January’s shows have to compete with everyone’s resolutions, so the good ones bring something extra. These seven are open or opening this month, picked for crossover pull as much as prestige: a painter who made a Sonic Youth cover, Selena’s stage wardrobe, a late filmmaker’s paintings and the first show built around Basquiat’s heads. They cover Paris, Los Angeles, Berlin and Denmark, in order of opening date. Dates are as the venues and outlets published them.
Kandinsky, La musique des couleurs, Musée de la Musique, Paris
Last call on the most on-brand show in Paris. Kandinsky: The Music of Colour has been at the Philharmonie de Paris’s Musée de la Musique since Oct. 15 and closes Feb. 1. The Philharmonie and the Centre Pompidou built it around the idea that Kandinsky’s abstraction began as a musical one, with nearly 200 works plus scores, records, books and tools from his studio, per the Pompidou.
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It starts with the “Wagner shock” he felt in Moscow in 1896 and runs through his stage experiments at the Bauhaus, with a headset-guided route through the rooms.
Gerhard Richter, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Richter retrospective, which opened Oct. 17 and runs through March 2, is billed as the first full panorama of his six decades. The foundation counts 270 works from 1962 to 2024, which Studio International puts at 275 across four floors. Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota arranged them by decade, from Onkel Rudi and the 48 Portraits to the 18 October 1977 cycle on loan from MoMA.
The music angle isn’t in the show’s billing, but it’s in the back catalogue: Richter’s painting of a candle is the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1988 double album Daydream Nation, as Domus recounts. If you’ve ever owned that record, you’ve owned a Richter.
Mickalene Thomas, All About Love, Grand Palais, Paris
Open since Dec. 17 and running to April 5, this is billed as the first major solo show at the Grand Palais for an African-American artist. It gathers more than two decades of Thomas’s work across painting, collage, photography, video and installation, and the title comes from bell hooks’s 1999 book All About Love: New Visions.
The rhinestone-studded portraits are the draw. Thomas puts Black women at the center of art-history set pieces, reworking Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque. Time Out Paris says the Paris edition is laid out as a series of vintage-style living rooms over two levels rather than a chronological march.
Selena, From Texas to the World, Grammy Museum, Los Angeles
The Grammy Museum’s newest pop-up opens Jan. 15 and runs through March 16 on the fourth floor, with about 15 items from the Selena Museum in Corpus Christi, Texas, on show outside her home state for the first time. Suzette Quintanilla, Selena’s sister, handpicked them. Curator Kelsey Goelz told the Associated Press the highlights include the white beaded gown Selena wore to the 1994 Grammys, the leather outfit from the Amor Prohibido cover, and the microphone from her final performance, still marked with lipstick.
It’s incredibly special to share these treasured items, for the very first time outside of our Selena Museum, at the iconic Grammy Museum in Los Angeles,
Suzette Quintanilla, The Associated Press, via KSAT
Her Grammy and Lifetime Achievement Award, plus fashion designs she drew as a teenager, are on view too, with every description in English and Spanish.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Keep Movin’, Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Tillmans’s pictures of nightlife, portraiture and fashion shaped how a generation sees youth culture. His ninth show at Regen Projects, Jan. 15 to March 1, folds four decades of that into new photographs, videos and installations, including coiled industrial ropes on the floor and a new version of his ongoing Truth Study Center.
The sound connection is literal: his video Wild Carrot is set to a spare soundtrack he plays himself on the kalimba, and Regen says he is increasingly folding sound and music into his moving-image work. Tillmans told Family Style:
What looks new often turns out to be something returning from 10 or 20 years ago,
Wolfgang Tillmans, Family Style
David Lynch, Pace Gallery, Die Tankstelle, Berlin
Pace’s second Lynch solo show opens Jan. 29 in a former petrol station that the gallery and Galerie Judin turned into a space. It carries never-before-seen mixed-media paintings, watercolors in frames he built himself, three of his uncanny lamp sculptures and early short films screened beside the paintings, per Artnet.
The earliest works are his 1999 photographs of abandoned industrial sites in Berlin. Pace’s Genevieve Day told Artnet the show “builds on an idea Lynch was actively developing last year”, and it previews a larger Lynch exhibition slated for Pace’s Los Angeles gallery in fall 2026. Pace also lists music among the media of the Twin Peaks director’s nearly six-decade career.
Basquiat, Headstrong: Basquiat on Paper, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
Denmark’s Louisiana opens the first institutional survey devoted entirely to Basquiat’s heads on Jan. 30, and it runs to May 17. The 45 works are mostly oil-stick drawings from 1981 to 1983, many rarely shown, and Artprice notes the paper pieces carry almost none of the text and numbers he’s known for, which pushes the focus onto the faces themselves.
Hypebeast traces the obsession to a seven-year-old Basquiat’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy, a gift from his mother after a car accident. Asked how he began a painting, he once said:
I suppose I would start with a head.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hypebeast
Next month
February brings Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery in London on Feb. 12 and Tracey Emin’s 40-year retrospective at Tate Modern on Feb. 27, per The Art Newspaper. The same week, Frieze Los Angeles takes over the Santa Monica Airport, and our March guide picks up with the Whitney Biennial and David Hockney at the Serpentine.
Sources
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
