We can look forward to these 10 exhibition highlights in 2025

In the coming year it will be worth going to the museum regularly again, because a fewArt highlights of 2025have already been determined.

There are supposed to be people who don't go to museums too often - which is completely incomprehensible to us. Even if you don't like museums, you shouldn't miss these exhibitions.

Street photography created images that were primarily photographed in urban public spaces, and its rise began almost a hundred years ago with the advent of fast and compact 35mm cameras. Instead of staging scenes, supposedly fleeting moments were captured. And some of the main protagonists of this street photography are Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Joseph Rodríguez. All three have significantly influenced and developed the genre, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne is showing some of their iconic photographs from the sixties, seventies and eighties from May 3rd. Without question an exhibition that you definitely shouldn't miss in 2025.

The five friends in question here are not Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy, the dog from the well-known children's book series. This refers to an illustrious circle of artists who undoubtedly left their mark on the post-war period. And not just in painting, but also in music, dance, sculpture and drawing. It's about John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Although all artists are individually recognized, their mutual influence and their friendly ties have so far been largely ignored in the discussion about them. In close collaboration, the Museum Ludwig and the Museum Brandhorst are now presenting works and connections that previously often remained undiscovered, but a completely new perspective on the works of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly - and that is extremely exciting!

Putin's terrible war of aggression against the battered country is still raging in Ukraine - and unfortunately there is no end in sight. It's understandable that no one in Ukraine has the head space to go to a museum. But starting in January, the Berlin Picture Gallery will be showing sixty paintings from the Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odesa (based on the Ukrainian spelling), the port city in southern Ukraine that is heavily threatened by war. The works were brought to safety shortly after the outbreak of the war, first to a Ukrainian emergency camp, and now they are in Berlin and (hopefully!) safe there. These are paintings by European painters from the 16th to 19th centuries, including works by important artists such as Andreas Achenbach, Francesco Granacci, Frans Hals, Cornelis de Heem, Roelant Savery, Bernardo Strozzi, Alessandro Magnasco and Frits Thaulow. The Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art would have celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, but given the current situation in Ukraine, this will not be celebrated.

The expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky is one of the most influential painters of the 20th century and one of the first to bring abstraction into art (he was presumably the second after the painter Hilma af Klingt). At that time he no longer wanted to (only) reproduce what was visible, but instead wanted to find a new visual language that would enable him to break down and expand the boundaries of what had previously been depicted by reducing it to shapes, colors and surfaces. Together with Franz Marc, he was also the founder of the Der Blaue Reiter editorial group. The exhibitionCosmos Kandinsky. Geometric abstraction in the 20th centuryin the Barberini Museum spans six decades and shows how the geometric abstraction established by Kandinsky, in all its varieties, repeatedly found radical expression in Europe and the USA.

In 1924 André Breton published thisManifesto of surrealism, the intellectual basis of surrealism. Visual artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Frida Kahlo carried these ideas further in their works. After this circumstance and the associated 100th anniversary of Surrealism will be celebrated this year (and into the next) with two major exhibitions (one in the Center Pompidou in Paris until January 13th, 2025), one in the Kunsthalle Vogelmann in Heilbronn until January 5th .25, the Hamburger Kunsthalle will once again focus on the exciting field of surrealism in the middle of next year. Under the titleRendezvous of dreams. Surrealism and German RomanticismImportant works of surrealism by artists such as Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Valentine Hugo, Paul Klee etc. are compared to those of romantics such as Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. This makes direct references to German Romanticism clear on topics such as cosmos, nature, dreams and community, especially in resistance and exile during the Second World War. Very exciting, especially since the exhibition takes a new perspective on both Romanticism and Surrealism, revealing things that had not been on the radar.

Around 1900, the Swedish artist Anders Zorn (1860–1920) was one of the most famous painters in the world, who even painted two official portraits of US presidents (the 22nd and 24th Presidents Grover Cleveland and the 27th President William Howard Taft). . Today he and his work have been somewhat forgotten outside of his home country - but the Hamburger Kunsthalle is trying to change that next year. Around 150 works will be on display there from the end of September, giving a fantastic impression of Zorn's work and impact. These include not only some of his major works, but also a watercolor of the port of Hamburg, which the former director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle commissioned from Zorn in 1890.

Two mythical animals in particular have fascinated people of almost all ages over and over again, across generations: one is the dragon, the other is the unicorn - and the Barberini Museum in Potsdam will be dedicated to the latter from the end of October next year. It has been an integral part of art for centuries, and the museum traces it and the fascination for it. With over a hundred works on loan from renowned museums such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, it is shown how much this mythical creature has stimulated people's imagination for centuries. From graphics to paintings, from sculptures to tapestries – artists such as Arnold Böcklin, Albrecht Dürer, Angela Hampel, Gustave Moreau, Joachim Sandrart and Marie Cecile Thijs have dedicated themselves to this mythical animal in a wide variety of media. Literally fantastic!

The topic of surrealism will also be the focus of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin next year. The starting point of the exhibition is the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch collection, which is part of the holdings of the Neue Nationalgalerie. This collection also includes some surrealist works, including pictures by Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, whose eventful paths the exhibition traces. It's about the biographies of the individual works, which - apart from their actual subject - tell stories of friendship, loss, persecution, passion for collecting and new beginnings. An interesting approach and definitely an exciting exhibition that should not be missed in 2025.

The Chinese-Canadian artist Matthew Wong died far too young in 2019; and that at a time when he was being treated as a new phenomenon in the art world with his impressive landscape paintings. One painter has always been a very special influence for him: Vincent van Gogh. And the exhibitionMatthew Wong-Vincent van Gogh. Last Refuge Painting, which will be on view at the Albertina Modern in Vienna from mid-February 2025, traces precisely this influence. It turns out that the parallels are not only of a painterly and content nature, but that both also had other things in common: both were self-taught and struggled with psychological challenges throughout their lives - and these are precisely the stylistic and biographical parallels between Wong and van Gogh tells the exhibition. Around forty paintings and drawings by Wong can be seen there, complemented by a dozen selected masterpieces by van Gogh.

Monster Chetwynd, also known by names like Lali, Spartacus or Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, became world famous in the noughties for her carnivalesque performances, which always take up themes from art history and pop culture, but are often reminiscent of medieval mystery and carnival plays. In 2012 she was even the first performance artist to be nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. But Chetwynd is much more than “just” a performance artist; she also paints, creates sculptures, installations and films. This exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich shows for the first time more than sixty works from Chetwynd's oeuvre, which is truly something to behold.