9 European Exhibitions Worth Travelling For In 2025

From big shows in London and Amsterdam to a Cézanne tribute in the south of France, these art experiences will be worth the journey.

The Angel of History

Bode Museum, Berlin

Swiss artist Paul Klee painted many angels throughout his life. Angels ascending, angels descending, angels serving breakfast; weeping, forgetful, vigilant, doubting, full of hope. His best known is the Angelus Novus (1920), now commonly called the Angel of History, a name assigned to it by philosopher Walter Benjamin, who owned the print and considered it his most prized possession. Walter wrote of the angel — a curly-haired seraph in sepia tones, arms raised in excitement or alarm — as facing the past while being driven toward the future by a storm too strong for his wings to beat against: the storm of progress.

Paul and Walter both died in 1940: Paul, stateless and who had scleroderma, a rare autoimmune disease, drew angels in his dying days; Walter died by suicide after fearing capture by the Nazis at France’s border with Spain. At the Bode Museum, The Angel of History (May 8 to July 13), places the Angelus Novus alongside other angels struck by damage and disaster, including a reproduction of Caravaggio’s 1602 St. Matthew and the Angel, destroyed in Berlin in 1945, and screenings of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), whose pensive spirits look down on the divided city.

Suzanne Valadon

Pompidou Centre, Paris

It was Edgar who encouraged Suzanne to pick up a brush and move to the other side of the canvas, and Toulouse-Lautrec who nicknamed her Suzanne (she was born Marie-Clémentine) after the bathing biblical maiden famously ogled by lecherous elders. Suzanne made the name her own and became the author, rather than the subject, of hundreds of striking portraits. The most notable are her women: self-possessed and in casual repose, unidealised and unbothered by being beheld. The Pompidou Centre is mounting a vast retrospective (January 15 to May 26), including new archival material that paints a picture of Suzanne’s plucky and pioneering personal life.

Anselm Kiefer

Stedelijk and Van Gogh Museums, Amsterdam

Sag mir wo die Blumen sind implores the poetic title of a sprawling Anselm Kiefer exhibition that will span two of Amsterdam’s most prestigious institutions: the Stedelijk Museum and the Van Gogh Museum (March 7 to June 9). The show takes its title from the German version of Pete Seeger’s anti-war folk ballad, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” — made popular by Marlene Dietrich at a Unicef gala in 1962 — and presents work old and new by Anselm, whose oeuvre reckons with memory, ruins, history, war, mythology and landscape.

A new, 24m site-specific installation of the same name will occupy the grand staircase of the Stedelijk, while its galleries present new and never-before-displayed Anselm works from the museum’s impressive collection alongside other highlights from the artist’s 60-year career. A two-minute walk away, the Van Gogh Museum will focus on Anselm’s relationship with Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh’s life and art, juxtaposing works by the two, including their many blooming offerings: sunflowers and more sunflowers, representing life and death, prospering and decay, with art as the eternal bridge between the two.

James Turrell

ARoS; Aarhus, Denmark

The vast structure, 15m high by 40m wide, has been under construction for more than 10 years. When finished, it will be the most ambitious of James’ Skyspaces: total environments that are simple in structure (containing only seating, lighting and a window to the sky above) but sublime in their perception-altering power. At ARoS, visitors will enter an enormous dome via a series of snaking corridors glowing with golden light. Ushered into the vaulted space, with its overhead oculus like a giant eye, you can stand, sit or lie on the ground and watch a beam of natural light pass around the space as the walls shift in hue, bathed in artificial light — pink, blue, green and white, each colour introducing a new relationship to the sky outside. You’ll have to see it to believe it.

Leigh Bowery

Tate Modern, London

Note the exclamation mark in the title: “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern (February 27 to August 31) is the first large-scale exhibition to present the multi-disciplinary output that was the work and too-short-life of the boy from suburban Sunshine, Australia, who out-weirded the colourful 1980s London club scene. Leigh is best known for his fabulously outré costumes: oversized bulging eyes and painted smiles, wigs of inflated spikes, bedazzled masks, baroque bustiers, sky-high platforms, PVC, bondage gear, tulle, feathers … You name it, he wore it.

This avant-garde garb, which he wore to London’s chicest deviant venues (including the famously “polysexual” club Taboo, where he mingled with Boy George, John Galliano and George Michael), has influenced countless haute-couture runway shows since Bowery died from an Aids-related illness in 1994, at age 33. But Leigh was a brilliant polymath, whose work included performance, live art, dance, music, modelling, television and club promotion. His larger-than-life persona knew no confines; art and life were one and the same. The Tate Modern show will consider all these facets together and promises a beautiful, wild ride through Leigh’s eclectic, boundary-breaking oeuvre.

When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting

Bozar, Brussels

Hot on the heels of her announcement as curator of the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, Koyo Kouoh is bringing her exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting to Bozar, Brussels (February 7 to August 10). The Cameroonian-born curator and her team at Zeitz MoCaa, the Cape Town museum she has run since 2019, have put together a rich and varied exhibition that includes works by over 120 artists who address how people from Africa and its diaspora have been represented during the past century.

The show’s name riffs on Ava Duvernay’s 2019 Netflix series about the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers wrongfully accused of rape and assault in 1989. But where Duvernay’s title had “they” — When They See Us — Koyo substitutes “We,” inviting the viewer to see this way, too. The show is organised around themes including sensuality, spirituality, joy, revelry and emancipation. Different names will be familiar to different viewers (I jump at any chance to see work by Sudanese modernist innovator Ibrahim El-Salahi), but no doubt it’s the panoply, the many arrayed together, that will move most.

Venice Architecture Biennale

Venice

To the beautiful but sinking city, Carlo Ratti, the curator of Venice’s 19th International Architecture Biennale, brings Intelligens (May 10 to November 23), an exhibition that considers how architecture can harness natural, artificial and collective intelligence to combat climate change. “To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us,” Ratti said when he was announced in the role, adding that the building industry was one of the biggest contributors to atmospheric emissions and urgently needed to change.

Is it too late? Can we adapt? Alongside displays that will highlight some possible solutions — ranging from reviving traditional building practices to AI that saves instead of spends energy — the 2025 Architecture Biennale aims to live up to its own “circular economy manifesto,” reducing waste to focus on sustainability. Carlo’s show will be complemented by 29 national pavilions, only a few of which have been announced — but it’s safe to anticipate (or even to hope) that they will follow his lead and look to the future, whatever it may bring.

Cézanne

Musée Granet; Aix-en-Provence, France

You’ve seen it, or some aspect, in dozens of paintings by Paul Cézanne, whether you know it or not: the Jas de Bouffan, a large country house and farm just outside Aix-en-Provence, which the artist’s father bought in 1859. The stately 18th-century house, with its cream-coloured facade, blue shutters and sloping terra-cotta tiled roof, is where Paul worked for 40 years and it appears in many of his paintings — near, far, obscured by thickets of trees. Sometimes it’s a view from the house, of chestnut tree alleys, shady paths and golden fields. Other times, the house hosts friends for portraits, or its grounds give rise to imagined views, like bucolic gatherings of nude bathers.

This summer at the Musée Granet, the exhibition Cézanne au Jas de Bouffan (June 28 to October 12) will gather 100 paintings, drawings and watercolours to show the special relationship the artist had with his family home and its environs in the south of France. As part of a citywide tribute to Paul taking place across Aix-en-Provence, you can also visit the newly renovated house itself and the painter’s final studio, Les Lauves, where he worked from 1901 until his death in 1906, and see what Paul saw.

Fra Angelico

Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco, Florence

After his death in 1455, they called the unassuming artist known as Fra Angelico “the Angelic Painter.” Grigorio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists describes this painter of impossibly delicate and luminous religious scenes as “a rare and perfect talent” who was “so humble and modest in all that he did and said, and whose pictures were painted with such facility and piety.”

As is so often the case with early 15th-century artists in Italy, only bits and pieces of Fra Angelico’s biography are known: Born Guido di Petro circa 1395, he joined the Dominican Order at a young age, possibly trained with an illuminator, and moved monasteries many times. But his output was prolific and he quickly acquired a reputation for his astonishing mastery of perspective, and for his ethereal figures limned with gold. Angelico (September 26 to January 25, 2026), a joint affair between the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco (which includes a still-operating Dominican monastery that houses Fra Angelico’s most notable frescoes), brings together pieces by the pious painter that have been dispersed for more than 200 years.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Emily LaBarge

©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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