top of page

crtry.

Last Minute — 9 Exhibitions Closing This May

  • 21 hours ago
  • 3 min read

These are the shows we'd run to see before they're gone. Nine exhibitions in London, Paris, Rome, and São Paulo, all closing by the end of the month.



Wu Jian'an, Metamorphoses


LOCATION: Museo Nazionale Romano, Baths of Diocletian, Rome

CLOSES: May 17, 2026


His first solo museum show in Italy. Leather installations, blown Murano glass, paper cuttings, and large-scale collages. East meets West through Ovid. The venue is a Roman bathhouse from the 3rd century, which makes sense for a show about transformation.



Paula Rego, Story Line


LOCATION: Victoria Miro, London

CLOSES: May 23, 2026


The most comprehensive exhibition of Rego's drawings to date. Pen and ink, pastel, conté, charcoal, pencil. The show includes drawings that have never been exhibited, plus sketchbooks, letters, and archival material. It starts with a drawing she made of her grandmother at nine years old and ends with one of her granddaughter. Her son Nick Willing wrote the accompanying book.



Loie Hollowell, Overview Effect


LOCATION: Pace Gallery, London

CLOSES: May 23, 2026


Hollowell's first UK show since 2018. New paintings from a series about the physical sensation of contractions during childbirth, turned into geometric abstraction. The title comes from what astronauts call the experience of seeing Earth from space. Shaped canvases, colour gradients, and a body that keeps showing up in every composition.



Priscilla Kennedy, Soft Machines, Phantom Limbs


LOCATION: Fondation H, Paris

CLOSES: May 23, 2026


Ghanaian artist, born 1994, lives and works in Kumasi. Made during a residency at the Cité internationale des arts. Kennedy uses the Paris city map as raw material, breaking it down and reassembling it through painting, tapestry, and knitting. The octopus keeps coming back as a figure in her work, part prosthetic, part intruder.



Hawaiʻi: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans


LOCATION: British Museum, London

CLOSES: May 25, 2026


Feathered cloaks worn by chiefs, carved deities, shark-toothed weapons, and contemporary work by Native Hawaiian artists. The show marks 200 years since King Liholiho and Queen Kamāmalu crossed oceans to visit Britain. Built with Native Hawaiian knowledge-bearers and featuring one of the largest collections of Hawaiian objects outside the islands.



Carrie Mae Weems 


LOCATION: Goodman Gallery, London

CLOSES: May 27, 2026


Her debut with Goodman Gallery London. Four decades of work about migration, belonging, and the Atlantic passage. At the same time, Weems has a newly commissioned film, The Long Goodbye, showing at V&A East until October.



Sebastião Salgado


LOCATION: Hôtel de Ville, Paris

CLOSES: May 30, 2026

LINK: paris.fr


Major retrospective in the Salle Saint-Jean at Paris City Hall. Decades of humanist and environmental photography, conceived with his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. The show ends with work by their son Rodrigo.



Janaina Tschäpe, piruetas de olhos abertos


LOCATION: Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo

CLOSES: May 30, 2026


Her first solo in São Paulo since 2019. Large-scale panoramic paintings made between her New York studio and Bocaina in Minas Gerais. Oil, oil stick, watercolor, and pastel. The Brazilian landscape is in there like climate on a surface.



Katharina Grosse, I Set Out, I Walked Fast


LOCATION: White Cube Bermondsey, London

CLOSES: May 31, 2026


Grosse has been redefining what painting can do for over thirty years. Colour doesn't stay on the canvas, it goes everywhere. Walls, floors, architecture. White Cube Bermondsey is a big space and she needs all of it.

 
 
bottom of page