The new year brings new shows from Amsterdam to Zurich and beyond. Ranging from Marlene Dumas’s contemporary take on ancient art in Athens to Anslem Kiefer’s ties to Van Gogh, here are nine exhibitions that can’t be missed.

“Noah Davis” at the Barbican, London
February 6–May 11, 2025

Noah Davis at Work, Los Angeles, 2009. Photo: Patrick O’Brien-Smith. Courtesy of the Barbican.

Noah Davis was a young artist rapidly gaining a reputation with solo shows across America under when he died in 2015, aged just 32. In February, London’s Barbican will present Davis’s first U.K. museum show, celebrating the prolific artist who was so dedicated to his craft that he had his first studio at 17. The exhibition will champion Davis as “one of the most original and uncanny painters emerging in recent years,” showcasing 50 works by the artist exhibited chronologically and dating back to 2007. The show will also publicly debut a collection of personal source material and archival photographs used by Davis, and will include a partial re-staging of the first exhibition Davis curated at Los Angeles’s Underground Museum, which the artist co-founded in 2012. Community-building and representation were central to the museum, as it was Davis’s work, as he focused on capturing the beauty and dignity of everyday Black life.

—Verity Babbs

Anselm Kiefer “Tell Me Where the Flowers Are”  at the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
March 7–June 9, 2025

Anselm Kiefer, The Starry Night (2019) © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet.

Anselm Kiefer, widely considered one of the most important artists of our time, will be having a very big year in 2025, with multiple shows across Europe and beyond. Perhaps the most significant is “Tell Me Where the Flowers Are,” an unprecedented collaboration between the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. This dual arrangement will spotlight Vincent van Gogh’s influence on Kiefer at the former museum, combining new works by the German artist along with a selection of highlights from the museum’s collection, chosen by Kiefer. At the Stedelijk, Tell Me Where the Flowers Are is also the title of Kiefer’s new 78-foot-long painting, which will fill the space around the museum’s staircase. The show will then travel to London’s Royal Academy, running from June 28 to October 26.

—Vivienne Chow

“Tracey Emin: Sex and Solitude” at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
March 16–July 20, 2025

Tracey Emin, It – didnt stop – I didnt stop (2019). Photo: © Tracey Emin, all rights reserved, DACS 2024. Courtesy of the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.

Once an outspoken bad girl of the YBA movement in the 1990s, Tracey Emin is now a… Dame Commander of the British Empire, having earlier this year been recognized in King Charles’s birthday honors list. Despite this establishment approval, she is still proudly outspoken and cherished for the profound vulnerability she is able to express in her paintings on topics like womanhood, pain, and illness. Her recent at White Cube in London was a smash hit with audiences, appearing in viral TikToks that inspired devoted comments like “never cried like dis over art I’ve seen on here wow” and “oh lord the art did the thing where I can feel it.”

Now, Emin is set to have her first major Italian retrospective at Palazzo Strozzi. A selection of historical and more recent works will show how the artist has drawn from her own experiences over several decades, illuminating the everyday experiences of living as a woman in a way that was wholly absent from the many centuries worth of male-authored art that came before.

—Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Artemisia Gentileschi’ at Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris
March 19–August 3, 2025

Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (ca 1615). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Musée Jacquemart-André is celebrating Artemisia Gentileschi with an exhibition of around 40 paintings by the Baroque star, including rarely-exhibited works and pieces only recently attributed to the artist. Gentileschi reclaimed her place in the art historical spotlight in the 20th century after more than 200 years of relative obscurity. Recent major retrospectives have championed Gentileschi—including one at London’s National Gallery in 2020—rightly celebrating her as one of the few female artists to achieve major fame during her lifetime. A highlight of the Musée Jacquemart-André exhibition will be Gentileschi’s famous Self-portrait as a Lute Player (ca. 1615–18), which may have been originally commissioned by the Medici in Florence. Gallery-goers will also recognize Judith and Her Servant with the Head of Holofernes (ca. 1618–19), on loan from the Uffizi in Florence, as the narrative sequel to her world-renowned bloody Judith Beheading Holofernes (ca. 1614–18). The show promises to demonstrate “the profound originality” of Gentileschi’s work, as well as tracing the narrative of her personal life and the inconsistent trajectory of her legacy.

—Verity Babbs

“Do Ho Suh: Walk the House” at Tate Modern, London
May 1–October 19 , 2025

Do Ho Suh, Hub series, Installation view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2022. Photography by Jessica Maurer. © Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh is best known for his fabric sculptures but these works are merely a scratch on the surface of the 62-year-old artist’s practice, which often questions the idea of home, identity, and belonging. Born in South Korea, Suh has lived in the U.S. and is now based in London. At this survey show at Tate Modern, expect a deep dive into the South Korean-born, London-based artist’s career trajectory, exploring his large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, and videos from the last three decades. This exhibition, backed by Genesis Art Initiatives, will mark the first venture of the South Korean luxury car brand’s art program in Europe as demand for Korean art on the world stage grows. The opening will also coincide with the Tate’s 25th birthday celebration.

—Vivienne Chow

“Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues” at The Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens
June 5–November 3, 2025 

Marlene Dumas, Cycladic Blues (2020). Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven, courtesy Studio Damas, the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London, © Marlene Dumas.

We understand the influence of classical sculpture on many art movements, not least the Italian Renaissance. Lesser-known is how more recent, modernist developments, including the work of artists like Modigliani and Picasso, was hugely impacted by an even more ancient Greek art form. That is is the the abstracted, anthropomorphic marble figurines known as Cycladic Art, which was produced on the islands of the Aegean Sea from around ca. 3300 to 1100 B.C.E. The style is characterized by smooth faces with relatively few features apart from a prominent wedge of a nose and rigid bodies with both arms folded at the elbow.

Its enduring importance for successive generations of artists has been brought to the fore by the Museum of Cycladic Art by bringing these ancient works into dialogue with the paintings and works on paper of contemporary South African artist Marlene Dumas. The show has long been anticipated, having been postponed by several years, but the artist’s interest in the collection is already well-documented. Some of the newest works were even created in direct response to the museum’s collection and the artist has selected some archaeological objects to be exhibited alongside them.

—Jo Lawson-Tancred 

“Yoshitomo Nara” at Hayward Gallery, London
June 10–August 31, 2025

Yoshitomo Nara, Midnight Tears (2023). © Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy Yoshitomo Nara Foundation.

Yoshitomo Nara is on fire. The 1959-born Japanese artist who has charmed the world with his depiction of adorable but slightly menacing children is the second top-selling living artist from Asia, according to the Artnet Price Database. He is on a bit of a roll when it comes to exhibitions, including major gallery shows in Tokyo and Los Angeles with Blum. His turn at the Hayward Gallery in London marks his first institutional solo in the U.K. It’s an expanded version of the touring exhibition from the Guggenheim Bilbao, and Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, featuring 150 works, including early sculptures and new paintings.

—Vivienne Chow

“Emily Kam Kngwarray” at Tate Modern, London
July 10, 2025–January 13, 2026

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Ntang Dreaming 1989 National Gallery of Australia. © Estate of Emily Kam Kngwarray / DACS 2024, All rights reserved.

Emily Kam Kngwarray only began to paint in her 70s, and swiftly became one of the most critically acclaimed and successful Indigenous Australian artists of all time. Over the course of the next eight years, preceding her death in 1996, Kngwarray created more than 3,000 acrylic paintings (one per day on average), as well as a large body of textile work made with batik. In July 2025, she will become the first Indigenous Australian artist to have a major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern, and the exhibition will be Kngwarray’s first large-scale presentation anywhere in Europe. Her spiritual experiences as an Anmatyerre elder in the central desert of Utopia and her background creating ceremonial artworks throughout her lifetime inspired her practice in later life, and film, audio elements, textiles, and photographs included in the Tate retrospective help to illuminate the impact of Kngwarray’s heritage on her work. The exhibition is a collaboration with Australia’s National Gallery in Canberra, where the show debuted in December 2023.

—Verity Babbs

“Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly”, Museum Ludwig, Cologne
October 3, 2025–January 11, 2026

Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns at Louis and Fance Stevenson’s home “somewhere up the Hudson”, 1954. Photo: Rachel Rosenthal. Courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

The influence of the short-lived Black Mountain College for arts students looms large on the midcentury American art scene, not least for bringing together creatives from different disciplines who were able to share their ideas. The most famous of these is the friendship that formed between painters Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the composer John Cage, soon gaining a fifth member in Rauschenberg’s lover Jasper Johns.

As individuals, these titans have tended to command grand retrospectives of their own, but a new show at Museum Ludwig will interrogate the richly fertile web of influence that formed between them. How exactly did a musical theory devised by Cage go on to influence neo-Dada assemblage? What role did Rauschenberg and Johns’s stage sets play in the dance schemes dreamt up by Cunningham? This celebration of the power of collaboration touches not just on friendship but also romance, prompting the curators to also consider the experience of being a gay artist in 1950s America.

—Jo Lawson-Tancred