Safely past the threshold of 2025, the beginning of a new year carries a familiar illusion: that of renewal, momentum, and possibility. In the art world, this moment of collective recalibration often sharpens our appetite for exhibitions that do more than decorate walls. We seek work that unsettles, consoles, reframes art that reflects the fractures of the present or offers temporary refuge from them.
Wolfgang Tillmans “Keep Movin’” in London continues his lifelong investigation of perception, truth, and materiality. Blending photography, cameraless works, video, and an evolving iteration of Truth Study Centre, Tillmans invites viewers to slow down and reassemble meaning from fragments. His images rather industrial, organic, abstract, feel less like statements than propositions, asking how we process information, beauty, and uncertainty in overstimulated times.
In Berlin, David Lynch’s long-awaited return to the gallery space reveals a quieter but no less unsettling side of his imagination. Surrealist paintings, sculptural lamps, watercolours, and factory photographs trace Lynch’s fascination with decay, industry, and psychological residue. Stripped of cinematic narrative, these works still hum with tension.
At Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, “Headstrong: Basquiat on Paper” refocuses attention on the raw immediacy of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s works on paper. His recurring obsession with the human head, sketched, fractured, crowned, feels urgently contemporary, oscillating between vulnerability and defiance. These drawings, many created on the floor and never intended for public view, pulse with an unfiltered intensity that resists institutional polish.
Beyond Europe, Kyotographie 2026 expands the conversation globally. Centered on the theme of “Edge,” the festival foregrounds instability, marginality, and transition through photography, talks, and workshops woven into Kyoto’s urban fabric. The result is a living exhibition, restless, porous, and reflective of a world perpetually on the brink.
Later in the year, Tate Modern’s major retrospective of Ana Mendieta reclaims a vital, unresolved voice. Her earthworks, performances, and films, rooted in the body, nature, violence, and displacement seem eerily aligned with contemporary debates around identity and belonging. At Tate Britain, “The 90s”, curated by Edward Enninful, looks backward to understand the present, celebrating a decade when DIY culture, fashion, and art collided amid economic uncertainty.
Together, these exhibitions do not promise easy optimism. Instead, they offer something more durable: attention, friction, and the possibility of meaning, precisely what art, at its best, has always provided.
