designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this september

SEPTEMBER exhibitions FROM DESIGNBOOM RADAR

September brings a wide range of major exhibitions across art, design, and architecture, with museums and galleries unveiling new collections across the world. designboom radar highlights this month include the 40-year celebration of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Pont-Neuf in Paris, a survey of wedge-era automotive design at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, the long-anticipated U.S. debut of Richard Serra’s Running Arcs (For John Cage) at Gagosian in New York, and Ai Weiwei’s first commission in Ukraine. Explore our picks of what shows to see around the globe below, and check out our dedicated event guide for more listings.

beach ruins

The Galeria Municipal do Porto has inaugurated Beach Ruins, a site-specific installation by Greek artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis, in the gardens of Palácio de Cristal. Drawing on ideas of the ruin, Angelidakis stages a set of fragmented columns that appear to have traveled across Europe, coming to rest in Porto. The installation references the ‘Grand Tour’ tradition of the 17th to 19th centuries, when European elites sought out ancient sites, but here the ruins themselves become the travelers, embodying a playful inversion of history and cultural expectation.

By pairing stone-like columns with parasols, Angelidakis transforms markers of heritage into interactive urban furniture. The pieces function as oversized poufs that invite rest and social gathering. As the inaugural edition of the gallery’s new outdoor commission, the installation sets a precedent for works that activate Porto’s public realm through seasonal, experimental interventions.

name: Beach Ruins
artist: Andreas Angelidakis
gallery: Galeria Municipal do Porto
location: Porto, Portugal
dates: May 10th — October 12th, 2025

Andreas Angelidakis, Beach Ruins, Porto, 2025, image courtesy Galeria Municipal do Porto

Jean Jullien: JUJU’s Castle

The Nanzuka Art Institute in Shanghai presents JUJU’s Castle, the first solo exhibition in China by French artist Jean Jullien. Spread across multiple gallery spaces, the show comprises painting, sculpture, and installation into a spatial experience that unfolds like an imagined fortress. The presentation includes over eighty new paintings created during Jullien’s time in Tokyo, joined by three-dimensional works and a large-scale installation that turns the institute into a multi-room narrative environment.

Each room is conceived as a ‘dungeon’ within the castle, referencing the level-based structure of role-playing games. Visitors are positioned as protagonists — warrior, elf, mage, or hero — encountering fantastical creatures and settings. This transformation of the gallery into an architectural sequence gives the exhibition the pacing of an exploratory journey, moving from one immersive space to another.

name: JUJU’s Castle

artist: Jean Jullien

gallery: Nanzuka Art Institute

location: Shanghai, China

dates: July 12th — October 26th, 2025

image © Nanzuka Art Institute

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years

Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) becomes a vast landscape for Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, the artist’s largest indoor exhibition to date. Organized by the National Galleries of Scotland, the show spans five decades and over two hundred photographic works, transforming the historic galleries into an environment of cracked clay walls, windfallen oak branches, suspended reeds, and stones from over one hundred graveyards in Dumfriesshire.

The exhibition is designed as one continuous, site-specific work that responds directly to the RSA’s architecture, using its spaces, light, and materials as active elements. In doing so, it extends Goldsworthy’s long-term investigation into how people, buildings, and the land are bound together and where they are held apart.

name: Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years

artist: Andy Goldsworthy

gallery: Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), National Galleries of Scotland

location: Edinburgh, Scotland

dates: July 26th — November 2nd, 2025

Andy Goldsworthy, Edges made by finding leaves the same size. Tearing one in two. Spitting underneath and pressing flat on to another. Brough, Cumbria. Cherry patch. 4 November 1984, 1984 Cibachrome photograph | all images courtesy the artist, unless stated otherwise

The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge

Petersen Automotive Museum shows some of the iconic wedge cars from the 60s and 70s in an exhibition, from the 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero to the 1974 Lamborghini Countach LP400 Periscopio. Titled The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge, the show spotlights wedge-shaped automotive design that features angular silhouettes, faceted planes, and even bold geometric forms. These are some of the car concepts and designs that defined the era from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, with their forward-looking, and quite literally, styles.

Some of the vehicles include models from Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Lamborghini, and Lancia. The exhibition takes the chance to showcase the wedge‑car design movement that emerged as a stray from the curvaceous, chrome-laden styling of earlier eras, visibly favoring a futuristic aesthetic instead of the typical aerodynamic-focused production. Designers such as Marcello Gandini, Giorgetto Giugiaro, Sergio Coggiola, William Towns, and Jerry Palmer played a central role in this visual revolution, and their names appear in the exhibition, a rightful recognition for their progressive wedge-car works.

name: The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge

museum: Petersen Automotive Museum

location: Los Angeles, CA

dates: August 2nd, 2025 — September 2026

side profile of the 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero | image courtesy of Petersen Automotive Museum

Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities

The Seoul Museum of Art presents ‘Ernesto Neto: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities,’ a new site-specific installation by the Brazilian artist that transforms the Korean museum’s Seosomun Main Branch lobby into a sensory environment. Commissioned as part of the 2025 SeMA Public Space Project, the woven artwork expands Ernesto Neto‘s longstanding interest in the relationships between body, space, and collective experience.

The installation is composed of expansive crochet structures woven from industrial cotton fabrics in shades of brown and pink. These colors, chosen to evoke tree trunks and night alongside flowers and day, establish a dialogue between natural rhythms and architectural structure. Suspended and filled with dried guava leaves and locally sourced tea leaves, the artist‘s forms invite a multi-sensory encounter that engages smell both texture together.

name: Ba Ka Ba, a Dance of the Eternal Polarities (Ba Ka Ba, uma dança das eternas polaridades)

artist: Ernesto Neto

museum: Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)

location: Seoul, Korea

dates: August 13th, 2025 — December 31st, 2026

image courtesy SeMA, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

falling from the sky

Unit, the contemporary art gallery in London, welcomes artist Sho Shibuya with the exhibition Falling from the Sky. Since 2020, the artist has greeted each morning with a painting, translating the day’s sky onto the front page of a newspaper. While his series of daily rituals primarily captures the sunrise, Falling from the Sky turns to the quieter subject of rain. Rendered from photographs of water streaking across glass, the works reflect on ephemerality and the meditative patterns formed by droplets in motion.

For Shibuya, rain carries both intimacy and tension. It recalls both personal memories and stark contrasts in how skies are experienced across the world. Where he finds comfort in gray clouds, others may see smoke or destruction. This duality infuses the series with a sense of fragility, transforming depictions of rain into reminders of peace’s vulnerability. Falling from the Sky asks viewers to linger with these moments, considering what endures after the storm has passed.

name: Falling from the Sky
artist: Sho Shibuya
gallery: Unit
location: London, UK
dates: August 20th — September 17th, 2025

Sho Shibuya, Falling from the Sky, Unit, London | image courtesy Unit

Rocking to Infinity

Kukje Gallery will present Louise Bourgeois: Rocking to Infinity, focusing on the final two decades of the artist’s career. The exhibition gathers sculptures, drawings, and fabric suites that meditate on intimacy, memory, and time. The title, drawn from Bourgeois’s own writing, evokes the image of a mother rocking a child to sleep. This gesture of security and tenderness resonates throughout the works on view.

Immersive wall installations pair gouaches and watercolors that revisit themes of the self, the couple, family, and the spiral. The gallery’s center hosts major sculptures which explore emotional bonds and the passage of time. The Hanok space introduces a rarer body of drawings on coffee filters, made in 1994, where circular compositions bridge domestic material with reflections on cycles, abstraction, and organic form. All together, the works reveal Bourgeois’s late practice as both intimate and monumental.

name: Rocking to Infinity
artist: Louise Bourgeois
gallery: Kukje Gallery
location: Seoul, South Korea
dates: September 2nd — October 26th, 2025

installation view, Louise Bourgeois: Rocking to Infinity, image courtesy Kukje Gallery

GABRIEL CHAILE: ESTO ES AMÉRICA, O QUAL É O LIMITE?

Gabriel Chaile’s debut New York solo exhibition, Esto es América, o qual é o limite?, presents new adobe sculptures created on site at Marianne Boesky Gallery, alongside drawings and photographs. Drawing from the artist’s ongoing exploration of what he calls the ‘genealogy of form,’ the works draw from the material and formal traditions of Indigenous communities in northeast Argentina while linking them to broader histories across the Americas. The sculptures are at once monumental and anthropomorphic. Their surfaces are covered with dense networks of line drawings, resist straightforward interpretation while holding onto layers of cultural memory.

The exhibition incorporates influences from Chaile’s time in Montana, where he observed a No Kings Day protest that shaped the atmosphere of the new works. Charcoal drawings on canvas echo the markings on the sculptures, while photographs from the protest offer a documentary counterpart. The title itself, half in Spanish and half in Portuguese, reflects Chaile’s negotiation between statement and question, declaration and doubt: ‘This is America’ followed by ‘What is the limit?’

name: Esto es América, o qual é o limite?

artist: Gabriel Chaile

gallery: Marianne Boesky Gallery

location: New York, NY

dates: September 4th — October 18th, 2025

image © Macy Rajacich, courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

lee bul: from 1998 to now

The Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art will open Lee Bul: After 1998, a large-scale survey tracing nearly three decades of work by one of Korea’s most influential contemporary artists. Bringing together around 150 pieces, the exhibition spans performance, sculpture, installation, and drawing, examining Lee Bul’s sustained inquiry into the body’s entanglement with society, technology, and systems of power. Together, a range of works illuminate her engagement with utopian modernity’s ideals and contradictions, and the recurring human pursuit of perfection.

Organized in collaboration with M+ Hong Kong, the exhibition unfolds as a landscape where individual memory and historical fragments intersect with broader sociopolitical references. The show charts the evolution of Lee Bul’s practice, and highlights her role in expanding conversations around humanity’s past and imagined futures.

name: Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now

artist: Lee Bul

museum: Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art

location: Seoul, South Korea

dates: September 4th, 2025 — January 4th, 2026

installation views, ‘Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now’, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025. courtesy of the artist and BB&M © Lee Bul, photo by Jeon Byung-cheol

Design Disco Club

During Paris Design Week, Pli Office will present DESIGN DISCO CLUB, an exhibition dedicated to a new generation of designers and architects reshaping contemporary practice. Drawing on the collective energy of disco, the project frames design as a space of freedom, emotion, and shared experience, while questioning the balance between industrial and human rhythms. With scenography by Paf atelier, the exhibition stages a diverse spectrum of works that reflect the shifting temporalities of production and the commitments that define today’s creative landscape.

The show will feature contributions from around forty emerging creators alongside legendary fashion houses like Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Marine Serre, Marie-Ève Lecavalier, and Mugler. A range of objects are each presented as an example from a multifaceted moment in design. With a series of talks, DESIGN DISCO CLUB adopts the spirit of a club to become a gathering space for imagining the cultural forms of tomorrow.

name: DESIGN DISCO CLUB

gallery: Pli Office

location: Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, France

dates: September 6th — 12th, 2025

image courtesy Pli Office

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE: PARIS PROJECTS

This fall, Paris marks the 40th anniversary of The Pont Neuf Wrapped with a citywide tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, supported by the City of Paris, will stage a free outdoor exhibition along the Seine. Titled Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Paris Projects, the installation will highlight the couple’s close relationship with the French capital, where they lived, worked, and realized a series of landmark projects over several decades. The program also includes the naming of a public square in their honor, underscoring the city’s recognition of their enduring cultural impact.

Paris served as both the starting point and central site for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic collaborations. Their interventions included Wall of Oil Barrels — The Iron Curtain (1961–62), Wrapped Statue, Trocadero (1964), The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975–85), and L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (conceived in 1961, realized posthumously in 2021). Artist JR will revisit the Pont Neuf with a new project that will transform the iconic bridge into a stone-like cave for two weeks in September 2025..

name: Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Paris Projects

artist: Christo and Jeanne-Claude

location: Paris, France

dates: September 6th — October 30th, 2025

Sweets and Paradise

Bernhard Knaus Fine Art will present Sweets and Paradise, a new exhibition of photographic works by Ralf Peters. Recognized as a leading figure in conceptual photography in Germany, Peters uses digital manipulation to reframe everyday objects, landscapes, and environments, unsettling the line between reality and construction. His practice asks viewers to reflect critically on how images shape perception.

The exhibition brings together two recent series. In SWEETS, natural forms such as branches and leaves are digitally enhanced against vivid backgrounds, transforming them into visual compositions that waver between authenticity and invention. PARADISE introduces AI-generated gardens and architectural visions that draw from cultural and religious ideals, evoking both the desire for harmony and the unease of a digitally engineered utopia. Shown together, the works highlight the tension between nature’s fragility and technology’s promise of perfection, positioning photography as a space where beauty, illusion, and critique converge.

name: Sweets and Paradise

artist: Ralf Peters

gallery: Bernhard Knaus Fine Art Gallery

location: Frankfurt, Germany

dates: September 6th — November 22nd, 2025

Ralf Peters, Poppi Paradise, 2025, image courtesy Bernhard Knaus Fine Art Gallery

Lygia Pape. Tisser l’espace

The Pinault Collection will present the first solo exhibition in France dedicated to Lygia Pape (1927–2004), a central figure of the Brazilian avant-garde. Serving as a prelude to the upcoming exhibition Minimal, Lygia Pape: Weaving Space is built around a major work from the collection, Ttéia 1, C (2003/2025). Formed from copper threads stretched across space, the installation immerses visitors in an environment where light and movement activate the work. This embodies Pape’s idea of ‘weaving space’ and redefines the viewer’s role in the artistic encounter.

The exhibition brings together key pieces from across Pape’s career, from her early abstract engravings to her monumental Livro Noite e Dia III (Book of Night and Day III, 1963–1976), as well as a selection of experimental films. Deeply informed by Brazil’s sociopolitical context, her work reflects a commitment to social transformation, dissolving the boundaries between art and life. The show highlights Pape’s place alongside Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica as one of the defining voices of Brazil’s postwar avant-garde.

name: Lygia Pape. Tisser l’espace

artist: Lygia Pape

gallery: Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection

location: Paris, France

dates: September 10th, 2025 — January 26th, 2026

LLygia Pape, Ttéia 1, C (2003/2025), image courtesy Pinault Collection

Max Lamb: Crockery

Gallery FUMI will open Crockery, a new exhibition by Max Lamb in collaboration with ceramics manufacturer 1882 Ltd., on September 11, 2025. The series features slip-cast earthenware pieces produced from plaster models hand-carved by Lamb, extending his ongoing investigation into material possibilities. Made in Stoke-on-Trent, the works embody the technical rigor of 1882 Ltd. and the designer’s experimental approach, rethinking the role of ceramics in contemporary design.

With Crockery, Lamb turns to a medium traditionally associated with fragility and transforms it into functional forms that challenge assumptions about strength and durability. His interest lies in pushing ceramic beyond its conventional uses, exploring its viability as both a sculptural surface and as a material capable of bearing weight and shaping furniture. In doing so, the project reframes ceramic as both resilient and versatile, opening new ground for its role in design.

name: Crockery

artist: Max Lamb with 1882 Ltd.

gallery: Gallery FUMI

location: London, UK

dates: September 11th — 30th, 2025

image courtesy Penguins Egg Studio (Tom Wright) for Gallery FUMI

Carmen d’Apollonio: Salut, ça va, c’est moi

Friedman Benda will open Salut, Ça va, c’est moi, the fourth solo exhibition by Carmen D’Apollonio, on September 11. Known for her playful and idiosyncratic approach, the Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based artist expands her practice here with new materials and sculpted glass lampshades, pushing her work toward greater dimensionality and narrative depth.

The exhibition unfolds like a theatrical set, populated by personified lamps that perform across the gallery space — leaning, dripping, suspending, and wandering. D’Apollonio’s new glass elements amplify the dialogue between form, light, and shadow, revealing more of what was once hidden behind linen shades. Titles such as Why fall in love when you can’t fall asleep and If you ever have forever highlight her use of language as a candid, humorous, and empathetic extension of her practice, drawing viewers into a direct conversation that is both intimate and universal.

name: Salut, Ça va, c’est moi

artist: Carmen D’Apollonio

gallery: Friedman Benda

location: 515 W 26th St 1st Floor, New York, NY

dates: September 11th — October 16th, 2025

Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

Gagosian will present the U.S. debut of Richard Serra’s Running Arcs (For John Cage) (1992), opening September 12th, 2025, at the gallery’s West 21st Street space in New York. First shown more than three decades ago at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the large-scale steel work returns on the exact anniversary of its original unveiling and will remain on view through December 20th, 2025.

The sculpture consists of three massive conical steel segments, each inverted in relation to the others and set in a staggered arrangement. Measuring 52 feet in length and 13 feet in height, the monumental forms embody Serra’s enduring investigation into weight, balance, and spatial perception, while also honoring his longtime connection to composer John Cage.

name: Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

artist: Richard Serra

gallery: Gagosian

location: West 21st Street, New York, NY

dates: September 12th — December 20th, 2025

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET: THE ALICE IN WONDERLAND SYNDROME

Pace Gallery presents The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles by Elmgreen & Dragset, on view from September 13th through October 25th. Spanning the gallery’s main space and adjoining south gallery, the show explores shifts in perception through acts of doubling, resizing, and spatial reduplication.

The Berlin-based duo, known for sculptural interventions that probe identity and belonging, uses the gallery’s architecture as both stage and subject. Each artwork appears at full scale in the main hall, while exact half-size versions are replicated in a carefully constructed miniature of that same space.

name: The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

artist: Elmgreen & Dragset

gallery: Pace Gallery

location: 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California

dates: September 13th — October 25th, 2025

ai weiwei’s installation in ukraine

RIBBON International will debut Ai Weiwei’s Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White at Pavilion 13, marking the artist’s first commission in Ukraine. Conceived as a site-specific installation, the work continues Ai’s investigation into the material and symbolic traces of conflict, transforming ideologically charged objects into reflections on contemporary struggles and shared human experience.

Referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s Divina Proportione, the piece engages with Enlightenment ideals of harmony and rational order while questioning their appropriation in contexts of war and concealment. By juxtaposing mathematical precision with objects tied to militarized histories, Ai underscores the fragile line between ideals of progress and the realities of violence, positioning the installation within his broader humanist and pacifist practice.

Ai WeiWei says: ‘That is the challenge, to build new works relating to what I feel, to me in the past and to the current situation. Art is more metaphysical. You cannot really give every description, but you can always suggest a gesture or attitude or some kind of symbolic meaning, more like a poetic gesture.’

name: Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White

artist: Ai WeiWei

location: Pavilion 13, Kyiv, Ukraine

commissioner: RIBBON International, FORMA Architects, Pavilion of Culture

dates: September 14th — November 30th 2025

image courtesy RIBBON International

Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Alejandro G. Iñárritu presents Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu at Fondazione Prada in Milan, an exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of his debut feature Amores Perros (2000). The installation resurrects previously unseen footage — abandoned during the film’s editing and preserved for decades in the archives of the National Autonomous University of Mexico — revealing fragments that speak to enduring themes of love, betrayal, and violence against the backdrop of Mexico City’s complex social realities. At its core, the work emphasizes the tactile presence of 35mm film, using its grain and flicker to evoke memory and immediacy.

name: Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu

artist: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

gallery: Fondazione Prada

location: Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Italy

dates: September 18th, 2025 — February 26th, 2026

calder gardens

Calder Gardens, the new cultural destination designed by Herzog and de Meuron and Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, has announced its opening date for September 21st, 2025. Located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia, the gallery space is set to showcase the art and ideas of Alexander Calder, one of the 20th century’s most influential artists and a Philadelphia native.

The institute has also appointed Juana Berrío as the Marsha Perelman Senior Director of Programs. A seasoned curator, educator, and arts programmer, Berrío will lead public programming that connects audiences to Calder’s work through performances, events, and wellness activities, fostering engagement and community in this innovative blend of art, nature, and architecture.

name: Calder Gardens

architect: Herzog & de Meuron

landscape designer: Piet Oudolf

location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
opening: September 21st, 2025

image courtesy Calder Gardens

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