Exhibitions

What is the meaning of life to someone who has experienced a long, eventful ride? Yayoi Kusama, one of the most famous living artists in the world, has the answer.
At the age of 95, Kusama is still bursting with creative energy, and her latest solo exhibition “Every Day I Pray for Love” is solid proof. Opening at Victoria Miro in London this week ahead of Frieze London, the show (the artist’s 14th solo exhibition with the gallery) is more than just a presentation of the famed artist’s vision and versatility across paintings, installations, and sculptures. Collectively, they paint a picture of a life that should be embraced by people of all ages.
Some industry insiders jokingly said Kusama is like a lifeline to many art industry workers,  and even to luxury brands in these trying times. Indeed, she is one of the top-selling artists in the world, with a total sales value of $190 million, the eighth “most bankable” artist in 2023, according to Artnet Price Database. But sales aside, she is adored by the people.
Yayoi Kusama, Death of Nerves (2022), installation view of “Every Day I Pray For Love.” All works courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro © YAYOI KUSAMA
A long queue formed outside the gallery on Wharf Road when I went to the show’s first public opening day on Wednesday. It was a diverse crowd of all ages and different ethnicities. There were plenty of mothers bringing their young children along; one toddler was wearing a child harness, which was probably a relief to gallery staffers worried about sticky fingers and unsteady toddlers (another child nearly touched a painting). But they all shared the same eagerness and excitement as they stepped into the gallery to immerse themselves in the world of Kusama.
Many of them first stopped by the nearly 50-foot tall installation Death of Nerves (2022), located the closest to the ground floor entrance. Originally commissioned by Hong Kong’s M+ as part of the artist’s 2022 retrospective, “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now,” the work consists of multiple, long, colorful fabric tentacles decorated with the artist’s signature polka dots. When it was shown at M+, the work was given more space and spread out across the room, whereas at the London gallery, the work is installed in a much more confined space, suspended from the ceiling of the gallery’s upper floor and saturating the gallery’s architectural void like tendrils or vines. Viewers get to enjoy two very different perspectives of the work standing on either the ground or upper floor. The setting offers a more dynamic and playful viewing experience as one cannot get a full-view of the entire gigantic installation no matter where they stand. It is almost like playing hide and seek with these sewn tentacles.
Yayoi Kusama, Every Day I Pray for Love—Women’s Profiles (2024). All works courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro © YAYOI KUSAMA
A few steps away from that installation sits the much-anticipated Infinity Mirrored Room—Beauty Described by a Spherical Heart. This 2024 work is the latest rendition of Kusama’s popular Infinity Mirrored Room series, echoing two of the artist’s early works from 1966, Infinity Mirrored Room—Love Forever and Narcissus Garden. Tickets to its showcases, such as the one at Tate Modern, were constantly sold out throughout its nearly three-year exhibition period that concluded in April. The work, set in a hexagonal space is also a headliner of the show.
Does this Infinity Mirrored Room live up to the hype? In most cases, standing in any room immersed in the visual illusion of infinite mirrored images can never be called a total disappointment. But what about when  the room is installed with a ceiling of flashing LED lights in fluorescent colors that form a hexagonal pattern, reflecting endlessly across all surfaces from the mirrored walls to the reflective surface of a large sphere sitting right in the middle of the room? It was fun at first when I set foot in the room. Then, it grew uncomfortable as the throbbing lights changed the tone of the room in rapid speed, and I could not stay for longer. Certainly, contemporary art is not meant to make you feel comfortable, but such a unique viewing experience leaves a complex aftertaste that lingers on my mind.
Exhibition goers and their children admire Yayoi Kusama’s paintings on the wall at Victoria Miro, London. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Compared to all these complex installations, the playful paintings hung on the walls of the upper gallery offer a much more straightforward channel to connect with Kusama’s rich inner world. These colorful new paintings from the artist’s most recent ongoing series Every Day I Pray for Love (2021-) are created in the artist’s room, rather than her studio, according to poet, critic, and curator Akira Tatehata, who penned an essay for the show. “Kusama has often described her approach to art as being a quest,” she wrote, “and it would be no exaggeration to say her entire life is now focused on picking up a paintbrush.”
Polka dots are still the dominant motif but these whimsical, childlike paintings—some that even appear to be spontaneous—are the artist’s most direct expressions of and commentaries on life. They may seem repetitive at times, but if one has a will, it is still possible to create extraordinary out of the ordinary. Out of these lines and dots in different colors and patterns, Kusama added some profiles of funny faces which serve as inspirations for the three new bonze sculptures installed in the gallery’s garden. The artist also inscribed texts in Japanese and English on several paintings, prompting Tatehata to wonder if poetry is playing a role in Kusama’s creations now. Together, they form a meaningful body of work.
Yayoi Kusama, Ladder to Heaven (2024). All works courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro © YAYOI KUSAMA
The sculpture Ladder to Heaven (2024), a new rendition of the series of the same name, may well be a metaphor of the role Kusama plays as an artist. The sculpture is simple, a 13-foot ladder with a reflective surface connecting two mirrored circular panels, one on top and one at the bottom. The ladder’s surface is full of hollowed polka dots.
The gallery said this is the first from the series ever created for outdoor installation. The past renditions, such as the one conceived in 2002 that sold for £478,800 ($536,771) at a Sotheby’s London auction in October 2022 according to Artnet Price Database, were made with lighting fibre tube and exhibited indoors only. But this latest version in the garden sees the ladder expanding endlessly through mirrored panels, as if it was an infinity ladder that connects heaven and earth. The artist, who had once incorporated herself into works by applying polka dot stickers on her body in her performances, or the polka-dotted mannequin sculptures featured in Self-Obliteration (1966-74), is like this ladder, acting as a conduit bridging the infinite realms.
“I pray for love everyday,” Kusama inscribed across her paintings. Seeing the smiling faces of curious visitors and young children roaming around the gallery, I am certain that Kusama’s prayers are heard.
The exhibition runs through November 2. It is free but all advance tickets have been fully booked. The gallery will release additional new tickets each Monday. More

With the impending closure of New York’s Rubin Museum of Art on October 6, the institution has made arrangements for its Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, the jewel of the collection, to move to the Brooklyn Museum.
The Rubin, which is dedicated to Himalayan art, announced plans to close its Chelsea flagship back in January. The museum is adopting a decentralized model to become a “museum without walls,” organizing traveling exhibitions and loaning out works from its holdings.
The shrine represents the first such loan, set to go on view at the Brooklyn Museum’s second-floor Arts of Asia galleries for the next six years, starting in June 2025.
“The guiding principle of our borderless future is: more art, accessible to more people, in more places. We are so thrilled that the beating heart of our 17th Street building, the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, will continue to have an exceptional home in New York City at the Brooklyn Museum,” Jorrit Britschgi, the Rubin’s executive director, said in a statement.
An exterior view of the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. Photo by Ben Hide, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art, New York.
The installation features an impressive array of over 100 artworks, ritual objects, and furniture pieces from the 14th to 18th centuries. The display reflects how such pieces would be found in a typical household shrine. Adding to the meditative effect are recordings of prayerful chanting from Tibetan monks and nuns, as well as the smell of incense, which is burned during religious rituals.
“From the very start, the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room has been the most loved space at the Rubin Museum for providing a glimpse into how Tibetan religious art would be displayed and used as a part of the living cultural tradition and practice,” Elena Pakhoutova, the Rubin’s curator of Himalayan art, added.
At the Rubin, curators would rotate in different works from the collection every two years, allowing the shrine to change to represent the four major Tibetan Buddhist religious traditions: Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug. (It also served an important conservation purpose by limiting the amount of time light-sensitive paintings spent on view.) The Rubin curators will also continue to regularly rotate the works in the installation at the Brooklyn Museum.
At the Brooklyn Museum, it will help fill a gap in the collection.

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“We’ve never been as strong in Buddhist art from the Himalayas as we are in some other regions of Asia,” Joan Cummins, a senior curator for Asian art at the Brooklyn Museum, told the New York Times. “This is an opportunity, in a really dramatic way, to beef up our presentation of a really dynamic and beautiful regional art form.”
Husband-and-wife collectors and philanthropists Donald and Shelley Rubin founded their namesake institution in 2004 to showcase their collection. They had bought the museum’s Chelsea building, a former Barneys New York, for $22 million in 1998. With the closing of the Rubin’s physical location, the couple plans to sell the building.
If you can’t make it to see the shrine before the Rubin closes its doors, you can also experience it online, via a two hour streaming video the museum posted on YouTube during lockdown in 2020. More

When most think of Monet, their mind brings forth sunsets on the Seine or water lilies from his beloved flower garden in Giverny in northern France. Sooty scenes of industrial London may be a less obvious reference, but the Impressionist painter became enchanted by the Big Smoke on his first visit in 1870. Decades later, between 1899-1901, Monet returned three times to obsessively repaint the river Thames.
These works are the subject of a landmark exhibition “Monet in London: Views of the Thames,” opening at the Courtauld in London on September 27. It reunites 21 paintings that debuted as part of a larger group of 37 works in Paris in 1904. The artist’s intention to show the “Thames” series in London never came to be until now, some 120 years later.
Among the exhibition’s highlights is a historically significant view of Charing Cross Bridge once owned by Winston Churchill, which has recently been restored to its former glory after decades of the former prime minister’s cigar smoke was cleaned from it.
Of course, the Courtauld couldn’t be a more ideal location, being mere stone’s throw from the artist’s main subjects of Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament, and just a few doors down from his regular haunt: the Savoy Hotel. Contemporary viewers will see first-hand how the other-worldly smog that draped the city of Monet’s day has evolved into a lively cacophony of flashing lights and skyscrapers.
Installation view of “Monet and London: Views of the Thames,” at The Courtauld Gallery in London. Photo: © Fergus Carmichael.
What was it that kept Monet coming back to set up his easel along the same London riverbanks? It wasn’t the city’s stately monuments, which he makes hardly discernible beyond a hazy silhouette. Rather, the artist marveled at the city’s ever-changing atmospheric conditions.
“It has to be said that the climate is so idiosyncratic;” Monet wrote to his wife in 1900. “You wouldn’t believe the amazing effects I have seen in the nearly two months that I have been constantly looking at this river Thames.”
Years later, in 1920, he recalled how London’s “fog gives it its magnificent breadth. Its regular and massive blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.”
Installation view of “Monet and London: Views of the Thames,” at The Courtauld Gallery in London. Photo: © Fergus Carmichael.
Though Monet returned relentlessly to the same locations, the weather and the time of day made each painting wholly individual. Responding to an unpredictable climate, Monet usually stopped and started sketching on several different canvases each day, eventually completing the unfinished works from his studio in Giverny.
“It may feel repetitive to represent the same thing over and over, but for him it wasn’t at all,” explained the Courtauld’s senior curator Karen Serres. “Every time he was seeing something completely different. He realized that to represent a specific site only once was not to do it justice.”
This effect is greatly emphasized when the works are viewed as a group. Even as Monet was working on the “Thames” series, he refused to send a single canvas to his dealer. “Seeing the complete series will be of far greater importance,” he insisted. As such, the Courtauld show presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see together loans from as far afield as Ottawa, Atlanta, Zurich, and Dublin.
Here, Serres offers unique insights into exemplary works from each of Monet’s three preferred locations.
Waterloo Bridge
Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Overcast (1903). Photo: Anders Sune Berg, courtesy of Ordrupgaard, Denmark.
From his suite on the top floor of Savoy, Monet could see a skyline of chimneys emanating steady plumes of smoke. As this pollution came into contact with vapor rising from the river, it enveloped the city in a delicate shroud of fleeting visual effects. For Monet, this presented an exciting challenge. “My practiced eye has found that objects change in appearance in a London fog more and quicker than in any other atmosphere, and the difficulty is to get every change down on canvas,” he told a journalist in 1901.
“This painting shows you all the activity on the river,” said Serres, noting how blobs of color represent horse-drawn double-decker buses making their way across the bridge as barges pass beneath. “Really, this is a reminder that the Thames is a working river and a thoroughfare.”
“Monet has rendered the semi-agitated river with just these very quick brushstrokes that are slightly pinkish ochre,” she added. “That really animates the river.”
Houses of Parliament
Claude Monet, London, Parliament. Sunlight in the fog (1904). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski, © Grand Palais RMN (Musée d’Orsay).
In February 2020, Monet began crossing over to the south bank and painting the Houses of Parliament from a private terrace in St Thomas’s Hospital. The dramatic neo-Gothic architecture cut a striking figure, looming out from the mist. Monet particularly loved when the sun, which he described as “a huge ball of fire,” began to sink behind the rooftops.
Of this painting, Serres notes how “the sun is just piercing through the clouds, illuminating the Thames in the foreground. Of course, Monet as a colorist uses complementary colors very well. The sunlight at dusk is very orange in contrast to the building, which is this purple-y blue.”
Charing Cross Bridge
Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, the Thames (1903). Photo: Alain Basset, © Lyon MBA.
Everyday modern life is depicted in Monet’s studies of Charing Cross Bridge, a railway often populated by a passing train billowing clouds of steam. Serres praised how in these paintings Monet produced a “much more subdued sun that on the river sheds an orange light.” In some of these examples, “the fog has dissolved all the forms,” so that the composition “almost goes towards abstraction. But the more you look, the more you realize the subtlety in the sky and then you see these forms emerging from the fog.”
Another view of Charing Cross Bridge, dated 1902 but actually completed in 1923, was given to Winston Churchill in 1949 by his literary agent. It was accompanied by a note urging the ex-prime minister, at that time leader of the opposition party, to “dissipate the fog that shrouds Westminster,” a reference to the U.K.’s seat of power. It still belongs to Churchill’s country house Chartwell, now a National Trust property.
We can only guess at what Monet might have made of the changing atmospheric conditions to which this particular “Thames” study would continue to be subjected to, and eventually bear the traces of. The composition is primarily yellow, a reflection of Victorian London’s highly sulfurous air, but it has only recently regained the full effects of this sickly pale glow thanks to a recent restoration effort.
Among the sources of airborne grime to have accumulated on the painting’s surface? As well as soot from the fireplace, potentially smoke from Churchill’s ten Cuban cigars a day, National Trust conservator Rebecca Hellen told The Art Newspaper.
“Monet and London: Views of the Thames” is on view at the Courtauld in London until January 19.  More

Pioneering light and space artist James Turrell counts Kanye West, Drake, and Kendall Jenner as fans. His ever-increasing portfolio of Skyspaces dots the globe. On October 14, though, Gagosian will unveil the largest James Turrell show to hit Europe in 25 years at their sprawling Le Bourget gallery, on the outskirts of Paris. Throughout its eight-month run, “At One” will survey the Quaker art star’s transcendental oeuvre, spanning works new and old from various series and mediums, including a few debuts.
James Turrell, Aten Reign (2016). Woodcut etching. © James Turrell. Photo by Peter Baracchi. Courtesy the artist.
Among all of Gagosian’s 19 spaces throughout America, Europe, and Asia, the mega gallery’s spacious single-story concrete exhibition hall in Le Bourget particularly lends itself to spectacles, from Richard Serra’s enveloping steel curves to Takashi Murakami’s oversized visions. For Turrell, the centerpiece of “At One” will be his never-before-seen Ganzfeld, All Clear (2024)—a rounded, all-white immersive pavilion meant to stimulate the ganzfeld effect. Inside, the lack of sensory cues will collapse time and space for viewers, as if “skiing in whiteout conditions, ascending into enveloping clouds while flying, or diving into the void of the deep ocean,” Gagosian’s release reads.
James Turrell, Dhatu (2010) from the artist’s “Ganzfeld” series. © James Turrell. Photo by Mike Bruce. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
“Echoes of such experiences occur when space is dissolved ephemerally in the Ganzfeld piece, All Clear,” the gallery added. “This occurs at timed intervals to prevent the disorientation from becoming overwhelming.”
“At One” will also debut Either Or (2024), a new addition to Turrell’s “Wedgework” series—the apotheosis of his interest in the “thingness” of light (which is, in fact, both a wave, and a particle.) Here, projectors create the illusion of tangible objects like floating cubes and suspended walls. Earlier standouts of this series, such as Shanta, Red (1968)—which Turrell created just two years after deeming light his primary medium—will appear in smaller adjacent galleries.
James Turrell, Rounded Up (2024) from the “Glassworks” series. © James Turrell. Photo by Stathis Mamalakis. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Turrell’s “Glassworks” series of luminous computer-programmed LED panels will line the hallways between all these spaces. (Kendall Jenner has one one such work.) The selection in “At One” will bridge the aughts through today, including six Glassworks made this year that debuted in Turrell’s smaller exhibition with Gagosian Athens in May. This latest body of Glassworks encompasses every shape Turrell has used in the series so far. Aquatints and woodcuts from Turrell’s monumental Aten Reign, which the Guggenheim boldly installed in 2014, will also appear along the exhibition’s inter-gallery passageways.
James Turrell, Lap Desk (1990). © James Turrell. Photo by James Turrell Studio. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
And, because “At One” intends to mark Turrell’s first exhaustive—dare we say “museum quality”—exhibition in Europe in nearly three decades, it wouldn’t be complete without archival materials and some reference to perhaps Turrell’s most famous, formative opus: his still-unfinished land artwork Roden Crater (1976–). Even Kanye West has chipped in to help fund Turrell’s ambitious vision for this Arizona volcano, which has cost him at least two marriages since he began. Blueprints, holograms, models, photographs, a three-dimensional photo viewer, and lap desks related to Turrell’s efforts manifesting Roden Crater will punctuate the show’s disparate components.
“At One” is on view at Gagosian Le Bourget, 26 Av. de l’Europe, Le Bourget, France, October 14, 2024–June 2025. More

Wayne Thiebaud, appropriation artist? That’s the thesis of a forthcoming exhibition at the Legion of Honor, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
“It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such an obsessive thief,” Thiebaud told the New York Times back in 1996.
The California artist, who died at 101 in 2021, is of course best known for his still life paintings of cakes and other sugary confections. But he was also a dedicated student of art history, infusing his works with references to masterpieces of the past—both subtle and overt.
“He constantly, continually refers to himself as a thief—and yet no one has completely taken him at his word!” curator Timothy Anglin Burgard told me.
In putting together the show, he found dozens of examples of paintings where Thiebaud was riffing on the composition of works from the past.
Wayne Thiebaud, Tapestry Skirt (1976, reworked 1982, 2003). ©Wayne Thiebaud Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
There’s Tapestry Skirt, a 1976 portrait of a woman seated in profile in a colorful skirt that mirrors James McNeill Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871). The splayed out figure in Thiebaud’s Supine Woman (1963) recalls The Dead Toreador (1864–65) by Édouard Manet. And an array of tasty-looking parfaits in 1962’s Confections mimics the jars in a 1941 Giorgio Morandi Still Life.
Thiebaud would also look to abstract canvases, spotlighting a composition’s similarities with figurative objects. After visiting his hero Franz Kline in New York early in his career, for instance, Thiebaud returned to U.C. Davis in California and painted the gestural looking Electric Chair (1957). More

The U.K.’s annual Turner Prize exhibition opens at Tate Britain in London on September 25, presenting all four nominated artists to the public before a winner is announced on December 3. If a thematic thread can be woven through the suite of exhibitions by Pio Abad, Jasleen Kaur, Delaine Le Bas, and Claudette Johnson, it must be how each reflects on the ways in which the histories we inherit continue to inform our lives.
Founded in 1984, the Turner Prize once thrived on controversy, stirring up heated debate about the nature of contemporary art while spotlighting future titans like Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, and Steven McQueen. Now in its 40th year, the award is a more low-key affair but continues to recognize important achievements by artists either born or working in Britain.
The winner will receive £25,000 ($31,000), with a further £10,000 ($12,500) for each runner-up. Last year the award went to Jesse Darling.
Installation view of Claudette Johnson, Protection (2024) and Friends in Green + Red on Yellow (2023) in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
The standout nominee this year is portrait painter Claudette Johnson, who was selected for two exhibitions from 2023: “Presence” at the Courtauld Gallery in London and “Drawn Out” at Ortuzar Projects in New York. The 64 year old artist emerged as part of the BLK Art Group in Wolverhampton in the 1980s but has only recently gained widespread renown after taking a multi-decade break from her practice.
In Friends in Green + Red on Yellow (2023), Johnson captures a charming sense of quiet camaraderie between her two sons. A new work, Protection (2024), is the latest of a series of self-portraits like Figure with Figurine (2019) that reference Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) in their arrangement and use of space. Rather than othering West African sculptures and masks, however, Johnson explores her own relationship to these objects as a Black British woman.
Installation view of Jasleen Kaur’s presentation in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
Nominated for “Alter Altar” at Tramway in Glasgow, Jasleen Kaur’s show layers found material to create an impressively evocative and fondly humorous record of her experiences growing up in Scotland as the daughter of Indian parents. The most literal example is an untitled series of salvaged family photographs that have been encased in resin stained the lurid orange of Irn Bru, the quintessential Scottish soda, and inlaid with torn scraps of chapati bread.
Which other objects store cultural memory? Among the everyday detritus on view is an open packet of soft mints, turmeric-stained fake nails, balls of hair, and old flyers for the Indian Workers Union. An unexpected poignance is introduced by the central installation of a vintage Red Ford Mk3 Escort Cabriolet XR3i which Kaur said represents her “dad’s first car and his migrant desires.” These elements are all viewed within the context of sound work Yearnings, featuring the artist’s own vocals in the style of the Muslim Rababi tradition, the practice of which she sees as an act of political resistance.
Installation view of Pio Abad’s presentation in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
If the gallery dedicated to Pio Abad has the unmistakeable atmosphere of a museum, that’s intentional. Nominated for “To Those Sitting in Darkness” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Filipino-born artist has delved into the legacy of the many cultural artifacts that have been locked away in the store rooms of Western museums or flagrantly mislabelled for decades.
Abad’s meticulously researched artworks take these “icons of loss, of personal grief, of colonial grief,” out of the darkness and revisit long unexamined histories. In one example, a 1692 etching advertises the chance to view Giolo, a Filipino man who bought as a slave and trafficked to England, where he was put on display as a curiosity before he died of smallpox. It is displayed beside Abad’s Giolo’s Lament (2023), a series of laser engravings on pink marble that in sequence depict the man’s arm reaching out.
“Giolo is at once monument an flesh, etching the forgotten man into permanence but also reminding us of his fragile humanity,” said Abad.
Installation view of Delaine Le Bas’s presentation in “Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain from September 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025. Photo: Josh Croll, © Tate Photography.
A clear conceptual underpinning for the immersive installation by Delaine Le Bas is more elusive than it is with the other three artists, though the work apparently delves into the artist’s Roma heritage. She was selected by the judges for the show “Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/ A New Life Is Beginning,” at Secession in Vienna. The constructions of loose fabric decorated with colorful swathes of paint and fantastical figures will certainly be fun for attendees to walk through, but on their way out they are met with an ominous maxim scrawled in blood red: “know thyself.”
“Turner Prize 2024” is on view at Tate Britain through February 16, 2025. More

Next fall, visiting the Design Museum in London will be like stepping aboard The Darjeeling Limited, when the institution hosts Wes Anderson’s first museum showcase.
The 55 year old director, who was born in Texas to an archaeologist and an advertising professional, has already staged several shows celebrating his visionary film career, which began with cult classics like Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998) before producing award-winners like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). Anderson himself, however, just won his first Oscar earlier this year, when his adaption of Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar scored a nod for best live-action short film. Now, it seems, Anderson is ready to crack open his archives.
The taut innocence and angst of Anderson’s summer camp tale Moonrise Kingdom (2012) perhaps best embodies his vibrantly repressed twee aesthetic, which has transcended film to become an outright meme around whimsy. Anderson has woven in and out of fine art while honing that aesthetic. During work on The French Dispatch (2021), even he employed actual painters to produce the art of his imprisoned Benicio del Toro, star of the film’s second vignette.
Interior of the Design Museum © Rob Harris for the Design Museum. Courtesy of the Design Museum.
Anderson already has curatorial experience under his belt, too. In 2018, for instance, he and his wife Juman Malouf took over Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum amidst the institution’s ongoing experiment inviting contemporary creatives like Ed Ruscha to reinterpret their collection. Anderson signed off on a presentation of puppets from The Isle of Dogs (2018) that same year, and authorized a pop up show of the delightfully detailed sets from Asteroid City (2023) after its release. Both spectacles took shape on London’s Strand.
For his comprehensive retrospective, though, the auteur is working with American Empirical Pictures, la Cinémathèque française, and the Design Museum to offer props, costumes, and behind-the-scenes ephemera straight from his personal collection.
“Each Wes Anderson picture plunges the viewer into a world with its own codes, motifs, references, and sumptuous and instantly recognizable sets and costumes,” the press materials read. “Visitors have the opportunity to delve into the art of his complete filmography, examining his inspirations, homages, and the meticulous craftsmanship that define his work.”
In addition to the Anderson show, the museum has also announced a glitzy homage to the iconic London club Blitz, as well as a group show of art, architecture, and technology around the “more than human” movement.
In the meantime, the public is awaiting Anderson’s 12th film, The Phoenician Scheme, which will mark Michael Cera’s first outing with Anderson. Filming has wrapped, and the movie should hit theaters within the next two years—perhaps in time to align with “Wes Anderson” at the Design Museum.
“Wes Anderson: The Exhibition” will be on view at the Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High St, London, the U.K., November 21, 2025–May 4. 2026. More