What to See Across Europe This Summer

Tolia Astakhishvili | Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, Venice | 8 May – 23 November 

The morning after the night before: a line of precariously stacked, mismatched glasses stand to attention along a rough ledge (house of mending, 2024–25). In one, a plastic toy or broken ornament – resembling the wings of a fairy – appears to have been dropped. Behind them, the white cistern of a toilet peeps out from behind another low wall. The scene reads like the debris of a bougie party – the kind Venice excels at – albeit set in a sort of tasteful building site.

It’s the hand of Tolia Astakhishvili, who has a knack for imbuing even the most unremarkable objects with a delicate sense of reverence – by combining, concealing and curating them in unorthodox ways. The exhibition, ‘to love and devour’, unfolds across ten battered and incised rooms in a palazzo, with a sense of calm revelation: her sensitivity to the surfaces of the house – both extant and augmented – charges this remarkable show with a measured intensity. It is a testament to what can happen when artists are given the time and resources to truly invest their attention. – Sean Burns

Mohamed Bourouissa | Fondazione MAST, Bologna | 23 May – 28 September 

Migration, systems of control and shifting power dynamics are among the urgent themes addressed in ‘Communautés. Projets 2005–2025’, Franco-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa’s latest exhibition. Curated by Francesco Zanot, and displayed across Fondazione MAST in Bologna, this major project brings together four series from the last two decades of Bourouissa’s prolific practice, foregrounding his commitment to representing communities typically excluded from dominant narratives – residents of the French banlieues, Black equestrians in Philadelphia and others whose social visibility is often denied.

Bourouissa’s work resists simple classification. His multilayered practice moves fluidly between photography and sculpture to collage, drawing and video installation. Across Bourouissa’s images, the subjects are not passive figures, but observers and active interpreters of a society that seeks to make them invisible, transforming them into participants in acts of staged resistance. – Giovanna Manzotti

Oswald Oberhuber | Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna | 22 May – 23 August 

After more than three decades, the practice of Oswald Oberhuber returns to Galerie Krinzinger as a solo exhibition, bringing together works from various periods and, as the title suggests, across different media: ‘skulptur – malerei – zeichnung’ (sculpture – painting – drawing). It occupies the second, smaller space of the Viennese gallery, spanning two rooms and a narrow corridor, offering a concise insight into the artist’s vast and dynamic oeuvre. Informed by the spirit of European post-war art informel, which embraced spontaneity, gestural techniques and an emphasis on materiality and process, Oberhuber was guided by the principle of ‘permanent change’, first introduced in his text Die permanente Veränderung in der Kunst (Principle of Permanent Change in Art, 1956). Accordingly, the artist rejected any notion of evolution or continuation in his work, opposed stylistic consistency and resisted the development of a recognizable signature style. – Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas 

Dafna Maimon | Kiasma, Helsinki | 25 April – 21 September 

Dafna Maimon’s sprawling solo exhibition at Kiasma in Helsinki implores us to reconnect with our messy corporeal entanglements. Dismissing René Descartes’s dualist division between mind and body, Maimon asks: what about the symptoms that persist, that make themselves known and felt, despite (or precisely because of) our calculated attempts at control? With grotesque specificity and a healthy dose of humour, ‘Symptoms’ rejects the claim of mind over matter, bringing to life the pulsating, meaty core of that which makes us human – our embodied knowledge.

In the first room, a pastel-on-velvet painting, Initially a Portrait of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680) (2025), depicts a heavily abstracted version of the sovereign, her head composed of bulbous bowels and coiled gut formations. The fleshy tubes of peach and ochre are punctuated with ovular white pearls, to denote her noble status. Elisabeth famously corresponded with Descartes, repeatedly challenging his assessment that the mind was wholly separate from the body. Middle-aged femme figures appear throughout the exhibition, representing alter-egos for the artist and expressing her wider interest in embodied processes. – Alison Hugill

Monster Chetwynd | Kunsthaus Zürich | 16 May – 31 August

For ‘The Trompe l’oeil Cleavage’, Monster Chetwynd transformed the rooms of Kunsthaus Zürichinto a dramatically lit sequence of spaces inspired by accounts of the ancient Via Appia, the Roman thoroughfare that doubled as a burial ground. Set against the backdrop of sprawling wallpaper collages and dotted with sculptural structures of wood, cardboard, papier mâché and latex, the exhibition brings together a constellation of objects, paintings and films celebrating over two decades of the artist’s idiosyncratic practice. The result is evocative of a walk through the set of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) combined with remnants of a DIY session involving psychedelic substances. – Krzysztof Kościuczuk

^{Main image: Tolia Astakhishvili, universe (detail), 2025, washing hanger from demolished bathroom, found objects Water Tank, toilet, found objects, murano glass, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist}