FROM CALDER’S RISE TO BASQUIAT’S REIGN: ART IN 2025

2025 opened with a cultural infrastructure in motion. Institutions returned to public life — from the long-awaited reopenings of The Frick Collection and the Studio Museum in Harlem to the Fondation Cartier’s new Paris home and Trondheim’s transformation of an Art Deco post office into the PoMo museum — advancing the broader momentum reshaping the art world. The market expanded outward as well, with Art Basel and Frieze announcing Middle Eastern outposts and Sotheby’s debuting its first auctions inside the newly refurbished Breuer Building. Against this backdrop of renewed energy, art stretched into ever-wider spheres: Alexander Calder’s mobiles rose over tarmacs, Surrealism spilled across continents, Jean-Michel Basquiat reclaimed New York pavement, Daniel Buren reshaped the architecture around us, and fashion wore its art influences openly. Even Jean Tinguely’s scrap-built machines roared back to life, reminding audiences that chaos and play still have a place in the cultural imagination. It was a year when art didn’t simply appear; it pushed boundaries and asserted itself everywhere.

CALDER SOARED ABOVE THE FRAY

Calder’s presence hit rare air this year, with exhibitions, institutions, and collaborations reaffirming the continued vitality of his vision. In February, Nahmad Contemporary’s Calder in Flight touched down at Tarmak22 in Gstaad, setting the artist’s iconic mobiles in view of planes taking off from the nearby runway. Installed under the creative direction of Edward Enninful, the exhibition traced Calder’s evolution across five decades, underscoring how he translated the principles of aerodynamics into sculptural form.

The year’s momentum continued in September with the opening of Calder Gardens in his native Philadelphia, a long-anticipated Herzog & de Meuron and Piet Oudolf–designed site devoted exclusively to the artist. More experiential than institutional, the $90 million project offers a rotating program shaped by the Calder Foundation. Meanwhile in New York, the Whitney marked the centennial of Calder’s Circus with High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100, a deep dive into the theatrical imagery that powered his early vocabulary. A companion Bode x Calder capsule extended that spirit into fashion, affirming his enduring relevance across art, design, and contemporary culture.

SURREALISM’S DREAMWORLD DIDN’T REST — EVEN AT 101

A year after André Breton’s manifesto turned 100, Surrealism continued to surge, carrying its centenary momentum straight into 2025. Across continents, museums pushed deeper into the dream logic, psychological charge, and appetite for upheaval that defined Surrealist aesthetics. At the Fondation Beyeler, The Key to Dreams unveiled the collection of Claude Hersaint for the first time, a landmark presentation of works by Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and others that revived the movement’s core obsessions: metamorphosis, mystery, and the deep forest of the mind. The Hepworth Wakefield pushed those ideas forward with Forbidden Territories, charting how Surrealist landscapes — from Ernst’s spectral woodlands to Nicholas Party’s lush dreamworlds — have continued to mutate across generations.

At the newly renamed Philadelphia Art Museum, Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 made its final stop, tracing the movement’s full arc, from its early hallucinations to the wartime “exiles” who carried Surrealism across Mexico, the Caribbean, and the United States. The exhibition, which is open through February, underscores how Surrealist methods seeded new forms of painting, photography, and political resistance.

Major retrospectives kept the centenary in motion. Miró drew record crowds in Tokyo; Man Ray’s When Objects Dream reframed the photographer’s camera-less experiments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and new exhibitions of Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, and Wifredo Lam reintroduced Surrealism’s most visionary outliers. In 2025, Surrealism didn’t just return — it infiltrated. It unsettled. It reminded the world that the unconscious still holds the sharpest tools for reinvention.

THE STREETS OF NEW YORK BELONGED TO BASQUIAT

New York reaffirmed Basquiat’s place in its cultural bloodstream. In October, the city officially christened a stretch of Great Jones Street “Jean-Michel Basquiat Way,” returning his name to the site where he lived and worked through much of the 1980s — now home to Angelina Jolie’s creative hub, Atelier Jolie. His energy surged through pop culture, too: in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, Basquiat paintings appeared as vivid visual leitmotifs inside the luxe world of Denzel Washington’s character David King, a New York music scion at the center of the film’s propulsive crime plot. And this November, after seven years, the Studio Museum in Harlem opened the doors to its new David Adjaye–designed home, unveiling its first Basquiat painting, Bayou (1984), a landmark acquisition that underscores just how few major artworks by the artist reside in U.S. museum collections.

BUREN’S STRIPES REALIGNED OUR PUBLIC SPACES

Sixty years after discovering the striped fabric that became his lifelong visual tool, Buren remains one of the most revelatory forces in contemporary art. Known worldwide for Les Deux Plateaux in the Palais-Royal and a lifetime of site-specific interventions — not to mention his 2012 project with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton — Buren’s 8.7-centimeter stripes continued to redefine public space in 2025.

In Italy, Palazzo Buontalenti mounted Fare, Disfare, Rifare, a sweeping survey of in situ works from 1968 to the present. Spread across 10 rooms, a courtyard, and satellite sites throughout Tuscany, the exhibition showed how Buren’s rigorously simple stripes still turn architecture into perceptual theater, reframing space through color, light, and repetition.

In Paris, during Art Basel, Buren unveiled La Façade aux acacias and Nouvelles images du ciel — two new permanent interventions for the Reiffers Initiatives art center — dressing an entire building in his iconic vertical bands and tinting its glass ceiling in alphabetical waves of color. Paired with the mentorship exhibition of works by Reiffers’ Buren and Miles Greenberg, the moment underscored a rare truth: at 86, Buren’s work is still changing how we see.

ART WAS WORN ON THE SLEEVE

Across runways and ateliers, art threaded itself through the cuts and constructions of fashion’s vanguard. Designers increasingly leaned on the visual vocabularies of the avant-garde — from Surrealism to Expressionism — to articulate a year defined by material tension, structural invention, and cultural flux. At Tom Ford, newly appointed creative director Haider Ackermann made its influences unmistakable: mood boards crowded with Francis Bacon’s contorted figures and rich color palettes, signaled a season shaped by dramatic tailoring, tactile finishes, and sculptural silhouettes.

Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry pushed the house’s Surrealist lineage to new extremes. His Fall 2025 couture collection culminated in a rhinestone-encrusted, mechanically beating heart perched atop a faux red décolletage — a spectacular homage to Dalí’s 1953 Royal Heart. Engineered to contract and pulse on the runway, the jewel became an instant phenomenon, reaffirming how seamlessly Dalí’s theatricality continues to infiltrate the imagination.

In Milan, Jil Sander’s Simone Bellotti translated Richard Prince’s Hoods into sculptural garments with car-panel curvature and rigid contours. Elsewhere, designers continued mining the canon: Louis Vuitton reunited with Takashi Murakami for the seventh edition of its Artycapucines collection; Piaget collaborated with the Andy Warhol Foundation on a limited-edition Andy Warhol “Collage” timepiece; and, of course, Loewe found new footing in dialogue with Josef and Anni Albers.

TINGUELY’S CENTENARY WENT OFF WITH A BANG

Tinguely’s centenary sparked a surge of kinetic energy across Europe, as museums revisited the artist’s collaborations, mechanical irreverence, and radical rethinking of sculpture. His unruly, machine-driven imagination felt uncannily of-the-moment, speaking to a world negotiating automation, spectacle, and the need for communal joy. The Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg set the tone, reuniting Tinguely with his early collaborator and first wife, Eva Aeppli, in an exhibition that offered a rare, comprehensive view of their intertwined artistic development. In Paris, the Grand Palais continued the conversation with Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten, celebrating the creative alliances that helped reshape postwar European art.

Museum Tinguely brought the celebration to Basel, marking what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday with an open-air gathering, complete with a tongue-in-cheek moustache dress code, and the debut of Scream Machines, a ghost-train–inspired installation reviving the anarchic spirit of Tinguely’s 1977 Crocrodrome de Zig et Puce (1977). Geneva’s Musée Rath echoed this momentum by recreating Tinguely’s 1983 exhibition, complete with restored sculptures and newly donated drawings. In an age defined by technology, pageantry, and mayhem, Tinguely’s unruly machines — built from scrap, powered by chance, and designed for collective delight — speak directly to the present. His spirit, cooperative, chaotic, and triumphantly alive, still moves. Even Switzerland’s postal service joined in, issuing a centenary stamp featuring his beloved Fasnachtsbrunnen.