Museum Shows Worth Planning a Trip Around This Summer

You may be trading Palm Beach for New York, Paris, London, or even Beijing this summer, and if you are, museums around the world are giving art lovers and culture enthusiasts plenty to see along the way. From major retrospectives and once-in-a-generation loans to glittering jewelry exhibitions and long-awaited museum shows, here are eight exhibitions worth traveling for.

 

LONDON

Tracey Emin: A Second Life
Tate Modern, London
Until 31 August 2026

Any opportunity to see Tracey Emin’s deeply personal and emotionally exposed work is worth taking, but especially a landmark exhibition in her home country spanning four decades of her career. The show includes iconic works like My Bed (1998), the installation of her own unmade bed surrounded by stained sheets, empty bottles, used condoms, and other remnants of private life that, when first exhibited, sparked fierce debate about what art could be and what it could contain. Alongside these historic pieces are an array of works never shown before publicly. Working across painting, video, textiles, neon, writing, sculpture, and installation, Emin has built a body of work rooted in autobiography, transforming her own experiences of love, grief, sexuality, trauma, and vulnerability into some of the most emotionally charged and influential contemporary art of the past several decades.

 

BASEL

Pierre Huyghe
Fondation Beyeler
24 May 2026 – 13 September 2026

 

Switzerland might be on your map this summer, as it has been named one of the top luxury travel destinations this year (you can read more about it in our recent article about summer travel trends.) Whether you’re traveling to the Alpine country to immerse yourself in its spectacular natural landscapes or heading there for Art Basel in mid-June, you won’t want to miss Pierre Huyghe’s major exhibition at Fondation Beyeler. Conceived specifically for the museum, the exhibition brings together new and recent works by the French artist, whose immersive environments blur the boundaries between art, science, technology, biology, and fiction. Widely considered one of the most innovative contemporary artists working today, Huyghe creates unsettling and deeply atmospheric worlds that constantly shift and evolve around the viewer.

 

PARIS

Calder. Rêver en Équilibre
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
April 15 2026 – August 15 2026

 

A hundred years ago, a young American mechanic named Alexander Calder arrived in Paris with big dreams of becoming an artist. His early wire sculptures were among the first works ever described as “drawings in space,” years before the phrase became widely associated with modern sculpture. In 1931, Calder began creating suspended abstract forms that moved with air currents, effectively inventing an entirely new kind of sculpture. Marcel Duchamp would eventually give them their name: mobiles. Fondation Louis Vuitton is celebrating that centennial with one of the most ambitious Calder exhibitions in decades, bringing together nearly 300 works spanning everything from his whimsical Cirque Calder performances in 1920s Montparnasse to the monumental mobiles and stabiles that would permanently change modern sculpture.

 

NEW YORK

Marcel Duchamp
Museum of Modern Art
April 12 2026 – August 22 2026

 

Speaking of Duchamp, few artists changed the course of art history as radically as Marcel Duchamp. Long before conceptual art became a category of its own, Duchamp was asking a question that still unsettles museum visitors today: what actually makes something art? This major MoMA retrospective revisits the artist who turned a mass-produced urinal on its side, signed it “R. Mutt,” called it Fountain, and permanently altered the relationship between art, authorship, and the museum itself. The exhibition brings together roughly 300 works spanning nearly six decades, offering a rare opportunity to encounter the full breadth of Duchamp’s practice, from painting and sculpture to film, performance, and experimentation that would shape generations of artists after him. For anyone spending time in New York this summer, it is an essential museum stop.

 

BEIJING

Carsten Höller
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
June 6 2026 – October 11 2026

 

UCCA Center for Contemporary Art is opening a major exhibition dedicated to Carsten Höller, the Belgian-born artist known for turning museums into immersive psychological experiments. Bringing together some of his best-known installations alongside new site-specific works created for the occasion, the exhibition transforms the museum into what Höller describes as a “Laboratory of Doubt,” inviting visitors to question their own perception of space, time, movement, and even social behavior. Trained originally as a scientist before becoming an artist, Höller has spent decades creating works that sit somewhere between amusement park attraction, scientific experiment, and contemporary art installation. Expect sensory confusion, altered perspectives, and the feeling that you may not entirely trust your own eyes by the time you leave.

 

MELBOURNE

Cartier
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
June 12 2026 – October 4 2026

 

If you happen to be down under this summer (technically Australia’s winter but bear with me), Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria is presenting one of the year’s most sparkling museum exhibitions: Cartier. Created in partnership with the V&A in London and featuring nearly 400 jewels, watches, precious objects, archival drawings, and historic commissions, the show traces the evolution of the legendary French maison from the early twentieth century to today. Royal tiaras, Hollywood jewels, extraordinary gemstones, and pieces worn by everyone from princesses to film stars make an appearance.

 

BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS

Keith Haring in 3D
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
June 6 2026 – January 25 2027

 

Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges will open the first major exhibition dedicated entirely to Keith Haring’s sculptural and three-dimensional work, revisiting the artist not just as the downtown New York graffiti icon of the 1980s, but as an artist working across objects, installation, performance, furniture, clothing, and public space. The exhibition, which will open alongside a major expansion for the museum, includes everything from painted boomboxes and skateboards to monumental sculptures, masks, and even a 1963 Buick Special covered in Haring’s signature lines and figures.

 

COPENHAGEN

Lucian Freud – Drawing into Painting
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
June 11 2026 – September 27 2026

 

Last but definitely not least, if you missed the excellent Lucian Freud exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery earlier this year, do not worry: it is now traveling to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art just outside Copenhagen. Focusing on Freud’s lifelong obsession with the human figure, the show traces the relationship between his drawings and paintings, revealing how his intimate sketches evolved into the psychologically charged portraits that made him one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. The exhibition reveals just how fundamental drawing was to Freud’s way of seeing, something often overshadowed by the sheer force of his paintings.