The Top Ten Shows in Europe in 2024

From an exhibition dedicated to legendary filmmaker Chantal Akerman at Bozar, Brussels, to US painter Noah Davis’s first presentation in Germany, this has been a year of long-overdue retrospectives and stand-out solos in Europe. Featuring Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Leonora Carrington, the bombastic ‘Surrealism’, at Centre Pompidou, is the only group show on our list and is a fitting send-off for the museum, which will close next year for renovation until 2030.

‘Surrealism’ / Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

In honour of the centenary of André Breton’s founding Surrealist Manifesto (1924) this autumn, the Centre Pompidou has dedicated an expansive group show to the movement. Set within a maze-like structure and organized chronologically as well as thematically, ‘Surréalisme’ skilfully circumvents the curatorial pitfall of an anodyne presentation. Showcasing favourites such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Joan Miró, the exhibition also acknowledges the significant contributions to the canon of female surrealists, including Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning. Whether cocooned in cow hides (Carrington’s Green Tea, 1942) or walking down endless mirrored hallways (Tanning’s Birthday, 1942), the uncanny figures painted by these artists prod at your subconscious long after you leave the museum. – Ivana Cholakova

Christoph Büchel / Fondazione Prada, Venice, Italy

Christoph Büchel has a track record of courting controversy at the Venice Biennale. He turned Santa Maria della Misericordia into the city’s first place of Muslim worship (The Mosque, 2015) and exhibited the wreckage of a fishing vessel on which more than 800 migrant passengers died (Barca Nostra, Our Boat, 2019). During this year’s edition, the Swiss Icelandic artist opened a solo show at Fondazione Prada, turning the gorgeous 18th century palazzo into a giant liquidation sale in reference to the building’s history as a community bank (Monte de Pietà, Mount of Piety, 2024). What made this immersive, multi-layered installation so impressive was the obsessive level of detail that went into every aspect. By interweaving piles of literal rubbish with priceless artworks from the foundation’s collection, Büchel made us question how we assign value in the first place. – Chloe Stead

Chantal Akerman / Bozar, Brussels, Belgium

Earlier this year at Bozar, Chantal Akerman’s long-overdue first major retrospective, ‘Travelling’, featured never-before-exhibited archival images and working documents alongside her iconic films and installations. The artist’s estate also partnered with CINEMATEK to restore and offer screenings of Akerman’s films, including her light-hearted musical Golden Eighties (1986), which showcases her innovative use of mundane settings and tropes as a starting point to dissect broader social themes such as feminism and capitalism. After Bozar, the exhibition travelled to Paris’s Jeu de Paume, where it is still on view. In his review of this iteration for frieze, Ren Ebel wrote that ‘Travelling’ is a ‘dual-purpose retrospective with two distinct goals: to celebrate Akerman’s work as a filmmaker and to present her practice as a video artist – an often-overlooked strand of her career’. – Ivana Cholakova

Gisèle Vienne / Haus am Waldsee and Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin, Germany

With puppetry enjoying a moment in contemporary art, it is no surprise that Gisèle Vienne has made the list. At Haus am Waldsee, the artist and chorographer’s haunting, life-sized, streetwear-dressed dolls tap into the longstanding function of puppetry as a political tool to express that which is repressed and unconscious. As Gabriela Acha observes in a recent review for frieze, ‘In their radical stillness, they evoke anything but silence.’ At the nearby Georg Kolbe Museum, Vienne’s dolls are presented alongside puppets made by avant garde female artists, such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hannah Höch. At Sophiensæle, other aspects of Vienne’s practice could be seen in recurring screenings of the artist’s horror film Jerk (2021) and stagings of her experimental performance Crowd (2017), a fractured reconstruction of dancers at an electronic rave. – Ivana Cholakova

Rene Matić and Oscar Murillo / Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria

There was something refreshingly non-didactic about Rene Matić and Oscar Murillo’s duo show, ‘Jazz’, at Kunsthalle Wien. Rather than trying to convey a specific meaning, these London-based artists seemed more intent on creating an atmosphere or engendering a feeling. By hanging his black canvases from the ceiling, Murillo devised a disorienting, labyrinth-like space where viewers could lose themselves among Matić’s enigmatic photographs and films, which were inspired by a 1928 performance in Vienna by Josephine Baker so controversial that it sparked the ire of the Catholic Church. Coupled with the gallery’s dim lighting and the irregular ringing of church bells (Matić’s Voice, 2024), it felt like there was something sacred about the space, causing audiences to speak in the revered tones usually associated with places of worship. – Chloe Stead

Rebecca Horn / Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany

Rebecca Horn tragically passed away during the run of her retrospective at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, which made it even more essential viewing for her admirers. Focusing on the performative aspects of the artist’s oeuvre for the first time, this exhibition presented Horn as a choreographer heavily influenced by the language of dance. Writing about the artist for issue 246 of frieze, associate editor Vanessa Peterson observed: ‘Shaped through the prism of youthful illness, Horn’s understanding of bodily movement instigated a career-long reckoning with corporeal limitations.’ This interest was on full display in Munich, especially in works from her ‘body extension’ series, such as Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989) and Finger Gloves (1972). – Chloe Stead

Noah Davis / Das Minsk, Potsdam, Germany

The late Noah Davis is perhaps best known for co-founding The Underground Museum, an institution dedicated to underrepresented voices in the historically Black and Latinx neighbourhood of Arlington Heights in Los Angeles. This retrospective, however, firmly places him as one of the prominent figurative painters of his generation. Bringing together more than 60 works, the show, which will travel to the Barbican, London, in 2025, is a rare chance to see Davis’s oeuvre outside of the US. ‘In his depictions of black subjects, Davis eschews a sense of otherness,’ Erica N. Cardwell said about the artist in issue 210 of frieze. ‘His simplicity is instructive: small details of everyday life speak frankly to a Black audience without distracting appeals to white art audiences.’ – Chloe Stead

Ulla Wiggen / Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland

This September, EMMA opened a long-awaited retrospective of Swedish artist Ulla Wiggen’s work, tracing more than six decades of her hyper-realist practice. Wonderfully eclectic, ‘Passages’ shows Wiggen’s intricate depictions of circuit boards (Conditions, 1963) and organs (Passim, 2014) alongside her magnified iris paintings (Iris XXIX Christopher, 2023). Whilst they may share little in common on the surface, these works are bound by their interest in hidden mechanisms, highlighting Wiggen’s intrinsic curiosity around the unseen aspects of contemporary life. As Nicholas Norton observed in his review for frieze: ‘Walking through Wiggen’s show leaves one contemplating the limits of perception and whether our obsession with detail truly leads to a better understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.’ – Ivana Cholakova

Penny Siopis / National Museum of Contemporary Art Αthens, Greece

Writing about the all-woman takeover of EMST earlier this year, I was shocked that I hadn’t previously been aware of the work of Penny Siopis, a South African artist who has been critiquing colonialism, apartheid, racism and sexism for more than four decades. Featuring painting, sculpture and film, ‘For Dear Life. A Retrospective’ includes works from all of Siopis’s major series, including ‘Pinky Pinky’, a group of canvases from the early 2000s based on the titular South African bogeyman, and ‘Will’ (1997–ongoing), an ever-growing collection of objects and ephemera that the artist plans to bequeath to friends and family when she dies. I hope this show – the artist’s first major European solo – will result in more institutional attention for Siopis in the Northern hemisphere. – Chloe Stead

Zhanna Kadyrova / Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czechia

Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova’s ‘Unexpected’ at Galerie Rudolfinum marked a strong start to the year in terms of political art. The exhibition provided harrowing documentation of the displacement and violence in the artist’s home country caused by the Russian invasions in 2014 and 2022. At first, works in her ‘Harmless War’ (2023) series look like examples of modernist sculpture but, upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that their minimalist topography is made from shrapnel-pitted doors, roof panels and cladding from bombed houses. Reviewing the exhibition for frieze, Noemi Smolik highlighted the artist’s powerful use of absence: ‘Standing for resilience and the importance of mutual aid in times of crisis, Refugees (2023) embodies Kadyrova’s conceptually inspired approach to visualizing the horrors of war without resorting to graphic and dehumanizing imagery.’ – Ivana Cholakova

_{Main image: Gisèle Vienne, ‘This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; photograph: Frank Sperling}