8 Must-See Museum Shows Opening This Fall

As the art world returns from its late-summer sabbaticals, museums across the world are gearing up for a hearty crop of autumn exhibitions. From mid-century standbys and first-time retrospectives to rigorously researched group shows on feminist and Indigenous art histories, here we feature eight of the most intriguing museum exhibitions opening this fall.

“Mark Rothko”

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

Oct. 18, 2023–Apr. 2, 2024

This massive Mark Rothko retrospective, opening at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris this October, gathers more than 115 works by the famed abstractionist. The show promises a cogent, chronological survey of the 20th-century titan’s emotional and artistic development. Head curator Suzanne Page and co-curator Christopher Rothko (the artist’s son) have worked over the elder Rothko’s wide-ranging oeuvre, from his early portraiture through his stark final canvases, to ensure an effective and affecting retrospective—the first of Rothko’s to show in Paris in more than 20 years.

The exhibition opens with the only existing self-portrait of Rothko, which the artist painted in 1936, and continues through his early realist visions of New York’s urban vistas, as well as his 1940s foray into biomorphic abstraction à la Paul Klee. As for classic Rothko canvases, there will be plenty on display—more than 70, in fact. That includes funkier, more compositionally jumbled numbers like 1949’s No. 21, as well cohesive sets like his “Seagram Mural” series, nine of which are on loan from Tate Modern.

The chronology concludes with a hanging of Untitled (Black on Gray) (1970) from his somber final series of works, which will here be staged alongside a number of sculptural works by Alberto Giacometti, an artist that Rothko admired during his lifetime. Altogether, this exhibition promises an unrivaled opportunity to become absorbed by Rothko’s eternally enthralling simplicity.

“Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick”

The Frick Collection, New York

Sep. 21, 2023–Jan. 7, 2024

The Frick’s fall presentation is a delectable selection of early works by the contemporary portraiture master Barkley L. Hendricks, whose own history with the Frick brings a particular sense of resonance to this finely wrought show.

“The Frick was one of Barkley’s favorite museums,” said Aimee Ng, who co-curated the exhibition alongside curator and writer Antwaun Sargent, in an interview with Artsy. “When he was an art student in 1966, he visited those temples of European art—the Prado, the Rijksmuseum, the Louvre—and it was a turning point for him. The Frick represented that for him in the U.S. It was sort of the kernel of the greatest works of European art history.”

Hendricks’s iconic painting style, rich in sartorial and sculptural detail, makes for an enthralling continuation of that lineage. Come for shimmery, near-religious portraits like 1969’s gold leaf–flecked Lawdy Mama, or the white-out cool of 1976’s Steve; stay for the distinctly Frick-flavored echoes of the Old Masters, whose style is a clear inspiration for this master of our own time.

“Inside Other Spaces. Environments by Women Artists 1956–1976”

Haus der Kunst, Munich

Sep. 8, 2023–Mar. 10, 2024

This intriguing group survey, opening in September at Haus der Kunst in Munich, takes an art historical core sample of the nebulous concept of immersive art, which, in the process, draws a series of linkages between the pioneering work of women working at the interstices of art, architecture, and design throughout the 20th century.

The exhibition, which was curated by Marina Pugliese and Andrea Lissoni with Anne Pfautsch, was the product of three years of meticulous research—not only into the histories and practices of the artists on display, but also into their archival materials and plans, which the curators used to guide the recreation of these otherwise ephemeral works from the mid–20th century.

These works include Judy Chicago’s Feather Room, originally displayed in 1965, which Lissoni described in an interview as an environment that conjures experiences of “floating,” “moving,” and “pure pleasure” as visitors move through a room piled with downy feathers. There’s also Tania Mouraud’s We used to know (1970), “an environment you cannot really enter because it’s too hot and too loud,” according to Lissoni; as well as Aleksandra Kasuba’s Spectral Passage, a chromatic passageway that the artist originally constructed for San Francisco’s de Young Museum in 1975.

Between all of these works courses a highly original stream of curatorial thought that prods variously at notions of immersion, fabrication, and corporeality.

“Marisol: A Retrospective”

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Oct. 7, 2023–Jan. 21, 2024

The long, varied career of the multihyphenate mononymic artist Marisol is highlighted in this wide-ranging touring retrospective, which was organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and opens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in October. It will travel to the Toledo Museum of Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art over the next two years. The presentation marks the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date.

“Marisol” brings together more than 250 works by the artist, highlighting in particular the peculiar, Pop-adjacent sculptural practice that brought her widespread attention in the 1960s. These blocky, disjointed human figures with multiple faces and finely rendered fabric details are placed in conversation with showcases of Marisol’s later drawing practice, as well as the costume and set design she did for such leading dance studios as Louis Falco and Martha Graham.

What emerges is a well-rounded portrait of a talent that burned bright in the public eye during the Factory-flecked ’60s, and the ways she maintained her radical production for decades after that.

“Rirkrit Tiravanija: A Lot of People”

MoMA PS1, New York

Oct. 12, 2023–Mar. 4, 2024

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s distinct brand of social artmaking gets the retrospective treatment at this forthcoming MoMA PS1 exhibition, opening in October. “A Lot of People” gathers more than 100 works by the artist, including a number of little-seen early works from the 1980s and ’90s. These works include sculptures, installations, and editions, as well as his investigations into news media as its own artistic medium, including everything from Philip Guston appropriations printed on newsprint, to the “Demonstration Series” (2001–present), in which Tiravanija hand-draws photographs from the International Herald Tribune.

The highlight of the exhibition, though, looks to be the restaging of some of Tiravanija’s most famous participatory artworks, such as untitled 1990 (pad thai) (1990), in which the artist makes and serves pad thai to audience members; and untitled 1994 (angst essen seele auf) (1994), which features a bar serving beer and cola. Five of these works will be staged at one-month intervals throughout “A Lot of People,” giving audience members a chance to participate directly in works by one of contemporary art’s most inventive thinkers.

“The questions that Rirkrit probes within his works continue to be relevant,” co-curator Ruba Katrib told Artsy. “I think they are even more profound when looking at them in retrospect—because you are looking back at the contributions of someone who was responding to the future before it fully arrived.”

“Histórias indígenas”

MASP, São Paulo

Oct. 20, 2023–Feb. 25, 2024

This large-scale survey, organized by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in collaboration with the Kode Bergen Art Museum, gathers works by more than 170 Indigenous artists from across the Americas, Oceania, and Scandinavia, covering a staggeringly large scope of geographies, typologies, and chronologies.

The nearly 300 works on view in “Histórias indígenas” are divided across eight sections that variously place these artworks in both art historical and thematic conversations with one another, while leaving open the possibility of new readings and histories.

“It is important to consider the meaning of the word ‘histórias’ in Portuguese, which is rather different than ‘histories’ in English,” a press release for the exhibition stated. “The term ‘histórias’ encompasses both fiction and nonfiction, historical accounts as well as personal ones, of a public and private nature, on a micro or macro level, and thus possesses a more polyphonic, speculative, open, incomplete, processual, and fragmented quality than the traditional notion of History.”

“Suki Seokyeong Kang: Willow Drum Oriole”

Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul

Sep. 7–Dec. 31, 2023

This exhibition by Suki Seokyeong Kang at Seoul’s Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art highlights the artist’s uniquely recombinant and historically inspired artmaking practice. “Willow Drum Oriole” will feature a bevy of new works by Kang, including new approaches to existing works such as her “Mat” series, which Kang initiated as part of her U.S. museum debut, “Black Mat Oriole,” at ICA Philadelphia in 2017. There will also be a number of new sculptures, video works, and paintings, all of which the artist will bring together into “choreographed scenographies” that “connect each space like an archipelago,” according to a statement from the museum.

Kang—who is represented by Tina Kim Gallery and Kukje Gallery, and was featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2019—creates works that draw on traditions of fabric-making, court dance, and Korean notational systems, among many other historical precedents. In “Willow Drum Oriole,” such works will be placed in conversation with pieces from the Leeum’s Korean art collection, allowing for a fruitful, cross-temporal meditation of tradition and contemporaneity.

“Nicole Eisenman: What Happened”

Whitechapel Gallery, London

Oct. 11, 2023–Jan. 14, 2024