September exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR
September brings a dense new season of exhibitions across art, architecture, and design, with major retrospectives arriving alongside immersive installations and more focused looks at individual practices. This month’s exhibition radar moves from the late legend Yayoi Kusama at the Stedelijk Museum and Remedios Varo at Louisiana to Maurizio Cattelan in Berlin, Do Ho Suh in Seoul, and Homo Faber’s return to Venice, while shows in Tokyo, Mumbai, Lisbon, and New York take on subjects ranging from artificial intelligence and contemporary habitation to craft, technology, and the natural world.
Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and listings on our dedicated events guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them around the globe.
Wendell Castle: Living
At Friedman Benda‘s New York gallery, Wendell Castle: Living reconstructs the domestic world that furniture maker and sculptor Wendell Castle shared with ceramist and multimedia artist Nancy Jurs in Scottsville, New York. Curated by their daughter Alison Castle, the exhibition takes a 1973 House Beautiful feature on the couple’s home as its starting point, returning Castle’s furniture and Jurs’ ceramics to the kind of lived setting in which they originally appeared.
Several works photographed in the 1973 interior are being shown publicly for the first time in decades, alongside domestic objects that suggest a kitchen, bedroom, living room, and dining room. Early pieces including Castle’s Chaise Rocker from 1962 and Environment from 1972 sit with later works, tracing how his sculptural approach to furniture developed while keeping its relationship to everyday use in view.
name: Wendell Castle: Living
designer: Wendell Castle
museum: Friedman Benda
location: New York, USA
dates: September 17th, 2026 — October 17th, 2026
Wendell Castle: Living, Friedman Benda | image courtesy Friedman Benda
Do Ho Suh’s largest exhibition to date brings together around 500 works spanning more than thirty years of practice at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Drawings, sculptures, videos, and installations trace his ongoing interest in home and migration, and in the ways memory and identity become attached to the spaces people inhabit. The exhibition reaches back to works from his student years in Seoul alongside major pieces and projects still in progress.
Early material appears in a section called Seed Bank, including drawings, records, and objects that would later develop into recurring ideas across Suh’s work. The exhibition also brings together architectural installations including ‘Small Gate’, the ‘Rubbing/Loving’ series, and ‘Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul’, where translucent fabric reconstructs the ordinary details of homes the artist has lived in across different cities.
name: Do Ho Suh
artist: Do Ho Suh
museum: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA)
location: Seoul, Korea
dates: August 27th, 2026 — February 9th, 2027
Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024 Polyester, stainless steel, photo by Jeon Taeg Su © Do Ho Suh
Yayoi Kusama
A major retrospective for the legendary late artist Yayoi Kusama retrospective arrives at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, tracing more than seventy years of work from her early practice in Matsumoto through the experimental years she spent in New York and her later work in Tokyo. Painting, sculpture, drawing, fashion, collage, installation, and documentation of happenings come together to show how recurring ideas around repetition, infinity, and the dissolution of the self developed across her career.
The Amsterdam exhibition is the final stop of a European retrospective organized with Fondation Beyeler and Museum Ludwig. Alongside familiar works are historical pieces rarely seen in Europe and recent installations, including a new version of one of Kusama’s immersive environments, where patterns and reflections extend across the surrounding space.
name: Yayoi Kusama
artist: Yayoi Kusama
museum: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
dates: September 11th, 2026 — January 17th, 2027
Yayoi Kusama with Yellow Tree / Living Room at the Aichi Triennale, 2010 | image courtesy Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner © YAYOI KUSAMA
Remedios Varo
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents the first major museum exhibition in Europe devoted to Remedios Varo, bringing together more than 70 works from across the Spanish-Mexican surrealist’s career. Early paintings from Barcelona and Paris appear alongside works from her most productive years in Mexico during the 1950s and early 1960s, including rarely shown loans from museums and private collections.
Varo’s strange interiors and imaginary landscapes bring scientific inquiry into contact with mythology, mysticism, mechanics, and the occult. Paintings populated by hybrid creatures, travelers, and eccentric machines are joined by drawings, notebooks, and archival material, giving a broader view of the references and ideas behind her precisely constructed surrealist world.
name: Remedios Varo
artist: Remedios Varo
museum: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
location: Humlebæk, Denmark
dates: September 18th, 2026 — January 10th, 2027
Still Life Reviving, 1963 © 2025 The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY / Scala, Florence
Water Works: in the Flow of Making
Berlin-based collective raumlaborberlin brings Water Works: in the Flow of Making to TOTO GALLERY·MA in Tokyo, extending its long-running experiments around water, public space, and collective forms of urban life. The exhibition gathers earlier water-related projects alongside new work developed in Japan, where the group has been looking at Tokyo Bay as a space for architecture and everyday use beyond the city’s fixed ground.
A workshop with students from Shibaura Institute of Technology feeds directly into the show. Working with bamboo and inflatable dunnage bags, the group built floating structures and staged a performance from a barge in Tokyo Bay, testing how bodies, temporary construction, and maritime regulations might shape new ways of occupying the waterfront. Materials from the workshop return inside the gallery alongside documentation, studies of water circulation, and proposals for future waterfront environments.
name: Water Works: In the Flow of Making
designer: raumlaborberlin
museum: TOTO GALLERY·MA
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: September 10th, 2026 — November 29th, 2026
Bathing Culture (Göteborg, Sweden, 2014) © raumlaborberlin
Second Nature
Second Nature takes over all four floors of the Art House at Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, bringing together nine immersive installations by Random International, teamLab, A.A. Murakami, Simon Heijdens, and Es Devlin. Presented with experiential art platform Superblue for its first exhibition in Asia, the show looks at the increasingly blurred relationship between digital systems and the natural world.
Several of the works shift in response to visitors or their surroundings. Digital flowers bloom and disappear around moving bodies, weather data animates an indoor landscape, and motion-sensing installations change as people pass through them. Across the exhibition, technology becomes part of the environment itself, shaping how visitors move, look, and interact with each work.
name: Second Nature
museum: Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC)
location: Mumbai, India
dates: July 3rd, 2026 — January 10th, 2027