One Art Space in Tribeca presented "Thread of Memory – The Language of Healing," a solo exhibition by Korean artist Sung Min Jang, held from November 18–25, 2025. The show featured Jang's acrylic paintings that combine painterly surfaces with textile motifs and symbolic threads, exploring themes of memory, trauma, and renewal. A private VIP reception took place on November 20.
Sotheby's held three back-to-back evening sales in New York on November 20, achieving a combined total of $252.9 million ($304.5 million with fees). The highlight was Frida Kahlo's self-portrait *El sueño (La cama)* (1940), which sold for $54.6 million with fees, setting a new auction record for the artist, for a Latin American artist, and for a female artist. The sales included 13 lots from the estate of Cindy and Jay Pritzker, a group of Surrealist works from an unnamed collection, and a multiple-owner Modern art sale featuring collections from the Bucksbaum family and Geri Brawerman.
Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex, is staging the first full survey of British painter William Nicholson (1872-1949) in 25 years, running from 22 November 2025 to 10 May 2026. The exhibition aims to present Nicholson's diverse output—including posters made with the Beggarstaff Brothers, woodcuts, book illustrations, theatre costumes, portraits, still lifes, and landscapes—as an integrated whole, rather than isolating individual media as past shows have done.
Berlin's Gemäldegalerie has unveiled Vittore Carpaccio's "The Preparation of Christ's Tomb" (circa 1505-20) after a four-year restoration that removed decades of dirt and discolored varnish. The cleaned painting reveals new subtleties, including a striking sky of bright blue and stubborn grey clouds, and will be the centerpiece of a small exhibition titled "Tribute to Vittore Carpaccio" running from November 20 to April 6, 2026. The restoration was led by recently retired head conservator Babette Hartwieg, who also reinvestigated a false Mantegna signature that had misled earlier attributions.
The Portland Art Museum (PAM) will unveil a $116 million expansion and renovation on November 20, the largest single-organization arts investment in Oregon history. The centerpiece is the new Mark Rothko Pavilion, a multi-story glass structure designed by Hennebery Eddy Architects and Vinci Hamp Architects, which bridges the museum's 1932 building with a former Masonic Temple. The project adds 100,000 square feet of renovated space, including new plazas with sculptures by Ugo Rondinone, Roy Lichtenstein, Anthony Caro, and Clement Meadmore. The Rothko family is lending major paintings from their private collection for display over two decades, with a promised gift at the end of that period, and made a six-figure donation to the museum's $146 million capital campaign.
Agustín Arteaga, the new Mort and Marcy Friedman director and CEO of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, discusses his first months on the job, including extensive meetings with staff, board members, and community stakeholders. Arteaga, who previously led the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, and the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, emphasizes the need to balance fundraising, donor relations, educational programming, and political transparency while maintaining the museum's relevance as the oldest art museum in the American West.
Jenny Saville will present previously unseen works in Venice next year as part of a major exhibition at the International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro, running from 28 March to 22 November 2026. The show will feature around 30 works from the last 30 years, including a new cycle created in homage to the lagoon city, and coincides with the 61st Venice Biennale (9 May-22 November 2026). The exhibition draws from private and public collections, placing Saville's monumental canvases in dialogue with the great painters of Venice's artistic heritage.
The Charleston museum in Firle, East Sussex, will mount a major solo exhibition of paintings by Roger Fry (1866-1934) from 15 November 2025 to 15 March 2026. Fry, a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, was a polymath who introduced Post-Impressionists like Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin to British and American audiences, co-founded the Omega Workshops and the Burlington Magazine, taught at Cambridge, and curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show brings together nearly 80 works, over 60 from private collections, including portraits of friends like E.M. Forster and Vanessa Bell, and landscapes that reveal his experimental range from Gauguin-esque outlines to Cubism.
This article presents a curated list of the top 10 exhibitions to see around the world in November, highlighting key shows such as 'Project a Black Planet' at MACBA, which explores Pan-Africanism through art and culture, Sylvie Fleury's installation 'She-Devils On Wheels Headquarters' in New York, and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's survey at Jameel Arts Centre. Other featured exhibitions include Karolina Jabłońska's paintings of pickled beets and severed limbs, among others, each offering unique perspectives on identity, gender, and mortality.
The second edition of Manar Abu Dhabi, a public art initiative focused on light-based works, will launch on 1 November 2025, featuring 23 installations across four locations including Jubail Island and Al Ain. High-profile street artist KAWS will present a large-scale work showing his signature COMPANION figure reclining while lifting a lit moon. Other participating artists include Emirati sculptor Shaikha Al Mazrou, Dutch duo DRIFT, Maitha Hamdan, Ammar Al Attar, and Hamburg-based Christian Brinkmann, who will debut an interactive audio-visual piece called Floral Resonance.
The Portland Art Museum will celebrate the opening of its major expansion and renovation with four days of free admission and activities from November 20 to 23, 2025. The centerpiece is the new Mark Rothko Pavilion, a nearly 22,000-square-foot transparent entrance that connects the museum's two campus buildings, adding nearly 100,000 square feet of new or upgraded public and gallery space. The transformed museum features a complete reinstallation of its collection with nearly 300 major new acquisitions by artists including Marie Watt, Simone Leigh, and Carrie Mae Weems, alongside thematic displays that emphasize place, community, and identity. Free tickets are available for reservation starting November 1, and the museum will also expand its regular hours beginning November 25.
Christie's will hold a live auction titled 'SILSILA: Highlights from the Dalloul Collection including Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art' on 6 November 2025 at King Street, London, with an online sale running from 28 October to 11 November. The evening sale features 20 exceptional works from the esteemed Dalloul Collection in Beirut, Lebanon, led by masterpieces from artists such as Mohamed Melehi, Mahmoud Saïd, Dia Al-Azzawi, Marwan, Huguette Caland, Paul Guiragossian, Samia Halaby, and Kamal Boullata. A preview will be held at Christie's Dubai from 3-10 October, showcasing highlights including Guiragossian's 'Automne (Autumn)', El Rayess's 'Soukhour Meyrouba', and Said's 'La colline de Mekarzel'.
The Delaware Art Museum (DelArt) will present "Imprinted: Illustrating Race," an exhibition assembled by the Norman Rockwell Museum and co-curated by Robyn Phillips-Pendleton of the University of Delaware. Opening October 18, 2025, the show features over 200 works originally commissioned for newspapers, magazines, books, trade cards, posters, packaging, and advertising, tracing how illustration reflected and shaped perceptions of race in the United States from the 19th century onward. It places Norman Rockwell’s Civil Rights–era images alongside works by artists such as Faith Ringgold, Emory Douglas, Howard Pyle, and Loveis Wise, highlighting both harmful racial stereotypes and the efforts of artists and publishers who used illustration to challenge those narratives.
The Charleston Trust has launched a £250,000 fundraising campaign called Studio 100 to urgently repair a century-old studio at Charleston in Firle, East Sussex. The studio, originally built in a chicken shed in 1925 by artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry, was intended as a temporary space but has become a globally significant site. The total project cost is about £470,000, with support already secured from Arts Council England. Repairs will focus on the roof, windows, doors, and fragile painted surfaces, along with installing climate control systems, scheduled from November 2026 to April 2027.
The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) has appointed Brian Ferriso, the longtime director of the Portland Art Museum (PAM), as its next director. Ferriso will oversee the inauguration of PAM's $111 million expansion on November 20 before starting his new role in Dallas on December 1. He succeeds Agustín Arteaga, who left the DMA last spring to lead the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Ferriso brings nearly two decades of experience at PAM, where he increased the endowment by $40 million, doubled curatorial staff, eliminated $7 million in debt, and led a $140 million fundraising campaign for the museum's expansion and endowment.
Berlin's Meyer Riegger and Parisian Galerie Jocelyn Wolff will open a joint gallery in Seoul's Hannam-dong district on 2 September 2025, marking their first permanent Asian outpost. The new space, named Meyer Riegger Wolff and led by director Gaia Musi, will represent artists from both galleries including Clemens von Wedemeyer, Miriam Cahn, and Marcel Duchamp. The inaugural exhibition, "Heute Nacht geträumt (Dreamed Last Night)" (2 September–7 November 2025), will explore drawing across four centuries in a salon-style format.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and its Art Bridges Foundation have acquired 90 contemporary works by Indigenous artists from the John and Susan Horseman Collection. Art Bridges will receive 81 works for long-term loans across the U.S., while nine pieces will join Crystal Bridges' permanent collection. Artists include Kent Monkman, George Morrison, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Cannupa Hanska Luger. The acquisition is part of a broader strategy to expand the museum's holdings in Indigenous and craft art, with works set to debut in exhibitions starting November 2024.
Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation have announced the 2025–26 edition of 'Re:assemblages', a programme focused on African and Afro-diasporic archives as sites for artistic inquiry and decolonial practice. Curated by Naima Hassan with contributions from Maryam Kazeem, Ann Marie Peña, and Jonn Gale, the initiative includes international convenings, symposia, fellowships, and micro-publications, anchored by a two-day symposium in Lagos during Lagos Art Week (4–5 November 2025). The programme draws on the Picton Archive at G.A.S.'s Lagos campus and is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, featuring four curatorial themes: Ecotones, The Short Century, Annotations, and The Living Archive. It also launches the African Arts Libraries Lab (AAL Lab), a pan-African network of libraries and publishers across Lagos, Dakar, Marrakesh, Cairo, Nairobi, Cape Town, and Limbe.
Citi Wealth's report, "State of the Art Market 2026: Don’t Call It A Comeback," finds that the global art market entered 2026 with renewed optimism, but confidence is highly selective and concentrated at the high and accessible ends. The November 2025 Modern and Contemporary Art auctions in New York surged 77% year-on-year to $2.2 billion, driven by the record-breaking $236.4 million sale of Gustav Klimt's *Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer* from the Leonard Lauder collection. However, numerous galleries closed in 2025, including BLUM gallery and Venus Over Manhattan, and traditional hubs like London and New York face slow growth while emerging regions gain influence.
The 61st Venice Biennale, titled 'In Minor Keys' and curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, will run from May to November 2026. The exhibition will feature 15 artists from Latin America, including Alvaro Barrington, Carolina Caycedo, Alfredo Jaar, and Guadalupe Maravilla, among others, who will present works across the Giardini, Arsenale, and other Venetian venues.
M+ museum in Hong Kong has announced a major exhibition titled "Robert Rauschenberg and Asia," scheduled to run from November 2022, 2025, through April 26, 2026. Curated by Russell Storer, the show explores the American master's deep engagement with the region, featuring his own works alongside pieces by Asian contemporary artists like Huang Yong Ping and Sui Jianguo.
Nottingham Contemporary has announced plans for the first institutional solo exhibition of British artist Sarah Cunningham, who died in November 2024 at age 31. The show, the largest presentation of her work to date, is scheduled to open next autumn, marking a homecoming for the artist who was born and raised in Nottingham and previously worked as a gallery assistant at the same institution. Cunningham, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2022, had her first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in 2023 and developed a distinctive abstract style characterized by exaggerated brushwork and extended brushes made from scrap wood.
Gabrielle Bejani, a Lebanese Palestinian artist based in South London, created a new series of works in response to the November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon that was quickly broken. The series, exhibited as "Deliberate Dreams" at Beirut's Saleh Barakat Gallery in July 2025, uses painting, drawing, and collage to process grief, anger, and guilt over the violence. Bejani incorporates everyday cultural items like bougainvillea and 20th-century Lebanese postage stamps to explore themes of land, identity, and resistance, reclaiming darkness as a source of empowerment rather than a metaphor for evil.
A new exhibition titled "Deviant Ornaments" opens at the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) of Norway in Oslo, running from 27 November 2025 to 15 March 2026. Curated by Noor Bhangu, a South Asian curator and scholar based in Norway, the show explores queer desires and practices in the visual cultures of the Islamic world, bringing together over 40 works spanning 1,000 years. It connects historical objects—such as a Safavid textile, a 19th-century armband, and 13th-century Iranian wall tiles—with works by 12 contemporary artists, including Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Alize Zorlutuna, Shahzia Sikander, Taner Ceylan, Damien Ajavon, Rah Eleh, Kasra Jalilipour, and Sa’dia Rehman. Four works are newly commissioned.
Margaret Whyte, an artist from Uruguay, is set to represent her country at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, with her pavilion located in the Giardini. In an interview with ArtReview, Whyte discusses her exhibition, which builds on her earlier show "Tiempo de Escuchar" at the National Museum of Visual Arts in Uruguay, curated by Patricia Bentancur. Her work is inspired by Nassim N. Taleb's book "Antifragile" (2012), exploring themes of chaos, uncertainty, and resilience. She sees her antifragile approach as complementary to the Biennale's theme, "In Minor Keys," curated by Koyo Kouoh, emphasizing emotional depth, silence, and healing.
Pavel Brǎila is representing Moldova at the 61st Venice Biennale with an installation titled "Echoes of Harmony and Silent Cries" (2026), featuring flying carpets that fill the pavilion space at Santa Veneranda. In an interview with ArtReview, Brǎila explains that the work was driven by the constant presence of war in the news—Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, and other conflicts—and evolved into a sound installation as the propellers of the carpets created a minor-key resonance. He describes his first visit to the Biennale 25 years ago as a festive art festival, but now sees the platform as a crucial opportunity to represent his country's voice and express his urgent feelings about the world.
The first UK presentation of Nancy Holt's work, titled "MoonSunStarEarthSkyWater," opens at the Goodwood Art Foundation in Sussex from 2 May to 1 November 2026. The exhibition includes both a gallery-based show and works in the landscape, featuring key pieces such as the monumental site-responsive installation "Ventilation System" (1985-92) and the earthwork "Hydra's Head" (1974). The show aims to highlight Holt's exploration of perception, language, and light, and includes works from her diverse practice spanning concrete poetry, film, photography, and public sculpture.
Five of seven valuable 18th-century snuffboxes stolen from Paris’s Cognacq-Jay Museum in November 2024 have been recovered. Paris Musées announced the return, crediting a police investigation with assistance from the Paris Criminal Investigation Department. The boxes were taken by masked thieves during a daylight robbery from the exhibition “Pocket Luxury.” Two of the recovered boxes were on loan from the Louvre, two from the British royal family’s Royal Collection Trust, and one from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Two more boxes, one from the V&A and one from the Royal Collection, remain missing. The stolen items, decorated with gold, precious stones, mother-of-pearl, or enamel, are estimated to be worth at least €1 million ($1.16 million).
Two print curators from the Rijksmuseum, Huigen Leeflang and Joyce Zelen, discovered a rare 19th-century condom with an erotic print at an auction house in Haarlem, Netherlands, in November 2023. They acquired the 1830s condom for €1,000 ($1,140) with no other bidders, and it is now the centerpiece of a small exhibition titled "Safe Sex?" at the Rijksmuseum, which explores 19th-century sex work and sexual health through Dutch and French prints. The condom, likely made from sheep's appendix, features an etching of a half-naked nun with clergymen and is believed to be a souvenir from an upmarket French brothel.
The 2026 Whitney Biennial is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, running from March 8 through August 2026. For the first time in the museum's history, the exhibition is co-curated by a Latina, Marcela Guerrero, who brings a new perspective to the prestigious show. Of the 56 artists featured, 16 are Latino, and the exhibition includes immersive installations with slimy green sculptures, lemongrass scents, and insect sounds, alongside works such as Leo Castañeda's video game "Camoflux: Levels & Bosses (Igapó)" and Gabriela Ruiz's "Homo Machina."