A museum, a gallery, a new exhibition or a cultural event – festival, concert, performance – often serve as the trigger for a short excursion, they motivate us for a different city break or long weekend, they become a reason for choosing a destination or a reason to return to it and ultimately they can upgrade travel moments into unforgettable cultural experiences, with depth, inspiration and meaning. In this article we present, always in our opinion, the most important art exhibitions on offer:
- LONDON (UK)
Exhibition: “Tracey Emin: A Second Life“
Another major exhibition for London’s iconic Gallery of Modern Art, a comprehensive tribute to the now Dame and eternal revolutionary of painting, Tracey Emin. More than 90 works – including the Turner Prize-winning “My Bed” – explore 40 years of a wide-ranging practice in sculpture, drawing, painting, video and textiles, often shocking with their uncompromising honesty.
Dame Tracey Emin is one of the most important contemporary artists of her generation. She was catapulted into the public eye in the 1990s with iconic works like her Turner Prize nominated My Bed, which sparked fierce critical and public debate, challenging what art could be. Emin’s disregard for any separation of the personal and the public, along with her commitment to unapologetic self-expression, came to define a historic moment in British culture and global art history. Tate Modern
February 27 – August 31, 2026
- CHICAGO (USA)
Exhibition: “Matisses’s Jazz: Rythms in Color”
Cut paper may not seem as noble a medium for artistic expression as paint, pencil or ink, but after a painful operation that deprived the great French artist of the ability to handle a brush, he turned to paper-cut collages as a means of expression. Encouraged by his friend, the book publisher Tériade (the pseudonym of Stratis Eleftheriades), Matisse furthered his exploration of this new technique. This method of “scissor painting”, as he called it, created 20 works, inspired by Parisian music halls, his travels to Tahiti, as well as folk tales, the world of the circus and mythology, which were reproduced in stencils to form a book. This is also its first presentation since 1948, when the Art Institute of Chicago acquired it.
March 3 – June 1, 2026
- FLORENCE – ITALY (EU)
Exhibition: Rothko in Florence
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi presents one of the most significant exhibitions ever devoted to Mark Rothko, the undisputed master of American modern art. Curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, Rothko in Florence is a unique project, conceived and produced specifically for Palazzo Strozzi to celebrate the artist’s special relationship with the city. The architecture of the palazzo and Florence itself become an ideal setting in which to explore how Rothko translated the tension between classical measure and expressive freedom into painting, generating through colour a renewed perception of space that transcends the two-dimensional surface of the canvas.
The deeply emotional works of American Mark Rothko dialogue with the artistic heritage of the birthplace of the Renaissance. Everything indicates that this retrospective will prove to be fascinating, not only because of the more than 70 works from MoMA, The Met, Tate and Centre Pompidou – including the iconic color fields – that will run through his entire career since 1930, but also because of the artist’s deep love for Florence, a relationship that began with his first visit in 1950.
March 14 – August 23, 2026
