designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this february

February exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

 

February brings together exhibitions that examine how meaning is constructed through material, memory, and spatial experience. Ceramic works by Nicole Cherubini emphasize motifs of collage at Friedman Benda in New York, while the Berlin show, Vital Architecture: Between Idealism and Reality, turns attention to the built environment, tracing how architectural thinking negotiates environmental conditions and history through research-driven practice.

 

Questions of time, inheritance, and transformation run through the month. In Denmark, Memoryscapes – Archaeology of the Future looks to excavation as both method and metaphor, considering how past structures inform future imaginaries, while Milan’s Over, under and in between focuses on spatial thresholds and transitional states. 

 

Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and listings on our dedicated events guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them around the globe.

 

Vital Architecture: Between Idealism and Reality

 

Vital Architecture presents selected projects by Atelier Li Xinggang that examine relationships between built form, landscape, and lived experience in contemporary China. Shown at Aedes Architecture Forum, the exhibition frames architecture as a mediating practice shaped by environmental conditions, historical layers, and everyday use, drawing on long-term research into Chinese cities, gardens, and construction traditions.

 

Models, sketches, photographs, films, and installations trace design thinking from research through occupation, emphasizing spatial continuity between structure and context. Display elements made from reused transport crates echo a cyclical approach to making, where building, environment, and human presence are understood as interconnected parts of a shared milieu.

 

name: Vital Architecture: Between Idealism and Reality
architect: Atelier Li Xinggang
museum: Aedes Architectural Forum
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: February 7th — March 18th, 2026

National Sliding Center Yanqing at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics competition venue. © Atelier Li Xinggang

 

 

sarah morris: transactional authority

 

Sarah Morris, born in 1970, lives and works in New York and has developed a practice since the 1990s that centers on geometric abstraction shaped by diagrammatic grids. Her work spans painting and video, reflecting sustained interests in urban form, systems, and architectural typologies.

 

Closely associated with the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Morris became the first artist added to its collection in Japan, which includes large-scale paintings and the video Sakura. Sarah Morris: Trading Power marks her first large-scale solo exhibition in the country, presenting paintings, video works, drawings, a site-specific mural, and Sakura, filmed in the Kansai region in 2015.

 

name: Sarah Morris: Transactional Authority
artist: Sarah Morris
museum: Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka
location: Osaka, Japan
dates: January 31st, 2025 — April 5th, 2026

White Cube, courtesy the artist and White Cube. photo by Tom Powel Imaging

 

 

hotel roma

 

Nicole Cherubini presents Hotel Roma at Friedman Benda‘s New York gallery, an exhibition of ceramic works that emphasize motifs of collage. Installed across the gallery, the sculptures move between monumentality and intimacy with their large-scale presence and dense symbolic detailing.

 

Cherubini is recognized for building by hand in clay, and that commitment to direct contact remains central here. Terracotta and white earthenware carry layered glazes in turquoise, amber, emerald, and metallic luster, applied with an eye toward weight and tempo. The surfaces feel worked over time, and show evidence of the artist’s hand that stays visible even at a distance.

 

name: Nicole Cherubini: Hotel Roma
artist: Nicole Cherubini
gallery: Friedman Benda
location: New York, USA
dates: January 16th — February 21st, 2026

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda. image © Pierre Le Hors

 

 

noguchi’s new york

 

In 1922, Isamu Noguchi arrived in New York, a city that remained central to his life and work despite long periods abroad. Many of his best-known sculptures were made there, alongside proposals and ideas shaped by the city’s shifting cultural and political conditions.

 

The exhibition considers how New York informed Noguchi’s thinking and materials, while also tracing his efforts to shape public space through projects for communal use, several of which faced resistance from city leadership, including Robert Moses. Organized on the 40th anniversary of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, the presentation also reflects on the museum as a lasting contribution to the city.

 

name: Noguchi’s New York
artist: Isamu Noguchi
museum: The Noguchi Museum
location: New York, USA
dates: February 4th — September 13th, 2026

Isamu Noguchi at the debut of Unidentified Object, at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York, 1979. Photo: Donna Svennevik. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 04144. © INFGM / ARS

 

 

Memoryscapes – Archaeology of the Future

 

Memoryscapes, the second exhibition in the Architecture Connecting series at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, presents work by DnA_Design and Architecture and ATTA – Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects. Drawing from anthropology, archaeology, and geology, the exhibition examines how architectural practice engages with memory, tradition, and place as active forces in contemporary design.

 

Projects by Xu Tiantian and Tsuyoshi Tane trace site-based research through models, installations, and archival material, addressing ruins, landscapes, and production environments as sources of spatial meaning. Supported by Realdania, the exhibition situates architectural work within broader human narratives, emphasizing continuity between inherited knowledge and future spatial imagination.

 

name: Memoryscapes – Archaeology of the Future
architects: DnA_Design, ATTA – Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects
museum: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
location: Humlebæk, Denmark
dates: January 22nd — May 17th, 2026

image courtesy Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

 

 

art of noise

 

Art of Noise opens at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, adapted from an earlier presentation organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition examines the role of design in shaping everyday encounters with music across the past century, with more than 300 works installed throughout the third-floor galleries.

 

A handmade audio environment by Devon Turnbull occupies the first floor, while a choir installation by teenage engineering appears alongside objects ranging from sound technologies to graphic materials tied to music culture. Together these elements trace shifting relationships between sound, technology, and listening within a New York context.

 

name: Art of Noise
museum: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
location: New York, USA
dates: February 13th — August 16th, 2026

 

david lynch

 

Pace Gallery presents work by David Lynch in Berlin. The presentation spans multiple media and includes photographs made in the city, set ahead of a larger exhibition planned for fall 2026 in Los Angeles.

 

Trained as a painter in the late 1960s, the late filmmaker approached images through material experiment, a trajectory that began with Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) and continues across painting and film, with sculpture. Photographs taken at abandoned industrial sites in Berlin in 1999 appear alongside this work, extending an exhibition history that moves from early gallery presentations to major museum surveys.

 

name: David Lynch
artist: David Lynch
museum: Pace Gallery
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: January 29th — March 29th, 2026

David Lynch, portrait, courtesy Pace Gallery

 

 

koo jeon a: LAND OF OUSSS [ GRAVITTA ]

 

KOO JEONG A works with restrained gestures that draw attention to peripheral experiences shaped by sound, scent, and subtle shifts in perception. At Kunsthaus Bregenz, the scale of the building supports an approach where minimal elements carry presence and where invented and found conditions overlap without fixed boundaries.

 

For the ground floor, the artist develops a curving floor object derived from a skatepark, its phosphorescent surface altering movement and light in dialogue with the architecture of Peter Zumthor. Upper floors extend this inquiry through magnetic wall elements, an olfactory environment developed from a perfume created with NONFICTION, and a film installation surrounded by fluorescent forms, each addressing forces sensed beyond direct visibility.

 

name: KOO JEON A: LAND OF OUSSS [ GRAVITTA ]
artist: Koo Jeon A
museum: Kunsthaus Bregenz
location: Bregenz, Austria
dates: January 21st — May 25th, 2026

 

 

tracey Emin: a second life

 

This exhibition surveys four decades of work by Tracey Emin, bringing together widely recognized pieces with works shown for the first time. Across painting, video, textiles, neon, writing, sculpture, and installation, her practice draws on lived experience, with the body serving as a recurring site for intimacy, vulnerability, and endurance.

 

Emerging into public attention during the 1990s, Emin became closely associated with debates around authorship, exposure, and the place of autobiography in art. The presentation situates her recent paintings within a longer trajectory, showing how personal history, memory, and emotion continue to inform her work over time.

 

name: Tracey Emin: A Second Life
artist: Tracey Emin
museum: Tate Modern
location: London, UK
dates: February 27th — August 31st, 2026

Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998 © Tracey Emin. photo courtesy The Saatchi Gallery, London / photograph by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

 

 

in-play. Design for Sport

 

IN-PLAY. Design for Sport takes place as part of the Cultural Olympiad of Milano Cortina 2026. Framed by the Olympic Charter’s view of sport as a fundamental human right, the exhibition examines sports practice as a shared social space shaped through design.

 

The presentation looks at shifts in contemporary culture, where design reflects changing ideas around competition and performance. Through projects, stories, data, and biomedical research, the exhibition considers how these fields inform current understandings of the sporting body and its environments.

 

name: IN-PLAY. Design for Sport
museum: ADI Design Museum
location: Milan, Italy
dates: February 3rd — April 6th, 2026

image courtesy ADI Design Museum

 

 

Over, under and in between

 

Mona Hatoum brings a constellation of hand-blown glass spheres and a motorized metal tower sculpture to her exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan. Named ‘Over, under, and in between,’ the site-specific project is divided into three parts comprising a web, a map, and a grid.

 

These installations find a temporary home in the reactivated Cisterna building, once located on Fondazione Prada’s compound and which housed the silos and tanks of a former alcohol distillery. The space accommodates the height, volume, and shape of the three large-scale installations, enveloping the viewers in a physical spatial experience.

 

name: Over, under and in between
artist: Mona Hatoum
museum: Fondazione Prada
location: Milan, Italy
dates: January 29th — November 9th, 2026

 

Philippe Starck, The spirit of the forest

 

Philippe Starck began integrating references to nature into his work early on, initially through form and imagery. Projects from the mid 1990s such as Maison Starck and the Bo Boolo collection for 3 Suisses marked a shift from stylistic evocation toward a more direct engagement with ideas of shared responsibility and everyday use.

 

Maison Starck proposed an accessible domestic model shaped by childhood memory and spatial quality, later gaining recognition through its boxed presentation. With Bo Boolo, Starck introduced untreated tree trunks into interior furniture and worked with the National Forestry Office to foreground material origin, reinforcing an ongoing concern with environmental awareness and the social role of design.

 

name: Philippe Starck, The spirit of the forest
artist: Philippe Starck
museum: Galerie Ketabi Bouret
location: Paris, France
dates: January 30th — February 28th, 2026

image courtesy Galerie Ketabi Bouret

 

 

Louise Bourgeois – Echo of the Morning

 

In the final years of her life, Louise Bourgeois produced a group of gouaches centered on an intimate iconography of the couple, family life, and floral forms. These works reflect sustained attention to bodily experience and personal memory through a pared, direct visual language.

 

Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, the exhibition places the gouaches alongside sculptures from across Bourgeois’ career that engage related formal and thematic concerns. It marks her first solo presentation in Mid Norway and is accompanied by a publication with new scholarly writing.

 

name: Louise Bourgeois – Echo of the Morning
artist: Louise Bourgeois
museum: PoMo
location: Trondheim, Norway
dates: February 5th — May 31st, 2026

 

Belongings: Affection as a Design Strategy

 

Belongings: Affection as a Design Strategy examines emotional attachment to objects as a factor in longer use and care. The exhibition frames design as a relationship that shapes everyday behavior and influences how objects are maintained over time.

 

Visitors are invited to bring a personal object and engage with it through an AI-mediated exchange that assigns voice and character. These encounters feed into a digital archive that gathers personal narratives, forming a shared record of relationships between people and things and offering a lens on future design culture shaped by care and affection.

 

name: Belongings: Affection as a Design Strategy
museum: Design Museum Denmark
location: Copenhagen, Denmark
dates: January 25th — May 31st, 2026

image courtesy Design Museum Denmark

 

 

Lynda Benglis. Encounters: Giacometti

 

Works by Lynda Benglis and Alberto Giacometti are shown together for the first time in this exhibition, which forms the third chapter of Encounters: Giacometti. Benglis presents previously unseen works alongside a selection of Giacometti’s sculptures, creating a dialogue across different generations of sculptural practice.

 

Active since the 1960s, Benglis is known for expressive forms that test the limits of material and gesture, while Giacometti’s elongated figures reshaped approaches to the human body in twentieth-century sculpture. The exhibition situates their works in proximity to explore shared concerns around form, presence, and physical experience.

 

name: Lynda Benglis. Encounters: Giacometti
artist: Lynda Benglis
museum: Barbican Centre
location: London, UK
dates: February 12th — May 31st, 2026

Lynda Benglis, portrait. image © Jonathan Pow

 

 

Leonora Carrington

 

Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 in Lancashire and shaped her life and work through sustained movement across places and inner states. From Florence and Paris to the south of France, Spain, and later Mexico, her trajectory informed an artistic language shaped by surrealism, mythology, and esoteric thought.

 

The exhibition presents her practice through a chronological and thematic lens, tracing early encounters with Italian art, an engagement with Renaissance imagery, Celtic and post-Victorian references, and involvement with surrealist circles in France. Her work brings human and animal forms into dialogue and reflects a lifelong pursuit of transformation, self-knowledge, and symbolic meaning.

 

name: Leonora Carrington
artist: Leonora Carrington
museum: Musée du Luxembourg
location: Paris, France
dates: February 18th — July 19th, 2026

 

Kiefer. The Women Alchemists

 

Kiefer. The Women Alchemists presents a site-specific project by Anselm Kiefer at Palazzo Reale in Milan. Conceived for the Sala delle Cariatidi, the exhibition reflects on history, painting, and female memory, and forms part of the cultural program connected to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics.

 

The installation comprises thirty-eight large-scale canvases created in dialogue with the hall’s war-scarred interior, marked by damage from the 1943 bombing. The Sala delle Cariatidi carries a layered exhibition history, including the presentation of Guernica in 1953, and continues to serve as a charged setting for contemporary artistic interventions.

 

name: Kiefer. The Women Alchemists
artist: Anselm Kiefer
museum: Palazzo Reale Milano
location: Milan, Italy
dates: February 7th — September 27th, 2026

Anselm Kiefer, Sophie Brahe, 2025. photo: Nina Slavcheva © Anselm Kiefer

 

 

Tino Sehgal

 

The Zapopan Art Museum presents the first solo exhibition in Mexico by Tino Sehgal, whose practice centers on constructed situations shaped through human interaction. At EstaciónMAZ, variations of Kiss appear from November 29th, staging a slow, intimate choreography between two dancers that references poses associated with Western art history.

 

From January 31st, 2026, These Associations takes place along the pedestrian route connecting the Zapopan Art Museum and EstaciónMAZ. The work activates the walkway through a shifting sequence of encounters adapted for Guadalajara, extending a project previously realized in exhibition spaces such as Tate Modern and Palais de Tokyo.

 

name: Tino Sehgal
artist: Tino Sehgal
museum: Museo de Arte de Zapopan
location: Jalisco, Mexico
dates: January 31st — March 1st, 2026

Tino Sehgal, portrait, image courtesy Zapopan Art Museum

 

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