The exhibitions to see in April 2026: KAWS in Vienna, Duchamp at MoMA and a V&A East show about Black British music

April is the month the art world swings from fair season back to museums, and this year the best shows are the ones where music and street culture are all over the walls. These seven open or run through April: a KAWS blowout in Vienna, the first Duchamp retrospective in North America in more than 50 years, a first U.S. museum survey of Harmony Korine, a V&A East show built around headphones and 125 years of Black British music, and Keith Haring’s painted cars parked in a Village gallery for nine days. They span Vienna, New York, Tokyo, Miami, Paris and London, in order of opening date. Dates are as the venues published them.

KAWS: Art & Comix, Albertina Modern, Vienna

KAWS’s big European museum show opens April 3 and runs through Sept. 27 at Albertina Modern, on Karlsplatz. It sets his sculptures, paintings and collectible toys beside 27 other historical and contemporary artist positions to explore how comics, cartoons and fine art have fed each other since the second half of the 20th century, per ORF. The names include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Futura 2000, Kenny Scharf and Raymond Pettibon, with a Roy Lichtenstein lamp and a walk-in papier-mâché subway car by Red Grooms and Mimi Gross.

Read moreRoy Lichtenstein’s Whitney Retrospective Says He Saw the Repost Coming

The surprise is Haring’s 1986 Tokyo Pop Shop, painted floor to ceiling in black line and moved into the galleries so visitors can walk in. A six-meter wooden KAWS figure with X eyes greets people on Karlsplatz. Co-curated by Angela Stief and Florian Waldvogel, the show also draws on KAWS’s own collection, now more than 4,000 works. He told FM4 how that started: “As I started to sell my work and to make money from selling my art, I started transitioning that into buying original works.”

Keith Haring: In the Street, Free Parking, New York

This is a nine-day pop-up, so it’s the one to catch first. From April 10 to 19 at 16 Morton Street, the new Free Parking gallery shows two cars Keith Haring painted: a 1963 Buick Special, believed to be the first car he painted, and a 1971 Land Rover Series III, both owned by the collector Larry Warsh. Haring painted the Land Rover in 1983 for Switzerland’s Montreux Jazz Festival, which is painted into the tangle of symbols, and Warsh bought it from the festival’s producers.

The show launches Keith Haring in 3D, the book by Warsh and Glenn Adamson tied to the Crystal Bridges survey that opens June 6, and it’s free to the public. A kick-off party was DJed by G-Bo The Pro, and talks included Muna Tseng and Carlo McCormick on 1980s downtown New York and Eric Shiner with the muralist Marka27 on when street art becomes sculpture. Warsh explained the free admission to No Kill Mag:

It’s very important that Keith Haring’s art continues to remain accessible to the public and not be gated in anyway.

Larry Warsh, No Kill Mag

Martin Margiela at kudan house, Tokyo

Martin Margiela, who left fashion in 2008 to work as an artist, gets what is described as his first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan. It runs April 11 to May 5, extended from its original April 29 end date because of demand, in a 1927 Spanish-style house in Chiyoda that’s a registered cultural property. Margiela did the scenography and curation himself, spreading collage, painting, drawing, sculpture, assemblage and video through the rooms.

The house is a nod to 2000, when he opened his first Maison Martin Margiela shop in a historic house in Ebisu and showed collections through the whole building. The official site quotes him on why he keeps his distance from the spotlight and what he’d rather do instead: “I prefer to instill questions than to show answers.”

Marcel Duchamp, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

MoMA’s Duchamp opens April 12 and runs through Aug. 22 on the sixth floor, and it’s the first North American retrospective of the artist in more than 50 years, spanning six decades and every medium he worked in. It was organized by Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo of MoMA and Matthew Affron of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with the Centre Pompidou, and ARTnews’s review counts more than 300 works.

Because the original 1917 Fountain is lost, the show uses copies from 1950, 1963 and 1964 to argue about originals and replicas, and Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) comes from Philadelphia, its first loan to MoMA since 1973. Also on view is Musical Erratum (1913), a score unplayable on any known instrument. ARTnews critic Alex Greenberger quotes Duchamp himself in his review: “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” A parallel show of 1964 readymade replicas opens April 25 at Gagosian’s new gallery at 980 Madison Avenue.

Harmony Korine: Perfect Nonsense, ICA Miami

The first U.S. museum survey of Harmony Korine runs April 15 to Oct. 18 on the ICA’s third floor, curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Gean Moreno. It brings together more than 75 works in painting, photography, collage, zines and drawing, from the screenplay for Kids (1995) to the ghostly “Twitchy” paintings made by combining iPhone captures with paint. Artnet singles out the “Fazors” paintings (2016), which radiate patterns from a single point, and BLOCKBUSTER (2018), a painted collage of VHS cassettes and covers.

The music link is real. Korine has lived in Miami since 2015, founded the experimental media company EDGLRD there and shot music videos for Rihanna, Sonic Youth, Will Oldham, Cat Power and the Black Keys. The show ends with Aggro Dr1ft (2023), his infrared “post-cinema” film starring Travis Scott. On the title, he told Artnet:

I think it was from a quote or something where I said I wasn’t necessarily concerned with the films making perfect sense,

Harmony Korine, Artnet News

Calder: Rêver en équilibre, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

Frank Gehry’s glass building hosts a Calder blockbuster from April 15 to Aug. 16, timed to the centenary of the artist’s arrival in France in 1926 and 50 years since his death. It has about 300 works across 3,000 square meters, including mobiles, stabiles, wire portraits, paintings and jewelry, directed by Suzanne Pagé with guest curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer.

The anchor is Cirque Calder (1931), loaned by the Whitney and shown act by act in circular cases that echo a ring, with the records he played during performances. Curator Olivier Michelon told designboom why it had to be here:

There couldn’t be a Calder retrospective without having the circus, as this is also the 100th anniversary of Calder coming to Paris,

Olivier Michelon, Fondation Louis Vuitton, designboom

The Music Is Black: A British Story, V&A East Museum, London

It opens April 18 with V&A East Museum in Stratford’s East Bank and closes Jan. 10, 2027, and it’s the one to hear as much as see. The V&A bills it as 125 years of Black music-making in Britain, with more than 120 tracks playing through headsets that react to where you stand and more than 200 objects, curated by Jacqueline Springer.

The list of things on view reads like a playlist: Winifred Atwell’s upright piano, Joan Armatrading’s childhood guitar, Jerry Dammers’s sketches for the 2 Tone logo, JME’s Nintendo setup and the Banksy-designed Union Jack stab-proof vest Stormzy wore at Glastonbury in 2019, per Square One. The V&A’s own highlights include Skepta and Jammer at Fabric in 2005 and So Solid Crew in Battersea Park in 2001. Springer said at the show’s announcement:

Music is the soundtrack to our lives, and one of the most powerful tools of unification.

Jacqueline Springer, curator, Crack Magazine

Also on our radar

Cao Fei’s Dash takes over Fondazione Prada in Milan from April 9 to Sept. 28, a two-channel, 47-minute video about smart agriculture plus a rice-granary tent and a temple woven from fertilizer bags. The Whitney Biennial and Raphael at the Met are still on view in New York, and Lorna Simpson’s Venice show continues. Art lovers watching the market should also see how Pharrell’s auction house sold a triceratops this month, and for the next month’s picks, our May guide.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.