Suzanne Valadon, The Blue Room, 1923. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France.
2025 promises to be another year for great art exhibitions. Exciting anniversaries, one-woman shows, big blockbusters, and innovative curations. From 15th-century Italy to new work by living artists, there is something for everyone. We round up the best from the USA and Europe.
Vincent Van Gogh, Snow Covered Field with Harrow (After Millet), 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
A collaboration between the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which has long championed Anselm Kiefer’s work, and the Royal Academy in London (which will be showing its version from June 28th), this is an exciting prospect. Kiefer traveled in Van Gogh’s footsteps as a 17-year-old and has remained fascinated by the Post-Impressionist throughout his career.
Vincent van Gogh often feels like an overexposed artist—there is always an exhibition dedicated to him on somewhere in the world. However, you can now see him in a new light, through the eyes of one of the great contemporary exponents of monumental painterly and politicized art. The exhibition, titled Anselm Kiefer—Sag mir wo die Blumen sind, will be presented in two Amsterdam museums at the same time. The Van Gogh Museum will show the works of both artists. Meanwhile, the Stedelijk is putting all their existing Kiefers on display.
Anselm Kiefer is also producing new works for the exhibition. What more needs to be said?
Anselm Kiefer—Sag mir wo die Blumen sind, Van Gogh Museum & Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 7–June 9, 2025
Kiefer/Van Gogh, Royal Academy, London, UK June 28–October 26, 2025.
Simone Martini, The Angel Gabriel, Orsini Polyptych, c. 1333–1340, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Antwerp, Belgium.
This is a bit of a cheat because it is already on at the MET Museum in New York, but Siena 1300—1350 is arguably the biggest show in London next year. It also acts as a grand finale to the National Gallery’s 200th birthday celebrations and a curtain-raiser for the reopening of their Renaissance galleries in the Sainsbury Wing. The New York iteration has received rave reviews, and it really is a once-in-a-generation event. Some of the panels from Duccio’s Maesta are, for instance, being reunited for the first time in centuries.
Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti brothers, and Duccio himself are the big names but, despite its title, the exhibition is not just about painting. Objects including sculptures, tapestries, and metalworks will emphasize that art was all about lived experience. The show is also a valuable focus on a town and a time that is often overlooked in the broader narrative of the Renaissance.
There will be precision, pattern, detailed observation, and gold galore, which is going to be an absolute joy.
Siena 1300–1350: The Rise of Painting, National Gallery, London, UK, March 8–June 22, 2025.
Gabriele Münter, Still Life on the Tram (After Shopping), c. 1912, The Gabriele and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Looking far ahead, the Guggenheim is exploring the work of Gabriele Münter, one of the key figures in European Expressionism first in Munich, then at Murnau, as a founder-member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). The show focuses on the period until 1920, despite Münter playing a major role in the preservation of Expressionist works during the Second World War and living until 1962. However, with 60 paintings and examples of her photography, it should be a good survey.
Münter is on a roll at the moment. Not only did she get equal billing with Kandinsky in the Tate’s Expressionist exhibition this summer, but the Leopold Museum in Vienna dedicated a show to her at the end of 2023 and she is currently (until February 9, 2025) the subject of a major one-woman show at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Her strong colors, landscape and figurative subjects, and increasing experiments with abstraction provide some of the most emblematic examples of pre-1914 Expressionism.
Once dismissed as Kandinsky’s mistress, Münter is now firmly established as part of the canon. A must-see show.
Gabriele Münter: Into Deep Waters, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, NY, USA, November 7, 2025–April 26, 2026.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Fog, c. 1817, Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany.
2024 was really Caspar David Friedrich‘s year—the 250th anniversary of his birth—so you could argue off the mark that the MET is a bit slow. Last year, all his works were virtually on show in various exhibitions around Germany. The gallery is waiting to get their pick of them, showing 75 works from 30 collections in what is, unbelievably, Friedrich’s first-ever major show in the United States.
Master of precisely rendered, deeply symbolic landscapes, Friedrich is the very essence of Romanticism, expressing ideas of faith, humanity, and nationalism through representations of the natural world. He pioneered the Rückenfigur—drawing you into his art by showing figures from behind—and it is almost impossible not to get involved in his world. The exhibition promises to look at his artistic practice, with examples of finished drawings and working sketches alongside the more familiar oils. It will also contextualize him within the early 19th-century culture and politics.
Ships and shores, fir trees and gothic ruins, mists and mountains: indulge your inner Romantic.
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY, USA, February 8–May 11, 2025.
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, NY, USA.
The full title of this exhibition—Geometric Abstraction in the 20th Century—gives a better idea of its expansive ambition. Is a six-decade survey of art in Europe and the United States, covering 70 artists too ambitious? Maybe, but you have to admire the aim of a show that unites Piet Mondrian, Barbara Riley, and Frank Stella.
Wassily Kandinsky is the starting point, specifically his 1926 theoretical essay Point and Line to Plane. In it, he tried to establish a new non-objective language of art that would more effectively express the spiritual and metaphysical ideas he had previously explored as an Expressionist. The exhibition also seeks to contextualize the same ideas in the scientific and technological advances of the 20th century which saw old ideas of time, space, and “reality” itself challenged.
Geometric abstraction might sound a bit dull but any show which takes in Orphism and Op Art is certain to be a wild ride.
Kandinsky’s Universe: Geometric Abstraction in the 20th Century, Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany, February 15–May 18, 2025.
Suzanne Valadon, The Blue Room, 1923, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France.
This exhibition has already done the rounds, having started in Metz in 2023 and visited Nantes and Barcelona in the last 12 months. Next year, the Paris Pompidou promises “new loans and unpublished archives” and around 200 works. Although there has been renewed interest in Valadon recently including a major exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2021, she has not had a show in the French capital since 1967.
Suzanne Valadon, like many women artists, began as a model before establishing herself as a painter. Self-taught, she forged her own path with a distinctive use of flattened color blocks and heavy outlines and is especially associated with her uneroticized portrayal of the nude. She was also heavily involved in the Paris art scene of the 1890s and early 20th century. The Centre Pompidou exhibition will take a thematic approach, including a section on The Nude—A Feminine Gaze. It will also contextualize her work alongside lesser-known contemporaries like Juliette Roche, Georgette Agutte, and Jacqueline Marval.
Big, bold, and colorful, this exhibition is surely going to confirm Valadon’s importance.
Suzanne Valadon, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, January 15–May 25, 2025.
Edvard Munch, Vampire, 1893, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg, Sweden.
This is a really intriguing exhibition that puts fin de siècle Symbolism alongside Medieval and Northern Renaissance works. It is already showing at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki (until January 26, 2025) and will travel on to the Albertina in Vienna. Munch and Holbein, Kollwitz and Cranach: these are not the sort of artists who usually appear next to each other. There is a mixture of painting, printmaking, drawing, and sculpture and a thematic structure with sections given suitably angst-ridden titles, like From Love to Suffering and Encounters with Death.
At 250 works by 60 artists, the show is a pretty extensive. It grants plenty of room for less familiar names: Finland’s Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Belgian sculptor George Minne, for instance. And if you are worried that it might all seem a bit dark and depressing, the show also covers the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19th century, which promoted traditional craft skills.
The result of a big international research project (there is a very impressive catalog), this promises a new slant on an often neglected art movement.
Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light, National Museum, Oslo, Norway, February 28–June 15, 2025 / Albertina, Vienna, Austria, September 19, 2025–January 11, 2026.
John Constable, The White Horse, 1819, Frick Collection, New York City, NY, USA.
Plenty of artists who have big anniversaries in 2025 are not getting exhibitions. Jean Francois Millet might have been expected to get better recognition than the small show at the National Gallery with Life on the Land (August 7–October 19, 2025). Robert Rauschenberg has a raft of exhibitions in 2025 across the globe. Tate Britain is giving J. M. W. Turner major birthday honors: a joint show with John Constable which runs into 2026 (the latter’s anniversary).
Chalk and cheese painters and personalities, the two men had very different but equally influential landscape styles. This is being described as “the definitive exhibition,” a combination of the artists’ personal stories, fleshed out with sketchbooks and artifacts, running alongside a context of industrialization, urbanization, and changing perceptions of landscape. On one hand, Turner’s love of travel, drama, and narrative; on the other, Constable’s careful observation and nostalgia for home, but above all both loved nature and sought the best means they could to represent it.
This is billed as the heavyweight battle of the year but ultimately these artists complement each other. However you like your landscape, you will find it here.
Turner and Constable, Tate Britain, London, UK, November 27, 2025–April 12, 2026.
Elizabeth Catlett, Black Unity, 1968, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, USA, 2014.11 © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.
Elizabeth Catlett, known for both sculpture and printmaking, spent a career as a teacher before being increasingly recognized for her representation of the African American experience, of her life as a Black woman, and as that of an émigré artist living in Mexico. Her work is a potent mixture of the political and the personal with a series of works investigating that most timeless of themes—the mother and child—and others supporting the Civil Rights Movement. Her activism led to her being temporarily banned from returning to the United States.
The NGA is doing a full retrospective of Catlett’s career, with 150 prints, sculptures, and even rare examples of her painting. A version of the exhibition is currently showing at Brooklyn Museum (until January 19, 2025) and it will later travel to Chicago. Taking a broadly chronological approach the show charts a life of protest and campaigning for social justice and an artistic practice that embraced bold form, modernism, and African and Mexican traditions.
Catlett’s art packs a real punch. This should be as visually stunning as it is inspiring.
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA, March 9–July 6, 2025 / Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, August 30, 2025–January 4, 2026.
Frans Hals, St Luke the Evangelist, c. 1625, Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odesa, Ukraine.
These might not be the most famous paintings on show in Europe this year, but it is hard to think of a more poignant exhibition. 60 Ukrainian refugee pictures, evacuated from their home in Odessa at the start of the war will be shown alongside works from Berlin collections, this includes religious art, still life, portraiture, and landscape organized into a series of nine themes.
Although many of the artists are not household names, the curators have deliberately chosen works that emphasize the cultural and stylistic links between the two collections. The idea is to emphasize the historic ties between Ukraine and Western Europe and present the show as a gesture of solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
Sometimes art can speak louder than words.
From Odesa to Berlin: European Painting of the 16th to 19th Century, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Germany, January 24–June 22, 2025.
J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed, 1844, National Gallery, London, UK.
These are just some of the best exhibitions to look out for as we speed into 2025. Whatever the year holds, carve out some time to look at art. For every big exhibition, there are many other less heralded shows full of interesting paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. Check out what is available in your area. Art is always worth seeing.
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Catriona Miller is an art historian and freelance writer on art. Having studied at Oxford and St Andrews, she is currently researching issues of nationalism and identity in British landscape painting. She has taught art history and lectures on art history and art appreciation.
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