## Spring’s Art Calendar, From the Whitney Biennial to a Landmark Zurbarán Show in London
If the art world’s spring season has a pulse, it’s beating in museums and biennials rather than at the fair tents. In the coming months, a new Whitney Biennial opens in New York, major surveys land in Venice and Paris, and London prepares a rare, career-spanning look at Francisco de Zurbarán — a painter whose most intense canvases are seldom gathered in the city.
### The Whitney Biennial opens March 8 The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial arrives March 8 under the stewardship of curators Chrissie Iles and Drew Sawyer, who joined the museum as a photography curator in 2023. The exhibition includes 56 artists, with many making their first appearance in New York. Whitney director Scott Rothkopf framed the show’s ambitions in The New York Times, saying it “doesn’t try to simplify the strangeness of our times.”
While the Biennial has long served as a barometer for American art’s shifting priorities, this edition’s emphasis on artists new to the city suggests a deliberate widening of the museum’s usual gravitational field — a reminder that the most urgent practices are not always incubated within the familiar coastal circuits.
### São Paulo: Sandra Gamarra Heshiki at MASP Also opening this season is “Sandra Gamarra Heshiki: Replica” at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. The exhibition title signals a pointed inquiry into how museums construct authority through display, copying, and the visual language of institutional history — questions that feel especially charged at a moment when collections worldwide are reexamining the narratives they have long presented as neutral.
### New York: Carol Bove at the Guggenheim, through August 16 At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Carol Bove is on view through August 16. Bove’s work has often tested the boundary between sculpture and the architecture that contains it, and the Guggenheim’s spiraling interior has historically functioned as both a stage and a constraint for artists willing to engage its centrifugal logic.
### Venice: A London-based painter returns with a decade-long survey In Venice, a London-based painter returns seven years after presenting “dreamy visions of life in Nairobi,” the city where he was born. This time, the presentation is described as a survey spanning a decade of paintings that grapple with Europe’s refugee crisis and “realms beyond our own.” The shift in focus — from intimate urban reverie to geopolitical rupture and speculative space — underscores how quickly the emotional weather of contemporary painting can change when history accelerates.
### Paris: Jesse Darling at the Palais de Tokyo, March 29–January 10 Jesse Darling’s project at the Palais de Tokyo runs March 29 through January 10, giving the artist an unusually long runway in one of Europe’s most visible contemporary venues. Darling’s practice has been closely associated with the aesthetics of vulnerability and institutional pressure, and the extended dates suggest a show designed to be lived with — not simply visited.
### London: A first-of-its-kind Zurbarán retrospective, May 2–August 23 One of the season’s most consequential historical offerings is a Zurbarán retrospective in London, billed as the first of its kind in the city. The exhibition promises a full view of Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán (Spanish, 1598–1664), including the period when he helped cultivate the career of his son, Juan.
The show’s anchor is a painting of a Catholic friar, kneeling in prayer and partially swallowed by shadow — a work defined by dramatic illumination and a devotional intensity that helped shape the Baroque’s visual rhetoric. London rarely has multiple Zurbaráns of this caliber on view at once; the retrospective aims to change that, if only for a season.
### Pittsburgh: Carnegie International and new commissions In Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Museum of Art stages the 59th edition of the Carnegie International. The program includes 14 new commissions, with participating artists named in the announcement including Torkwase Dyson and G. Peter Jemison — a signal that the exhibition is investing in work that will enter the world for the first time in this context.
### Venice’s national pavilions: controversy around the US selection Beyond the central Biennale exhibition, the national pavilions are already generating debate. Among the most discussed decisions is the selection of Alma Allen to represent the United States — a choice described as controversial, and one likely to keep attention trained on how nations narrate themselves through art.
Taken together, these openings map a season in which contemporary institutions are balancing the immediate pressures of the present with longer historical arcs — from the Whitney’s refusal to “simplify” the moment to London’s rare chance to see Zurbarán’s chiaroscuro devotion assembled at scale.
