Mr. Flower Fantastic reimagines New York City as an exhibition with landscapes of immersive orchid and floral installations. The show forms part of the 23rd edition of The Orchid Show, which returns to the New York Botanical Garden from February 7th through April 26th, 2026. Hosted inside the historic Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, this year’s exhibition reimagines New York City as an orchid horizon, where streets, skylines, and storefronts bloom in petals instead of concrete.

At the center of the transformation is designer Mr. Flower Fantastic, a native New Yorker known for merging floristry with popular art and street culture. His past collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Adidas, and Netflix reveal a practice that moves easily between luxury, fashion, and media. Now, he turns his focus to orchids, reshaping one of the world’s most exotic flowers into an urban design statement. Inside the exhibition in New York, he brings this botanical vision to life, making the garden vividly come to life through layers of orchids and floral bouquets.

all images courtesy of New York Botanical Garden

Mr. flower fantastic curates immersive floral landscapes

Inside the exhibition, visitors encounter a floral tribute to the spirit and structure of the streets around New York through installations of cascading orchids. Architectural references emerge with floral installations sprawling around them: a car wash with the yellow cab dressed in flowers, a pizza restaurant with the logo decorated in bouquets, and washing machines of orchids that viewers can look through like an observatory. The exhibition stages a dialogue between nature and metropolis, and the result is monumental and intimate, a dreamlike version of New York, just rendered in petals and orchids. The exhibition also explores scale, as large-format floral gestures wrap around the downsized buildings inside the exhibition. This shift between macro and micro perspectives reflects the dual nature of New York itself: vast and towering, yet filled with small, personal moments. 

By staging orchids within this urban narrative, designer Mr. Flower Fantastic reframes floristry as immersive environment design. Beginning March 21, select evenings introduce Orchid Nights, which are botanical block parties. Music, dancing, cash bars, and food activate the space after hours, turning the conservatory into a living cultural venue. Light, sound, and movement add new dimensions to the installation, allowing the experience to become less a traditional flower show and more a social landscape in bloom. The exhibition runs inside the New York Botanical Garden until April 26th, 2026, and here, the conservatory becomes a floral metropolis in the hands of Mr. Flower Fantastic, presenting a tangible reminder that even in the coldest months, the city can still bloom.

Mr. Flower Fantastic reimagines New York City as an exhibition with orchid and floral installations

view of the washing machines containing flowers and orchids

a pizza restaurant decorated with flowers

city bus stop with flowers blooming around it

subway station of Orchid Avenue

view of the Newsstand installation

detailed view of the orchids

the New York Botanical Garden hosts the show

the show runs until April 26th, 2026

project info:

name: The Orchid Show: Mr. Flower Fantastic’s Concrete Jungle

designer: Mr. Flower Fantastic | @mrflowerfantastic

garden: New York Botanical Garden | @nybg

location: 2900 Southern Blvd Bronx, New York

dates: February 7th to April 26th, 2026

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Until March 15th, 2026, Spazio UniFor at Viale Pasubio 15 in Milan hosts La città degli oggetti: Aldo Rossi e Francesco Somaini (The City of Objects: Aldo Rossi and Francesco Somaini) as part of the In Vetrina program promoted by MuseoCity. Curated by Studio Klass with Fondazione Francesco Somaini Scultore, the installation brings into dialogue iconic furnishings designed by Aldo Rossi for UniFor and a selection of 1970s sculptures by Francesco Somaini. The exhibition takes place in the central hall of Spazio UniFor, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and reflects the city as object, memory, and constructed idea.

all images by Alessandro Saletta – DSL Studio

four rooms, one urban grid

Studio Klass structures the exhibition as a sequence of four rooms aligned with the structural grid of the building, extending the logic of the architecture into the curatorial layout. The spaces function as compact, museological architectures, pairing one sculptural work with one architectural object and introducing a distinct chromatic register, a recurring theme in Rossi’s work.

Visitors move through calibrated spaces where light, scale, and material contrasts shape the encounter. Cartesio, Consiglio, Parigi, and Museo are presented as architectural objects. Designed by Rossi for UniFor, they condense personal and archetypal memories while evoking imaginary cityscapes. Bookcases assume the presence of facades, cabinets read as civic volumes with modular rhythms. Rossi’s notion of the analogue city, a conceptual city assembled through memory, typology, and repetition, becomes tangible in these pieces. 

Spazio UniFor at Viale Pasubio 15 in Milan hosts La città degli oggetti: Aldo Rossi e Francesco Somaini

sculpture against the metropolis

In counterpoint, Somaini’s archi-sculptures introduce a material and formal tension. Conceived in the 1970s through his engagement with the built environment, these works treat the city as a field of forces rather than a fixed image. For the sculptor, New York becomes a paradigmatic site in which to test the relationship between art and architecture at urban scale. Placed alongside Rossi’s objects-architectures, the sculptures expand the dialogue between memory, matter and the city. 

From this encounter emerges a landscape in which the real city overlaps with the imagined one. The installation constructs what can be understood as an analogue city, shaped by collective memory and set in contrast with a critical reinterpretation of the modern metropolis.

Within the framework of MuseoCity’s In Vetrina initiative, Spazio UniFor becomes a vessel for La città degli oggetti: Aldo Rossi e Francesco Somaini, an exhibition that proposes a precise, close-range reading of two parallel investigations into how the city can be reimagined through art and design.

part of the In Vetrina program promoted by MuseoCity

the installation brings together iconic furnishings by Aldo Rossi for UniFor and 1970s sculptures by Francesco Somaini

the exhibition takes place in the central hall of Spazio UniFor

Studio Klass structures the exhibition as a sequence of four rooms

aligned with the structural grid of the building

the spaces function as compact, museological architectures

introducing a distinct chromatic register, a recurring theme in Rossi’s work

pairing one sculptural work with one architectural object

visitors move through calibrated spaces where light, scale, and material contrasts shape the encounter

project info:

name: La città degli oggetti: Aldo Rossi e Francesco Somaini (The City of Objects: Aldo Rossi and Francesco Somaini)

location: Spazio UniFor, viale Pasubio 15, Milano

dates: February 6th – March 15th 2026

host: UniFor | @unifor_official

collaborator: Fondazione Francesco Somaini Scultore | @fondazionesomaini

exhibition design: Studio Klass | @studioklass

The post aldo rossi’s furnishings for unifor meet francesco somaini’s 1970s sculptures in milan appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

At the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the eighth edition of Roppongi Crossing assembles 21 artists and artist groups to map Japan’s contemporary art scene through the single, elastic concept of time. First launched in 2004 as a recurring snapshot of the present moment, the triennial returns with the subtitle What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., bringing together more than 100 works across painting, sculpture, video, craft, sound, zines, and community-based practices. For this edition, the museum’s curators are joined by two internationally active Asian guest curators, widening the frame to include artists working in Japan regardless of nationality and those based abroad with Japanese roots.

Materially and conceptually, time unfolds in radically different registers. A.A.Murakami presents an immersive installation governed by an AI-written operating system. Kuwata Takuro’s large-scale ceramics push traditional techniques toward rupture. Kelly Akashi’s bronze and glass sculptures draw on familial memory and histories of internment. Through distinct practices, the exhibition frames Japan as a shifting field shaped by memory, technology, craft, and migration.

Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026 | all images by Takehisa Naoki courtesy of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

beyond the clock

Roppongi Crossing at the Mori Art Museum proposes Japan as a shifting collection of memories, migrations, and material practices. National identity becomes porous and time becomes plural. In assembling works that stretch from geological epochs to AI simulations, from embroidery to immersive fog systems, the exhibition positions contemporary art as a site where duration is felt rather than measured. The question is not simply what time is, but how it is lived, individually, collectively, and across borders.

In a culture structured by speed, efficiency, and technological acceleration, the exhibition asks whether contemporary life allows space for slower, embodied experiences. Art, the curators suggest, offers a counterpoint where time expands and contracts according to perception.

The subtitle, What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., drawn from a poem by Indonesian writer Sapardi Djoko Damono, reflects on the fragility and continuity embedded in lived moments. In this framing, eternity is not abstract duration but the persistence of memory, relationships, and meaning. 

Hiro Naotaka Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026 Courtesy: MISAKO & ROSEN, Tokyo

immersive systems and material memory

Several artists present newly commissioned works. A.A.Murakami unveils The Moon Under the Water, a large-scale installation composed of soap bubbles governed by an AI-written operating system. Known for immersive environments that blur architecture, design, and art, the duo once again foregrounds the volatility of matter and the instability of form.

Hiro Naotaka contributes new paintings and a sculpture that impose physical constraints on canvas and surface, emphasizing the body as both subject and structure of experience. Kuwata Takuro’s monumental ceramic works reference historical techniques of Japanese pottery while pushing material excess to the edge of rupture. Oki Junko’s embroidery, resembling abstract painting from a distance, carries intimate histories within its threads. Hosoi Miyu debuts a new sound installation built from her own voice and environmental recordings, layering sonic traces of specific places and gatherings. Across these practices, craft and technology intersect. The exhibition resists medium hierarchies, positioning zines, handicrafts, and workshops alongside sculpture and video.

A.A.Murakami The Moon Underwater 2025 Steel, aluminium, custom robotics, custom filtration system, bubbles, water, and AI-guided robotic system 407 x 807 x 485 cm Production Support: Anthropic Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

participation as archive

Visitors can engage with Kihara Tomo’s AI-based game simulating divergent life paths, highlighting the irreversibility of choice. Miyata Asuka activates her Traveling Knitting’n Stitching Club, forming temporary communities that function as living archives of shared memory and skill. Amefurashi sustains local traditions such as straw sandal making through workshops, while Kitazawa Jun collaborates with Indonesian kite artisans to revisit the history of the Hayabusa fighter planes, tracing wartime entanglements between Japan and Indonesia.

ZUGAKOUSAKU & KURIEITO reconstruct entrances and exits of Roppongi Station in cardboard and watercolor, deliberately embracing ephemerality; on the final day, fragments of the work will be dismantled and taken home by visitors.

Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

scales, rhythms and entanglements

The exhibition unfolds across four interpretive perspectives. The first, titled Scales of Time examines how personal memory becomes universal. Kelly Akashi’s bronze and glass sculptures draw from family histories of internment, while Shoji Asami and Hiro Naotaka restrict bodily gesture to foreground the limits of perception. Kuwata Takuro situates contemporary ceramics within historical lineage, compressing centuries of technique into singular objects.

Moving forward, Sensing Time shifts attention to duration as sensation. A.A.Murakami’s atmospheric installation dilates perception through fog and light. Gardar Eide Einarsson translates sound into painted closed captions, suspending fleeting audio into fixed language. Hosoi Miyu’s layered soundscapes and Wada Reijiro’s sculptural use of brandy propose time as evaporation, absorption, and residue.

The third perspective, Time Together, emphasizes collaboration and transmission. Amefurashi’s long-term preservation of local printing factories and broom-making traditions intersects with Multiple Spirits’ feminist zine publishing. Kim Insook foregrounds sustained engagement with specific communities as a condition for cross-cultural understanding. Rhythms of Life widens the scale further. Shooshie Sulaiman’s installation of roof tiles from abandoned houses in Onomichi binds personal movement between Malaysia and Japan to architectural remains. Carrie Yamaoka maps detention sites alphabetically, transforming landscape into an index of displacement. Maya Watanabe’s video of mammoth remains emerging from thawing permafrost gestures toward temporalities beyond human history.

Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

Wada Reijiro MITTAG 2025 Glass, brass, bronze, and brandy 238 x 212 x 79 cm Production support: SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tokyo Courtesy: SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tokyo Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

Gardar Eide Einarsson Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

Gardar Eide Einarsson Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

Kitazawa Jun Fragile Gift Factory 2025 Project Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

Kitazawa Jun Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

Kihara Tomo What Plays You? — Game of Possible Lives 2025 Game cabinet, game software, and local large language model Dimensions variable Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

Kihara Tomo What Plays You? — Game of Possible Lives (detail) 2025 Game cabinet, game software, and local large language model Dimensions variable Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

ZUGAKOUSAKU & KURIEITO Subway Exit 1a (detail) 2025 Water-based paint on cardboard Dimensions variable Production Support: Shinkaichi Community Center for Arts and Interaction, Kobe Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

ZUGAKOUSAKU & KURIEITO Subway Exit 1a 2025 Water-based paint on cardboard Dimensions variable Production Support: Shinkaichi Community Center for Arts and Interaction, Kobe Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

Kelly Akashi Astral Echo 2025 Flame-worked borosilicate glass, wood, uv-reactive flame-worked glass, and weathering steel 66 x 43.2 x 43.2 cm Production Support: Lisson Gallery Courtesy: Lisson Gallery Installation view: Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal., Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026

project info:

name: Roppongi Crossing 2026: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal.

artists: A.A.Murakami, Kelly Akashi, Amefurashi, Araki Yu, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Higaleo, Hiro Naotaka, Hosoi Miyu, Kihara Tomo, Kim Insook, Kitazawa Jun, Kuwata Takuro, Miyata Asuka, Multiple Spirits, Oki Junko, Shoji Asami, Shooshie Sulaiman, Wada Reijiro, Maya Watanabe, Carrie Yamaoka, ZUGAKOUSAKU & KURIEITO

venue: Mori Art Museum | @moriartmuseum, Tokyo

dates: December 3rd, 2025 – March 29th, 2026

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The Rhinoceros in the Room, an inflatable installation by Itamar Gov, occupies the central volume of Kunstmuseum Magdeburg in Magdeburg, Germany with a single, overwhelming gesture. Installed inside the former monastery church that houses the museum, the project places a larger than life rhinoceros directly in the nave, its bulk stretching from aisle to aisle and rising toward the Romanesque vaults, so that the animal becomes the primary spatial condition of the building rather than an object within it.

Approaching the exhibition, visitors pass through stone arcades and patterned floors before meeting the pale mass of the creature head on. The architecture remains visible in fragments around its edges. Columns appear cropped. Sightlines shorten. Sound travels differently. The installation shifts the way the church is read, turning a familiar heritage interior into a tight, compressed environment shaped by proximity to an immense body.

the inflatable installation contrasts with the Romanesque monastery architecture | images © Hans-Wulf Kunze

the inflatable rhinoceros contrasts with its historic context

Artist Itamar Gov’s rhinoceros at Kunstmuseum Magdeburg has a matte, almost chalky surface that absorbs light and softens detail. From a distance it reads as a simplified volume, closer to a model or prototype than a naturalistic sculpture. Up close, folds, legs, and horn emerge with quiet precision. The animal stands still, heavy and grounded, yet its size creates a subtle tension, as if any movement would set the entire hall in motion.

Music circulates through the gallery as a multi channel composition, filling the church from every direction. Eight cellos and voices drift between recognizable melodies and lullaby tones, then veer into darker passages. The sound seems to slide along the stone walls and settle into the floor, guiding the pace of walking and encouraging longer pauses. Visitors listen as much as they look. The installation becomes acoustic as well as sculptural.

the installation alters how visitors perceive the Romanesque church architecture

History and symbolism at Kunstmuseum Magdeburg

The rhinoceros carries a dense cultural history in Europe, often linked to power and conquest since Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving. Gov draws on this lineage while introducing ambivalence. The animal suggests armor and strength, yet also vulnerability. It feels ancient, almost prehistoric, and at the same time oddly contemporary, like a prop or inflatable figure placed inside a sacred structure.

Meanwhile, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg’s striped stonework and vaulted ceiling carries centuries of ritual and civic use. Gov treats the building as an active partner. The sculpture blocks axial views and redirects circulation, making visitors trace the perimeter and discover the architecture from oblique angles. Small shifts in position reveal new overlaps between the animal’s rounded back and the sharp geometry of the arches.

project info:

name: The Rhinoceros in the Room

artist: Itamar Gov | @itamargov

museum: Kunstmuseum Magdeburg | @kunstmuseum_magdeburg

dates: January 27th to July 5th, 2026

photography: © Hans-Wulf Kunze

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For ABERTO5, the itinerant exhibition series is set to open next month at Casa Bola, Eduardo Longo’s spherical residence in São Paulo, opening the architect’s private home to the public as the setting for its fifth edition. 

From March 7th to May 31st, 2026, ABERTO returns to Brazil after its Paris chapter at Le Corbusier’s Maison La Roche (read more here) and shifts its attention to one of the city’s most unique dwellings. The choice of venue continues the platform’s habit of taking over architecturally significant houses — often times never-before-seen — and using them as an immersive backdrop for contemporary art and design.

images courtesy ABERTO

a são paulo home designed as a floating ball

Casa Bola, the sculptural home of the upcoming ABERTO5, seems to float above the roof of Eduardo Longo’s home in São Paulo. The spherical structure reads from the street as a pale volume suspended in air. The eight meter diameter ‘ball’ hovers over a concrete base, its curved shell catching light in soft gradients across plaster and ferrocement. A narrow stair leads upward along the edge, compressing the approach before the interior opens into a single continuous surface.

The architect built the structure by hand between 1974 and 1979 using ferrocement over a mesh of recycled steel tubes. Walls, furniture, lighting, and sanitary fixtures share the same material language. Corners disappear and floors tilt gently into partitions.

ABERTO5 will open inside Eduardo Longo’s Casa Bola in São Paulo

sixty contemporary works to transform the home

For ABERTO5, the organizers treat the geometry of Casa Bola as a working condition. More than sixty new and recent pieces by Brazilian and international artists will be installed across roughly 1,000 square meters that include three levels, the terrace, and the spherical volume itself. Works are conceived in response to the house, placed along ramps, tucked into niches, or suspended against the dome so that visitors move with the architecture.

Paintings, sculptures, and installations track the shifts in scale inside the sphere. A curtain of aluminum and coated steel by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané greets visitors at the entry. Elsewhere, sculptural interventions by Sarah Lucas and Erika Verzutti punctuate the tight passages.

Multimedia canvases by Laís Amaral and Paloma Bosquê register the curvature of the walls, while suspended works by Tomás Saraceno and Leonor Antunes trace new lines through the air, mapping the interior as a three dimensional field.

the exhibition occupies the spherical ferrocement house built by hand between 1974 and 1979

aberto5 to take over the architect’s current home

Casa Bola carries particular weight because Longo still lives there. The exhibition occupies a home that remains active, with traces of daily routines embedded in the plan. Windows are round and carefully placed, framing fragments of the surrounding neighborhood and the high rises beyond. Light enters as small, bright circles that drift across the floor during the day.

This proximity between domestic life and curated work shapes the atmosphere. Visitors encounter archival drawings, sketches, and models that outline Longo’s broader research into spherical housing, alongside new commissions. The effect is direct. Architecture, memory, and contemporary production share the same surfaces, each adjusting to the constraints of the other.

visitors enter through tight stairs into a continuous interior shaped by curves and light

public artwork beyond the house

The 2026 edition also extends into the city through ABERTO Rua, a parallel street project along Faria Lima. Site specific works by Brazilian artists will occupy sidewalks and plazas, engaging nearby buildings by architects such as Ruy Ohtake and Isay Weinfeld. The gesture connects the intimacy of the house with the scale of the avenue, linking private experimentation with public space.

more than sixty artworks will respond directly to the buildings geometry and surfaces

Longo still lives in the house, giving the show the atmosphere of an inhabited home

project info:

exhibition title: ABERTO5

location: Casa Bola, São Paulo

program: ABERTO | @aberto.art

architect: Eduardo Longo | @longoeu

dates: March 7th — May 31st, 2026

photography: courtesy ABERTO

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Noguchi’s New York opens at The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City with a focused look at how one artist spent decades imagining the city as a terrain for sculpture, play, and — most importantly — public life. The exhibition, which shows both realized and unrealized projects, is a survey of Isamu Noguchi‘s lifelong relationship with New York, and the experience feels like a tour through an imagined version of what the city might have been.

‘Noguchi celebrated materials as they related to place,’ the curatorial team tells designboom ahead of the show’s opening. ‘Here in New York, he often experimented with metal sculptures because he saw the city as a landscape of metal mountains emerging from the urban environment.’

Noguchi’s New York is on view at the Noguchi Museum from February 4th until July 5th, 2026.

Noguchi’s New York, install view, image © designboom

idealist design for the people of nyc

The exhibition emphasizes the ways in which New York cultivated Isamu Noguchi’s ‘restless sense of idealism.’ He first moved to New York in 1922 at age seventeen, and the city remained his home on-and-off until his death in 1988. The first rooms of the gallery gather works from these early years in the 1930s, when he arrived as a young sculptor searching for a language that could address public life.

Portrait heads of friends and collaborators share space with anti-fascist projects and proposals. A bronze model for Play Mountain (1933), intended either for Central Park or an entire city block, sits low and wide like a contoured piece of topography. Its stepped slopes, sledding run, and bandshell compress the scale of a neighborhood into a single surface.

Nearby, newly commissioned animated films project children moving across those contours, translating the bronze maquette into motion. The films answer a practical problem the team mentioned on the tour. It can be hard to picture how a child might occupy a sculpted landscape from a small model. The animations place viewers inside the proposal, climbing and sliding through space that once existed only in the forms of drawings and physical models.

Isamu Noguchi in front of the Plaza Hotel at the debut of his first public sculpture on city land, Unidentified Object (1979) in Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, NY, 1979. photo: Donna Svennevik, The Noguchi Museum Archives

noguchi celebrates the city’s working class

One realized commission on view at the exhibition may be familiar to New Yorkers: News (Associated Press Building Plaque) (1938–40), Noguchi’s first public work in the United States. It’s is a large-scale stainless steel relief installed at Rockefeller Center. Archival photographs and drawings trace the making of this piece, which renders a group of newspaper men as a celebration of the city’s heroic working class.

The material choice feels deliberate, as stainless steel belongs to the cavernous office towers of midtown Manhattan. Noguchi responded to that context with a relief that reads as both sculpture and architecture.

This relief is among the only realized works which draw heavily from Noguchi’s anti-fascist ideals. A collection of unrealized works are exhibited nearby — these include murals which render cannons shooting moneybags as well as skeletons stabbing a depiction of the financier and investment banker J.P. Morgan.

Isamu Noguchi, News (Associated Press Building Plaque), 1938–40. photo: Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero / ImagenSubliminal. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

colossal, unrealized playscapes

The heart of the Noguchi’s New York exhibition lies in the artist’s unrealized playgrounds. Five major proposals fill the galleries with bronze studies, drawings, and films. Alongside Play Mountain, there are the 1940 Play Equipment maquettes, including a compact Slide (model) and Jungle Gym (model), each reduced to spare lines and curves. These resemble small modernist sculptures that happen to invite climbing.

Noguchi described these projects as places for open exploration. He wanted children to invent their own routes rather than follow a prescribed path. With Robert Moses as the Parks Commissioner, these proposals were never considered. His first proposal for Play Mountain was rejected outright, and the artist later recalled that the commissioning team ‘turned their thumbs down so forcefully they almost broke their thumbnails.’

The playground which came closest to realization was planned for Manhattan’s Riverside Park in collaboration with the iconic and influential Louis Kahn. Blueprints, plaster models, and studies map out a sculpted terrain along the Hudson, with slide mountains and skating areas flowing into one another. Community opposition stalled the plan, and it slipped away.

Isamu Noguchi, Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza, 1960–64. Bronze. photo: © Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero / ImagenSubliminal / The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Downtown Interventions

Among Isamu Noguchi’s most successful realized works in New York, a modernist zen garden, can be found below street level in the financial district. The Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza (1961–64) is exhibited through photographs and film. River stones from Kyoto sit in a circular depression at the base of a glass tower. An archival video shows water moving quietly around the stones as office workers eat lunch along the edge.

The garden feels like a pocket of stillness carved into Wall Street. The stones carry geological time into a place governed by minutes. A few blocks away stands Red Cube (1968), tilted and bright against the grid of Lower Manhattan, and many New Yorkers pass it daily without knowing it’s the work of Isamu Noguchi.

Strange Bird (1945) (left), This Tortured Earth, 1942-43 (cast 1977) (center), Chess Table, 1944, fabricated by Herman Miller (right), image © designboom

Eros, 1966 (left), Fudo, 1966-1967 (center), Night Bird, 1966-1967 (right)

Isamu Noguchi, Swings, Slide, Jungle Gym (Play Equipment models), 1940 (left), Isamu Noguchi, model for Contoured Playground, 1941 (cast 1963) (right), image © designboom

Animated film inspired by Isamu Noguchi’s Contoured Playground, 2025, Vinyl emulsion on celluloid, DURATION (TBC), directed by Nicolas Ménard & Jack Cunningham, Eastend Western

install view, various portrait heads of friends and collaborators, image © designboom

project info:

exhibition title: Noguchi’s New York

artist: Isamu Noguchi

museum: The Noguchi Museum

dates: February 4th — July 5th, 2026

The post explore an unrealized vision of new york through the eyes of isamu noguchi appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Nicole Cherubini presents Hotel Roma at Friedman Benda‘s New York gallery, an exhibition of ceramic works that emphasize motifs of collage. Installed across the gallery, the sculptures move between monumentality and intimacy with their large-scale presence and dense symbolic detailing.

Cherubini is recognized for building by hand in clay, and that commitment to direct contact remains central here. Terracotta and white earthenware carry layered glazes in turquoise, amber, emerald, and metallic luster, applied with an eye toward weight and tempo. The surfaces feel worked over time, and show evidence of the artist’s hand that stays visible even at a distance.

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Nicole Cherubini draws from Surrealist themes

The exhibition at Friedman Benda draws themes from Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, a text that has long shaped Nicole Cherubini’s thinking. ‘Carrington vividly writes about her harrowing experiences during World War II,’ the artist tells designboom. ‘For me, her story offered an investigation, of sorts, into ideas of creativity, reality, disbelief and humanity, and its perception through a feminist lens. It feels like a bit of a mirror to our contemporary society, reflecting much that is going on with our current rights and freedoms.’

That perspective brings historical figures into conversation with current conditions. Carrington’s experience during World War II, including her stay at Madrid’s Hotel Roma, becomes a lens for examining how creativity functioned as endurance and resistance. ‘I looked back at the women working during this time period — who are all just incredible — and really explored how their use of creativity and agency forged an energy that made change through resistance and radicalism.’ she explains.

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

the collage as a feminist aesthetic

Several sculptures in Hotel Roma revolve around the Three Graces, a classical typology Cherubini approaches through ancient philosophical texts that describe generosity as a cycle of giving and return. Each work asserts a distinct physical character, including a sculpture conjoined to a ceramic bench that stretches more than ten feet across the gallery floor.

The forms combine swelling volumes with embedded figurative details, giving the sense of bodies assembling themselves in stages. Cherubini connects this method to ideas of collage and reconstruction. ‘Frankenstein, to me, is about collage. It is a taking of disparate parts to create a new whole, to form new possibilities and understanding of structure,’ she notes. The reference aligns with her broader interest in hybrid form, where fragments accumulate through labor and choice. The sculptures draw energy from baroque abundance and surrealist excess, yet remain grounded in the logic of their materials.

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

a handcrafted process

The making of the ceramic works results from both collective effort and solitary focus. ‘The creation of these pieces involve two major processes,‘ Cherubini continues. Large molds require sustained physical work by a team she has collaborated with for years, followed by a hand-building phase carried out entirely by the artist. ‘That’s where you can see all the hand marks. It’s almost performative, like a recording of time.’

Up close, this intimacy is rendered texturally. Impressions from rings and bandages remain embedded in the clay, turning the sculpture into a record of the artist’s own unique movements. Meanwhile, in works such as Butterfly, inspired by a lyric from American songwriter Erykah Badu, doubled forms suggest motion through their massing. Across Hotel Roma, Cherubini’s sculptural pieces sustain attention through this tension between scale and detail, along with contemporary design and historical reference.

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

project info:

name: Hotel Roma

artist: Nicole Cherubini | @nicolecherubinistudio

gallery: Friedman Benda | @friedman_benda

location: 515 W 26th Street, New York, NY

dates: January 16th — February 21st, 2026

photography: © Pierre Le Hors

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The third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale is on view until May 2nd, 2026, at the JAX District, unfolding across Diriyah’s former industrial zone with exhibition design by Formafantasma, which treats space itself as a continuous passage. Titled In Interludes and Transitions, the exhibition brings together 68 artists from more than 37 nations, with over 25 new commissions, and positions movement as a method. 

Formafantasma’s exhibition design reworks the raw industrial architecture of JAX into an environment of color and curved planes. Across 12,900 square meters of halls, courtyards, and terraces, walls bend and passages open, guiding visitors through the biennale as if following a score. The scenography avoids monumentality in favor of rhythm, encouraging a bodily awareness of movement that mirrors the curatorial emphasis on itinerancy.

Trương Công Tùng, The State of Absence… Voices from Outside (2020–ongoing). Photo by Alessandro Brasile, courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation | all images by Alessandro Brasile, courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation

diriyah contemporary art biennale 2026 activates jax district

Led by Co-Artistic Directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, the biennale frames the world as a set of overlapping processions. The curatorial concept draws from a colloquial Arabic expression that speaks to cycles of encampment and journey, using it to think through migration, transmission, and transformation across time. Rather than fixing histories in place, the exhibition allows them to circulate through sound, gesture, and collective memory, tracing how the Arab region has long been shaped by flows of people, trade, and ideas.

Musicality plays a central role in the 2026 edition, foregrounding oral and aural knowledge as carriers of social history. This approach is embodied in Folding the Tents (2026), a specially commissioned procession by Saudi artist Mohammed Alhamdan. Moving through Wadi Hanifah and the JAX District, the work culminates in a performance by the Miniawy Trio, exploring how an ancient collective practice adapts within contemporary electric and digital cultures. 

Organized by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, the exhibition reflects an ongoing effort to use JAX as both a production site and a meeting ground. As Razian and Ahmed note, thinking of the world in procession allows cultural forms to be understood through routes, rhythms, and relations rather than fixed origins.

front; Pio Abad, Vanwa (2023/2026), background right; Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Blues for the Martyrs (2022), Lady Grown in a Tree, 2017, background left; Pacita Abad, Asian Abstractions (1983–92)

front left; Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, Procession (Zaar), 2015, background right; Mohammad Al-Ghamdi, Untitled (c. 2000), Untitled (c. 2000), Untitled (2018)

left; Pacita Abad, Asian Abstractions (1983–92), right; Nour Mobarak, Dafne Phono (2024)

left; Karan Shrestha, sweet water rising (2026), a flow disrupted; realigns (2022–ongoing), cloud babies (2023), right; Moshekwa Langa, Collapsing Guide II (2000–03)

Théo Mercier, House of Eternity (2026)

Théo Mercier, House of Eternity (2026)

Daniel Lind-Ramos, Ambulancia (2020) [Ambulance (2020)] (2022–23)

left; Guadalupe Maravilla, Disease Thrower: Purring Monster with a Mirror on Its Back (2022), La alegría del fuego (The Joy of Fire) (2023), Popusa (Retablo twin) (2023), El Boquerón (Retablo) (2023), Una vez me salvó la vida un pez (Retablo) [Once a fish saved my life (Retablo)] (2024), right; Shadia Alem, Transformation – Jinniyat Lar (1996/2026)

left; Lulua Alyahya, Untitled, (2024), Untitled (2026), right; Abdelkarim Qassem, The Final Scene (2017)

Petrit Halilaj, Very volcanic over this green feather (2021)

Dineo Seshee Bopape (Raisibe), Matrices: thelletjang: Sedibeng, it comes w the rain (2026)

Nancy Mounir, Solћ (2023/2026)

Yussef Agbo-Ola [Olaniyi Studio], AGBA: 8 Stone Cave (2026)

Oscar Santillán, Anthem (2026)

project info:

name: In interludes and transitions (في الحِلّ والترحال)

event: Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026 | @biennale_sa

location: JAX District, Diriyah, Saudi Arabia

exhibition design: Formafantasma | @formafantasma

dates: January 30th – May 2nd, 2026

co-artistic directors: Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed

organizer: Diriyah Biennale Foundation

associate architect and exhibition designer: Sammy Zarka | @sammyzarka

lead partner: Lexus

principal partner: Saudia Airlines

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At Ketabi Bourdet in Paris, ‘The spirit of the forest’ traces how Philippe Starck’s relationship with nature moves from form and metaphor toward action and systems thinking. On view until February 28th, 2026, the exhibition reads as a slow reveal of an idea that keeps returning across decades, around design as a tool to reframe how we live with resources, memory, and the everyday.

Often labeled ‘eco-minded,’ Starck integrated nature early on through visual and formal cues. Works like the W.W. stool and the Étrangeté vase translate vegetal strength and organic flows into objects, stepping away from the stark black metal furniture of the 1980s. At this stage, nature functions mainly as style, echoing the decorative logic of Art Nouveau a century earlier. Yet these pieces already signal a shift toward the common good and the messages Starck would embed more explicitly from the 1990s onward.

all images © Studio Shapiro, unless stated otherwise

from nature as image to nature as method

That shift becomes tangible with Maison Starck in 1994, developed through the French industrial designer and architect’s long collaboration with the mail-order catalogue 3 Suisses. For 4,900 francs and a 24-hour delivery, buyers received a box containing plans, a construction binder, a VHS presentation, a hammer, and a ceremonial flag. The offer granted the right to build a 140-square-meter wooden house, the maximum allowed in France without an architect, with construction costs rising to around one million francs, depending on options. Although only about twenty houses were ever built, the ambition of the project was to propose an affordable, adaptable alternative to the anonymous low-end housing spreading across France. Today, the box itself is an iconic artifact, held in institutional collections such as the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

‘The spirit of the forest’ traces how Philippe Starck’s relationship with nature moves from form toward action

bringing the forest indoors

Across furniture, architecture, and everyday products, Starck repeatedly taps into collective memory and archetypes, sometimes with surreal humor. Rustic chairs become uncanny hybrids, a wheelbarrow morphs into an armchair, and garden gnomes migrate into high-end interiors. These gestures, although not ecological solutions in themselves, sharpen attention. ‘The spirit of the forest’ frames a career-long effort to alert, provoke, and invite reflection on how objects mediate our relationship with nature, consumption, and responsibility.

In 1995, Starck pushed the idea further with the Bo Boolo collection, again for 3 Suisses. Buyers received tabletops and legs, but the defining element was missing by design: a birch trunk spacer cut on site by a ranger from the French National Forestry Office, stamped with a numbered brass plaque and certificate. The gesture collapses distance between furniture and forest, reminding users that materials have origins and stewards. It is a modest move, but a pointed one, and Starck chose the Bo Boolo table as his own desk. Roughly 300 pieces were produced, later adapted by XO in special editions.

Starck’s ecological stance often operates through symbolism rather than engineering. The Jim Nature television, designed in 1994 for Thomson/SABA, replaced glossy plastic shells with particleboard casings made from recovered sawdust, anticipating contemporary conversations around recycling and material cycles. Watching television inside a wooden box subtly reframes consumption. Similar logic underpins later projects, from the Good Goods catalogue launched with La Redoute to the reusable La Feuille d’eau bottle distributed to Parisian schoolchildren in 2008, each extending the reach of design beyond the object.

the exhibition reads as a slow reveal of an idea that keeps returning across decades

design as a tool to reframe how we live with resources, memory, and the everyday

Chaise Dick Deck | Paul Bourdet © Studio Shapiro

Ceci n’est pas une brouette armchair

Banc Bo Boolo | Paul Bourdet © Studio Shapiro

Coffret Maison 3 Suisses

Vase Popopo

TV Jim Nature

across furniture, architecture, and everyday products, Starck repeatedly taps into collective memory and archetypes

Grand Vase Étrangeté

Console Boboolo 2

Starck integrated nature early on through visual and formal cues

project info:

name: The spirit of the forest

designer: Philippe Starck | @starck

venue: Ketabi Bourdet | @ketabibourdet

location: 22 Passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris, France

dates: January 30th – February 28th, 2026

The post philippe starck’s work on eco-design takes focus in ketabi bourdet gallery exhibition appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

February brings together exhibitions that examine how meaning is constructed through material, memory, and spatial experience. Ceramic works by Nicole Cherubini emphasize motifs of collage at Friedman Benda in New York, while the Berlin show, Vital Architecture: Between Idealism and Reality, turns attention to the built environment, tracing how architectural thinking negotiates environmental conditions and history through research-driven practice.

Questions of time, inheritance, and transformation run through the month. In Denmark, Memoryscapes – Archaeology of the Future looks to excavation as both method and metaphor, considering how past structures inform future imaginaries, while Milan’s Over, under and in between focuses on spatial thresholds and transitional states. 

Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and listings on our dedicated events guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them around the globe.

Vital Architecture: Between Idealism and Reality

Vital Architecture presents selected projects by Atelier Li Xinggang that examine relationships between built form, landscape, and lived experience in contemporary China. Shown at Aedes Architecture Forum, the exhibition frames architecture as a mediating practice shaped by environmental conditions, historical layers, and everyday use, drawing on long-term research into Chinese cities, gardens, and construction traditions.

Models, sketches, photographs, films, and installations trace design thinking from research through occupation, emphasizing spatial continuity between structure and context. Display elements made from reused transport crates echo a cyclical approach to making, where building, environment, and human presence are understood as interconnected parts of a shared milieu.

name: Vital Architecture: Between Idealism and Reality
architect: Atelier Li Xinggang
museum: Aedes Architectural Forum
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: February 7th — March 18th, 2026

National Sliding Center Yanqing at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics competition venue. © Atelier Li Xinggang

sarah morris: transactional authority

Sarah Morris, born in 1970, lives and works in New York and has developed a practice since the 1990s that centers on geometric abstraction shaped by diagrammatic grids. Her work spans painting and video, reflecting sustained interests in urban form, systems, and architectural typologies.

Closely associated with the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Morris became the first artist added to its collection in Japan, which includes large-scale paintings and the video Sakura. Sarah Morris: Trading Power marks her first large-scale solo exhibition in the country, presenting paintings, video works, drawings, a site-specific mural, and Sakura, filmed in the Kansai region in 2015.

name: Sarah Morris: Transactional Authority
artist: Sarah Morris
museum: Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka
location: Osaka, Japan
dates: January 31st, 2025 — April 5th, 2026

White Cube, courtesy the artist and White Cube. photo by Tom Powel Imaging

hotel roma

Nicole Cherubini presents Hotel Roma at Friedman Benda‘s New York gallery, an exhibition of ceramic works that emphasize motifs of collage. Installed across the gallery, the sculptures move between monumentality and intimacy with their large-scale presence and dense symbolic detailing.

Cherubini is recognized for building by hand in clay, and that commitment to direct contact remains central here. Terracotta and white earthenware carry layered glazes in turquoise, amber, emerald, and metallic luster, applied with an eye toward weight and tempo. The surfaces feel worked over time, and show evidence of the artist’s hand that stays visible even at a distance.

name: Nicole Cherubini: Hotel Roma
artist: Nicole Cherubini
gallery: Friedman Benda
location: New York, USA
dates: January 16th — February 21st, 2026

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda. image © Pierre Le Hors

noguchi’s new york

In 1922, Isamu Noguchi arrived in New York, a city that remained central to his life and work despite long periods abroad. Many of his best-known sculptures were made there, alongside proposals and ideas shaped by the city’s shifting cultural and political conditions.

The exhibition considers how New York informed Noguchi’s thinking and materials, while also tracing his efforts to shape public space through projects for communal use, several of which faced resistance from city leadership, including Robert Moses. Organized on the 40th anniversary of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, the presentation also reflects on the museum as a lasting contribution to the city.

name: Noguchi’s New York
artist: Isamu Noguchi
museum: The Noguchi Museum
location: New York, USA
dates: February 4th — September 13th, 2026

Isamu Noguchi at the debut of Unidentified Object, at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York, 1979. Photo: Donna Svennevik. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 04144. © INFGM / ARS

Memoryscapes – Archaeology of the Future

Memoryscapes, the second exhibition in the Architecture Connecting series at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, presents work by DnA_Design and Architecture and ATTA – Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects. Drawing from anthropology, archaeology, and geology, the exhibition examines how architectural practice engages with memory, tradition, and place as active forces in contemporary design.

Projects by Xu Tiantian and Tsuyoshi Tane trace site-based research through models, installations, and archival material, addressing ruins, landscapes, and production environments as sources of spatial meaning. Supported by Realdania, the exhibition situates architectural work within broader human narratives, emphasizing continuity between inherited knowledge and future spatial imagination.

name: Memoryscapes – Archaeology of the Future
architects: DnA_Design, ATTA – Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects
museum: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
location: Humlebæk, Denmark
dates: January 22nd — May 17th, 2026

image courtesy Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

art of noise

Art of Noise opens at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, adapted from an earlier presentation organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition examines the role of design in shaping everyday encounters with music across the past century, with more than 300 works installed throughout the third-floor galleries.

A handmade audio environment by Devon Turnbull occupies the first floor, while a choir installation by teenage engineering appears alongside objects ranging from sound technologies to graphic materials tied to music culture. Together these elements trace shifting relationships between sound, technology, and listening within a New York context.

name: Art of Noise
museum: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
location: New York, USA
dates: February 13th — August 16th, 2026

Devon Turnbull, HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 1, 2022; courtesy Devon Turnbull/Lisson Gallery; photo by Michael Lavorgna

david lynch

Pace Gallery presents work by David Lynch in Berlin. The presentation spans multiple media and includes photographs made in the city, set ahead of a larger exhibition planned for fall 2026 in Los Angeles.

Trained as a painter in the late 1960s, the late filmmaker approached images through material experiment, a trajectory that began with Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) and continues across painting and film, with sculpture. Photographs taken at abandoned industrial sites in Berlin in 1999 appear alongside this work, extending an exhibition history that moves from early gallery presentations to major museum surveys.

name: David Lynch
artist: David Lynch
museum: Pace Gallery
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: January 29th — March 29th, 2026

David Lynch, portrait, courtesy Pace Gallery

koo jeon a: LAND OF OUSSS [ GRAVITTA ]

KOO JEONG A works with restrained gestures that draw attention to peripheral experiences shaped by sound, scent, and subtle shifts in perception. At Kunsthaus Bregenz, the scale of the building supports an approach where minimal elements carry presence and where invented and found conditions overlap without fixed boundaries.

For the ground floor, the artist develops a curving floor object derived from a skatepark, its phosphorescent surface altering movement and light in dialogue with the architecture of Peter Zumthor. Upper floors extend this inquiry through magnetic wall elements, an olfactory environment developed from a perfume created with NONFICTION, and a film installation surrounded by fluorescent forms, each addressing forces sensed beyond direct visibility.

name: KOO JEON A: LAND OF OUSSS [ GRAVITTA ]
artist: Koo Jeon A
museum: Kunsthaus Bregenz
location: Bregenz, Austria
dates: January 21st — May 25th, 2026

LAND OF OUSSS [ GRAVITTA ], ehibition view Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2026, image courtesy the artist

tracey Emin: a second life

This exhibition surveys four decades of work by Tracey Emin, bringing together widely recognized pieces with works shown for the first time. Across painting, video, textiles, neon, writing, sculpture, and installation, her practice draws on lived experience, with the body serving as a recurring site for intimacy, vulnerability, and endurance.

Emerging into public attention during the 1990s, Emin became closely associated with debates around authorship, exposure, and the place of autobiography in art. The presentation situates her recent paintings within a longer trajectory, showing how personal history, memory, and emotion continue to inform her work over time.

name: Tracey Emin: A Second Life
artist: Tracey Emin
museum: Tate Modern
location: London, UK
dates: February 27th — August 31st, 2026

Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998 © Tracey Emin. photo courtesy The Saatchi Gallery, London / photograph by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

in-play. Design for Sport

IN-PLAY. Design for Sport takes place as part of the Cultural Olympiad of Milano Cortina 2026. Framed by the Olympic Charter’s view of sport as a fundamental human right, the exhibition examines sports practice as a shared social space shaped through design.

The presentation looks at shifts in contemporary culture, where design reflects changing ideas around competition and performance. Through projects, stories, data, and biomedical research, the exhibition considers how these fields inform current understandings of the sporting body and its environments.

name: IN-PLAY. Design for Sport
museum: ADI Design Museum
location: Milan, Italy
dates: February 3rd — April 6th, 2026

image courtesy ADI Design Museum

Over, under and in between

Mona Hatoum brings a constellation of hand-blown glass spheres and a motorized metal tower sculpture to her exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan. Named ‘Over, under, and in between,’ the site-specific project is divided into three parts comprising a web, a map, and a grid.

These installations find a temporary home in the reactivated Cisterna building, once located on Fondazione Prada’s compound and which housed the silos and tanks of a former alcohol distillery. The space accommodates the height, volume, and shape of the three large-scale installations, enveloping the viewers in a physical spatial experience.

name: Over, under and in between
artist: Mona Hatoum
museum: Fondazione Prada
location: Milan, Italy
dates: January 29th — November 9th, 2026

Over, under and in between, Mona Hatoum, Ph. Roberto Marossi, courtesy Fondazione Prada

Philippe Starck, The spirit of the forest

Philippe Starck began integrating references to nature into his work early on, initially through form and imagery. Projects from the mid 1990s such as Maison Starck and the Bo Boolo collection for 3 Suisses marked a shift from stylistic evocation toward a more direct engagement with ideas of shared responsibility and everyday use.

Maison Starck proposed an accessible domestic model shaped by childhood memory and spatial quality, later gaining recognition through its boxed presentation. With Bo Boolo, Starck introduced untreated tree trunks into interior furniture and worked with the National Forestry Office to foreground material origin, reinforcing an ongoing concern with environmental awareness and the social role of design.

name: Philippe Starck, The spirit of the forest
artist: Philippe Starck
museum: Galerie Ketabi Bouret
location: Paris, France
dates: January 30th — February 28th, 2026

image courtesy Galerie Ketabi Bouret

Louise Bourgeois – Echo of the Morning

In the final years of her life, Louise Bourgeois produced a group of gouaches centered on an intimate iconography of the couple, family life, and floral forms. These works reflect sustained attention to bodily experience and personal memory through a pared, direct visual language.

Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, the exhibition places the gouaches alongside sculptures from across Bourgeois’ career that engage related formal and thematic concerns. It marks her first solo presentation in Mid Norway and is accompanied by a publication with new scholarly writing.

name: Louise Bourgeois – Echo of the Morning
artist: Louise Bourgeois
museum: PoMo
location: Trondheim, Norway
dates: February 5th — May 31st, 2026

Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 2008. collection The Easton Foundation, New York © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS/BONO, Oslo 2026. photo: Christopher Burke

Belongings: Affection as a Design Strategy

Belongings: Affection as a Design Strategy examines emotional attachment to objects as a factor in longer use and care. The exhibition frames design as a relationship that shapes everyday behavior and influences how objects are maintained over time.

Visitors are invited to bring a personal object and engage with it through an AI-mediated exchange that assigns voice and character. These encounters feed into a digital archive that gathers personal narratives, forming a shared record of relationships between people and things and offering a lens on future design culture shaped by care and affection.

name: Belongings: Affection as a Design Strategy
museum: Design Museum Denmark
location: Copenhagen, Denmark
dates: January 25th — May 31st, 2026

image courtesy Design Museum Denmark

Lynda Benglis. Encounters: Giacometti

Works by Lynda Benglis and Alberto Giacometti are shown together for the first time in this exhibition, which forms the third chapter of Encounters: Giacometti. Benglis presents previously unseen works alongside a selection of Giacometti’s sculptures, creating a dialogue across different generations of sculptural practice.

Active since the 1960s, Benglis is known for expressive forms that test the limits of material and gesture, while Giacometti’s elongated figures reshaped approaches to the human body in twentieth-century sculpture. The exhibition situates their works in proximity to explore shared concerns around form, presence, and physical experience.

name: Lynda Benglis. Encounters: Giacometti
artist: Lynda Benglis
museum: Barbican Centre
location: London, UK
dates: February 12th — May 31st, 2026

Lynda Benglis, portrait. image © Jonathan Pow

Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 in Lancashire and shaped her life and work through sustained movement across places and inner states. From Florence and Paris to the south of France, Spain, and later Mexico, her trajectory informed an artistic language shaped by surrealism, mythology, and esoteric thought.

The exhibition presents her practice through a chronological and thematic lens, tracing early encounters with Italian art, an engagement with Renaissance imagery, Celtic and post-Victorian references, and involvement with surrealist circles in France. Her work brings human and animal forms into dialogue and reflects a lifelong pursuit of transformation, self-knowledge, and symbolic meaning.

name: Leonora Carrington
artist: Leonora Carrington
museum: Musée du Luxembourg
location: Paris, France
dates: February 18th — July 19th, 2026

Leonora Carrington, Artes 110, 1944 © NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; gift of Pearl and Stanley Goodman © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ADAGP, Paris

Kiefer. The Women Alchemists

Kiefer. The Women Alchemists presents a site-specific project by Anselm Kiefer at Palazzo Reale in Milan. Conceived for the Sala delle Cariatidi, the exhibition reflects on history, painting, and female memory, and forms part of the cultural program connected to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics.

The installation comprises thirty-eight large-scale canvases created in dialogue with the hall’s war-scarred interior, marked by damage from the 1943 bombing. The Sala delle Cariatidi carries a layered exhibition history, including the presentation of Guernica in 1953, and continues to serve as a charged setting for contemporary artistic interventions.

name: Kiefer. The Women Alchemists
artist: Anselm Kiefer
museum: Palazzo Reale Milano
location: Milan, Italy
dates: February 7th — September 27th, 2026

Anselm Kiefer, Sophie Brahe, 2025. photo: Nina Slavcheva © Anselm Kiefer

Tino Sehgal

The Zapopan Art Museum presents the first solo exhibition in Mexico by Tino Sehgal, whose practice centers on constructed situations shaped through human interaction. At EstaciónMAZ, variations of Kiss appear from November 29th, staging a slow, intimate choreography between two dancers that references poses associated with Western art history.

From January 31st, 2026, These Associations takes place along the pedestrian route connecting the Zapopan Art Museum and EstaciónMAZ. The work activates the walkway through a shifting sequence of encounters adapted for Guadalajara, extending a project previously realized in exhibition spaces such as Tate Modern and Palais de Tokyo.

name: Tino Sehgal
artist: Tino Sehgal
museum: Museo de Arte de Zapopan
location: Jalisco, Mexico
dates: January 31st — March 1st, 2026

Tino Sehgal, portrait, image courtesy Zapopan Art Museum

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