The streets are starting to fill with lights and Christmas decorations, and before we know it, we’ll be rushing from one office party to a pre-New Year cocktail event. Then, even faster, we’ll be declining invitations and dreaming of our booked holidays under the sun, on the slopes, or simply cosy at home and in an instant it will be 2026.
However, until all that happens, there is still time to discover something remarkable. Spanning centuries, styles, and ideas, from Paris to Seoul and New York, here are seven exhibitions worldwide that deserve a final visit before the year draws to a close. Each one offers its own compelling reason to step out and experience a memorable cultural moment in the final stretch of 2025.
Paris, France
John Singer Sargent: The Paris Years (1874–1884)
Musée d’Orsay, 23 Sept 2025 – 11 Jan 2026
Begin your journey in Paris with John Singer Sargent, the American artist who made elegance look effortless. He trained in France, built his circle there, and painted many of his early masterpieces. Yet this is the first monographic exhibition that the country has devoted to him. His Portrait of Madame X is a study in scandal disguised as sophistication – the Mona Lisa of the Met.
While in Paris, we also recommend the recently opened Cartier Foundation or the Richter exhibition at the Fondation Vuitton.
Milan, Italy
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well
Pirelli HangarBicocca, 11 Oct 2025 – 15 Feb 2026
Another must-see is Nan Goldin’s first major exhibition as a filmmaker, which brings together her iconic slide shows with new sound installations. From The Ballad of Sexual Dependency to her more recent works, Goldin’s camera never looked away, capturing her friends, lovers, and losses to create a visual diary of intimacy, addiction, and survival. Contrary to its ominous title, This Will Not End Well radiates with her dark humour and unshakeable joie de vivre. Each pavilion, designed by architect Hala Wardé, creates an immersive landscape of memory and resistance.
Seoul, South Korea
Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now
Leeum Museum of Art
Goldin’s intimate defiance finds its sculptural counterpart in Seoul. Since the late 1980s, Lee Bul has used her own body, and later cyborgs, as a stage for vulnerability and control. Her early performances shocked South Korea’s post-dictatorship society, while her later installations fuse flesh, metal, and utopia in shimmering, fractured forms. This exhibition traces her artistic evolution from the body to architecture and from pain to perfection, questioning who builds and who breaks the systems we inhabit.
In a sense, Lee Bul is doing in twenty-first-century Seoul what Michaelina Wautier dared to do in seventeenth-century Brussels: claim space in an art world that wasn’t designed for her, and reshape how the female form, and the artist herself, could be seen.
Vienna, Austria
Michaelina Wautier: Rediscovered Masterpieces
Kunsthistorisches Museum, 30 Sept 2025 – 22 Feb 2026
Hailed as ‘the most exciting rediscovery of the decade’, Michaelina Wautier painted historical scenes and male nudes on a monumental scale. In the 17th century, when women were typically confined to still lifes, her confident brushwork and command of anatomy transcended gender hierarchies long before the term existed.
Her presence in the halls of the Kunsthistorisches Museum is almost corrective and invites us to reconsider how later painters such as Turner and Constable reinterpreted the world through a distinctly Romantic gaze two centuries later.
London, UK
Turner and Constable: Visions of the Landscape
Tate Britain, 27 Nov 2025 – 12 Apr 2026
This rare double exhibition brings together the two rivals, Turner and Constable, for the first time in decades, revealing how these two contemporaries, born just a year apart, transformed landscape painting. Turner dissolved the horizon into light and atmosphere, while Constable grounded it in texture and weather. Shown side by side, their works capture Britain at the dawn of modernity – a country torn between industry and pastoral nostalgia, reason and emotion.
While in London, take a short walk to the Tate Modern for a completely different experience.
Emily Kam Kngwarray
Tate Modern, 10 Jul 2025 – 11 Jan 2026
Hailing from Australia’s Northern Territory, Kngwarray started painting in her seventies and, within a decade, had produced hundreds of monumental canvases pulsing with the rhythm of her ancestral land. This is the largest exhibition ever devoted to her work outside Australia. Her dotted and layered surfaces recall Pollock’s energy but replace his angst with continuity – abstraction as geography, painting as songline.
Madrid, Spain
Pollock and Warhol: New Spatial Strategies
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, 21 Oct 2025 – 25 Jan 2026
One of the season’s most anticipated dialogues: Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, together for the first time in Spain, alongside other key American contemporaries. The exhibition explores the concept of ‘New Spatial Strategies’ and examines how these two artists, one an expressionist and the other a pop artist, redefined the space of the canvas. Pollock turned paint into choreography, while Warhol flattened emotion through serial repetition. Yet both artists explored the self through abstraction, creating portraits of an age obsessed with fame and freedom.
The exhibition reveals an unexpected intimacy between the two artists: the artist as myth and the studio as stage.
New York, USA (addendum)
If you still have miles to spend or need an excuse for one last long-haul trip before resolutions set in, end the year in New York, where you should definitely head to the Guggenheim Museum for Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers. One of the most influential African-American artists of his generation, Johnson is known for transforming personal memory and Black cultural history into large-scale installations of mosaic, steel, wax, and living plants.
Across the river, the Brooklyn Museum celebrates Seydou Keïta, the Malian photographer whose 1950s portraits transformed pattern into portraiture and captured a country in transition. With his box camera, Keïta managed to feed a family of more than a hundred people before the government eventually nationalised his studio.
With that, here’s to a bright, art-filled holiday season, and to all the beauty still left to see before the year ends.
