The 2027 exhibition calendar is already filling in, and it reads like a wish list for anyone who plans holidays around culture. Major museums in Rome, London, Basel, Berlin, Florence, New York, Washington, Tokyo and Hong Kong have all locked in big-name shows, several of them career-spanning retrospectives that don't come around often.
In Italy, Rome's Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea marks Marina Abramović's 80th birthday with a survey running from November 2026 into April 2027, stacking landmark performances like Imponderabilia, Balkan Baroque and The Artist Is Present next to her recent Transitory Objects series. Come September, Florence's Palazzo Strozzi takes on Basquiat. In Italian, exploring how Leonardo and Galileo fed into the New Yorker's paintings, with more than 60 works borrowed from international collections.
Switzerland gets what may be the heavyweight of the year: Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, just outside Basel, stages a Louise Bourgeois retrospective from mid-June to mid-October 2027. Around 100 works, including her Cells installations and the famous spider sculptures, will spread across the museum and its expanded park. Berlin counters with a long-running James Turrell show at Hamburger Bahnhof from September 2027 into July 2028 — a rare chance to experience his light installations in person rather than through a screen.
London doubles up this autumn. The Courtauld Gallery shows nearly two dozen Georgia O'Keeffe paintings of Ghost Ranch, her New Mexico home, from October 2027 — notable because UK public collections own zero O'Keeffes, so most of these have never been shown in Britain. Weeks later, Tate Britain opens a David Hockney retrospective marking what would have been his 90th birthday, with over 200 works tracing seven decades of family, friends and lovers across his art.
Across the Atlantic, Washington DC's Hirshhorn kicks off its revamped Sculpture Garden West Lawn with three monumental Yoshitomo Nara aluminium figures, on view for most of 2027. In New York, the Met presents Félix González-Torres: The Spaces Between from June to October 2027 — his light strings, paper stacks and candy piles, loaded with meaning from the AIDS crisis — timed alongside a separate show at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Asia has its own draws. Tokyo's Mori Art Museum hosts Mariko Mori's first major retrospective in Japan since 2002, roughly 40 works tracing her path from futurism to Buddhist-informed practice, until late March 2027. And Hong Kong's M+ opens Do Ho Suh: Belonging in late September 2027, three decades of his translucent fabric architecture, his first institutional solo show in Greater China.
For travellers, the practical upshot is simple: 2027 rewards early planning. Several of these shows sit near major flight hubs (Basel, Berlin, Tokyo), and a few overlap neatly — a London autumn trip could cover both O'Keeffe and Hockney in one visit. If you only pick one long weekend, Bourgeois at the Beyeler is arguably the rarest of the lot.
