designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this april

Apr 4, 2026 - 22:00

designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this april

April exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

April opens with a global array of exhibitions which trace how artists and designers engage with systems in flux, from ecology and technology to language and space. In Milan, Fondazione Prada presents Cao Fei’s Dash, a multimedia exploration of smart agriculture and its social and environmental implications. In Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof hosts Shilpa Gupta’s What Still Holds, where fragmented language and participatory works question truth, censorship, and collective memory.

Major retrospectives revisit the role of art across time and scale. At Fondation Louis Vuitton, Calder: Dreaming in Balance brings nearly 300 works by Alexander Calder into dialogue with Frank Gehry’s architecture, while in Prague, Kunsthalle Praha presents William Kentridge’s The Battle Between YES and NO, spanning four decades of work and anchored by a new installation reflecting on ambiguity and history.

Elsewhere, shows foreground participation and expanded authorship. In Milan, Pirelli HangarBicocca presents Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The House That Jack Built, where architecture is activated through collective use, while in Atlanta, the High Museum of Art revisits Isamu Noguchi’s multidisciplinary practice through a major design retrospective.

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.

MARTIN MARGIELA AT KUDAN HOUSE

Martin Margiela at Kudan House marks the first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan by Martin Margiela, presenting a comprehensive view of his artistic practice since departing fashion in 2008. On view in Tokyo, the exhibition explores recurring themes of the body, absence, time, and transformation, with works spanning collage, painting, drawing, sculpture, assemblage, and video.

Installed within Kudan House, a 1927 Spanish-style residence and registered cultural property, the exhibition unfolds across a sequence of domestic rooms, preserving traces of everyday life. Margiela’s scenography embraces intimacy and observation. Emphasizing process, imperfection, and anonymity, the exhibition invites visitors to move through the house as both viewers and participants in open-ended exploration.

name: Martin Margiela at Kudan House
artist: Martin Margiela
museum: Kudan House
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: April 11th — April 19th, 2026

image courtesy the artist and Lafayette Anticipations

Ruth Asawa: a Retrospective

Guggenheim Bilbao presents Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, a comprehensive exhibition spanning six decades of work by Ruth Asawa. Organized across ten sections, the exhibition brings together her iconic suspended wire sculptures alongside drawings, paintings, prints, and archival material, offering a full view of her multidisciplinary practice.

Tracing Asawa’s development from her early studies at Black Mountain College to her later work in San Francisco, the exhibition highlights her sustained exploration of form, space, and material. Integrating art with education and community engagement, the presentation reflects her lifelong commitment to experimentation and her influence as both an artist and advocate.

name: Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
artist: Ruth Asawa
museum: Guggenheim Bilbao
location: Bilbao, Spain
dates: until September 13th, 2026

Julie Mehretu: Kairos / Hauntological Variations

Julie Mehretu: Kairos / Hauntological Variations at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw marks the first presentation in Poland of Julie Mehretu. The exhibition takes its title from the ancient Greek concept of kairos, a decisive moment, alongside Jacques Derrida’s idea of hauntology, where the present remains shaped by unresolved histories.

Bringing together works from the late 1990s to today, the exhibition traces Mehretu’s evolving practice across painting, drawing, and printmaking. Layering references from maps, media imagery, and sociopolitical events, her compositions register contemporary global conditions, presented here as a continuous, expansive body of work that reveals the depth and trajectory of her approach.

name: Julie Mehretu: Kairos / Hauntological Variations
artist: Julie Mehretu
museum: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
location: Warsaw, Poland
dates: until August 30th, 2026

Julie Mehretu, detail of Ghosthymn (after the Raft), 2019-2021. Tom Powel Imaging. courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York © Julie Mehretu

Kengo Kuma/KKAA: Earth / Tree

Inspired by the Japanese concept of komorebi — sunlight filtering through tree canopies — Earth / Tree by Kengo Kuma/KKAA transforms the sensory experience of being beneath a tree into an immersive architectural installation. Presented at Copenhagen Contemporary, the project explores shelter as a bodily memory, inviting visitors into a space shaped by wood and brick, materials chosen for their tactile qualities and deep cultural histories across Japanese and Nordic traditions.

Developed under the direction of Yuki Ikeguchi, the installation emphasizes light, air, and shadow as active elements, engaging the senses beyond vision through scent, texture, and movement. At its core, Earth | Tree extends beyond observation: a central workshop area encourages visitors to build, shape, and experiment with materials themselves, framing architecture as a shared, intuitive act of making.

name: Kengo Kuma/KKAA: Earth / Tree
architect: Kengo Kuma and Associates (KKAA)
museum: Copenhagen Contemporary
location: Copenhagen, Denmark
dates: until Februray 21st, 2027

Kengo Kuma/KKAA: Earth / Tree, image courtesy Copenhagen Contemporary

Tomás Saraceno: Interwoven

Interwoven, the first large-scale solo exhibition in Taiwan by Tomás Saraceno, invites visitors into an immersive environment shaped by webs of life spanning air, spiders, clouds, and cosmic matter. Through installations that combine spider/web architectures and floating structures made from reused materials, the exhibition explores interconnected systems across ecological and planetary scales.

Rooted in long-term collaboration with Indigenous communities in Salinas Grandes, Argentina, the exhibition foregrounds eco-social justice and alternative knowledge systems. Moving between microscopic and atmospheric perspectives, Interwoven reflects on how technology, environment, and society intersect today, proposing new ways of understanding coexistence in a world shaped by climate change and extractive economies.

name: Tomás Saraceno: Interwoven
artist: Tomás Saraceno
museum: New Taipei City Art Museum
location: Taipei, Taiwan
dates: until September 5th, 2026

Tomás Saraceno: Interwoven, installation view, photo by Hsuan Lang Ling & Lin Guan-ming, courtesy New Taipei City Art Museum

Isamu Noguchi: ‘I am not a designer’

High Museum of Art presents Isamu Noguchi: ‘I am not a designer’, the artist’s first major design retrospective in nearly twenty-five years, opening in spring 2026. Bringing together nearly 200 works across sculpture, furniture, lighting, stage design, and landscape, the exhibition traces the expansive practice of Isamu Noguchi, highlighting his approach to shaping space across disciplines.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Playscapes in Atlanta, the exhibition includes rarely seen models, industrial designs for Herman Miller and Knoll, and collaborations with figures such as Martha Graham. Large-scale installations and archival material emphasize Noguchi’s interest in function, play, and public space, framing his work as a continuous exploration of how design can shape shared environments.

name: Isamu Noguchi: ‘I am not a designer’
artist: Isamu Noguchi
museum: High Museum of Art
location: Atlanta, Georgia
dates: April 10th — August 2nd, 2026

Louise Dahl-Wolfe (American, 1895–1989), Isamu Noguchi (detail), 1955. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents. © 2026 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Dash

Fondazione Prada presents Dash, a new multimedia project by Cao Fei in Milan. Combining photography, video installation, virtual reality, documentary, and archival material, the exhibition explores the global transformation of agriculture through technology, focusing on both its possibilities and contradictions.

Developed through three years of research across rural regions in China and Southeast Asia, Dash examines the rise of smart agriculture amid climate instability, labor shortages, and shifting rural economies. The project reflects on how algorithms and automation reshape traditional knowledge, land use, and the relationship between rural and urban life.

Marking a new phase in Cao Fei’s long-term investigation into technology and society, the exhibition turns from industrial systems to agriculture as a foundational human practice. Through an immersive, layered presentation, Dash invites visitors to consider how technology, nature, and human experience intersect today, and what new forms of coexistence may emerge.

name: Dash
artist: Cao Fei
museum: Fondazione Prada
location: Milan, Italy
dates: April 9th — September 28th, 2026

Cao Fei Dash (still), 2026. courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers

CALDER. RÊVER EN ÉQUILIBRE

Fondation Louis Vuitton presents Calder. Rêver en équilibre (Dreaming in Balance), a major exhibition marking the centenary of Alexander Calder’s arrival in France and fifty years since his death. Spanning five decades of work, the exhibition traces his practice from the late 1920s — when his Cirque Calder captivated the Paris avant-garde — to the monumental sculptures that reshaped public art in the 1960s and 1970s.

Bringing together nearly 300 works, including mobiles, stabiles, wire portraits, paintings, drawings, and jewelry, the exhibition unfolds chronologically across the foundation’s galleries and grounds. Installed within Frank Gehry’s architecture, Calder’s suspended forms activate the space through movement, light, and balance. The presentation also situates his work within a broader artistic context, with contributions from figures such as Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso.

name: Calder. Rêver en équilibre
artist: Alexander Calder
museum: Fondation Louis Vuitton
location: Paris, France
dates: April 15th — August 16th, 2026

Nothing Is True But Everything Is Possible

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea presents Nothing Is True But Everything Is Possible, a solo exhibition by Damien Hirst. Bringing together over 50 works across sculpture, painting, and installation — many shown in Asia for the first time — the exhibition offers a focused view of Hirst’s practice.

The presentation includes key series such as Natural History, Spin paintings, Medicine Cabinets, Cherry Blossoms, as well as Spot and Butterfly works. Together, they trace Hirst’s sustained engagement with themes of science, belief, beauty, and mortality across his career.

name: Nothing Is True ButEverything Is Possible
artist: Damien Hirst
museum: The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA)
location: Seoul, South Korea
dates: until June 28th, 2026

Can Love Be a Photograph

Kunstmuseum Den Haag presents Can Love Be a Photograph, a major retrospective marking 40 years of collaboration by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Tracing their partnership since 1986, the exhibition brings together a wide selection of works that reflect their shared life and evolving practice.

Positioned between fashion and art, Inez & Vinoodh have shaped contemporary image-making through their early use of digital manipulation and their distinctive visual language, where familiarity meets unease. Alongside their artistic work, the exhibition also acknowledges their longstanding collaborations with major fashion houses and portraits of figures including Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, and Billie Eilish.

name: Can Love Be a Photograph
artist: Inez & Vinoodh
museum: Kunstmuseum Den Haag
location: Hague, The Netherlands
dates: until September 6th, 2026

Inez & Vinoodh, Think Love, 2025, shot on Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max. image courtesy Kunstmuseum Den Haag

The Antwerp Six

MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp marks the 40th anniversary of the Antwerp Six with a major exhibition in 2026, the first to bring together all six designers in a single institutional show. Tracing their shared origins at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the exhibition follows the moment in 1986 when Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, and Marina Yee presented their collections in London and launched their international careers.

Bringing together archival material and key works, the exhibition reflects on how their independent practices collectively positioned Antwerp as a global fashion capital, and how their influence continues to shape contemporary design today.

name: The Antwerp Six
artists: Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs, Marina Yee
museum: MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp
location: Antwerp, Belgium
dates: until January 17th, 2027

The Antwerp Six, image courtesy MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp

The Battle Between YES and NO

Kunsthalle Praha presents The Battle Between YES and NO, a major exhibition by South African artist William Kentridge. Bringing together early charcoal animations, theatrical installations, recent video works, and sculpture, the exhibition offers a broad view of Kentridge’s practice, alongside a new work created for Prague.

Anchored by A Letter to Felice (2026), a tribute to Franz Kafka, the exhibition unfolds as a spatial collage, reflecting Kentridge’s ongoing exploration of memory, contradiction, and political history. Drawing on themes of migration, colonial legacies, and uncertainty, the presentation emphasizes process, improvisation, and the studio as a site of experimentation, inviting visitors into a layered and open-ended engagement with the artist’s work.

name: The Battle Between YES and NO
artist: William Kentridge
museum: Kunsthalle Praha
location: Prague, Czech Republic
dates: April 16th — September 27th, 2026

William Kentridge: The Battle Between YES and NO. image courtesy Kunsthalle Praha

Anna Maria Maiolino – Poetic Earth

MAAT – Museum of Art Architecture and Technology presents a solo exhibition by Anna Maria Maiolino, tracing key moments in her practice from the 1970s to today. Bringing together drawings, photographs, and videos from her early career alongside her later clay works, the exhibition highlights her exploration of the body, materiality, and the political context of Brazil’s military dictatorship.

At the center of the exhibition are large-scale clay sculptures created on site, the largest of her career, which transform the Oval Gallery into a sensory environment. Shaping the movement of visitors through the space, these works emphasize process, gesture, and the evolving nature of matter, inviting a tactile and poetic engagement with Maiolino’s practice.

name: Anna Maria Maiolino – Poetic Earth
artist: Anna Maria Maiolino
museum: MAAT – Museum of Art Architecture and Technology
location: Lisbon, Portugal
dates: until August 31st, 2026

view of the exhibition courtesy Anna Maria Maiolino — Poetic Earth, MAAT, 2026. image: Pedro Tropa, courtesy EDP Foundation

Shilpa Gupta. What Still Holds

Hamburger Bahnhof presents What Still Holds, a solo exhibition by Shilpa Gupta, centered on the monumental installation Truth (2022–25). Composed of fragmented, oversized letters, the work invites visitors to move through language itself, questioning how truth is shaped, obscured, or controlled within systems of power.

Bringing together eleven works from the past two decades across sculpture, sound, drawing, and participatory formats, the exhibition explores themes of censorship, borders, and collective memory. Highlights include Listening Air, featuring resistance songs, 100 Hand Drawn Maps of My Country, which reimagines national boundaries from memory, and Someone Else, a library of anonymously authored texts.

Presented in dialogue with works by Joseph Beuys and as part of the museum’s 30th anniversary program, the exhibition reflects on the role of art in questioning authority and sustaining critical thought in conditions of uncertainty.

name: Shilpa Gupta. What Still Holds
artist: Shilpa Gupta
museum: Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: until January 3rd, 2027

Shilpa Gupta. What Still Holds, Ausstellungsansicht / exhibition view, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, 2026. photo by Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Luca Girardini

Andrea Branzi by Toyo Ito continuous present

In collaboration with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Triennale Milano presents a monographic exhibition dedicated to Andrea Branzi, a central figure in late 20th- and early 21st-century design culture. Framed through the perspective of Toyo Ito, the exhibition brings together installations, objects, and drawings to explore key themes in Branzi’s work, including fragility, hybridity, and planetary coexistence.

Structured within a biographical narrative, the exhibition also revisits Branzi’s longstanding relationship with both institutions and highlights major projects such as No-Stop City (1969–72), a foundational exploration of the contemporary metropolis and radical design thinking.

name: Andrea Branzi by Toyo Ito
artist: Andrea Branzi
museum: Milano Triennale
location: Milan, Italy
dates: until October 4th, 2026

Andrea Branzi, photo by Emanuele Zamponi

Tom Wesselmann: Seascapes, Still Lifes, and Nudes

Gagosian presents Tom Wesselmann: Seascapes, Still Lifes, and Nudes, marking the first solo exhibition in Greece of Tom Wesselmann. Bringing together key paintings and drawings from across his career, the exhibition highlights his distinctive approach to traditional genres through the lens of Pop art.

A central figure of the movement, Wesselmann reworked subjects such as interiors, landscapes, and the nude by merging modernist figuration with imagery drawn from mass culture. A highlight of the presentation is Great American Nude #1 (1961), which launched his iconic series, reflecting his concept of ‘erotic simplification’ through bold color, flat form, and references to artists such as Henri Matisse.

name: Tom Wesselmann: Seascapes, Still Lifes, and Nudes
artist: Tom Wesselmann
museum: Gagosian Athens
location: Athens, Greece
dates: until May 30th, 2026

Rirkrit Tiravanija: The House That Jack Built

Pirelli HangarBicocca presents The House That Jack Built, a major retrospective by Rirkrit Tiravanija, curated by Lucia Aspesi and Vicente Todolí. Spanning over three decades, the exhibition focuses on Tiravanija’s exploration of architecture as a social and participatory practice.

Featuring the largest presentation to date of his architectural works — many inspired by modernist figures such as Le Corbusier and Jean Prouvé — the exhibition reinterprets iconic structures by shifting their function and context. Conceived as an evolving sequence of environments, the show invites visitors to activate the works, positioning them as central participants in a dynamic, collective experience shaped by use, interaction, and unpredictability.

name: Rirkrit Tiravanija: The House That Jack Built
artist: Rirkrit Tiravanija
museum: Pirelli HangarBicocca
location: Milan, Italy
dates: until July 26th, 2026

Rirkrit Tiravanija: The House That Jack Built, installation view, photo courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca

Michael Armitage and Amar Kanwar At Palazzo Grassi

Pinault Collection presents two major solo exhibitions at Palazzo Grassi, featuring Kenyan-British painter Michael Armitage and Indian multimedia artist Amar Kanwar. Together, these exhibitions bridge the gap between art and activism, exploring sociopolitical tensions, the migration crisis, and the resilience of the human spirit through a blend of documentary reality and dreamlike vision.

Michael Armitage showcases forty-five large-scale paintings and over one hundred studies that redefine contemporary figurative art. Rejecting traditional canvas, Armitage paints on Lubugo bark cloth from Uganda, using its natural holes and rough textures to inform his ‘hallucinatory’ compositions. His work synthesizes East African news, Greek mythology, and global art history to address heavy themes like political repression and the perilous journeys of migrants with a lush, vibrant palette.

On the second floor, Amar Kanwar presents two significant multimedia installations that function as poetic meditations on power and justice. His landmark work, The Torn First Pages, documents the struggle for democracy in Myanmar, honoring a bookseller’s protest against military censorship. In contrast, his 2023 piece, The Peacock’s Graveyard, uses seven ‘invisible’ screens and a haunting piano raga to tell five metaphysical fables about death, karma, and the cycle of life.

name: Michael Armitage and Amar Kanwar at Palazzo Grassi

artists: Michael Armitage, Amar Kanwar
museum: Palazzo Grassi
location: Venice, Italy
dates: until January 10th, 2027

(from left to right) Michael Armitage, Strange Fruit, 2016, Private Collection; Baikoko at the mouth of the Mwachema River, 2016, Private Collection. installation views, Michael Armitage. The Promise of Change, 2026, Palazzo Grassi, Venezia. ph. Marco Cappelletti Studio © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

Lorna Simpson and Paulo Nazareth at Punta Della Dogana

Pinault Collection presents two major solo exhibitions at Punta della Dogana, featuring Lorna Simpson and Paulo Nazareth. The showcase explores the intersections of memory, racial identity, and the ‘unhealed fractures’ of history, transforming the former customs house into a space for investigating both personal and collective narratives.

Lorna Simpson’s exhibition marks her most significant European presentation in over a decade, focusing on her evolution from conceptual photography to painting. Spanning twenty years of work, including new pieces created for Venice, the exhibition features fifty works including her emblematic Ice and Special Characters series. Using a vast visual archive of collages and a palette of ‘nocturnal blues,’ Simpson examines the instability of memory and the mechanisms of racial stereotyping and erasure.

On the upper floor, Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth presents ‘Algebra,’ a title derived from the Arabic term for ‘the setting of broken bones.’ Drawing from over twenty years of practice, Nazareth uses his experience of walking across the Americas and Africa to confront the ‘structural racial and colonial violence’ of borders. A central feature is a thick line of salt that runs through the galleries, tracing the ghostly architecture of a tumbeiro (slave ship) to symbolize healing, corrosion, and the Atlantic crossing.

name: Lorna Simpson and Paulo Nazareth at Punta della Dogana
artist: Lorna Simpson, Paulo Nazareth
museum: Punta della Dogana
location: Venice, Italy
dates: until November 22nd, 2026

(floor) Lorna Simpson, Vibrating cycles, 2026, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth (wall, from left to right) Lorna Simpson, Night Fall, 2023, Private Collection; Thin Bands, 2019, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Time, 2021, Private Collection; Howling, 2020, Gina and Stuart Peterson Collection. installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

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