In 2025, museums delivered exhibitions that shaped the cultural conversation—bold, timely, and unforgettable. From Amy Sherald’s luminous portraits at the Whitney Museum of American Art, to Rashid Johnson’s expansive, soul-searching presentation spiraling through the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the year celebrated artists grappling with identity, history, and form. Europe answered with scale and gravitas: Gerhard Richter’s landmark exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton reaffirmed painting’s emotional force, while the unveiling of the newly reimagined Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain signaled a bold future for institutional architecture and programming. Together, these best of 2025 exhibitions defined a year where art felt urgent, intimate, and expansive all at once.
Pérez Art Museum Miami
Elliot & Erick Jiménez: “El Monte”
Installation view of Elliot & Erick Jiménez at PAMM.
Pérez Art Museum Miami presents “El Monte”, the debut solo museum exhibition by Miami-born twin photographers Elliot and Erick Jiménez. Drawing from Afro-Cuban spirituality and Lydia Cabrera’s seminal text, the show immerses viewers in Lucumí cosmologies through large-scale photographs, mixed media, and installation. Regal “shadow figures” clad in masks and garments by Willy Chavarria evoke the syncretic Afro-Caribbean religion of Santería, transforming anonymity into presence. At its heart, a monumental Ceiba tree trunk installation leads visitors through a forest-like environment that doubles as chapel and sanctuary. Interweaving dual identities, cultural heritage, and painterly photographic techniques, the Jiménez twins create a dreamlike language of ritual, resilience, and transculturation.
What we love: How the artists’ dual identities manifest through the fluid dialogue between photography, sculpture, and installation. Their ability to merge painterly composition with spiritual narrative transforms the exhibition into both a visual and emotional journey.
Elliot and Erick Jiménez at Pérez Art Museum Miami
August 28, 2025–March 22, 2026
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Exposition Générale, a Best of 2025
Courtesy of Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.
The Fondation Cartier inaugurates its new home at 2 Place du Palais-Royal with “Exposition Générale,” a landmark presentation of nearly six hundred works by more than one hundred artists from its Collection. Spanning four decades of contemporary creation, the exhibition highlights the institution’s enduring commitments to art, architecture, living worlds, technology, and science. Conceived as a public space for experimentation and exchange, the show revisits themes from past exhibitions while echoing the 19th-century “Expositions Générales” once hosted in the building, bridging Paris’s history of modernity with today’s global artistic dialogues.
What we love: The show’s democratic sprawl feels like a living archive—where masterpieces mingle with unexpected experiments, revealing the institution’s pulse as both collector and catalyst of creative ecosystems, and making it a best of 2025.
Exposition Générale at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
October 25, 2025–August 30, 2026
Danielle Mckinney: “Second Wind”
Galerie Max Hetzler
Danielle Mckinney, “Second Wind,” 2025, oil on linen, 45.9 × 35.9 cm (18 1/8 × 14 1/8 in.); 48 × 37.9 × 5 cm (18 7/8 × 14 7/8 × 2 in., framed), courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, London.
Danielle Mckinney, “Crux,” 2025, oil on linen, 41 × 30.5 cm (16 1/8 × 12 in.); 42.9 × 32.7 × 5 cm (16 7/8 × 12 7/8 × 2 in., framed), courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, London.
Danielle Mckinney’s debut U.K. exhibition, “Second Wind,” unfolded as a meditation on stillness, solitude, and renewal. Building from black-primed canvases, Mckinney conjured intimate interiors where Black female figures emerge from darkness in soft chiaroscuro—illuminated by the glow of a lamp, a cigarette, or a fleeting thought. Her subjects inhabited thresholds between rest and revelation, poised in moments of inward reckoning. Looser brushwork and richer hues marked a new vitality in her practice: curtains ripple into abstraction, walls hummed with chromatic tension, and fields of red, green, and amber disrupt the quietude of her scenes. Influenced by Vuillard and Sickert yet wholly her own, Mckinney transformed domestic space into a site of metamorphosis, where silence itself becomes a language of resistance and rebirth.
What we loved: Mckinney painted introspection as transcendence—her women, caught between shadow and light, reminded us that renewal often begins in stillness, and making it a best of 2025.
Danielle Mckinney at Galerie Max Hetzler, Mayfair
September 18 – November 1, 2025
Eva Helene Pade: “Søgelys”
Thaddaeus Ropac
Installation view, Eva Helene Pade’s “Søgelys”. Photo by Eva Herzog. Courtesy the artist & Thaddeus Ropac.
Eva Helene Pade’s “Søgelys” (“Searchlight”) flooded Thaddaeus Ropac’s Ely House with incandescent scenes where bodies ignite, blur, and reform within clouds of colour and smoke. Her large-scale canvases staged jewel-toned figures in charged, ambiguous spaces—part nightclub, part battlefield—where light acts as a sentient force. The recurring female form became a vessel for collective emotion rather than identity, oscillating between gesture and dissolution. Smoke, shadow, and fluorescent beams sliced through the compositions, transforming figures into energy fields that clash and converge. Drawing from history painting and Mexican muralism, Pade fused mythic and contemporary imagery—Pietà-like collapses, spectral crowds, and metamorphic ascents—to evoke a world perpetually on the edge between beauty and violence.
What we loved: Pade captured the ecstasy and peril of collectivity, turning the painted crowd into a living organism—radiant, chaotic, and alive with tension, and making it a best of 2025.
Eva Helene Pade at Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, Mayfair
October 14 – December 20, 2025
Fondation Louis Vuitton
“Gerhard Richter”
Gerhard Richter, “Venedig (Treppe)” [Venezia (staircase)], 1985 (CR 586-3), oil on canvas, 51,4 x 71,8 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Edlis Neeson Collection © Gerhard Richter 2025.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton presents a landmark retrospective of Gerhard Richter, one of the most influential contemporary artists. Spanning more than six decades of practice, the exhibition brings together over 270 works created between 1962 and 2024, including oil paintings, glass and steel sculptures, drawings, watercolors, and overpainted photographs. Richter’s ceaseless experimentation with technique and genre—ranging from photo-based realism to abstraction—reveals a singular vision that defies categorization. Organized chronologically, the presentation traces his evolution from early figurative works to his final abstractions, offering an unprecedented view of an oeuvre that has profoundly shaped the language of painting.
What we love: Richter’s restrained emotionalism—his quiet, shimmering tension between photography and abstraction—reminds us that the history of painting is also the history of seeing itself evolve, and making it a best of 2025.
“Gerhard Richter” at Fondation Louis Vuitton
October 17, 2025–March 2, 2026
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
“George Condo”
Installation view of George Condo at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, ©Pierre Antoine.
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents the most comprehensive exhibition to date of George Condo, organized in close collaboration with the artist. Bringing together over four decades of his practice, the exhibition spans painting, drawing, and sculpture, highlighting the distinctive approach to figurative art and abstraction by George Condo. Approximately 80 paintings, 110 works on paper, and 20 sculptures are on view, with loans from major American and European institutions. Structured around themes rather than chronology, the show explores a dialogue with art history by George Condo, his exploration of the human psyche, and his ongoing innovations in abstraction.
What we love: The fractured figures of George Condo seem to channel the entire spectrum of human emotion at once—hysteria, humor, and heartbreak rendered with a virtuosity that’s both unsettling and exhilarating.
“George Condo”
at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
October 10, 2025–February 8, 2026
Uri Aran, Diane Dal-Pra, Shuang Li, Liz Magor, Kirill Savchenkov: “Props”
Galerie Derouillon
Diane Dal-Pra, Solo show ‘‘Remaining Parts,’’ 2022, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Derouillon, Paris © Grégory Copitet.
Derouillon presented “Props,” a group exhibition curated by Marion Coindeau with Uri Aran, Diane Dal-Pra, Shuang Li, Liz Magor, and Kiril Savchenkov. “Props” approached absence as a critical experience through which our everyday perceptions are reexamined, bringing to light fractures in the fabric of the world and exploring the in-between where the familiar slips into the uncanny, embracing the inevitability of what escapes our grasp. Moving beyond the humor or melancholy often tied to the eerie, the artists drew on its unsettling quality to reveal the forces of domination and the images that shape our daily lives. The exhibition was guided toward a more sensitive form of knowledge, opening a space for reflection, for questioning the obvious, and for embracing dissent.
What we loved: The exhibition invites us to pause and reflect on the routines and images that shape our everyday lives, encouraging a deeper awareness of the unseen forces beneath the familiar.
Uri Aran, Diane Dal-Pra, Shuang Li, Liz Magor, Kirill Savchenkov at Galerie Derouillon
October 16 – November 29, 2025
Jeffrey Gibson: “This is dedicated to the one I love”
Hauser & Wirth
Jeffrey Gibson in the studio, 2025. © Jeffrey Gibson, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, photo by Emiliano Granado.
Jeffrey Gibson, “Transboundary Universe,” 2025, acrylic on canvas, 40.6 x 30.5 cm / 16 x 12 in, courtesy of artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Hauser & Wirth Paris presented “This is dedicated to the one I love,” the first solo exhibition in France by Jeffrey Gibson. Spanning three decades of practice, Gibson (b. 1972) merges American, Indigenous, and queer histories with references to popular culture, music, and literature, forging a vibrant language of pattern, abstraction, and collage. On view were new paintings of varying scales, his iconic punching bags, cloaks, and beaded panels, as well as a new body of ceramic head sculptures. Boldly chromatic and deeply layered, the works invited reflection on empathy, resilience, and the radical potential of seeing—and being—through multiple perspectives.
What we loved: Through his mastery of color and geometry, Gibson invited viewers into an almost trance-like engagement with his work, and making it a best of 2025.
Jeffrey Gibson at Hauser & Wirth
October 20–December 20, 2025
“Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional”
Museo Jumex
Installation view of the exhibition “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional.” Museo
Jumex, 2025. Photo: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR Estudio).
Commencing on February 1, “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” lit up Museo Jumex in the visionary’s much-anticipated, first museum presentation in Mexico since 2006. The illustrious Mexican creative showcased 300 captivating objects that ebbed and flowed throughout four floors, as well as a spirited public plaza. The expansive show confronted the very definition of art, focusing on the diverse creative processes utilized by Orozco that have only flourished throughout his majestic career.
“Thinking about Orozco’s multiple ‘technics,’ isn’t just a matter of thinking about whether he uses traditional artistic techniques like carving or casting, glazing or impasto,” said Curator Briony Fer. “Rather, it’s to ask how he uses tools of rotation and symmetry, amongst other modus operandi—that is, other ways of working—in order to create new relations and correspondences between things. In the process, he unsettles what we think we know about the world.”
What we loved: Every floor of “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” took a closer look at the artist’s transcendent ethos, and was not organized by time but by a parade of explorations into the intimate relationship between art and life.
Gabriel Orozco at Museo Jumex
February 1, 2025 – August 3, 2025
Lisa Yuskavage
David Zwirner
Lisa Yuskavage,
“Peacock in the Garret,” 2024,
Oil on linen,
96 1/4 x 120 1/4 inches ,(244.5 x 305.4 cm);
Courtesy of David Zwirner.
Lisa Yuskavage returned to Los Angeles for the first time in 30 years with a dazzling new exhibition at David Zwirner. One of the most influential painters of the past three decades, Yuskavage blends abstraction and figuration, inviting viewers into fictionalized studio spaces where past, present, and art history intertwine. Curated by Helen Molesworth, on view were both large and small-scale paintings that blurred the boundaries between artist and subject, creation and reflection. In Painter Painting (2024), Yuskavage envisioned herself at work in front of a monumental grisaille, weaving together self-portraiture, past works, and nods to her Bad Habits sculptures. Her luminous monochrome canvases leaned against walls, both displaying a study in color theory and a glimpse into her process.
What we loved: Yuskavage’s palette is filled with vivid pinks and electric greens using color theory and surrealism to intertwine her body of work.
Lisa Yuskavage for David Zwirner
February 18–April 12, 2025
Rashid Johnson
Guggenheim
Installation view, “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” April 18, 2025–January
18, 2026, Solomon. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald © Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
On April 18 at the illustrious Guggenheim New York, an enveloping solo presentation by visionary Rashid Johnson voyages through over 90 artworks, an outdoor sculpture, and site-specific new pieces. Creatively titled “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” the mid-career survey ebbs and flows throughout the museum’s iconic white rotunda, and is enhanced by live performance programming alongside local community organizations.
What we love: The expansive show marks Johnson’s inaugural solo exhibition at the legendary art institution, and includes standout series such as The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club, Cosmic Slops, black-soap shelf paintings, spray- painted text works, and much more.
Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim
April 18 – January 18, 2026
Amy Sherald
The Whitney
Amy Sherald, “Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons),” 2024 Oil on linen, three panels 128 x 68 x 2.5in Collection of the artist; courtesy Hauser and Wirth.
Visitors to New York this spring did not want to miss the masterful Amy Sherald at The Whitney Museum of American Art. The artist’s inaugural major museum survey delved into the nuances of her prismatic, trademark portraits, as well as her astounding influence on international contemporary art. Titled “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” nearly 50 paintings from 2007 to present day were at once united, championing Black Americans in a realm that has historically left them hushed and invisible.
What we loved: Renowned portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama, Breonna Taylor, and more were stunningly on view, encouraging viewers to viscerally connect with the individual as well as the intricacies and evolutions of American identity.
Amy Sherald at The Whitney
April 9 – Aug 10, 2025
Ayesha Sultana’s “Fragility and Resilience”
Jaipur Centre for Art
Installation view of Ayesha Sultana’s “Fragility and Resilience,” Courtesy of the artist, Jaipur Centre for Art, Ishara Art Foundation, and Experimenter.
Presented in collaboration with the Ishara Art Foundation and supported by Experimenter, “Fragility and Resilience” marks a significant new chapter in the Bangladeshi artist Ayesha Sultana’s practice. Originally conceived for Ishara and curated by Sabih Ahmed, the exhibition has been reimagined for JCA’s heritage setting, expanding its material, spatial, and emotional resonance.
Exploring vulnerability as a powerful, generative force, Sultana’s works meditate on the tensions between strength and delicacy—ideas that feel especially urgent amid social, ecological, and personal transformation in the 21st century. Her wide-ranging practice includes hand-blown glass sculptures, oil paintings, watercolor studies on Japanese silk tissue, clay-coated paper works, and photographic compositions.
What we love: At Jaipur Centre for Art, these pieces cultivate a new conversation between Jaipur’s historic architecture, shifting light, and the artist’s material sensitivity.
“Fragility and Resilience” at Jaipur Centre for Art
November 9, 2025—January 5, 2026
