As autumn settles across the Northern Hemisphere, museums and galleries worldwide are launching ambitious seasonal programs that challenge how visitors perceive space, time, and everyday objects. From porcelain bowls drifting across ancient pools in Athens and temperature-sensitive paintings in London to dense, immersive webs of thread filling galleries in Montreal, the October exhibition radar highlights spaces where contemporary art, design, and architecture intersect. Curated by designboom, this month’s global lineup explores everything from the utopian domestic futures once promised to mid-century American households to the creative networks that defined 1990s British fashion.
Several prominent exhibitions highlighted in earlier listings and dedicated museum calendars remain on view, offering art enthusiasts extended opportunities to encounter transformative works across the globe.
Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias
During the twentieth century, visions of self-cleaning kitchens and houses rapidly assembled from futuristic plastics promised Americans an entirely reimagined domestic life. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias examines how these optimistic visions were conceptualized, marketed, and sold, scaling from individual household appliances to entire futuristic living environments.
Through a rich archive of architectural models, speculative films, and everyday domestic objects, the exhibition illustrates how emerging technologies shaped the public imagination of tomorrow’s home. Crucially, the presentation also interrogates the social dimensions of these utopian schemes, questioning who these technological futures were intended to serve and who remained systematically excluded from their promises. By presenting alternative domestic visions, the exhibition broadens the historical narrative beyond the standard versions of progress promoted to mid-century consumers. The exhibition runs from September 27, 2026, through March 14, 2027.
Geoffrey Bawa: Architecture for the Senses
The architectural philosophy of Geoffrey Bawa is defined by its profound integration with the natural landscape, where existing trees, rock formations, and expansive tropical gardens become fundamental components of the structural plan. At the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, Architecture for the Senses traces the acclaimed Sri Lankan architect’s career spanning more than fifty years, encompassing everything from intimate private residences to the Sri Lankan parliament.
The exhibition pairs rare archival drawings and physical models with newly commissioned photography and film that capture the lived sensory experience of these spaces today. Furthermore, the presentation highlights Bawa’s extensive collaborations with artists and craftspeople, whose textiles and site-specific artworks were woven into the very fabric of his buildings. Featuring exhibition design by Lina Ghotmeh Architects, the show is on view from September 26, 2026, to February 28, 2027.
Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous
The deep artistic and personal relationship between Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, who met in New York in 1941 and married four years later before relocating to Springs, Long Island, is the focus of a major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Titled Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous and drawing its name from a 1976 painting by Krasner, the exhibition brings together more than 120 works to evaluate their respective practices both individually and through their continuous mutual exchange.
Pollock’s signature poured and dripped compositions are contextualized within a broader trajectory of twentieth-century abstraction, while Krasner’s shifting approaches reveal a lifelong fascination with nature, color, and collage. The narrative spans their shared life in Springs and extends deep into the decades following Pollock’s death, during which Krasner continued her pioneering work in abstraction. The exhibition runs from October 4, 2026, to January 31, 2027.
This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte
Apples, bowler hats, and profound visual paradoxes take center stage at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery in London, where René Magritte’s iconic imagery meets contemporary responses from more than forty artists. Organized in collaboration with the Fondation Magritte, This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte gathers significant paintings, sculptures, and works on paper spanning the Belgian surrealist’s career.
The exhibition explores the enduring influence of Magritte’s visual inquiries across generations. Several participating artists have created brand-new works specifically for the presentation, seamlessly integrating historical surrealist masterpieces with contemporary artistic practices to question the nature of representation and reality. The exhibition remains open through December 12, 2026.
Clinamen
At Onassis Mandra in Athens, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot’s captivating installation Clinamen features white porcelain bowls drifting rhythmically across three circular outdoor pools. As the floating vessels collide gently with one another, their porcelain edges produce delicate, ambient acoustic compositions that shift constantly with environmental conditions.
Originally developed in 1997, the installation takes its philosophical title from the unpredictable deviation of atoms described in Epicurean philosophy. Situated within a historic open-air theater, this iteration allows surrounding weather patterns—such as passing rain—to actively alter the sonic landscape, offering visitors a meditative space to pause and listen. The installation runs from September 26 to December 5, 2026.
Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles
Making its North American debut at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles surveys more than three decades of work by the Berlin-based Japanese artist. Known for her monumental, hand-woven networks of red and black thread, Shiota transforms gallery architecture into immersive environments that physically capture ordinary objects, memories, and interpersonal relationships.
The comprehensive survey features major installations such as Uncertain Journey and In Silence, alongside sculptures and performance documentation that chronicle the evolution of her practice. Because each monumental thread structure is meticulously reconstructed by hand to fit its specific architectural host, the exhibition underscores the inherent impermanence of both the physical artwork and the emotional experiences attached to it. The exhibition is on view through February 14, 2027.
Chasing Clouds
Early photographers faced immense technical hurdles when attempting to record both a terrestrial landscape and the dynamic sky above it. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chasing Clouds examines the ingenious workarounds developed by nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century artists, from painting skies directly onto photographic plates to combining multiple separate negatives.
Spanning from nineteenth-century oil sketches—created as landscape painters studied changing weather patterns while meteorologists began classifying cloud formations—to the photographic advancements that finally brought the sky into focus, the exhibition culminates with Alfred Stieglitz’s seminal Equivalents series from the 1920s. In these works, cloud formations transcend mere documentation to become powerful vehicles for pure emotion. The exhibition runs through February 28, 2027.
Ann Veronica Janssens: 5 Chome 4-1 Ginza, Tokyo
At Hermès Maison Ginza Le Forum, artist Ann Veronica Janssens presents her first solo exhibition in Japan, titled after the gallery’s exact street address. Utilizing subtle shifts in light, color, and physical atmosphere, the exhibition features around a dozen works designed to heighten the visitor’s sensory perception of the built environment.
Highlights include Rose, a striking star-like form constructed from intersecting beams of colored light, and Swing, a seat engineered to react subtly to temperature. Curated by Reiko Setsuda, the presentation offers a reflective overview of Janssens’ pioneering investigations into light, fog, and spatial awareness. The exhibition runs through January 11, 2027.
Broken: The Power of the Fragment
A damaged or incomplete sculpture carries tangible physical evidence of its history, whether shaped by centuries of weathering, warfare, or intentional iconoclasm. At Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Broken: The Power of the Fragment—organized in partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington—explores how fragmented works have captivated audiences across diverse cultures and historical eras.
The exhibition examines the dual nature of incompleteness, highlighting how surviving pieces preserve the memory of destruction while simultaneously taking on entirely new aesthetic lives as autonomous artworks, alongside sculptures conceived as fragments from their inception. The exhibition is on view through January 24, 2027.
Luciano Fabro: Abitare lo spazio. Inhabiting Space
At Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, Abitare lo spazio. Inhabiting Space brings together approximately fifty sculptures and installations in the first major Italian museum retrospective dedicated to Luciano Fabro since his passing in 2007. The exhibition traces the artist’s groundbreaking spatial experiments, beginning with early works utilizing reflective surfaces and culminating in the immersive architectural environments he termed "habitats."
Several of these complex environments have been meticulously reconstructed within the museum’s expansive Navate using Fabro’s original instructional plans. These spatial constructs dictate the pathways and viewpoints through which visitors navigate the gallery, fundamentally expanding sculpture into a bodily experience of movement. The exhibition runs from October 8, 2026, to February 21, 2027.
Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony
Spanning two floors of the newly expanded New Museum in New York, Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony offers a major survey of the artist’s nearly forty-year career. Named in honor of jazz drummer Tony Williams, the exhibition explores the development of a distinct filmic language informed by the complex rhythms, textures, and cultural weight of Black music.
Celebrated masterworks such as Love is the Message, The Message is Death and The White Album are presented alongside brand-new video works, recent paintings, and sculptural installations. Together, these large-scale projections examine how visual culture archives and reflects the historical and contemporary realities of Black life in America. The exhibition runs through January 3, 2027.
Kenny Scharf
The vibrant, biomorphic creatures of Kenny Scharf arrive at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza as part of its ongoing programming dedicated to the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Emerging from New York’s energetic East Village art scene during the 1980s, Scharf developed a distinct visual vocabulary he terms "Pop Surrealism."
His fantastical, cartoonish figures draw heavily on popular culture while imbued with exaggerated human expressions and animated personalities. The exhibition highlights Scharf’s populist ethos, showcasing a practice that effortlessly transcends traditional canvas painting to occupy everyday objects and public urban spaces, driven by a saturated palette and boundless energy. The exhibition is on view through January 17, 2027.
Trop mignon! L’art du bonheur
Bringing together nearly 300 diverse works at Louvre-Lens, Trop mignon! L’art du bonheur investigates how images and cultural artifacts generate affection and psychological comfort. The exhibition moves fluidly from ancient archaeological artifacts—such as a prehistoric toy hedgehog—to contemporary manifestations of "cute" and kawaii aesthetics.
Featuring works by artists including Rosa Bonheur and William Wegman, the presentation explores humanity’s historical fascination with animal companionship in art while also probing the more ambiguous emotional undercurrents that frequently lie beneath an ostensibly adorable exterior. The exhibition runs through January 18, 2027.
Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing
At Serpentine South in London, artist Justin Caguiat presents Change Ringing, an exhibition centered around paintings embedded with heat-sensitive pigments. As the ambient temperature of the gallery fluctuates, abstract forms continuously emerge and recede across the canvases, directly linking the artwork’s visibility to the atmospheric conditions of the room.
The visual installation is accompanied by a sonic score composed by Lily Pickett, executed by bronze bells cast in the shapes of floral elements and plant seeds. Drawing inspiration from the traditional English art of change ringing, the chimes resonate through the gallery walls, turning the building itself into a resonant vessel of accumulated memory. The exhibition opens on October 8, 2026, and runs through January 10, 2027.
Remember Me
Marking the bicentenary of the invention of photography, the Bourse de Commerce in Paris presents Remember Me, a monumental exhibition drawing approximately 700 works from the Pinault Collection. Curated by Matthieu Humery and Lola Regard, the presentation features more than seventy artists, juxtaposing rare historical photographs with contemporary imaging techniques.
Eschewing a strict chronological sequence, the curators encourage visual dialogues across different eras and photographic philosophies. The exhibition’s title borrows from a work by Barbara Kruger, who has also created a site-specific installation for the museum’s rotunda and display cases, exploring photography’s enduring capacity to preserve a passing human moment. The exhibition opens on October 7, 2026.
Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia
At M+ in Hong Kong, Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia traces the deep lineages connecting traditional Japanese woodblock prints to the contemporary global phenomena of manga and anime. The exhibition examines how fantastical characters and imaginary environments have evolved in response to shifting historical and social contexts across the region.
Beginning with early visual traditions such as Chinese shadow puppetry and Tibetan Buddhist scrolls, the exhibition charts the subsequent circulation of Surrealism throughout Asia, the eventual rise of post-war Japanese manga, and the integration of anime aesthetics into modern digital culture and contemporary design. The exhibition runs from October 17, 2026, to April 4, 2027.
Solange Pessoa: Of Day or Night
Organic and mineral materials anchor the artistic practice of Solange Pessoa, whose work remains deeply tied to the landscape of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz at Centro Botín in Santander, Spain, Of Day or Night marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the country, bringing early investigations from the 1990s into dialogue with recent sculptural works.
Pessoa’s tactile practice incorporates raw elements that evoke both bodily forms and geological formations, subtly integrating references to Brazilian modernism and Indigenous cosmologies. Two large-scale installations created specifically for the building’s architecture further ground the exhibition in the textures of the natural world. The exhibition runs from October 10, 2026, to March 28, 2027.
Adam Pendleton: Some Wild Kind of Language
Adam Pendleton transforms the historic interior of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam with Some Wild Kind of Language, presenting eleven new paintings and eight large-scale drawings that push his ongoing exploration of abstraction and fragmented language onto an architectural scale.
As part of the intervention, the museum’s iconic central staircase is temporarily shifted from its traditional bright white aesthetic into a stark black environment. Nearby, Pendleton’s layered, text-based canvases enter into a dynamic conversation with the museum’s permanent collection and historical traditions of abstraction, inviting viewers to navigate the boundary between reading a linguistic sign and observing a painterly mark. The exhibition runs from October 10, 2026, to January 17, 2027.
The 90s: Art and Fashion
At Tate Britain, a major new exhibition curated by Edward Enninful revisits the pivotal decade when British contemporary art and fashion operated within a tightly knit, highly collaborative creative ecosystem. The 90s: Art and Fashion places iconic artworks alongside era-defining photography and vanguard clothing designs to illuminate the networks that shaped the period’s cultural footprint.
Featuring works by Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst alongside photography by Juergen Teller and David Sims, and garments by Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen, the exhibition captures the raw DIY ethos of independent publications like i-D and Dazed during a time when experimental British culture seized international attention. The exhibition runs from October 8, 2026, to February 14, 2027.
Nike: Form Follows Motion
An intimate look into the rigorous research and development behind athletic footwear is on display at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Drawing primarily from the expansive holdings of the Department of Nike Archives, Nike: Form Follows Motion traces five decades of design evolution originating from the company’s roots in Oregon.
Organized by the Vitra Design Museum and curated by Glenn Adamson alongside assistant curator Marcella Hanika, the exhibition showcases rare experimental prototypes and one-off pieces alongside globally recognized sneaker collaborations. Exhibition design by JA Projects and graphic design by Daniel Streat of Visual Fields contextualize the deep relationship between human athletic movement and industrial design. The exhibition is on view through March 7, 2027.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life
Tracey Emin’s iconic unmade bed anchors a sweeping retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, surveying nearly forty years of an artistic practice rooted deeply in autobiography. Developed in close collaboration with the artist and organized by Tate Modern, Tracey Emin: A Second Life features several works exhibited to the public for the first time.
Recent, emotionally charged paintings are contextualized within Emin’s long-standing use of the female body as a vehicle to confront trauma, pain, and eventual recovery. Across the exhibition, the act of artistic creation remains intimately bound to the artist’s personal experiences of survival. The exhibition runs from October 8, 2026, to April 18, 2027.
Ibrahim Mahama: Le Temps des récoltes
At the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama presents his first major exhibition in the French capital, titled Le Temps des récoltes. The centerpiece installation, Things Fall Apart, reconstructs a former Ghanaian glass-bottle factory using its authentic industrial materials, directly transplanting the architectural history of Tamale into the institution’s Palais-Royal galleries.
Mahama collaborates closely with associated artists and cultural collectives, extending the community-driven ethos of his established art centers in Ghana. A new iteration of his Parliament of Ghosts series utilizes traditional wooden Ashanti stools to form a functioning parliamentary chamber that hosts live performances and public discussions throughout the run of the exhibition. The show opens on October 22, 2026, and runs through February 28, 2027.
Penn & Fashion
Spanning over six decades of production from 1947 to 2008, Penn & Fashion at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris charts Irving Penn’s legendary career through the lens of haute couture and garment design. Beginning with early postwar Parisian fashion assignments, the exhibition highlights Penn’s mastery of minimalist composition and studio lighting.
Particular emphasis is placed on Penn’s celebrated, long-term creative partnership with Japanese designer Issey Miyake, whose sculptural garments found a natural counterpart in Penn’s rigorous, spare photographic aesthetic. Even as fashion grew increasingly elaborate over the decades, Penn’s images consistently prioritized volume, texture, and structural purity. The exhibition runs from September 30, 2026, to January 17, 2027.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
Urban beauty salons, neighborhood barbershops, and vibrant outdoor gathering spaces serve as the theatrical backdrops for large-scale paintings in Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Spanning more than four decades of the artist’s career, the exhibition features seventy works, including eight paintings created specifically for this presentation.
Marshall’s figurative compositions systematically insert Black subjects into historical Western painting traditions and pictorial genres that have historically marginalized them, engaging directly with art history and popular culture alike. Everyday contemporary scenes sit alongside imagined portraits of historical figures and meditations on the Middle Passage, charting Marshall’s ongoing project to represent the depth of Black life and history through painting. The exhibition runs through January 24, 2027.
teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity
The Chicago-based Smart Museum of Art hosts Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity, marking the first Midwest museum exhibition for the renowned Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab. Bringing together twenty-five years of digital experimentation, the presentation merges established immersive installations with brand-new works developed specifically for the institution.
Drawing inspiration from historical East Asian approaches to perspective and space, the interactive installations challenge traditional boundaries between viewer and artwork, placing individual perception within a fluid, shared environment. Featured new presentations include Sea of Darkness, Memory Shines from the Depths, and selections from the collective’s Dissipative Figures series. The exhibition runs through February 21, 2027.
Metamorphoses: Hats by Maison Michel
Exploring the intricate craftsmanship and material origins of high-end millinery, Metamorphoses: Hats by Maison Michel at la Galerie du 19M in Paris traces the workshop gestures that transform raw straw and felt into finished Parisian headwear.
Founded in 1936, Maison Michel places its historical archives in conversation with contemporary works and collaborative projects involving emerging designers. As part of the exhibition’s extensive public programming, visitors can participate in hands-on weaving workshops led by figures like Emma Bruschi or experience Michel Gondry’s interactive Home Movie Factory, which invites participants to produce a short film inside a set modeled after an early twentieth-century hat shop. The exhibition runs through December 13, 2026.
