Summer on the Mediterranean Riviera offers the perfect opportunity to slow down and experience art differently. Whether between beach afternoons, long lunches, or evenings wandering historic towns, the season encourages a more reflective way of looking. This year’s exhibitions embrace that spirit, balancing moments of joy and beauty with timely explorations of identity, community, memory, and the uncertainty of the present. Alice Neel’s deeply empathetic portraits remain as resonant as ever, while Hauser & Wirth Menorca invites visitors to reflect on navigating today’s shifting world. In Monte Carlo, art and design come together in an immersive celebration of conversation and gathering. Across the Riviera, these exhibitions are as much about the places that host them as the artworks themselves, making each visit an experience that lingers long after the gallery doors close.
Whitewall rounds up the Riviera exhibitions not to miss this summer.
“Directionless”
Hauser & Wirth Menorca
Illa del Rei, Menorca, Spain
Installation view, “Directionless,” Hauser & Wirth Menorca, 2026. Photo by Nicolas Brasseur. Courtesy of the artists and Hauser & Wirth.
This summer, Hauser & Wirth Menorca presents “Directionless,” a group exhibition curated by Rashid Johnson that brings together 28 artists from more than 10 countries, many exhibiting outside the gallery’s roster. Rather than seeking resolution, the exhibition embraces the turmoil that defines the present moment, exploring how artists create new visual vocabularies to navigate a rapidly changing world. As Johnson notes, “The artists here aren’t paralyzed by that condition; they’re animated by it… What they offer isn’t a map, but a set of strategies for moving forward when the terrain is unfamiliar.”
The dialogue continues outdoors with a sculpture presentation curated by Cristina Iglesias, who invited artists to transform Illa del Rei’s gardens, pathways, and historic facades. Responding directly to architecture, water, and the Mediterranean landscape, the artworks challenge the permanence often associated with outdoor sculpture. Together, the exhibitions create unexpected conversations between artists, materials, and place, encouraging visitors to move slowly through the island and discover each artwork as it unfolds.
What we love: Few exhibitions respond so naturally to their Riviera surroundings, with the indoor and outdoor installations creating one continuous artistic journey.
“Directionless” at Hauser & Wirth Menorca
June 21–October 25, 2026
Alice Neel: “Beautifully Imperfect”
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art
Lordelo do Ouro, Porto, Portugal
Alice Neel, “Self-Portrait,” 1980, oil on canvas. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Alice Neel, “Well Baby Clinic,” 1931, oil on canvas. Courtesy of The Christina N. and Swan J. Turnblad Memorial Fund, by exchange, and Julia B. Bigelow.
The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents one of this summer’s standout Riviera exhibitions, bringing together nearly 90 artworks by the radical 20th-century American artist Alice Neel. Curated by Inês Grosso, the exhibition revisits Neel’s uncompromising practice through portraits that remain strikingly relevant today. “The people she painted, the dignity with which she portrayed them, and the underlying questioning of freedom, equality, and visibility in her painting still resonate today,” says Grosso. Best known for her psychologically charged portraits, Neel captured her subjects with remarkable empathy, reflecting experiences of identity, intimacy, motherhood, aging, queerness, immigration, and social inequality. Drawing from her own life and the communities she lived alongside in Spanish Harlem, she elevated those often overlooked by mainstream art history.
Radical both in subject and approach, Neel challenged conventions by placing marginalized lives at the center of her oeuvre, creating portraits that remain deeply human decades later. Highlights include her only major self-portrait, rarely exhibited cityscapes and still lifes, and archival letters from artists whose own practices were shaped by her legacy.
What we love: Beyond celebrating Neel’s remarkable oeuvre, the exhibition reveals the lasting influence she continues to have on generations of artists.
Alice Neel at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art
July 16–January 17, 2027
Urs Fischer: “Eugène Atget”
Gagosian Athens
Kolonaki, Athens, Greece
Urs Fischer, “Quadruple Elvis,” 2026, gesso, latex, acrylic paint, alcohol ink, and modeling paste on canvas, 66 x 110 inches (167.6 x 279.4 cm). © Urs Fischer Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
Titled “Eugène Atget,” Urs Fischer pays homage to the pioneering French photographer Eugène Atget, renowned for documenting “Old Paris” before it disappeared to modernization. More than a century later, Fischer turns a similarly observant eye toward his adopted city of Los Angeles. Combining silkscreen, hand-painting, and stenciling, Fischer layers historic motifs, original photographs, and manipulated imagery into monumental collages that blur the line between painting and photography. Some stretching across panoramic scales, the collages evoke the sensory overload of urban life through faces, signage, text, color, and architectural fragments. Bold gestures and vivid interventions transform everyday scenes into dynamic compositions that pulse with movement.
Installed within the neoclassical interiors of Gagosian Athens, the exhibition creates a compelling dialogue between Los Angeles and the Mediterranean. As gallerist Jeffrey Deitch notes, “Artists, writers, and filmmakers who are not native to Los Angeles often create the sharpest portrayal of the city… Urs Fischer…is capturing and then transforming into painting what may be the most resonant visual record of Los Angeles today.”
What we love: The contrast between Fischer’s energetic collages and the gallery’s serene neoclassical architecture creates an unexpected conversation between metropolitan chaos and Riviera tranquility, allowing each collage painting hybrid the space to fully unfold.
Urs Fischer at Gagosian Athens
June 9–September 12, 2026
Simon Hantaï: “the last studio”
Gagosian Gstaad
Promenade, Gstadd, Switzerland
Simon Hantaï, “Sans titre (Untitled),” 1984, acrylic on canvas, 115 x 193 inches (292 x 490 cm) © Archives Simon Hantaï / Adagp, Paris, 2026. Photo by David Bordes. Courtesy of Archives Simon Hantaï and Gagosian.
At Gagosian Gstaad, a rare chapter of Simon Hantaï‘s career comes into focus with sixteen paintings from his “dernier atelier (last studio)” series, created between 1982 and 1985. Curated by Anne Baldassari, the exhibition reunites canvases first introduced in her landmark retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Produced after Hantaï withdrew from public life following the 1982 Biennale, where he represented France, these vibrant abstractions reveal the artist working in complete creative freedom. Using his signature pliage process—crumpling, knotting, painting, and unfolding the canvas—Hantaï allowed pigment to pool, drip, and settle into unexpected compositions defined by both color and untouched reserves. Many of the paintings remained stacked and stapled together in his studio for decades.
The exhibition stems from Baldassari’s research into photographer and close friend Édouard Boubat, whose images documented Hantaï’s secluded practice. Alongside the monumental canvases are smaller, experimental artworks that layer folded, torn, cropped, and painted fragments into richly textured compositions. Never exhibited during the artist’s lifetime, these paintings reveal an intimate period of experimentation untouched by commercial expectations.
What we love: A remarkable opportunity to experience one of Hantaï’s least-seen canvases, thoughtfully brought to light through Anne Baldassari’s years of research.
Simon Hantaï at Gagosian Gstaad
July 9–September 27, 2026
“Mise-en-scène”
Hauser & Wirth Monaco and Paulin, Paulin, Paulin
Casino Boulingrins, Monte Carlo, Monaco
nstallation view, “Mise-en-scène,” Hauser & Wirth Monaco, 2026. © the artists / estates. Courtesy the artists / estates and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Philippe Fitte.
Meanwhile, in Monte Carlo, Hauser & Wirth collaborates with Paulin, Paulin, Paulin, the Paris-based design studio dedicated to preserving and expanding the legacy of legendary designer Pierre Paulin. Titled “Mise-en-scène,” the installation transforms the gallery into an immersive domestic environment where collectible design and blue-chip art exist in conversation. Exceptional artworks by Pablo Picasso, Louise Bourgeois, Jean Arp, Lucio Fontana, and Andy Warhol are presented alongside contemporary voices including Rashid Johnson, Henry Taylor, and Paul McCarthy.
Extending beyond the exhibition, Sounds Like Paulin, the studio’s record label, will host a series of musical performances and activations throughout the season, reinforcing Pierre Paulin’s legacy as one that continues to evolve rather than remain fixed in history. Signature designs including the Déclive n°3, Video Barnum, and Chirac Sofa highlight his vision of furniture as a catalyst for gathering, conversation, and cultural exchange.
What we love: Perfectly suited to its Riviera setting, the exhibition feels less like a gallery presentation and more like an elegant collector’s home.
“Mise-en-scène” at Hauser & Wirth Monaco and Paulin, Paulin, Paulin
April 9–August 31, 2026
Carlos Jacanamijoy: “Naturaleza Interior”
La Nave Salinas Foundation
Ses Salines, Ibiza, Spain
Photo by Fabian Alzate.
One of the season’s top Riviera exhibitions opens July 14 at La Nave Salinas Foundation in Ibiza, where Carlos Jacanamijoy‘s paintings invite viewers on a spiritual journey through color, memory, nature, and the cosmos. Drawing from his Inga heritage in Colombia’s Andean-Amazonian region, Jacanamijoy translates ancestral memory into a contemporary pictorial language, using abstraction rather than direct representation to evoke his cultural roots. As the artist recalls, “I remember listening, among lights and shadows, to the cacophony of animals during an overwhelming night in the middle of the jungle.”
The landscapes of Putumayo emerge through luminous color, organic forms, and emotionally charged compositions, while the exhibition title suggests an inner landscape as much as a physical one. As Isaac Malca, Director of Fundación La Nave Salinas, explains, “Carlos Jacanamijoy begins from another place: in his work, nature does not appear before us as an object; it contains us. That difference transforms the gaze itself.”
What we love: Jacanamijoy’s deft ability to weave culture, memory, spirituality, and color into deeply immersive paintings that feel both personal and universal.
Carlos Jacanamijoy at La Nave Salinas Foundation
July 14–October 30, 2026
