either way, the list of artists — Botticelli, Titian, Tintoretto, Cranach the Elder and more — promises delight, surprise and an expanding of horizons, past and present.
Sophie Calle
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Humlebaek, Denmark
The French photographer Sophie Calle arrives at one of the world’s most beautiful museums: the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, about 20 miles north of Copenhagen, a building whose labyrinthine modernist galleries look onto the blue waters of the Oresund strait.
The artist, who has taken most of the top art-world prizes during her more-than-five-decade career, will bring her trademark sly, enigmatic and frequently moving blend of fact and fiction to an exhibition that she is creating in close collaboration with the Louisiana. (If you can’t make it to Denmark, Calle has another exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin starting in November.)
Recent works will be on display as well as older series, including “The Blind” (1986), a project for which Calle asked 23 people who were born without sight what their image of “beauty” is. Like much of Calle’s art, “The Blind” has produced conversation and sometimes controversy.
Expect to be challenged and surprised and, perhaps, to find a new image of “beauty” all your own.
Pierre Huyghe
Fondation Beyeler; Riehen, Switzerland
Primates wearing humanoid masks that immediately transport them to the uncanny valley; puppets puppeteering other puppets; a skeleton surveyed, and mourned, by a team of robots in the desert. With the French artist Pierre Huyghe, you never know what you’re going to get, but it will always be astutely engaged with the technologies of today — be it A.I. or algorithmic film editing.
This May, when the Swiss town of Basel hosts the home edition of the Art Basel fair and associated events, the Beyeler Foundation — a 16-mile drive east, in the town of Riehen — will stage an exhibition of Huyghe’s work. In the striking Renzo-Piano-designed building, recent and new pieces will foreground the artist’s enduring fascination with art as ecosystem, as immersive installation, as both fiction and reality, as filled with potential to make us think about the world as it is and how it might be one day near or distant, or perhaps already here.
Tracey Emin
Tate Modern, London
She was once considered the great enfant terrible of the Young British Artists movement, but in recent years Tracy Emin has cemented herself as one of Britain’s most enduring and varied contemporary artists.
No doubt the forthcoming retrospective at Tate Modern will feature some of her best-known installations (including “My Bed,” which is in Tate’s collection); her textile works in which language plays a pivotal role; her bright scripts that swerve between funny, romantic and sad; and her video works that likewise have her trademark sense of humor, candor and wry cheekiness.
Yet the highlight of the survey of 40 years of the artist’s provocative and pioneering career will likely be her work as a painter, which has been a focus in recent years. It’s a great opportunity to see Emin’s canvases, big and small, in which her signature undulating line often traces the contours of her body in various vulnerable states.
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