Global Echoes of Art resonate through 7 unmissable art exhibitions this May, offering a powerful glimpse into the pulse of contemporary creativity. Spanning vibrant cultural hubs from Vienna and London to Paris, Berlin, Menorca, Monaco, and Athens these exhibitions tackle urgent global themes like identity, migration, labor, materiality, and heritage. Featuring acclaimed artists such as Jakob Lena Knebl, Sun Yitian, and Barbara Chase-Riboud, each show invites you into immersive worlds of sculpture, painting, video, and mixed media. Don’t miss this chance to experience how art resonates across continents and cultures.
Jakob Lena Knebl: La Primavera
Date: Fri 28 Mar 2025 to Sat 24 May 2025
Location: MEYER*KAINER, Eschenbachgasse 9, A-1010 Vienna, Austria
Jakob Lena Knebl’s La Primavera offers a captivating blend of sculpture, installation, and design that challenges traditional boundaries. Featuring playful, immersive environments with soft sculptures and fragmented body parts, the exhibition reinterprets modern art and design history through a queer and humorous lens. Drawing inspiration from Bauhaus, Art Nouveau, and mid-century design, Knebl’s work transforms space into an engaging narrative where viewers are invited to interact with lively and changeable art objects. The show reflects on sculpture’s evolving relationship with its surroundings, creating a fresh experience that questions how art is traditionally perceived.
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Isabel & Alfredo Aquilizan: Ellipsis
Date: Thu 1 May 2025 to Thu 29 May 2025
Location: Ames Yavuz, 31-33 Grosvenor Hill, W1K 3QU London, United Kingdom
Ellipsis by Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan marks the inaugural exhibition at Ames Yavuz’s new London gallery. This immersive presentation explores themes of displacement, migration, and labor in Southeast Asia through materials deeply connected to agrarian traditions. The artists weave together narratives of global capitalism’s overlooked histories with works such as hand-forged sickle wing sculptures, recycled metal crowns representing Commonwealth states, and multi-panel pineapple fiber textiles crafted by local communities. The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on home, identity, and heritage, while highlighting the loss and revival of artisanal craftsmanship amid modern industrial pressures.
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Anne Neukamp: Mirror
Date: Sat 17 May 2025 to Sat 21 Jun 2025
Location: Semiose, 44 rue Quincampoix, 75004 Paris, France
Anne Neukamp’s Mirror exhibition delves into the symbolism and abstraction of mirrors through a series of striking paintings. Inspired by the Bauhaus’s iconic events and the Isotype visual language, Neukamp reduces everyday objects like paperclips and locks to their simplest, semiotic forms. The exhibit features large-scale, digitally inspired pictograms of mirrors that explore perception and representation. With playful references to pop art and digital iconography, her work redefines how we see reflection and image-making, combining humor and conceptual depth. The exhibition invites viewers to question how symbols shape our understanding of reality and art itself.
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Sun Yitian: Romantic Room
Date: May 2 – May 31, 2025
Location: Esther Schipper, Berlin, Germany
In Romantic Room, Sun Yitian presents a vibrant collection of new paintings that blend personal memory with global visual culture. Known for her hyperreal depictions of mass-produced objects like inflatable toys and doll heads, Sun uses this exhibition to weave narratives that straddle Chinese cultural history and Western iconography. Her richly layered canvases explore religious imagery, classical art references, and consumer culture—all filtered through the lens of her upbringing in Wenzhou during China’s industrial boom. The show’s title work, portraying a slumbering princess and a lurking demon, encapsulates the artist’s recurring themes: the intersection of fantasy, nostalgia, and unsettling truths. With dramatic skies, symbolic figures, and playful yet poignant visual puzzles, Sun Yitian invites viewers into a dreamlike world that questions the boundaries between reality and illusion.
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Mika Rottenberg: Vibrant Matter
Date: May 10 – October 26, 2025
Location: Hauser & Wirth, Isla del Rey, Mahón, Menorca, Spain
Vibrant Matter marks Mika Rottenberg’s first solo exhibition in Spain, delivering her signature blend of absurdity and critique of global capitalism. The exhibition includes her acclaimed video works Cosmic Generator and Spaghetti Blockchain, which fuse real and imagined worlds—juxtaposing scenes from industrial China and the U.S.–Mexico border with surreal, constructed environments. Also on display are Lampshares, sculptural lamps made from invasive vines and recycled plastic, which fuse craft, sustainability, and a touch of humor. Rottenberg’s art, often playful on the surface, reveals deeper concerns about labor, environmental decay, and the entangled systems that drive human production and consumption. Her immersive installations and fantastical logic challenge the viewer to rethink material reality in an era of hyperconnectivity and excess.
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Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Josephines
Date: March 6 – June 14, 2025
Location: Hauser & Wirth Monaco, One Monte-Carlo, Place du Casino, Monaco
In this powerful tribute to Josephine Baker, celebrated artist Barbara Chase-Riboud merges memory, movement, and monumentality. Marking both the centenary of Baker’s Parisian debut and the 50th anniversary of her passing, the exhibition features striking bronze sculptures and intricate works on paper that embody the spirit of a performer who defied convention and captivated the world. Through cascading silks, sculptural rhythms, and poetic textures, Chase-Riboud offers not just a portrait, but an energetic resonance of Baker’s legacy. This show is both a deeply personal homage and a dynamic celebration of two revolutionary women whose stories intertwined in Paris.
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Adriana Varejão: Histórias Moldadas
Dat: May 15 – June 14, 2025
Location: Gagosian, 22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens, Greece
Adriana Varejão brings her signature cracked surfaces to Athens in a vibrant, multicultural exploration of ceramic history and cultural memory. Histórias Moldadas (“Molded Histories”) reveals a layered dialogue between continents through sculptural paintings inspired by the ceramic legacies of Brazil, Greece, Turkey, and China. From terra-cotta earth tones echoing Bahian pottery to celadon greens and maritime blues that shimmer with mythical allusions, Varejão’s art breathes life into the silent cracks of colonial pasts and collective identities. Her works blur boundaries between painting and sculpture, tradition and innovation offering a tactile, timeworn elegance that speaks across generations and geographies.
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To see the best art exhibitions around the world in 2025, visit here.
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