designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this june

June exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

June’s exhibitions turn familiar spaces into shifting ground. Fog rolls through the Bourse de Commerce, light bends inside Gagosian Hong Kong, and Chicago’s skyline is recast through the flight paths of migrating birds. Across the month, architecture becomes something to test with the body, the eye, and the weather around us.

There is also a sharp sense of objects refusing to sit still. Children’s chairs open a new read on design history, Sottsass turns furniture into color-charged architecture, and Ewa Juszkiewicz twists the language of portraiture from within. From Cao Fei’s near-future cities to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s fragile acts of exchange, June’s strongest shows ask viewers to look again at the rooms, images, and systems they thought they already knew.

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.

Flyway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem

Flyway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem is set to open at the Chicago Architecture Center, presenting a view of the city through the path of migrating birds. Co-curated by Studio Gang and the CAC, the exhibition turns Chicago’s lakeside skyline into a case study in glass, habitat, and the built forms that shape life above the street.

Through models, mock-ups, photography, bird-safe materials, and interactive media, the exhibition asks how architecture can support a fuller urban ecosystem. Its point is direct: buildings carry real consequences for birds, and design has the tools to change that.

name: Flyway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem
artist: Studio Gang
museum: Chicago Architecture Center
location: Chicago, USA
dates: June 11th, 2026 — January 3rd, 2027

photo by Steve Hall, courtesy Studio Gang

Leandro Erlich

Leandro Erlich fills the galleries of the Grand Palais in Paris with the kinds of spaces people think they know by heart. Houses, elevators, staircases, escalators, and city facades become strange again, shifted just enough to make the body hesitate. The show marks the artist’s first full retrospective in France, bringing together monumental installations with new productions made for the occasion.

Erlich works with architecture as a tool for perception. A building may appear to float, an elevator may lead nowhere, and a facade may invite visitors to climb it through illusion. The familiar turns slippery, drawing viewers into the work as participants instead of distant observers. Across the exhibition, the everyday built world becomes a place to test what the eye accepts, what the body believes, and how easily space can shift beneath us.

name: Leandro Erlich
artist: Leandro Erlich
museum: Grand Palais
location: Paris, France
dates: June 2nd — September 6th, 2026

Leandro Erlich Studio, Bâtiment, 2004. Le Centquatre, Paris, 2011

Verner Panton: Form, Colour, Space

At the Vitra Schaudepot in Weil am Rhein, Verner Panton: Form, Colour, Space enters the Danish designer’s world through colour, synthetic materials, and interiors that treat furniture as part of a larger spatial mood. Chairs hang from ceilings, lamps glow like small planets, and domestic space turns playful without losing its technical edge.

The exhibition moves from icons like the Panton Chair, Cone Chair, and Flowerpot lamp into rarely seen furniture, architectural projects, drawings, models, and prototypes from the Verner Panton Archive. A walk-in reconstruction of Fantasy Landscape brings visitors inside his colour-saturated thinking, where textiles, light, pattern, and form create rooms that feel immersive, optimistic, and still surprisingly bold.

name: Verner Panton: Form, Colour, Space
artist: Verner Panton
museum: Vitra Design Museum
location: Weil am Rhein, Germany
dates: May 23rd, 2026 — May 9th, 2027

installation view, Verner Panton: Form, Colour, Space, design by Verner Panton. image by Vitra Design Museum / Franz Wamhof © Verner Panton Design AG

EWA JUSZKIEWICZ

Ewa Juszkiewicz turns the language of European portraiture into something strange, precise, and slightly unnerving at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. The Polish artist borrows the posture, clothing, and polished surfaces of historical female portraits, then interrupts their familiar codes by covering faces with hair, fabric, flowers, or other sculptural forms.

The exhibition brings together more than twenty paintings, tracing a practice built on meticulous technique and sharp visual disruption. Juszkiewicz keeps the elegance of the genre in view while removing its expected center, so identity slips out of reach and the portrait becomes a study of control, beauty, and how women have been pictured through art history.

name: Ewa Juszkiewicz
artist: Ewa Juszkiewicz
museum: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
location: Madrid, Spain
dates: May 26th — September 6th, 2026

Ewa Juszkiewicz, Portrait in Venetian Red (after Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun), 2024. image © Ewa Juszkiewicz

Musical Bodies

At New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musical Bodies listens to the body as an instrument and looks at instruments as extensions of human form. Hands clap, feet tap, voices carry — across cultures, those gestures find their way into objects built for sound. The exhibition gathers instruments with paintings, sculpture, drawings, and other works to trace how music shapes identity, belief, and physical expression.

Across 4,000 years of art and music history, the show moves from ancient Egyptian rattles to works by Titian and Degas, instrument-inspired fashion, and one of Prince’s guitars. Its scale is broad, but the idea stays close to the body: sound begins with breath, touch, rhythm, and movement, then travels outward into objects that carry our voices through culture.

name: Musical Bodies
museum: Metropolitan Museum of Art
location: New York, USA
dates: June 7th — September 27th, 2026

exhibition poster showing Violino Harpa Forma Maxima, Thomas Zach, 1874, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future

Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future turns Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart into a city of screens, sets, avatars, factories, and imagined streets. The exhibition brings together thirty years of the Chinese artist’s work, moving through video, digital media, photography, installation, and sculpture to follow the social and technological shifts that have reshaped China, especially the Pearl River Delta.

Across all four floors, Cao Fei’s works move between documentary observation and speculative fiction. Factory workers perform dreams between machines, cosplayers drift through construction zones, and virtual cities carry the desires and anxieties of a networked world. The show frames her practice as a way of reading the near future through bodies, labor, memory, and digital space, with the physical gallery absorbing the logic of the worlds on screen.

name: Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future
artist: Cao Fei
museum: Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart
location: Basel, Switzerland
dates: May 30th — October 11th, 2026

Paper Planes

At Copenhagen Contemporary, Paper Planes enters Camille Henrot’s restless world of film, sculpture, drawing, installation, and systems that start to misbehave. The exhibition is her largest solo presentation in Scandinavia to date, with the Scandinavian premiere of In the Veins at its center, alongside major installations from the past decade and new works in sculpture and drawing.

Henrot treats a sheet of paper as a way of thinking, something that can become a bird, a map, a weapon, or a plane before the world tells it what to be. That openness runs through works on biodiversity loss, care, childhood, etiquette, spam emails, domesticated animals, and the strange rules we inherit without always seeing them.

Across the exhibition, her practice asks how imagination can stay active under pressure, and how art might loosen the systems that shape our behavior.

name: Paper Planes

artist: Camille Henrot

museum: Copenhagen Contemporary
location: Copenhagen, Denmark
dates: June 5th — December 31st, 2026

Camille Henrot, 73/37 (Abacus), 2024 © ADAGP Camille Henrot. courtesy of the artist, Mennour and Hauser & Wirth

Kho Liang

Kho Liang Ie: Mid-Century Modernist brings a defining Dutch designer back into view at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam through furniture, interiors, graphics, and exhibition design. Born in Indonesia and trained in the Netherlands, Kho Liang Ie shaped a version of modernism that felt functional, warm, and unusually open to exchange, drawing international ideas into the Dutch design scene.

The exhibition gathers more than 200 objects with archival material, including drawings, maquettes, photographs, printed matter, and reconstructions of earlier projects. His work for Artifort, Mosa, and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol gives the show its range, moving from chairs and cabinets to wayfinding and spatial systems. Across these scales, Kho’s practice reads as precise but human, with materials, color, and proportion doing much of the talking.

name: Kho Liang Ie
artist: Kho Liang Ie
museum: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
dates: May 14th — October 18th, 2026

Benno Wissing and Kho Liang Ie, wayfinding for Schiphol with the new arrow, 1967, prod. Omniscreen. lighting box Kho Liang Ie in cooperation with Interdesign. collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, gift of H. Bouchier (Schiphol Group)

The Century of Gehry

At Serralves in Porto, The Century of Gehry traces Frank Gehry’s architecture through movement, material instinct, and the charged spaces between buildings. Installed in the Álvaro Siza Wing, the exhibition gathers nineteen projects across eight thematic chapters, moving from the raw domestic experiment of his Santa Monica house to the titanium surfaces of the Guggenheim Bilbao and the sweeping forms of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The show brings sketches, models, archival material, and unbuilt projects into conversation with Gehry’s long creative process. It also follows his exchanges with artists and architects, including Álvaro Siza, whose friendship with Gehry helped connect Los Angeles and Portugal through shared work and ongoing dialogue. Across the exhibition, architecture appears as something restless and physical, shaped by intuition, structure, and a lifelong search for forms that can still surprise the city.

name: The Century of Gehry
architect: Frank Gehry
museum: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art
location: Serralves, Portugal
dates: June 12th — December 30th, 2026

Elmgreen & Dragset: Stillleben mit Gemüse

Elmgreen & Dragset: Stillleben mit Gemüse turns Frankfurt’s Städel Museum into a field of small disruptions. The artist duo places sculptures and installations across the building, from the Contemporary Art Collection into the historic galleries and onward to the neighboring Liebieghaus, setting their works into strange conversation with more than 700 years of art history.

The exhibition works almost like a treasure hunt, with figures and scenes appearing in unexpected corners, often with the dry humor that runs through Elmgreen & Dragset’s practice. Their interventions shift the usual museum rhythm, bringing attention to display conventions, social behavior, and the spaces between artworks. Familiar rooms begin to feel newly staged, as if the institution itself has become part of the story.

name: Elmgreen & Dragset: Stillleben mit Gemüse
artist: Elmgreen & Dragset
museum: Städel Museum
location: Frankfurt am Main, Germany
dates: May 20th, 2026 — January 17th, 2027

exhibition view, Elmgreen & Dragset: Stillleben mit Gemüse. image by Städel Museum – Norbert Miguletz

Vitalità dell’architettura italiana 1946-2026

At MAXXI in Rome, Vitalità dell’architettura italiana 1946-2026 follows eighty years of Italian architecture through the life of the Republic. Curated by Pippo Ciorra and Elena Tinacci, the exhibition looks at ideas, projects, and visions that helped shape the present, while tracing how Italian architects have worked across changing political, cultural, and urban conditions.

The exhibition gathers voices from key figures working around the turn of the millennium, then moves toward recent projects by Italian architects in Italy and abroad. Its focus is broad but direct: the themes that gave Italian architecture its international presence, and the newer generation now carrying that language forward. Across the gallery, architecture reads as a civic practice, tied to institutions, cities, public space, and the ongoing question of how a country builds its future.

name: Vitalità dell’architettura italiana 1946-2026
museum: MAXXI
location: Rome, Italy
dates: May 28th — November 15th, 2026

Vitalità dell’architettura italiana 1946-2026, exhibition view, image © Giorgio Benni, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI

Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe builds an uncertain world within Fondation Beyeler in Riehen from living systems, digital images, sound, sensors, and shifting conditions. Conceived specifically for the museum, the exhibition brings new works together with key pieces from recent years, setting the artist’s practice inside a space where technology, biology, and fiction begin to move through one another.

Huyghe’s work often feels alive because it keeps changing. Simulations respond in real time, organisms and machines share the same environment, and the viewer enters a situation that continues beyond any fixed image. Across the exhibition, art becomes a dynamic field of perception, where human presence is only one part of a larger, unstable system.

name: Pierre Huyghe
artist: Pierre Huyghe
museum: Fondation Beyeler
location: Riehen, Switzerland
dates: May 24th — September 13th, 2026

film, color, sound, 19 min., Collection Maja Hoffmann / Luma Foundation. courtesy the artist and Anna Lena Films, Paris © Pierre Huyghe, represented by ProLitteris (CH) / ADAGP (FR)

jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers

At Serralves in Porto, Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers follows the American artist’s use of language across streets, buildings, stone, paper, painting, and electronic signs. It is her first solo exhibition in Portugal, tracing a practice that began with the sharp public address of Truisms and Inflammatory Essays before moving into benches, sarcophagi, LED works, redacted documents, bones, and broken sculptural forms.

The exhibition looks at what happens when words gain force, lose meaning, or get deliberately erased. Jenny Holzer’s emphatic capitals once slipped into the visual language of advertising and authority, carrying messages about war, grief, power, and survival into public space. At Serralves, that tension becomes the central thread, with works that move between liberated speech and censorship, asking how language can protect, expose, distort, or disappear.

name: Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers
artist: Jenny Holzer
museum: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art
location: Serralves, Portugal
dates: June 18th — November 1st, 2026

James Turrell: Lifting the Veil

James Turrell: Lifting the Veil gathers light into rooms built for slower looking at Gagosian Hong Kong. The exhibition brings together holograms, prints, three Glassworks, and material connected to his Skyspaces and Roden Crater, tracing a practice that treats perception as something physical, architectural, and deeply atmospheric.

The Glassworks sit inside chambers constructed for the gallery, each using computer-controlled LED light behind shaped openings in the wall. Ellipse, diamond, and rectangle become fields of shifting color, moving between depth and flatness as the eye tries to understand what it is seeing. In Hong Kong, a city defined by density, height, and electric glow, James Turrell’s work asks visitors to slow down and meet light as a space in itself.

name: James Turrell: Lifting the Veil
artist: James Turrell
museum: Gagosian
location: Hong Kong
dates: May 28th — August 1st, 2026

James Turrell, As Seen Below – The Dome, a Skyspace by James Turrell. image by Mads Smidstrup © ARoS, 2025. From James Turrell’s visit in As Seen Below, June 2025

Ettore Sottsass: Design begins where magic begins

At Artizon Museum in Tokyo, Ettore Sottsass: Design Begins Where Magic Begins follows the Italian designer’s long argument with rationalism. Furniture, ceramics, glassware, office equipment, photography, and drawings trace a career that moved from Olivetti and Poltronova into Radical Design and Memphis, where color and form became tools for loosening the rules of modern design.

The exhibition is Japan’s first major Ettore Sottsass retrospective and the museum’s first design-themed show, built around more than one hundred works from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection. Familiar pieces like Carlton, Casablanca, Valentine, and Superbox sit alongside later cabinets, vases, and archival material, framing design as something technical, emotional, and slightly magical in the same breath.

name: Ettore Sottsass: Design begins where magic begins
artist: Ettore Sottsass
museum: Artizon Museum
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: June 23rd — October 4th, 2026

Cabinet No. 8, Ettore Sottsass, 1994 (design / produce), produce: Gallery Mourmans © Erede Ettore Sottsass

Fujiko Nakaya

A cloud gathers inside the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris as Fujiko Nakaya fills Tadao Ando’s circular interior with water vapor. Titled Cloud #07156, the Fog Sculpture turns the museum’s central space into a field of shifting density, where visitors appear, vanish, and reemerge through a thick white atmosphere. The work forms part of the Pinault Collection’s Clair-obscur exhibition.

Nakaya has worked with fog since the late 1960s, using high-pressure pumps and rows of nozzles to release tiny water droplets into the air. The material is simple, but the experience stays unstable. In the Rotunda, fog meets glass, concrete, painted panorama, and dome, softening the building’s lines while also interrupting the act of looking.

From above, the space becomes a sea of clouds; from within, it becomes a moving environment shaped by weather, architecture, and the bodies passing through it.

name: Fujiko Nakaya
artist: Fujiko Nakaya
museum: Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection
location: Paris, France
dates: opening June 4th

image © Les Graphiquants

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Dulce venganza

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Dulce venganza brings the artist’s work to Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía, back to a city tied to his own biography. Gonzalez-Torres passed through Madrid as a child after leaving Cuba, then returned years later with a candy sculpture titled ‘Untitled’ (Revenge). That memory gives the exhibition its title, a phrase he once used for the return itself: sweet revenge.

The show follows the emotional and political charge of his practice through paper stacks, candy spills, light strings, curtains, and billboards, works that shift as people move through them, take from them, and leave their own trace.

Beauty stays close to grief, love, illness, and public life, especially in the context of the AIDS crisis and the conservative politics that shaped his years in the United States. Here, Gonzalez-Torres’s art feels alive because it keeps changing, holding tenderness and resistance in the same gesture.

name: Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Dulce venganza
artist: Felix Gonzalez-Torres
museum: Museo Reina Sofía
location: Madrid, Spain
dates: May 27th — October 12th, 2026

installation view, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Dulce venganza, Museo Reina Sofía, 2026. image © Roberto Ruiz

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor will return to London’s Hayward Gallery with a full-building exhibition that takes over the Southbank Centre. Nearly thirty years after his first major UK survey at the same gallery, Kapoor fills the space with mirrored steel forms, Vantablack objects, vertiginous voids, and works that press against the walls, floors, and ceiling.

The show moves through the artist’s long-running interest in perception, scale, and bodily unease. Reflective surfaces bend the room around the viewer, black forms absorb light, and recent paintings and sculptures bring a more visceral charge into the gallery. Several new works also appear, including two monumental red installations that turn Kapoor’s spatial language into something physical, disorienting, and hard to look away from.

name: Anish Kapoor
artist: Anish Kapoor
museum: Southbank Center, Hayward Gallery
location: London, United Kingdom
dates: May 16th — October 18th, 2026

THE CUBISTS

In Seoul, the Centre Pompidou Hanwha opens inside a former annex of the 63 Building, whose redesign by Jean-Michel Wilmotte has recently opened as a glowing cultural space. The building is wrapped in a translucent double-glazed envelope that draws daylight inward and turns luminous after dark, and its curved form takes cues from traditional Korean roof tiles.

Its opening exhibition, The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision, brings around 90 paintings and sculptures from the Centre Pompidou’s collection to Seoul. Picasso, Braque, Gris, Léger, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, and others trace Cubism’s movement across Europe and beyond.

Meanwhile, a dedicated Korea Focus section looks at how this modern vision entered Korean art history. The project frames the new venue as a bridge between the French and Korean scenes, with the collection traveling through a local lens rather than arriving as a closed story.

name: The Cubists
museum: Centre Pompidou Hanwha
location: Seoul, South Korea
dates: June 4th — October 4th, 2026

Robert Delaunay, La Ville de Paris, 1910-1912. image © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Georges Meguerditchian/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn

Mini Furniture: Chairs for Children

Small chairs take center stage at MK&G Hamburg in Mini Furniture: Chairs for Children, an exhibition that looks at design through scale, posture, and the way children inhabit space. The show brings together around 200 pieces from the 19th century to today, with works by Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray Eames, Verner Panton, Marcel Breuer, and contemporary designers.

The exhibition treats children’s furniture as a serious design field, shaped by changing ideas around education, play, comfort, and independence. Some chairs mirror adult icons at a smaller size, while others respond directly to how children move, climb, sit, and test the world around them. Through these objects, the show opens a broader view of design history, where size becomes a way to read social attitudes as much as form.

name: Mini Furniture: Chairs for Children
museum: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
location: Hamburg, Germany
dates: June 14th — November 1st, 2026

Mini Furniture: Chairs for Children, image by Patrick Lipke © MK&G

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