Required attendance

While your mind is rested and porous, this is the moment to feed it well. These exhibitions gather artists who are our all-time muses, timeless influences, taste shapers. As loyal inhabitants of the worldwide underground, we still sometimes have to turn to our totemic figures who ingrained themselves into our collective creative DNA. From Helmut Lang to Tracey Emin, David Lynch and Ellen von Unwerth, Basquiat and Nan Goldi, these are our upcoming 2026 cult exhibitions — spaces where you recalibrate your inner compass and set the tone for the year ahead.

Helmut Lang’s “Séance De Travail”
MAK, Vienna
December 10th – March 5th 

If you missed this in the December holiday haze, you are forgiven — but don’t miss it twice. Known for his razor-sharp minimalism and acute yet sensual restraint, Lang not only revolutionised design language codes, but also how fashion consciousness is transmitted. Advertising became storytelling for the first time, seeping onto the tops of NYC cabs, or real-life matchmaking campaigns. Unfolding like a brand manifesto, the exhibition is also a testament to Lang’s metallic surfaces, clinical silhouettes, and severe elegance that conjure a near-extraterrestrial experience in an extremely chic way. Moreover, the exhibition traces Lang’s collaborations with cultural heavyweights — Louise Bourgeois, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jenny Holzer. Central is the idea of the “work session”: fashion not as seasonal output, but as a continuous, ever-evolving mental state. 

Wolfgang Tillmans’ “Keep Movin’”
Regen Projects, LA
January 15th – March 1st

Spread across historic rooms and white-cube expanses alike, Wolfgang Tillmans’ Keep Movin’ feels like a living organism, with photographs, videos, and sculptural installations representing vital organs existing in full symbiosis. Material becomes metaphor, as heavy industrial ropes — once used to tow ships — lie coiled, worn by salt and time. Elsewhere, Tillmans’ renewed photocopier experiments echo this fascination with process: images born of touch, repetition, and chance. A singular vision emerges — one that insists art must stay permeable to politics, sensation, and doubt.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Gagosian, London
January 13th – March 21th

Nan Goldin’s work will never fail to give us goosebumps, for her photographic eye is fully devoid of any voyeurism, emerging instead from pure relational intimacy. 126 prints from her tremendous book ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ are arriving at the Gagosian in London, depicting friends, lovers, attachment, abuse, heartbreak, and infatuation. The Ballad is both a requiem for Goldin’ lost generation, struck by the opioid and AIDS crises, but also a timeless reflection of the sheer complexity of human relationships (a needed, or not-so-needed, proof that dating has always been an inextinguishable hellpit). Having featured Goldin in our Night issue following her retrospect at the Stedelijk, we know first-hand that entering her world is one transformative experience. 

David Lynch 
Pace Gallery, Berlin
January 29th – March 29th

Everyone’s favourite male manipulator director opens up another room in the architecture of his mind at Pace Gallery in Berlin. Following David Lynch’s passing last year, the show takes on a spectral weight, allowing his early short films to converse with paintings and sculptures that feel haunted, viscous, unresolved. Lynch began his artistic career studying painting, which then formed the basis for “moving painting” – proto-cinematic works that share the same thick textures as his later full-feature films. The synergy between his moving images and fine art works reveals a singular obsession: the impossibility of separating beauty from horror. Lynch’s work is seductive and disorienting, and this exhibition is a reminder that his true medium was atmosphere itself.

Tracey Emin’s “A Second Life”
Tate Modern, London
February 27th – August 31st

Tracey Emin’s largest exhibition is set to land to Tate Modern under the title ‘A Second Life’. Spanning over 40 years of Emin’s work, the retrospective brings together painting, textiles, installation, and sculpture, all united by autobiographical tenderness and vulnerability as method. Tracey Emin is the ultimate artist of visceral girlhood, yet her centering of the body as a site of study is not about the aestheticisation of pain – it’s about its gentle dignification. Her work lies so close to her skin that the distance between the artist and the viewer is collapsed, and you have no choice but to recognise yourself in her world.

Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs 
Onassis Stegi, Athens
March 7th – May 17th

Known for his absurdly surgical dissection of human relationships on screen, Yorgos Lanthimos turns his uncanny gaze toward photography. On-set images from Poor Things and Bugonia sit alongside deeply personal photographs taken in Greece, his motherland. The result is disarming – warm yet estranged. Like his films, the photographs bend reality slightly out of shape (or, perhaps, exaggerate its contours so we can see its hidden crevices more clearly). Bodies linger awkwardly in space, glances feel loaded, domestic scenes carry a sense of threat. There is humour here, but it’s sharp-edged. Seeing Lanthimos’ work outside cinema continues to play on his signature manipulation and poignancy — of how we look, how we misread, how meaning slips.

Basquiat: “Headstrong”
Louisiana MoMA, Denmark
January 30th – May 17th

There will never be enough Basquiat in the world, and his exhibition at Louisiana in Denmark brings us to a slightly different side of his oeuvre. Focusing almost entirely on oilstick drawings on paper, a body of work rarely foregrounded, the repetition is deliberate: heads, skulls, faces fractured into anatomical zones. Eye sockets widen into voids, mouths become entry points rather than features. What’s striking is how analytical these works feel. Lines coil, break, and restart, as if Basquiat is testing how much a head can hold before it collapses. Investigative in their nature and removed from the noise of his public persona, these works feel intimate and relentless. At Louisiana, Basquiat isn’t presented as myth or martyr, but as someone thinking obsessively through form.

Ellen von Unwerth: “My Circus”
Fotomuseum Maastricht
January 31th – September 13th

Ellen von Unwerth’s unmistakable style can actually be traced to an unlikely inspiration source: the circus. Having worked at Circus Roncalli in Munich in her childhood, von Unwerth has continued exploring the magic and theatricality of the circus as a cultural phenomenon in her fashion and fine art photography, shaking up the industry that often gets eaten up by its own seriousness. Photographing some of the biggest supermodels and pop stars with a healthy dose of provocation, humour, and eroticism, von Unwerth builds her own circus in the entertainment world, and it’s pure joy to watch it unfold.