Tilda Swinton Is Getting Her Own Museum Show in Amsterdam

Everyone’s favorite screen icon and fashion plate Tilda Swinton is taking the spotlight in a forthcoming exhibition celebrating her artistry and creative partnerships.

Opening in September, “Tilda Swinton – Ongoing” is being developed by the actor exclusively for Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. The outing, she said in a statement, is offering her the opportunity to revisit her four-decade career, during which she’s starred in films from experimental indies to big-budget Hollywood productions.

It’s a working practice, she added, that has “come to rest on the—ever present—bedrock and battery of the close fellowships I found from the very first and continue to rely upon to this day.”

Ever since her film debut in 1986’s Caravaggio, Derek Jarman’s biopic of the hard-drinking Italian painter, Swinton has proven a head-turning, versatile presence on screen. Over a storied career, she’s played the gender-fluid lead in Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), a harried lawyer in Michael Clayton (2007), a vampire in Jim Jarmusch’s dreamy Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and an ancient sorcerer in Doctor Strange (2016).

So chameleonic is Swinton that she’s played two, even three, separate roles in single films—see: Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter (2022) and Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria—sometimes disappearing beneath layers of makeup, prosthetics, and accent work. She’s nigh-on unrecognizable in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) and Julio Torres’s Problemista (2024), for two.

“I don’t really look like people in films,” she reflected in 2014. “I look like people in paintings.”

Throughout, Swinton has embarked on collaborations with the fashion world (with Viktor and Rolf for their 2003 outing, with photographer Tim Walker for an array of editorials) as well as artists including Doug Aitken and Lynn Hershman Leeson.

The exhibition will delve into the various themes that surface in Swinton’s oeuvre, among them nature, memory, ancestors and spirits, and fellowships. To better unpack these ideas, the actor will be presenting eight works, six of them new, created with her choice collaborators.

Five of the pieces are co-helmed by filmmakers. Namely: Pedro Almodóvar, whose The Room Next Door (2024) starred Swinton and Julianne Moore as friends confronting death; Guadagnino, with whom she has made five films; Hogg, whose work with Swinton goes back to 1986; Jarmusch, who has directed her in four movies; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who cast Swinton in 2021’s Memoria.

Another work takes the form of a performance and installation based on artifacts from Swinton’s personal archive, developed alongside celebrated fashion curator Olivier Saillard. Yet another piece, similarly exploring the actor’s roots, will be lensed by Walker, who lately photographed Swinton for a John Singer Sargent-inspired series, among other projects.

The eighth and final work serves as a tribute to Jarman, who died in 1994—a presentation of previously unseen material from the filmmaker’s 8mm archive, curated by Swinton.

“In focusing attention on profoundly enriching creative relationships in my life,” said Swinton, “we share the narratives and atmospheres that inspire us: we offer new work, especially commissioned for the Eye exhibition, as the most recent gestures borne out of various companionable conversations that keep me curious, engaged, and nourished.”

This is not the first time Swinton has orchestrated an exhibition. In 2019, she helmed her first show, “Orlando,” at New York’s Aperture Foundation, bringing together 50 photographs by 11 artists that draw on the themes in Virginia Woolf’s playful novel, on which the 1992 film is based. Coming up, an exhibition of British designer Marianna Kennedy, overseen by Swinton, is set to open at Christie’s Paris in May.

“Tilda Swinton – Ongoing” will be on view at Eye Filmmuseum, IJpromenade 1, 1031 KT Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 28, 2025–February 8, 2026.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com