From London to Tokyo, via Boston, Paris, Venice or New York, meet renowned artists exhibited in the four corners of the world. Contemporary, impressionist or classical art, there is something for everyone. Here are eleven exhibitions not to be missed in 2023.
1. “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now” at the M + Museum (Hong Kong), from November 12, 2022 to May 14, 2023
Yayoi Kusama has become a global cultural icon of the 21st century over the past seven decades. With a forward-thinking vision, she has refined a singular personal aesthetic and a fundamental philosophy of life. Kusama’s work captivates millions by offering glimpses of limitless space and reflections on natural cycles of regeneration. Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now tells the story of the artist and her work, highlighting her desire for interconnectedness and the profound questions about existence that drive her creative explorations. The largest retrospective of the artist’s work in Asia outside of Japan, the exhibition features more than 200 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, and archival materials, from her teenage years in World War II to the present.
2. “Egon Schiele: Young Genius in Vienna 1900” at the Leopold Museum (Tokyo), January 26 – April 9, 2023
Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was one of Vienna’s most remarkable painters of the late 19th century. Throughout his short life of 28 years, Schiele practiced an art that undresses dark and nervous thoughts. His paintings are imbued with an assumed, sometimes disturbing sexual desire and a close connection to the body. This exhibition, drawn largely from the collection of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, presents Schiele’s life, work, and artistic milieu, as well as works by other artists of fin de siècle Vienna.
3. “Vermeer” at the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), from February 10 to June 4, 2023
The work of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is best known for his subtle, quiet, introverted interior scenes, his unprecedented use of bright, colorful light, and his oh-so-realistic illusionism. Having lived and worked in Delft, Vermeer left a rare oeuvre of only about 35 paintings. The exhibition includes masterpieces such as The Girl with the Pearl, The Geographer, Woman Writing a Letter and Her Maid, and Woman with Scales. The Rijksmuseum also displays paintings that have never been seen in the Netherlands before, such as the recently restored Reading Girl at the Window from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.
4. “After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art” at the National Gallery (London), March 25 to August 13, 2023
This exhibition looks at the artists who broke with established tradition and laid the foundation for the art of the 20th and 21st centuries. It presents the achievements of three giants of the era: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin and their influences on younger generations of French artists and wider circles of artists across Europe, in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, and Vienna. With more than a hundred works by artists ranging from Klimt to Kokoschka, including Matisse, Picasso, Rodin and Camille Claudel, the exhibition follows the creation of a new modern art, free of all convention, through various successive movements: expressionism, cubism and abstraction. Important loans have been granted to the exhibition by institutions and private collections from around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museu nacional d’arte de Catalunya in Barcelona.
5. “Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence” at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston), March 26-July 16, 2023
This major exhibition of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) explores in detail his impact on other artists during his lifetime and beyond. Throughout a career spanning more than 70 years, Hokusai experimented with a wide range of styles and subjects, producing landscapes such as The Great Wave and Red Fuji (both ca. 1830-31) as well as nature studies and depictions of women, heroes, and monsters. The exhibition brings together more than 90 woodcuts, paintings, and illustrated books by Hokusai and over 200 works by his teachers, students, rivals, and admirers. Works by his daughter Katsushika Ōi, his contemporaries, 19th-century French Japonists, and modern and contemporary artists demonstrate Hokusai’s influence across time and space.
6. “Manet/Degas”, from March 28 to July 23, 2023 at the Musée d’Orsay (Paris), and from September 2023 to January 2024 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Edgar Degas (1834-1917) were both key players in the new painting of the 1860s-80s. This exhibition, which brings the two painters together in the light of their contrasts, forces us to take a new look at their real complicity. It shows the heterogeneous and conflicting aspects of pictorial modernity and reveals the value of Degas’s collection, where Manet took a larger place after his death. The exhibition reveals what differentiates or opposes them before and after the birth of Impressionism.
7. “Basquiat x Warhol, à quatre mains” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), from April 5 to August 28, 2023
From 1984 to 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987) produced approximately 160 paintings together, “four hands”, some of which were among the greatest of their respective careers. “Basquiat x Warhol, Four Hands”, the largest exhibition ever devoted to this singular work, features three hundred works and documents, including eighty jointly signed paintings. Individual works by each artist will also be on view, as well as a body of work by New York downtown artists from the 1980s.
8. “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: His Final Months”, from May 12 to September 3, 2023 at the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam), and from September 25, 2023 to January 28, 2024 at the Musée d’Orsay (Paris)
The Musée Van Gogh and the Musée d’Orsay are celebrating the 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s death in 1853 with a major exhibition on the last months of the artist’s life that he spent in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise. During these months, Van Gogh was extremely productive and produced many of his most famous masterpieces, including Wheat Field with Crows and Tree Roots. By this time, feelings of failure, loneliness, and melancholy had taken over, but Van Gogh nonetheless continued to produce extremely powerful works. A remarkable opportunity to see more than 50 paintings and 20 drawings and sketches by Vincent van Gogh that have never been exhibited together before.
9. “Marina Abramović” at the Royal Academy of Art (London), from September 23 to December 10, 2023
Marina Abramović has been hailed worldwide for decades as a pioneer of performance art, testing the limits of her own physical and mental endurance in her work. In her first major exhibition in the United Kingdom spanning her 50-year career, Abramović invites visitors into the intense, physical encounter for which she is known. In 2010, works such as The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, pushed viewers to question their own emotions as they sat in silence facing the artist.
10. “Marcel Duchamp e la seduzione della copia” at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice), from October 14, 2023 to March 18, 2024
Throughout his work, Marcel Duchamp sought to challenge the traditional hierarchy between original and copy. By reproducing his works in different media, in varying sizes and in limited editions, Duchamp radically redefined what constitutes a work of art and, by extension, the identity of the artist himself. The focus of the exhibition is Box in a Suitcase (1935-41), a masterpiece that is now part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The exhibition features important loans from prestigious Italian and American museums as well as from various private collections, including some thirty works from a private Venetian collection.
11. “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., November 19, 2023 – March 31, 2024
Mark Rothko is famous for his huge abstract paintings on canvas, but few people know that he also created more than 1,000 paintings on paper during his career. He considered them finished paintings in their own right. Through his luminous art, Rothko sought to express joy, despair, ecstasy and tragedy. These remarkable works challenge our expectations of what “counts” as painting, as well as preconceived notions about Rothko and his career. Bringing together more than 100 of these paintings on paper, many of which are presented for the first time, this exhibition brings together the early figurative and surrealist subjects for which Rothko is best known.
Read also > ART: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL EXHIBITIONS OF THE FALL
Featured photo : ©Fondation Louis Vuitton
