designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this september

September exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

September brings a dense new season of exhibitions across art, architecture, and design, with major retrospectives arriving alongside immersive installations and more focused looks at individual practices. This month’s exhibition radar moves from the late legend Yayoi Kusama at the Stedelijk Museum and Remedios Varo at Louisiana to Maurizio Cattelan in Berlin, Do Ho Suh in Seoul, and Homo Faber’s return to Venice, while shows in Tokyo, Mumbai, Lisbon, and New York take on subjects ranging from artificial intelligence and contemporary habitation to craft, technology, and the natural world.

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.

Wendell Castle: Living

At Friedman Benda‘s New York gallery, Wendell Castle: Living reconstructs the domestic world that furniture maker and sculptor Wendell Castle shared with ceramist and multimedia artist Nancy Jurs in Scottsville, New York. Curated by their daughter Alison Castle, the exhibition takes a 1973 House Beautiful feature on the couple’s home as its starting point, returning Castle’s furniture and Jurs’ ceramics to the kind of lived setting in which they originally appeared.

Several works photographed in the 1973 interior are being shown publicly for the first time in decades, alongside domestic objects that suggest a kitchen, bedroom, living room, and dining room. Early pieces including Castle’s Chaise Rocker from 1962 and Environment from 1972 sit with later works, tracing how his sculptural approach to furniture developed while keeping its relationship to everyday use in view.

name: Wendell Castle: Living

designer: Wendell Castle
museum: Friedman Benda
location: New York, USA
dates: September 17th, 2026 — October 17th, 2026

Wendell Castle: Living, Friedman Benda | image courtesy Friedman Benda

do ho suh

Do Ho Suh’s largest exhibition to date brings together around 500 works spanning more than thirty years of practice at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Drawings, sculptures, videos, and installations trace his ongoing interest in home and migration, and in the ways memory and identity become attached to the spaces people inhabit. The exhibition reaches back to works from his student years in Seoul alongside major pieces and projects still in progress.

Early material appears in a section called Seed Bank, including drawings, records, and objects that would later develop into recurring ideas across Suh’s work. The exhibition also brings together architectural installations including ‘Small Gate’, the ‘Rubbing/Loving’ series, and ‘Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul’, where translucent fabric reconstructs the ordinary details of homes the artist has lived in across different cities.

name: Do Ho Suh
artist: Do Ho Suh
museum: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)
location: Seoul, Korea
dates: August 27th, 2026 — February 9th, 2027

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024 Polyester, stainless steel, photo by Jeon Taeg Su © Do Ho Suh

Yayoi Kusama

A major retrospective for the legendary late artist Yayoi Kusama retrospective arrives at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, tracing more than seventy years of work from her early practice in Matsumoto through the experimental years she spent in New York and her later work in Tokyo. Painting, sculpture, drawing, fashion, collage, installation, and documentation of happenings come together to show how recurring ideas around repetition, infinity, and the dissolution of the self developed across her career.

The Amsterdam exhibition is the final stop of a European retrospective organized with Fondation Beyeler and Museum Ludwig. Alongside familiar works are historical pieces rarely seen in Europe and recent installations, including a new version of one of Kusama’s immersive environments, where patterns and reflections extend across the surrounding space.

name: Yayoi Kusama
artist: Yayoi Kusama
museum: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
dates: September 11th, 2026 — January 17th, 2027

Yayoi Kusama with Yellow Tree / Living Room at the Aichi Triennale, 2010 | image courtesy Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner © YAYOI KUSAMA

Remedios Varo

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents the first major museum exhibition in Europe devoted to Remedios Varo, bringing together more than 70 works from across the Spanish-Mexican surrealist’s career. Early paintings from Barcelona and Paris appear alongside works from her most productive years in Mexico during the 1950s and early 1960s, including rarely shown loans from museums and private collections.

Varo’s strange interiors and imaginary landscapes bring scientific inquiry into contact with mythology, mysticism, mechanics, and the occult. Paintings populated by hybrid creatures, travelers, and eccentric machines are joined by drawings, notebooks, and archival material, giving a broader view of the references and ideas behind her precisely constructed surrealist world.

name: Remedios Varo
artist: Remedios Varo
museum: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
location: Humlebæk, Denmark
dates: September 18th, 2026 — January 10th, 2027

Water Works: in the Flow of Making

Berlin-based collective raumlaborberlin brings Water Works: in the Flow of Making to TOTO GALLERY·MA in Tokyo, extending its long-running experiments around water, public space, and collective forms of urban life. The exhibition gathers earlier water-related projects alongside new work developed in Japan, where the group has been looking at Tokyo Bay as a space for architecture and everyday use beyond the city’s fixed ground.

A workshop with students from Shibaura Institute of Technology feeds directly into the show. Working with bamboo and inflatable dunnage bags, the group built floating structures and staged a performance from a barge in Tokyo Bay, testing how bodies, temporary construction, and maritime regulations might shape new ways of occupying the waterfront. Materials from the workshop return inside the gallery alongside documentation, studies of water circulation, and proposals for future waterfront environments.

name: Water Works: In the Flow of Making

designer: raumlaborberlin
museum: TOTO GALLERY·MA
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: September 10th, 2026 — November 29th, 2026

Bathing Culture (Göteborg, Sweden, 2014) © raumlaborberlin

Second Nature

Second Nature takes over all four floors of the Art House at Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, bringing together nine immersive installations by Random International, teamLab, A.A. Murakami, Simon Heijdens, and Es Devlin. Presented with experiential art platform Superblue for its first exhibition in Asia, the show looks at the increasingly blurred relationship between digital systems and the natural world.

Several of the works shift in response to visitors or their surroundings. Digital flowers bloom and disappear around moving bodies, weather data animates an indoor landscape, and motion-sensing installations change as people pass through them. Across the exhibition, technology becomes part of the environment itself, shaping how visitors move, look, and interact with each work.

name: Second Nature
museum: Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC)
location: Mumbai, India
dates: July 3rd, 2026 — January 10th, 2027

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Nirvana: Fleeting Flowers, Radiance Within, Mumbai | image courtesy Superblue

john baldessari: sculptures

John Baldessari is best known for the deadpan collisions of image and language that shaped his approach to conceptual art, but sculpture ran through his practice as well. Sculptures at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles turns to this three-dimensional side of his work, bringing together projects that play with physical space, scale, and the expectations attached to familiar objects.

Among them is Beethoven’s Trumpet (With Ear) Opus #133 from 2007, an oversized ear and trumpet installation that transforms a visual joke into something visitors physically encounter in the room. Across the exhibition, Baldessari’s humor moves off the flat surface, using enlarged forms and spatial relationships to extend questions that occupied him throughout his career.

name: John Baldessari: Sculptures

artist: John Baldessari
museum: Sprüth Magers
location: Los Angeles, USA
dates: September 11th, 2026 — October 24th, 2026

John Baldessari, Beethoven’s Trumpet; In One Ear & Out the Same Ear, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, 2007 | image by Reni Hansen

Learning from “Hōjōki”: Tiny Architecture Reweaves Life

Learning from ‘Hōjōki’: Tiny Architecture Reweaves Life at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT begins with a 13th-century text about living in a ten-foot-square hut. Written by Kamo no Chomei, Hōjōki reflects on impermanence through the small dwelling he called home, and the exhibition uses that modest structure as a way to think again about contemporary habitation and the built environment.

Exhibition director Yoshiharu Tsukamoto brings together architects, designers, artists, and companies to reinterpret Chomei’s hut within the same nine-square-meter footprint. Their structures fill the galleries alongside research into the forms of living described in Hōjōki, turning the historic text into a series of physical propositions about how little space a life might need, and what that constraint can make visible.

name: Learning from ‘Hōjōki’: Tiny Architecture Reweaves Life
museum: 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: August 28th, 2026 — January 11th, 2027

image © 21_21 Design Sight

Koo Jeong A: OUSSSMOS

Koo Jeong A brings three decades of work to Leeum Museum of Art for OUSSSMOS, her largest solo exhibition in Korea to date. The show draws together recurring elements from across her practice, including phosphorescence, skateparks, scent, and magnetism, tracing how she has used barely perceptible forces and large-scale installations to alter the way a space is sensed.

The exhibition extends beyond Leeum’s M2 gallery into the museum’s lobby and less expected spaces, with works appearing behind walls and among historical objects. These interventions lead into OUSSS, the conceptual universe Koo has developed across her practice, where familiar surroundings can shift through changes in light, smell, movement, and invisible fields.

name: Koo Jeong A: Ousssmos

artist: Koo Jeong A
museum: Leeum Museum of Art
location: Seoul, South Korea
dates: September 5th, 2026 — December 27th, 2026

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KOO JEONG A, LAND OF OUSS [KANGSE] installation view, 2025 — 2026, LUMA Arles, France | image by Victor & Simon – Grégoire d’Ablon

Maurizio Cattelan: NIGHT

Maurizio Cattelan takes over Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie with NIGHT, his first major solo exhibition in Germany and the presentation connected to the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie. Historical works including Him (2001) and Novecento (1997) appear alongside new commissions, bringing several of the artist’s recurring questions around authority, memory, and representation into the same space.

At the center is a new site-specific work developed for Mies van der Rohe’s glass-and-steel building. Cattelan uses the architecture itself as part of the exhibition, altering how visitors move through and gather within the museum while placing familiar works into a different physical and historical context.

name: Maurizio Cattelan: NIGHT
artist: Maurizio Cattelan
museum: Neue Nationalgalerie
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: September 10th, 2026 — March 7th, 2027

Maurizio Cattelan, detail, 2026 | image © Neue Nationalgalerie — Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Ivan Erofeev

Roy Lichtenstein Sweet Dreams, Baby!

Sweet Dreams, Baby! turns to Roy Lichtenstein’s printmaking, bringing together around fifty works made across five decades. Many are being shown publicly for the first time, including thirty-three prints recently given to Kunstmuseum Basel by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, alongside works already held in the museum’s collection.

The exhibition follows Lichtenstein from early experiments in the late 1940s through the comic-book imagery, Ben-Day dots, interiors, still lifes, and art-historical references that became central to his work. It also looks closely at the technical side of his practice, including collaborations with specialist print studios and works built through unusually complex combinations of lithography, woodcut, screen printing, and other processes.

name: Roy Lichtenstein Sweet Dreams, Baby!

artist: Roy Lichtenstein
museum: Kunstmuseum Basel
location: Basel, Switzerland
dates: August 22nd, 2026 — March 14th, 2027

Roy Lichtenstein, Sweet Dreams, Baby!, 1965 | image courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel

Tatiana Trouvé: The Auxiliaries

Tatiana Trouvé brings new sculpture, drawing, and installation to Xavier Hufkens for The Auxiliaries, her first solo exhibition in Brussels. Spread across three levels of the gallery, the show moves through familiar strands of her practice: travel, memory, mapping, studio labor, and the way materials can carry traces of earlier uses. One installation resembles an improvised storage system cast in aluminum, while other works begin with objects gathered during the artist’s travels or with measurements of sound pollution around Paris.

The basement turns toward the often unseen materials that support sculptural production. Mattresses, blankets, lifting straps, silicone molds, pallets, and discarded fragments reappear as part of Trouvé’s Invisible Workers series, giving physical form to the movement and labor behind finished works. Upstairs, new drawings sit alongside her ongoing Les Dessouvenus series, extending the exhibition’s interest in things that shift between states, uses, and meanings.

name: Tatiana Trouvé: The Auxiliaries
artist: Tatiana Trouvé
museum: Xavier Hufkens
location: Brussels, Belgium
dates: September 10th, 2026 — October 31st, 2026

L’inventario, Tatiana Trouvé, 2003–2024 | image courtesy Xavier Hufkens

homo faber 2026: An Island of Light

Homo Faber returns to Venice for its fourth edition with An Island of Light, bringing the work of more than 500 artisans from over 70 countries to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Artistic director Es Devlin has shaped the biennial around the relationship between light, materials, and the human hand, arranging more than 700 objects across fifteen installations on San Giorgio Maggiore.

The exhibition takes its cue from the Venetian lagoon, treating each maker as an individual island within a wider landscape of craft. Water, mirrors, movement, and shifting light run through Devlin’s staging, while live demonstrations and workshops bring the processes behind the objects into view alongside the finished works.

name: Homo Faber 2026: An Island of Light
museum: Fondazione Giorgio Cini
location: Venice, Italy
dates: September 1st — September 30th, 2026

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Energies of IA

Energies of AI looks at artificial intelligence through the physical and social systems that keep it running. Curated by Antonio Somaini, the exhibition considers the electricity, water, critical minerals, computation, labor, and capital behind AI alongside the effects these technologies produce across culture and everyday life. Its setting at MAAT, partly housed within Lisbon’s former Tejo Power Station, gives that question of energy a particularly direct architectural context.

The exhibition brings together recent work by artists including Hito Steyerl, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Trevor Paglen, Grégory Chatonsky, and Fabien Giraud. Several projects are being produced specifically for the show, addressing subjects such as the hidden labor used to train AI models, its material metabolism, machine learning, surveillance, and forms of psychological influence.

name: Energies of AI

museum: MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology
location: Lisbon, Portugal
dates: September 15th, 2026 — April 10th, 2027

Tony Oursler: Between Technology and Spiritual Knowledge

Tony Oursler’s Between Technology and Spiritual Knowledge – Magic, Media, and Art brings together more than three decades of work at Tokyo Node, tracing his long-running interest in the spaces where technology, psychology, belief, and the paranormal begin to overlap. Video, sculpture, sound, light, and language appear throughout the exhibition, alongside subjects ranging from surveillance and data flows to magic, religion, conspiracy theories, and signals that remain invisible but shape daily life.

The show includes major works such as Private and Specular, as well as previously unrealized pieces and new site-specific installations created for Tokyo. Oursler also presents material from his own archive of roughly 3,000 objects and documents relating to science, magic, and unidentified phenomena, extending the exhibition beyond finished artworks into the research and visual culture that has fed his practice for decades.

name: Tony Oursler: Between Technology and Spiritual Knowledge – Magic, Media, and Art
artist: Tony Oursler
museum: Tokyo Node
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: July 3rd, 2026 — September 27th, 2026

Liu Wei: Speculation

For The Met’s 2026 Genesis Facade Commission, Beijing-based artist Liu Wei places four large-scale sculptures across the museum’s Fifth Avenue exterior. Titled Speculation, the installation centers on the recurring form of the human hand, using it as a familiar motif that shifts between bodily, architectural, and more fantastical associations.

The commission continues Liu’s interest in fragments drawn from urban environments, historical imagery, and the body, while responding directly to the scale of The Met’s facade. Shaped in part by his experience of rapid transformation in contemporary China, Speculation considers cycles of rupture and repair and marks Liu’s first major presentation in the United States.

name: Liu Wei, Speculation
artist: Liu Wei
museum: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
location: New York, USA
dates: September 17th, 2026 — June 8th, 2027

Liu Wei portrait | image courtesy The Met

Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You

Taryn Simon fills the Guggenheim’s rotunda with Father Country I Do Love You, a new body of work nearly a decade in the making. Forty-two interconnected works move across photography, text, video, and sculpture, tracing the life of an unnamed federal agent whose actions and omissions ripple outward into larger histories of power, justice, and national identity.

The project also brings Simon’s own family history into her practice for the first time. Dedicated to her father, who worked for the U.S. government and later manufactured arcade games, the exhibition folds fragments of his life into a wider narrative about America and the stories that remain partially hidden within institutions and personal memory.

name: Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You
artist: Taryn Simon
museum: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
location: New York, USA
dates: September 18th, 2026 — March 14th, 2027