november exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

November continues with exhibitions that transcend disciplines and generations, exploring the intersections of art, design, and architecture through material and memory. From Gerhard Richter’s sweeping retrospective in Paris to Ruth Asawa’s survey in San Francisco, the month’s highlights trace how artists transform process into poetry.

In Milan, Alchimia. The Revolution of Italian Design revisits a radical era of experimentation, while Histories of Ecology at MASP in São Paulo redefines our relationship with the natural world. Janet Echelman’s Radical Softness reveals the quiet power of form and light, and Jeff Koons’s Porcelain Series transforms myth into modern art.

Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and our dedicated event guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them in their travels. On the whole, the broad list of exhibitions shows the range of themes taken by both designers and galleries across the world.

kaws Family

KAWS: FAMILY invites visitors into the artist’s vibrant and emotionally charged world. Presented as the artist’s first major museum exhibition on the West Coast, the show spans three decades of work, tracing his ability to tap into shared feelings and collective culture.

Paintings, drawings, sculptures, and interventions, from ad takeovers to collaborations and toys, show the breadth of KAWS’s evolving visual language, built around recurring figures and reimagined pop imagery.

At its center stands FAMILY (2021), a monumental bronze sculpture that gathers KAWS’s well-known characters together. Their gestures of tenderness and fragility mirror our own experiences of care and connection. By reframing familiar animated icons through his own lens, KAWS turns nostalgia into reflection, creating space for empathy and shared cultural memory.

name: KAWS Family artist: KAWS **museum: **SFMOMA location: San Francisco, USA dates: November 15th, 2025 — May 3rd, 2026

KAWS Family, 2021, courtesy the artist © KAWS

Meriem Bennani: sole crushing

For her solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, Meriem Bennani transforms the Fondation into a vast resonant instrument with Sole Crushing, a multi-floor sound installation where more than two hundred flip-flops perform a composition blending orchestral harmony with the energy of collective noise.

As they strike surrounding surfaces, the flip-flops evoke the pulse of crowds — protests, stadiums, or dakka marrakchia gatherings — turning a simple, familiar sound into a meditation on community and individuality.

Reimagined from its 2024–25 presentation at Fondazione Prada, this version features a new soundtrack by Reda Senhaji (Cheb Runner) and a site-specific design attuned to Lafayette Anticipations’ architecture.

name: Meriem Bennani: Sole Crushing artist: Meriem Bennani **gallery: **Lafayette Anticipations location: Paris, France **dates: **until February 8th, 2026

view of Meriem Bennani’s exhibition Sole Crushing at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery (LA), Lodovico Corsini Gallery (Brussels), and Sadie Coles Gallery (London) © Aurélien Mole

shigeru ban: architecture and social contributions

Opening at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków, the exhibition devoted to Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban will span two floors of the Europe-Far East Gallery and remain on view for six months.

Showcasing Ban’s inventive use of materials — especially wood and cardboard — the exhibition traces his work across diverse contexts, from private residences and corporate buildings to public institutions and humanitarian projects responding to crises such as earthquakes and wars.

Original models arriving from Japan, France, and Ukraine, along with reconstructions, drawings, photographs, and diagrams, will illuminate Ban’s balance of structural experimentation, spatial clarity, and social purpose.

name: Shigeru Ban: Architecture and Social Contributions architect: Shigeru Ban **museum: **Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology location: Kraków, Poland **dates: **until May 3rd, 2026

Mount Fuji World Heritage Centre, Japan, 2017, image by Hiroyuki Hirai, © Shigeru Ban

paola pivi: I Don’t Like It, I Love It

At the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Paola Pivi — I Don’t Like It, I Love It transforms AGWA’s Brutalist spaces into a vivid, imaginative world where humor and gravity meet. Known for her surreal scenarios — feathered polar bears, inverted airplanes, zebras in snow — Pivi explores coexistence, empathy, and environmental fragility.

The exhibition features new commissions, including a giant inflatable comic cell made with Big Nate creator Lincoln Peirce, three new polar bears, and a rooftop installation of suspended trays filled with colored liquid that play with light and space. Pivi blends joy with reflection, and invites viewers to experience art as a space of connection and wonder.

name: Paola Pivi: I don’t like it, I love it artist: Paola Pivi **gallery: **AGWA location: Perth, Australia **dates: **November 8th, 2025 — April 26th, 2026

‘Paola Pivi: I don’t like it, I love it,’ image courtesy AGWA

strates

To mark its tenth anniversary, Philia presents STRATES, a major exhibition staged across two brutalist icons in Noisy-le-Grand — Jacques Kalisz’s iconic Mont d’Est parking structure and Ricardo Bofill’s Espaces Abraxas. Bringing together one emblematic work from each Philia artist, the exhibition retraces a decade of dialogue between art, design, and architecture.

Set within the sculptural concrete spirals of Kalisz and the theatrical facades of Bofill, STRATES explores how memory and projection shape both objects and place. Extending Philia’s commitment to architecture as context and community as medium, the project activates Mont d’Est’s evolving public realm through installations and workshops with artists. See designboom’s coverage here!

name: Strates **gallery: **Galerie Philia location: Paris, France **dates: **until November 30th, 2025

Espaces Abraxas by Ricardo Bofill, image © Studio Brinth, courtesy Galerie Philia

wes anderson: The Archives

The Design Museum presents a landmark exhibition offering rare access to Wes Anderson’s personal archives, revealing over thirty years of the filmmaker’s creative world. For the first time in Britain, more than 600 objects — from storyboards and polaroids to puppets, costumes, and miniature sets — trace the evolution of Anderson’s craft and collaborations.

Visitors can explore highlights like the pink model of The Grand Budapest Hotel, vending machines from Asteroid City, Margot Tenenbaum’s FENDI fur coat, and the stop-motion puppets from Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. These artifacts all together illuminate Anderson’s devotion to detail and design, and show how his handmade sensibility and visual precision have shaped a whimsical and deeply human cinematic universe. See designboom’s coverage here!

name: Wes Anderson: The Archives artist: Wes Anderson **museum: **Design Museum location: London, UK **dates: **November 21st, 2025 — July 26th, 2026

Wes Anderson © Searchlight Pictures, image by Charlie Gray

juergen teller: you are invited

The inaugural exhibition at the Onassis Foundation’s new Athens space, ‘you are invited,’ offers a wide-ranging view of Juergen Teller’s evolving practice. Bringing together photographs, videos, and new, previously unseen images from the 1990s to today, the exhibition traces Teller’s distinctive blend of intimacy and irony across portraits, still lifes, and personal scenes.

Alongside his iconic images of figures like Iggy Pop, Kate Moss, and Charlotte Rampling, the show reflects a deepened emotional register shaped by recent experiences — photographing Pope Francis at a women’s prison during the Venice Biennale, documenting Auschwitz’s 80th liberation anniversary, and ongoing collaborations with his wife, Dovile Drizyte. Balancing humor and gravity, Teller’s work here takes on a renewed sense of purpose, exploring faith and fragility with an openness that’s at once personal and universal.

name: Juergen Teller: you are invited artist: Juergen Teller **gallery: **Onassis location: Athens, Greece **dates: **until December 30th, 2025

Leg, Snails And Peaches No.43, London, 2017, image courtesy Juergen Teller

Learning from design Maestros

21_21 DESIGN SIGHT presents Learning from Design Maestros, an exhibition directed by Noriko Kawakami and Kaoru Tashiro that reflects on six visionary figures whose ideas continue to shape the way we think about design and life: Bruno Munari, Max Bill, Achille Castiglioni, Otl Aicher, Enzo Mari, and Dieter Rams.

Through films, archival materials, and key works, the exhibition reveals how these designers fused creativity, teaching, and social awareness to redefine their disciplines. It also highlights the perspective of Shutaro Mukai, whose friendships with Bill and Aicher helped establish Japan’s Science of Design.

By revisiting these masters’ lessons in an era of rapid change, the exhibition invites visitors to consider how design remains a vital means of understanding and shaping the world.

name: Learning From Design Maestros gallery: 21_21 Design Sight

location: Tokyo, Japan **dates: **November 21st, 2025 — March 8th, 2026

Enzo Mari, Timor, 1967, image courtesy Danese Milano

Jeff Koons: Porcelain Series

Gagosian presents Porcelain Series, an exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by Jeff Koons, marking the first show devoted entirely to this body of work. Drawing on imagery that ranges from the everyday to the mythological, Koons transforms familiar forms into radiant, reflective icons that explore beauty, desire, and cultural memory.

His mirror-polished stainless-steel sculptures, crafted through advanced digital and mechanical processes, invite viewers into their gleaming surfaces, blurring the line between object and observer.

The accompanying paintings layer natural landscapes, gestural brushwork, and metallic leafing with motifs from art history, creating luminous compositions that bridge centuries of visual tradition. Across both mediums, the artist reflects on humanity’s enduring pursuit of transcendence through art.

name: Jeff Koons: Porcelain Series artist: Jeff Koons **gallery: **Gagosian location: New York, USA **dates: **November 13th, 2025 — February 28th, 2026

Jeff Koons, Three Graces, 2016-22 (detail), image courtesy Gagosian

petersen automotive

The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles opens a new exhibition, Performance and Prestige: A History of Aston Martin, tracing the British company’s evolution from its 1913 origins. Installed in the Meyers Gallery, the presentation gathers more than a dozen vehicles that embody the changing language of speed and craftsmanship that has defined Aston Martin for over a century.

The Aston Martin exhibition is the first in the museum’s history. The collection of models is organized to convey the shifting priorities of automotive design, which evolved from the pragmatic, streamlined sculpting of post-war racing prototypes to the expressive surfaces of contemporary hypercars. See designboom’s coverage here!

name: Performance and Prestige: A History of Aston Martin **museum: **Petersen Museum | @petersenmuseum

location: Los Angeles, California **dates: **October 30th, 2025 — October 2026

1979 Aston Martin Bulldog, image courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum

Gerhard richter

Fondation Louis Vuitton presents a sweeping retrospective dedicated to Gerhard Richter, one of the most influential artists of the past century. Bringing together 275 works spanning more than six decades, the exhibition offers an unparalleled view of Richter’s practice — from early photo-based paintings to his final abstractions, as well as glass and steel sculptures, works on paper, and overpainted photographs.

Tracing his lifelong engagement with both image and material, the exhibition reveals how Richter continually redefined painting’s possibilities, filtering reality through photography, memory, and abstraction. Organized chronologically, it highlights the artist’s restless experimentation and his enduring fascination with perception, history, and the act of making.

Continuing the Fondation’s tradition of major monographic exhibitions, this presentation stands as the most comprehensive exploration to date of Richter’s vision, and demonstrate his deep impact on contemporary art.

name: Gerhard Richter artist: Gerhard Richter **museum: **Fondation Louis Vuitton location: Paris, France **dates: **until March 2nd, 2026

Gerhard Richter, 4900 Farben, 2007. laquer on Alu Dibond, 196 panels, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris © Gerhard Richter 2025, image © Primae / Louis Bourjac

fungi: Anarchist Designers

FUNGI: Anarchist Designers reimagines mushrooms not as materials for human use but as autonomous collaborators in shaping the world. Curated by anthropologist Anna Tsing and architect-artist Feifei Zhou, the exhibition at Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Instituut challenges the human-centered narratives of ‘sustainable design,’ and positions fungi as unruly co-designers that flourish in the margins and ruins of capitalism.

Through installations, sculptures, sound, and multimedia works — many created in collaboration with scientists — the exhibition explores how fungi connect species, environments, and economies, from decaying forests to nuclear fallout zones.

Rejecting polished notions of eco-innovation, FUNGI embraces decay and unpredictability as creative forces, inviting visitors to reconsider design as a shared, anarchic process among humans and other living beings.

name: FUNGI: Anarchist Designers **museum: **Nieuwe Instituut location: Rotterdam, Netherlands **dates: **November 21st, 2025 — August 9th, 2026

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Fungi Anarchist Designers, n.d. digital photograph. courtesy the artist. from the 2025 grant to Nieuwe Instituut for the exhibition FUNGI: Anarchist Designers. image courtesy Graham Foundation

ruth asawa: A retrospective

‘I’m not so interested in the expression of something. I’m more interested in what the material can do,’ said Ruth Asawa, whose six-decade career is celebrated in Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective at MoMA. Gathering nearly 300 works across mediums — wire and bronze sculptures, drawings, prints, and public commissions — the exhibition traces the artist’s lifelong fascination with material transformation and spatial tension.

From her early studies at Black Mountain College to her San Francisco studio, Asawa pursued the possibilities of humble materials like paper and wire, creating forms that merge abstraction and representation.

Deeply committed to community and arts education, she approached making as an extension of living, seeing creativity in every act. This retrospective honors that vision, inviting viewers to experience the quiet radicalism of an artist who found infinite variation in the simplest of means.

name: Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective artist: Ruth Asawa **museum: **Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) location: New York, USA **dates: **until February 7th, 2026

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, installation view, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. digital image © 2025 The Museum of Modern Art, photo by Jonathan Dorado

alchimia

Alchimia. The Revolution of Italian Design is the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to the Milanese collective founded by Alessandro and Adriana Guerriero in 1976. Following its debut in Berlin, the exhibition returns to Milan in an expanded form with a new display conceived by Alessandro Guerriero himself — a poetic ‘carpet-raft’ that invites visitors into the group’s imaginative, utopian world.

Active until 1992, Alchimia emerged during a time of social transformation, fusing design, architecture, art, fashion, and performance into a free-spirited laboratory of experimentation. Rejecting the constraints of functionalism through their concept of ‘banal design,’ the collective reasserted design’s emotional and symbolic potential.

Featuring over 150 works, from furniture and objects to paintings and films, the exhibition traces Alchimia’s radical redefinition of design as a space for irony, storytelling, and visionary thought.

name: Alchimia: The Revolution of Italian Design **gallery: **ADI Design Museum location: Milan, Italy **dates: **November 11th, 2025 — January 22nd, 2026

image courtesy ADI Design Museum

cerith wyn Evans: forms in Space… Through light (in time)

Forms in Space… by Light (in Time) presents a monumental installation by Cerith Wyn Evans, composed of an intricate network of white neon suspended in the Oval Gallery. The work unfolds as both sculpture and choreography of light, tracing rhythm and motion through space.

Joined by sound pieces, installations, and videos, the exhibition reveals the conceptual depth and sensory precision that define Wyn Evans’s practice. The Welsh artist’s work originated with experimental cinema, and has since expanded with influences from music, literature, and philosophy to create experiences that are cerebral and atmospheric.

name: Cerith Wyn Evans — Forms in Space… through Light (in Time) artist: Cerith Wyn Evans **museum: **MAAT: Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology location: Lisbon, Portugal **dates: **until February 16th, 2026

image by Bruno Lopes, courtesy MAAT

adam pendleton: Who owns Geometry Anyway?

Friedman Benda presents Who Owns Geometry Anyway?, an exhibition by Adam Pendleton marking the artist’s first collaboration with the gallery and his debut exploration of furniture as form. Known for weaving together expressionism, minimalism, and conceptual rigor, Pendleton reimagines geometry as both language and structure.

Circles, squares, and triangles — recurring motifs in his paintings and sculptures — reappear here in wood, onyx, and granite, transformed into functional objects that merge precision with poetics. The works engage the surrounding architecture through painted geometric interventions, creating a total environment that blurs the line between art and design.

Evoking Isamu Noguchi’s belief that art should be inseparable from its setting, Pendleton’s installation reflects on form, tension, and openness—suggesting that geometry, like meaning, is always contingent, shifting, and shared.

name: Adam Pendleton: Who Owns Geometry Anyway? designer: Adam Pendleton **gallery: **Friedman Benda location: New York, USA **dates: **November 7th — December 19th, 2025

Adam Pendleton, EXTENDED FORM ONE, 2025, image courtesy Friedman Benda

Histories of Ecology

In the year Brazil hosts COP30 in Belém, MASP presents Histories of Ecology, an exhibition that broadens the idea of ecology beyond the climate crisis to encompass the intertwined relationships between human and more-than-human worlds.

Bringing together works by 116 artists — many from the Global South — the exhibition examines how colonialism, environmental racism, and capitalism have shaped contemporary ecological realities while foregrounding resilience, solidarity, and interconnectedness. Rejecting the notion of ‘nature’ as something separate from society, it instead proposes ecology as a living network of forces — fluid, relational, and constantly transforming.

Organized into five thematic sections, Histories of Ecology traverses spiritual, territorial, and planetary dimensions, inviting viewers to imagine more inclusive ways of inhabiting the world and to see the future as a shared, collective endeavor.

name: Histories of Ecology **museum: **MASP location: São Paulo, Brazil **dates: **until February 1st, 2026

Aycoobo Wilson Rodríguez, Calendário, 2024, image courtesy MASP

janet echelman: Radical Softness

Radical Softness offers an intimate view of Janet Echelman’s remarkable career, tracing her evolution from early experiments in drawing, painting, and textiles to the monumental net sculptures that have transformed cityscapes worldwide.

Known for using ancient fishing-net techniques together with advanced engineering, Echelman creates vast, floating forms that render wind, light, and motion visible — poetic expressions of humanity’s connection to the natural world.

The exhibition explores her use of softness as both material and philosophy, revealing how pliancy, transparency, and suspension become acts of strength and empathy. Featuring works from across four decades, alongside new cyanotypes, Radical Softness reflects on the power of art to unite people and invite stillness within the rhythms of contemporary life.

name: Janet Echelman: Radical Softness artist: Janet Echelman **gallery: **Sarasota Art Museum location: Sarasota, Florida, USA **dates: **November 16th, 2025 — April 26th, 2026

Janet Echelman (American), Enfold, Hill House Montecito, CA, 2022, image by Joe Fletcher, courtesy the artist