Six Fall Exhibitions Worth Planning Around
The season's most interesting shows are not the ones on every list. Here is where we would go.
Every autumn, the art world publishes the same preview: the blockbuster retrospective, the household name, the museum wing with the queue around the block. Those shows are fine, and you will hear about them without our help. This list is the other one, six exhibitions around the world chosen the way NALA chooses everything, for discovery over name recognition. Overlooked artists getting their due, new institutions opening their doors, and shows built on ideas rather than famous signatures. If your travel and your looking overlap anywhere this season, start here.
Kaihō, Mudam Luxembourg
25 Sept - 14 Feb
A landmark survey of Japanese women artists of the postwar era, many of whom worked for decades outside the recognition their male contemporaries received. It is the kind of corrective exhibition that changes what the canon looks like in ten years, and the chance to see this work gathered in one place in Europe is truly rare.
W̶o̶m̶a̶n̶ Painter, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
8 Oct - 7 Feb
The female Old Masters the canon largely ignored, painted between 1550 and 1650: Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster, Artemisia Gentileschi, and their contemporaries. These artists were celebrated in their own lifetimes and then written out of the story for three centuries. Oslo is putting them back in, and the strike-through in the title says everything about how.
Broken, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
25 Sept - 24 Jan
An exhibition built entirely from artworks that have been damaged, shattered, and repaired across the centuries. It sounds like a curiosity and lands as something deeper, a show about fragility, restoration, and why we keep mending the things we love. The strangest premise of the season, and possibly the most moving.
Latin American Histories, MASP, São Paulo
4 Sept - 31 Jan
The latest chapter in MASP's celebrated Histórias series turns to Latin America itself, telling the region's story through its own artists rather than through the lens of the North Atlantic art world. MASP has spent a decade proving that the most vital rewriting of art history is happening in São Paulo, and this is the series at full strength.
Mariko Mori, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
31 Oct - 28 Mar
Her first exhibition in Japan since 2002, a full survey including works never shown before. Mori's fusion of technology, spirituality, and pop has influenced a generation, and seeing the arc of it in Tokyo, in the museum that shares her name by coincidence, is a once-in-two-decades event that has somehow stayed off most Western preview lists.
Kanal-Centre Pompidou, Brussels
Opens 28 Nov
Not a show but a whole new place to see art: the long-awaited transformation of a former Citroën garage into Brussels' major contemporary art museum finally opens this fall. New institutions matter because they get to choose what the walls say from scratch, and opening seasons are when museums are at their bravest.
And one closer to our home
If London is on your map, 10,000 HOURS runs at Laundry Studios through November, and its successor, GIVE PRESENCE, opens December 3rd, art from around the world, live art, workshops, and the series' first auction. Free to attend, and the walls are full of artists you can collect directly on NALA.
The thread through all of it: the best looking you will do this season will not be in front of the paintings everyone already agreed on. It will be the room you walked into on a hunch. Wherever you are, go on the hunch.