Art exhibitions in May 2025 span continents and creativity, offering powerful experiences across media and themes. From Kaari Upson’s eerie dollhouses in Denmark to Julie Mehretu’s layered abstractions in Germany, these global art showcases highlight boundary-pushing retrospectives, immersive installations, and cross-cultural dialogue. Whether you’re drawn to sound art, performance, or ecological interventions, this curated selection captures the spirit of contemporary expression and guides you through the most exciting visual journeys this May.
Kaari Upson: Dollhouse – A Retrospective
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
May 27 – Oct 26, 2025
Step into the strange, fragmented dreamworld of late American artist Kaari Upson in her first major European retrospective. With ghostly dollhouses, fleshy furniture casts, and haunting video works, this immersive exhibition uncovers the hidden anxieties of American domestic life. Through her iconic “Larry Project” and final introspective pieces, Upson guides us through memory, desire, and the unstable stories we tell about ourselves.
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Joan Jonas: Drawings, Curated by Adam Pendleton
Pace Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
May 17 – June 28, 2025
Legendary artist Joan Jonas takes center stage in Tokyo with a rare exhibition spotlighting her drawing practice. Curated by long-time collaborator Adam Pendleton, this show reveals the deep links between Jonas’s gestural mark-making and her influential performance work. Spanning five decades, and enriched by her historic ties to Japanese aesthetics, the exhibit celebrates the quiet, persistent power of line, memory, and movement.
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Julie Mehretu: Kairos / Hauntological Variations
K21, Düsseldorf, Germany
May 10 – Oct 12, 2025
In her first German mid-career survey, Julie Mehretu presents nearly 100 works that layer history, politics, and abstraction into powerful visual landscapes. From delicate early drawings to vast, map-like canvases, the show also features sound and video works that trace Mehretu’s evolving vision. Visitors gain an inside look at her process—where media images become the blueprint for an ever-shifting world.
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Rosa Barba: The Ocean of One’s Pause
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, USA
May 3 – July 6, 2025
At MoMA, Rosa Barba transforms film into a multisensory experience. Her kinetic sculptures, sound environments, and speculative celluloid works blur science, poetry, and memory. Anchored by her new 35mm film Charge, which explores light as ecological force, the exhibition crescendos with live performances that turn light and sound into a living language of collaboration, transformation, and pause.
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Jeremy Shaw
Secession, Vienna, Austria
May 29 – Aug 31, 2025
Time folds in on itself in Jeremy Shaw’s hypnotic new works. His two major installations—There in Spirit and Maximum Horizon—use flickering candles, stained glass, and sci-fi motifs to visualize spirituality in the digital age. Blending religious iconography with futuristic aesthetics, Shaw invites viewers to contemplate transcendence, devotion, and the tension between past ritual and future longing.
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Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order
WIELS & ARGOS, Brussels, Belgium
May 29 – Sept 28, 2025
This ambitious group show brings together over 30 artists—including Joan Jonas, Otobong Nkanga, and Cecilia Vicuña—to explore nature, myth, and ecological chaos. Rejecting binaries like “natural vs. artificial,” the works blur science with ancestral knowledge, fiction with fact. Through video, installation, and performance, the show reimagines ecological futures with complexity, contradiction, and creative resistance.
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Susan Philipsz: The Lower World & Agnes Denes: The Living Pyramid
Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
May 10 – Oct 18, 2025
Two monumental public works activate the urban and ecological landscape of Luxembourg. Susan Philipsz’s haunting sound installation fills the Aquatunnel with a blend of civil defense sirens and mythical song, transforming the underground into an emotional corridor. Above ground, Agnes Denes’s nine-meter-high Living Pyramid, planted with 2,000 native species, roots ecological urgency in community and legacy—with a time capsule to be opened in a thousand years. Together, these works invite reflection on memory, place, and planetary time.
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To see the best art exhibitions around the world in 2025, visit here.
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