THE SUMMER ART AGENDA

Pierre Huyghe
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen | Through 13 September 2026

Few artists have done more to reshape how we experience art than Pierre Huyghe. For his first solo exhibition in a Swiss museum, the artist transforms Fondation Beyeler into an environment shaped by sound, moving images, machine learning, and living organisms. At its center is Apnea (2026), an artificial breathing organ whose rhythms pulse throughout the galleries. Featuring new and selected earlier works, the exhibition unfolds as a constantly evolving ecosystem where boundaries between the biological and the technological, the human and the non-human, remain in flux.

Jean Dubuffet. La houle du virtuel 
Palais des Arts et du Festival, Dinard | Through 20 September 2026

This summer, Dinard turns its attention to one of the defining chapters of Jean Dubuffet’s career. Dedicated to L’Hourloupe, the vast cycle that occupied the artist’s imagination from the early 1960s through the 1970s, the exhibition brings together more than 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and models. What began as a series of ballpoint-pen drawings evolved into the expansive world of L’Hourloupe — a distinctive visual language of interlocking forms, hatched lines, and bold red, blue, black, and white patterns that moved from the picture plane into three-dimensional space.

Andy Warhol Family Album
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York | Through 19 October 2026

There is something undeniably summery about a box of Polaroids: friends gathered, weekends away, and memories preserved almost as quickly as they occur. Drawn from one of Andy Warhol’s personal “family albums,” the Whitney brings together snapshots taken in 1972 and 1973, offering an intimate glimpse into the artist’s circle of friends, collaborators, and celebrities. The photographs range from posed portraits to candid moments at his Montauk home, travels abroad, and even time spent with his beloved dachshund Archie, capturing a side of Warhol that feels remarkably personal.

Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice | Through 19 October 2026

For only 18 months, Peggy Guggenheim’s London gallery stood at the center of Britain’s avant-garde. Active between 1938 and 1939, Guggenheim Jeune became a vital platform for abstraction and Surrealism, championing artists such as Vasily Kandinsky, Jean Cocteau, and Henry Moore while mounting a series of ambitious exhibitions. Bringing together key works, archival material, and ephemera from this remarkable period, the exhibition revisits the gallery’s program while tracing the relationships and ideas that shaped Guggenheim’s collecting vision. The exhibition offers a vivid portrait of London’s avant-garde on the eve of war — and of a collector whose influence is still felt today.

Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York | Through 10 January 2027

More than 60 years after Guggenheim curator and critic Lawrence Alloway helped introduce Pop art to New York audiences, the museum revisits the movement through the lens of its permanent collection. Surveying works from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition pairs iconic figures, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Yayoi Kusama, with contemporary artists, such as Maurizio Cattelan and Alex Da Corte. The result is a fresh look at how Pop’s fascination with mass media, consumer culture, and image-making continues to shape contemporary art.

Hepworth in Colour
The Courtauld Gallery, London | 12 June–6 September 2026

Days before the outbreak of the Second World War, Barbara Hepworth left London for Cornwall, bringing with her a single sculpture that explored the possibilities of color. Over the following decades, her chromatic experiments would evolve into one of the most distinctive yet overlooked aspects of her practice. Moving between nearly 20 sculptures and 30 drawings, this exhibition traces Hepworth’s engagement with color from the wartime years through the 1960s. At its center is a remarkable group of painted carvings from the 1940s, where vivid blues, reds, and yellows animate her abstract forms and reflect the influence of Cornwall’s landscape, sea, and light.

Henri Matisse — Yves Saint Laurent
Musée Matisse Nice | 17 June–28 September 2026

Color, pattern, and ornament unite the creative visions of Henri Matisse and Yves Saint Laurent at the Musée Matisse Nice this summer. Bringing together more than 160 works — including paintings, drawings, textiles, and garments — the exhibition explores the creative affinities between the French painter and couturier. Though separated by a generation, both sought to extend art beyond traditional boundaries and into everyday life. From Matisse's radical reimagining of pictorial space to Saint Laurent's groundbreaking designs, the exhibition reveals a shared desire to dissolve the boundaries between fine and applied arts.

Ellsworth Kelly — At the Edge of Water
Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence | 27 June–15 November 2026

Throughout his life, Ellsworth Kelly continually returned to the water’s edge. At the Fondation Maeght, drawings, collages, paintings, and sculptures explore how rivers, coastlines, and the sea informed the work of an artist best known for his vivid abstractions. Tracing Kelly’s encounters with aquatic environments from the Côte d’Azur to New York and the Caribbean, At the Edge of Water offers a new perspective on his practice. Rather than depicting landscape, Kelly translated the shifting perceptions of water into distilled forms, highlighting the enduring interplay between observation and abstraction that shaped his work.

Henri Matisse dans l'aventure du tissu
Le Doyenné - Espace d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Brioude | 4 July–18 October 2026

Born into a family of weavers in northern France, Matisse maintained a lifelong fascination with textiles. Fabrics appear throughout his work — as backdrops, garments, and decorative motifs — shaping his approach to color and composition. From regional French fabrics to Congolese Kuba cloth and Oceanic tapa, the exhibition threads together the diverse textile traditions that informed Matisse's visual language, culminating in the vestments he designed for the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence. At a moment when Matisse is the subject of renewed attention across institutions, Henri Matisse dans l'aventure du tissu reframes the artist's career through one of its most enduring influences.

Invitation to Daniel Buren "Plantations," in situ works, 2026
Musée des impressionnismes, Giverny | 17 July–1 November 2026

Few places are more closely associated with the changing effects of light and color than Giverny. To mark the centenary of Claude Monet's death, the Musée des impressionnismes has granted carte blanche to Daniel Buren, whose new installation extends from the gardens into the museum itself. Presented alongside works from the museum's collection, the project creates a dialogue between Buren's site-specific practice and the Impressionists' enduring fascination with light, color, and perception.