The 20 best exhibitions of 2025

BarcelonaThe first major exhibition on the Pan-Africanist movement on a global scale, the committed To imagine landscapes and Matters matters A historical exhibition about comic book author Chris Ware has been one of the highlights of Barcelona's 2025 exhibitions. Internationally, it has once again been a year of big names such as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Jacques-Louis David.

The new presentation of the permanent collection at Can Framis, the Vila Casas Foundation's painting museum, marks a turning point in the institution's history, a journey that spans from the most tangible reality to humanistic and spiritual ideas. The project, entitled A constantly changing permanent collectionIt contains highlights such as the meeting of artists who are little known today, such as Josep Cisquella and Josep Roca-Sastre, with more popular ones, such as Jaume Plensa and the work Daphneby Josep Maria Subirachs, which serves to discuss new masculinities. Likewise, Nazario's drawingAllegory of AIDS and Blood bank, by Frederic Amat, evocative of the HIV pandemic.

Visits were possible until August. the first major international posthumous retrospective This artist, unjustly little known in Catalonia, Marta Palau (Albesa, 1934 – Mexico City, 2020) went into exile in Mexico with her parents when she was six years old. With her sculptures and installations, often made from natural materials and imbued with a spiritual and magical character, she evoked pain, memory, migration, and borders, but also fertility. Palau is also considered a pioneer of ecological art.

An exhibition that had been in the works for many years, and which ran until November 16th. Twenty years after his death, the Joan Gaspar Gallery and the Clavé Archives of Paris, with public support, celebrated the legacy of Antoni Clavé with a major exhibition featuring 85 of his works, some of which were being shown outside their owners' homes for the first time. The exhibition continued at the Royal Artistic Circle, with sculptures and works on paper.

The Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera continues to delve deeper into the great names of modern and contemporary sculpture with the first major exhibition by Cristina Iglesias in Barcelona. The exhibition includes some thirty works from 2002 onwards that engage with the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. The most characteristic aspects of Iglesias's work are represented, such as suspended walkways, works based on vegetation, and wells, which introduce the temporal dimension into sculpture.

This is about the first retrospective by the artist Paloma Polo (Madrid, 1983), known for her questioning of hegemonic narratives through long-term research that materializes in audiovisual and photographic projects. Some of the protagonists of this exhibition are the Native American nations united in the alliance haudenosaunee, who were victims of genocide by the French colonizers; the Valencian communist Dulcinea Bellido, who was silenced by Francoism and its comrades, and Julián Grimau, who was tortured and murdered during the Franco regime.

Joan Miró's relationship with the United States ranged from rejection to fascination. a great display of international ambition It analyzes how Miró found inspiration in younger American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson. And how, at the same time, he inspired them with his energy.

The most famous slogans of the American Barbara Kruger (Newark, 1945), including works such as "I Buy, Therefore I Am" and "Your Body Is a Battlefield," remain fully relevant. The artist's first retrospective in the state (running until November 9) was conceived as a monumental, immersive experience that made it even more evident how Kruger subverts the language of advertising and the media to expose the mechanisms of persuasion, consumption, and control embedded in everyday life.

German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has revisited his 35-year career in an unusual way, with a curatorial experiment that, from June 13 to September 22, transformed the library space of the Centre Pompidou, which had given him free rein to complete the program before closing for renovations for five years. Tillmans not only exhibited his photographs, but also curated a selection of films, music, texts, and performances.

The Botín Centre and the Reina Sofía Museum have settled their historical debt with the great Galician artist of the Generation of '27 with the most ambitious exhibition of her legacy. Visitors can see everything from the five paintings of street festivals, iconic works from the 1920s, to the fascinating hybrid figures of humans and animals. And, like an undercurrent, the exhibited works reveal how Maruja Mallo (1902-1995) grappled with existential, scientific, and cosmic questions.

"Shit!" As the museum director, Emmanuel Guigon, says, the adjective ubuesco It covers the entire 20th century, so the exhibition It had to do justice to its magnitude. And it does: the exhibition includes nearly 500 works and documents by dozens of renowned artists, photographers, and authors from the 20th and 21st centuries, including Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Georges Rouault, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Antonin Art Corbusier, Jean Dubuffet, Enrico Baj, Raymond Queneau, Francisco Catalán Roca, and William Kentridge.

With all due respect to Gerhard Richter, the German artist Anselm Kiefer (Donaueschingen, 1945) is one of today's most famous painters, known for his cathartic exploration of Germany's traumatic history in large-scale, symbolically rich paintings. This was evident in the double exhibition dedicated to him until June 9th at the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum, which acquired his work in the early 1980s and held a major exhibition in his honor in 1986. Before all this, Kiefer discovered the Netherlands on a bicycle trip when he was 17—and he remains 17 at heart. Furthermore, the Royal Academy in London dedicated another exhibition to him, exploring the influence Van Gogh has had on his work since his teenage years.

The Australian Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) asserted that one should be oneself beyond the limits of social acceptance. This exhibition, which ran until August 31, revealed through her dresses and collaborations with other artists how Bowery shone as an artist, performer, model, television personality, club promoter, fashion designer, and musician. She was admired by figures such as John Galliano, Sade, Derek Jarman, and Boy George; and Lady Gaga would not be who she is without her legacy.

An icon of sacred art. An exceptional exhibition With two venues, the exhibition traces the career of Fra Angelico, one of the great painters of the 15th century, and his evolution from the late Gothic to the Renaissance. It also analyzes his influence on other contemporary painters and sculptors. The exhibition includes more than 140 works, including drawings, paintings, sculptures, and illuminated manuscripts, from major museums around the world, such as the Louvre in Paris, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

For decades, Gerhard Richter (Dresden, 1932) has been considered one of the most important—and most sought-after—living artists, due to the way he has experimented with the language of painting and pushed its boundaries, especially with his abstract paintings in which he uses a scraper to spread the paint on the canvas. This is the first major exhibition to review sixty years of his career, with some 275 works, including oils, steel and glass sculptures, drawings, watercolors and painted photographs.

To coincide with the bicentenary of his death in exile in Brussels, the Louvre has organized a major retrospective of Jacques-Louis David, the painter who shaped the artistic imagination of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire with iconic works such as The death of Marat, Napoleon crossing the AlpsandThe coronation of Napoleon. The exhibition includes a hundred works, among which is also the enormousBallgame Oath. As the commissioner, Sébastien Allard, says, David is "the defender of an ideal of beauty in the service of a political project."

This is about the most important exhibition This is the first exhibition of its kind in Catalonia dedicated to a living international comic book author, and it demonstrates the CCCB's ambition for comic book exhibitions. Ware is the author who has most influenced his contemporaries, and for seven months (until November 5), the public could trace his evolution through hundreds of original pieces, animations, objects, and sculptures.

The CCCB closes the year in style with a monumental exhibition The exhibition focuses on the world of Mercè Rodoreda, aiming to break down the clichés that still surround her and reclaim her literary and cultural significance. Curated by Neus Penalba, the exhibition features a selection of newly created works by artists and theater companies such as Èlia Llach, Mar Arza, Oriol Vilapuig, Cabosanroque, Carlota Subirós, and La Veronal, presented alongside documents and original works.

A lesson in how to get more out of heritage, adding new layers of interpretation to historical objects to connect them with the present and the challenges of today's world. A feast for all audiences. Even so, Matters matters (Matter Matters, Matter Is an Important Issue) has been the other major controversial exhibition of the year in Barcelona, ​​because its detractors believe it belittles the museum's heritage. "We still have many objects that arose from extractivism and colonialism; everything is tinged by this past, and it is absolutely present: Trump and techno-oligarchs like Musk, Putin, and Xi Jinping. This is shaping the world and the products we have around us. Can we change this trend? The exhibition speaks in a positive way," the exhibition argues.

This is aboutone of the most important fruits The project marked Manuel Borja-Villel's return to Catalonia after being hired by the Department of Culture. Borja-Villel's objective was to question the encyclopedic museum and create "a toolbox" for analyzing the museum as a place of "active listening" and "encounter and friction." The result, on view until October 5th, was a poignant exhibition that revisited the legacy of artists such as Isidre Nonell, Modesto Urgell, and Santiago Rusiñol, and where artists like Dan Lie provided a counterpoint to the Western world. To imagine landscapes It has been one of the most controversial exhibitions in recent years, due to the frictions of the project with the MNAC and because Borja-Villel's ideas, sometimes more advanced, caused the local sector to clash with its own limitations.

The director of the Macba, Elvira Dyangani Ose, has underscored the successes of the exhibitions of recent years with a gigantic and pioneering exhibition The exhibition focuses on the Pan-Africanist movement, which pursued goals such as fraternity and international solidarity among peoples of African origin. It features some 300 works of art and approximately 200 documents and other works by around 100 African, European, American, and Latin American artists and intellectuals, spanning from the 1920s to the present. On the other hand, it could be Dyangani's swan song as director of the museum if his contract is not renewed.