1. Fra Angelico
Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy, September 26, 2025–January 25, 2026
The big Old Master exhibition this season is arguably this Fra Angelico survey which is split between Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco. The 15th-century artist was a friar at San Marco and many of his frescoes painted to decorate the building are still in situ. The biggest Fra Angelico show for 70 years, this boasts over 140 works, including sculptures and manuscripts which look at his connection to artists like Masaccio and Lorenzo Ghiberti.
Fra Angelico straddled late Gothic and early Renaissance styles, exploiting gold and decorative pattern, but also exploring new ideas of space and solidity. The resulting works are deeply sensitive and faith-driven, but also surprisingly varied. From simple pastel colors to riotously decorative multi-figured extravaganzas, Fra Angelico is one of the most underrated Florentine artists.
2. Michaelina Wautier
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria, September 30, 2025–February 22, 2026
Don’t miss another highlight from our guide to the best exhibitions this fall 2025. Thankfully, nowadays not all “Old Master” exhibitions are focused on men. Michaelina Wautier is being given a proper retrospective in Vienna, with most of her extant works on display. Wautier is a relatively recent rediscovery, with her paintings previously misattributed to male contemporaries, including her own brother. Working in Flanders, she produced portraits, still life and history painting, and was celebrated during her lifetime, only to be forgotten after her death.
Like Artemisia Gentileschi, Wautier deliberately took on traditionally male subjects and painted herself into her works, including a self-portrait in the Triumph of Bacchus. Hopefully this exhibition, which is traveling to the Royal Academy in London next year, will really put her on the map.
3. The Stars We Do Not See
Australian Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA, October 18, 2025–March 1, 2026
If all that sounds too Eurocentric, then here is a landmark exhibition, coming from Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria and showcasing over 130 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. There are big names like Emily Kam Kngwarray and Gulumbu Yunupiŋu, whose paintings of the night sky inspired the exhibition title. Contemporary talents like Brook Andrew and Christian Thompson explore urban culture and exploit multimedia and installation. Figurative and abstract, traditional and modern, with materials from bark and weavings to video and sound, this is designed to challenge preconceptions and showcase Aboriginal artists.
The exhibition is touring North America over the next two years, including the Denver Art Museum, Colorado, April 19–July 26, 2026, Portland Art Museum, Oregon, September 5, 2026–January 3, 2027
Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts, February 28–June 13, 2027, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, July 31, 2027–January 9, 2028. It is also worth remembering that Emily Kam Kngwarray has a retrospective currently showing at Tate Modern in London (until January 11, 2026).
4. Turner and Constable
Tate Britain, London, UK, November 27, 2025–April 12, 2026
The two greatest British landscape artists go head to head, both celebrating their 250th anniversary in this Tate Britain show. JMW Turner, all atmosphere and drama, versus John Constable, the master of quintessential English countryside. The two were contemporaries, rivals, and different in almost every respect, except for their mutual love of nature and determination to record it in paint to the best of their abilities.
Tate is hyping this show up as “the definitive exhibition” but details are sketchy and it will be interesting to see how the curators present the two artists. Both can claim to be forerunners of Impressionism, both worked directly from nature, both were part of a British landscape tradition and also firmly rooted in early 19th-century Romanticism. Turner is usually seen as the radical to Constable’s conservatism, but you might leave thinking they are a lot more similar than first appears.
5. Warhol, Pollock and Other American Spaces
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain, October 21, 2025–January 25, 2026
Here is another must-see show from our selection of the best exhibitions of fall 2025. If Turner and Constable seem like opposites, the Thyssen Museum is challenging assumptions about two of the heavyweights in late 20th-century art. Andy Warhol, king of Pop, and Jackson Pollock, the archetypal Abstract Expressionist would seem to have little in common, yet this show argues that they shared artistic interests. Warhol’s obsession with Pollock is evidenced by his Car Crash series referencing the other’s death. Both men were interested in scale, space, and repetition and shared these preoccupations with other contemporaries also included in the show.
The Thyssen is showing another fascinating double-header this fall with 50 works by Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee on loan from the Heinz Berggruen collection in Berlin. Described as “the antithesis of each other” the exhibition seeks to find common ground: both stripped their work back using geometry, abstraction and manipulation of forms.
6. Radical Harmony
Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists, National Gallery, London, UK, September 13, 2025–February 8, 2026
The National Gallery’s big exhibition is also based on a single collection loan, this time Helene Kröller-Müller’s unrivaled Neo-Impressionist, also known as Pointillist, paintings. This short-lived but influential style developed out of the Impressionists’ use of visible brushstrokes and pure color. Artists like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac created canvases of dots, relying on the human eye to mix colors, and creating stylized, flattened works to counter the spontaneity of the Impressionists.
Some artists, like Camille Pissarro, explored radical political ideas. Vincent van Gogh, also included in the show, used dashes rather than dots, and exploited heightened, expressionistic color. Neo-Impressionism is a riot of color and form and a lot more varied than you might expect. This should be another crowd-pleaser for the National Gallery.
7. Unicorn: The Mythical Beast in Art
Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany, October 25, 2025–February 1, 2026
Themed exhibitions are always interesting and this one is especially intriguing–looking at how and why artists have represented unicorns across 4,000 years. It is by any standards a big show with over 150 works from 88 different lenders, ranging from tapestries to sculpture and works on paper. Unicorns transcend cultures, featuring in Western and Chinese traditions, and have long been associated with magic, healing, and purity. Medieval travelers claimed to have seen them, scholars tried to link them to existing animals, and rulers used them in heraldry. More recently the unicorn has become a queer symbol.
If you like this type of exhibition, another themed around “The Empire of Sleep” is running at the Musée Marmottan in Paris from October 9, 2025 to March 1, 2026. It has a 19th and 20th century focus but includes works from the Middle Ages onwards. It is also worth noting that Unicorn travels to Musée de Cluny next year.
8. Of Light and Air
Winslow Homer in Watercolor, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA, November 2, 2025–January 19, 2026
Winslow Homer is best known for his loosely painted oils of seascapes and rural life and is perhaps less associated with watercolor, even though he loved the medium. Boston has a fabulous collection of all his work, but is here showcasing the more fragile watercolors which inevitably get displayed less regularly. A large portion of the collection is being shown alongside oils and drawings, giving a full picture of Homer’s career.
From early childhood experiments up to his last unfinished canvas, there are all the familiar themes and locations, including the Caribbean, British seaside villages and the Adirondack Mountains. The watercolors are wonderfully spontaneous and luminous, emphasising the joy which Homer felt in Nature. Definitely a feel-good show.
9. Kandinsky
The Music of Colors, Musée de la Musique, Paris, France, October 15, 2025–February 1, 2026
Get ready for another highlight from our roundup of the best exhibitions this fall 2025. There is always an exhibition that stands out from the crowd, and this interpretation of Wassily Kandinsky‘s work, co-organized with the Pompidou Centre, is certainly different. On the one hand it is a large retrospective of the artist’s exploration of abstraction, with over 200 pieces on show. On the other, it promises multimedia rooms that will recreate his synesthetic works, like a 1928 staging of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
The importance of music to the development of Kandinsky’s abstraction is well known. His interest in performance and poetry is perhaps less familiar. The idea, however, that you will be able to “hear” his paintings is especially intriguing.
10. Leonora Carrington
Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy, September 20, 2025–January 11, 2026
The last exciting exhibition joins our roundup of fall 2025’s top art shows. This is the first Italian exhibition dedicated to Surrealist, Leonora Carrington, who has been enjoying a lot of attention in recent years. British-born, but based in Mexico, Carrington was nevertheless fascinated by Italian Renaissance art, and this show makes the most of that connection. She was also more than just an artist: her writing and her political activism are explored through over 60 exhibits. Carrington’s quirky, dreamlike paintings with their fairy-tale references can easily be underestimated. This exhibition aims to establish her as “one of the most influential and visionary figures of the 20th century.”
If Surrealism is your thing, then it is also worth noting “Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism,” on at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, October 17, 2025–March 1, 2026.
These exhibitions are, of course, just a fraction of what is on offer this fall. Wherever you are and whatever your tastes, there will be great art to visit. Get out there and enjoy fall 2025 exhibitions!