The summer months can usually be counted upon for a kaleidoscope of art festivals, fairs and exhibitions.

Whether they're open for short spells or run into autumn, these events promise to inject bursts of colour into our summer vacations. We've scoured the globe to bring you a selection of exhibitions that are too good to miss out on. Hurry though, as the next few weeks may be your last chance to see them!

Chiffon Thomas: Progeny

Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles 

June 20 - August 17 

This exhibition spotlights a body of work continued from Chiffon Thomas' recent solo exhibition: The Cavernous, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. CT. Thomas' works are textured biomorphic forms sculpted with bronze, steel and stained glass. Together, the materials evoke the painful surrealism of sutured skin, while invoking forgotten legacies of labor, communal perseverance, and historical injustices. Cast faces and heads collide and splinter against the glass as Thomas draws connections between our bodies, the spaces they inhabit, and the stories they tell.

At the core of the exhibition are two monumental concrete obelisks inverted to place the stability of the structures onto a spillage of life-casted cascading feet, replicated and amalgamated together to behave as a dense, impenetrable element. Other works in the exhibition expand on Thomas’ pursuit of representing “impossible bodies.” Citing Martin Puryear’s bulbous forms and Louise Bourgeois’ merging of homes with human forms, Thomas states: “I want skin to perform as architecture, and architecture to perform something bodily.” 

Chiffon Thomas, Untitled, 2024

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm

Brooklyn Museum, New York

May 3 - August 18 

Remember The Beatles? Since the frenzy of Beatlemania in 1963–64, their music has been inescapable. In the Brooklyn Museum's retrospective, the lead bassist Paul McCartney takes us behind-the-scenes and centre stage during these years of superstardom with his Pentax camera. More than 250 of McCartney’s photos, recently rediscovered in his archives, reveal his singular vantage point at the center of this whirlwind of attention and adoration.

These electric photographs are paired with video clips and archival material, to showcase McCartney’s artistic versatility and serve as a personal and historical record. The affection between the bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, is set against the intensity of The Beatles’ touring schedule, as the Fab Four were swept from concerts to hotels to the road with rabid fans and paparazzi at their heels. Running until August 18th, this exhibition offers you the chance to relive a musical legend’s meteoric rise.

Jeff Hochberg. Getty Images

Whispers

Bernheim, Zürich 

June 07 - July 26

Whispers is the second exhibition in a two-part presentation of Ebecho Muslimova’s recent series of paintings. The first display: Rumours, was showcased at Mendes Wood DM’s São Paulo gallery, while Whispers is showing a week later at the Bernheim Gallery in Zürich. Each of Muslimova's paintings responds to those displayed at the previous opening. Like the children’s game, telephone, where people whisper a word or phrase across a group in a successive chain. This display tracks the shifting persona of Muslimova’s signature character Fatebe: a character with a curious and liberated personality.

Fatebe appears across all of the paintings in different forms, mischievously bursting into some frames and, in some instances, physically embodying a portal between them, translating or responding to the joke of a previous painting. These comical depictions follow Fatebe from a stage to the boudoir, a park to a gallery, a New York skyline and to an imagined landscape. These seemingly disparate spaces become a playground for Fatebe to explore the interplay between psyche and environment, and reflect on the art-making process.

 Fatebe Dream Bar, 2024 by Ebecho Muslimova. Courtesy of Bernheim Gallery

Dog Days of Summer

Timothy Taylor Gallery, New York

June 20 - August 23

This group exhibition celebrates man’s best friend as a timeless subject in art history. With more than sixty works, it explores the variety of roles a pup might play in the life of an artist: muse, metaphor, and companion. Art-making can be a famously solitary process, and many painters throughout art history have turned to dogs for company. What would art of the last century have been without such faithful studio mates as William Wegman’s () Weimaraners or Pablo Picasso’s () (ungenerously named) dachshund Lump?

Dogs have been a feature of visual culture since at least 8,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers carved an image of leashed dogs into a sandstone cliff. A symbol of fidelity, protection, playfulness, and unconditional love, canines pop up in the paintings of Titian, Jan van Eyck, John Singer Sargent, and Gustave Courbet, among countless other masters. With this in mind, the gallery has curated a display of traditional and contemporary works. There's the seaside portrait Yellow Lab (2022) by Sean Landers, Wegman’s photograph Look (1989) and Ann Craven's Magic and Moonlight in Night Field (2024), among others. 

Magic and Moonlight in Night Field, 2024 by Ann Craven

Don’t Touch My Hair

Hannah Traore Gallery, New York

June 06 - July 27 

Hair can say a lot about one's identity. Don’t Touch My Hair is a group exhibition that explores hair's cultural and personal significance. Featuring intrepid artists such as Andy Jackson, Jayoung Yoon and Laetitia Adam-Rabel, Hannah Traore Gallery takes emotive cues from its eponymous curator and founder. In a statement Hannah Traore says: "As a gallerist and curator, I see everything through the lens of art. Since my hair loss and subsequent hypothyroid diagnosis, I have found myself seeing everything through the lens of hair. This exhibition is a very personal exploration of the subject that has occupied my thoughts for the past five years: Whether body hair, head hair, hair tools, objects made with hair, inspired by hair or depicting interesting representations of hair, this show celebrates hair as a symbol of beauty, power and identity. Throughout my life, my hair loss has affected me so deeply, because hair is so closely linked to our sense of ourselves." 

As a woman with both Black and Jewish ancestry, Traore's relationship with hair loss is multi-faceted. I was also taught from a young age that as Black Women, our hair is our crown and we must do everything in our power to protect it. The afro was a symbol for Black Power during the “Black is Beautiful” movement in the 1960s, signalling a shift away from Eurocentric standards of beauty. That being said, the importance of hair is not exclusive to the Black community. In many Indigenous communities, hair represents the spirit, the soul, identity and tradition – thus cutting it often carries significant meaning. During the Holocaust, Nazis shaved Jewish people of their hair in concentration camps. Historians disagree on the basis for this act; some argue that it was solely utilitarian, to repurpose Jewish prisoners’ hair for material, but many argue that the reasoning was more insidious, in an effort to dehumanise. Losing my own hair felt like losing a right; like losing a freedom I would have honoured for both my Black and Jewish ancestors."

Hair Test (Abode, 2021), Andy Jackson. Courtesy of  Hannah Traore Gallery

Kathy Ruttenberg: Illusions From A Daydream

Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

June 29 - August 17 

As part of Kathy Ruttenberg’s first solo exhibition at Anat Egbi gallery, the sculptor is showcasing new ceramic sculptures. A suite of ceramic pots, vases, and vessels express Ruttenberg's deep connection to the earth (her material) and nature (her subject). These eclectic pieces test the limits of “functional ware,” as numerous flowers, branches, women, men, amphibia, insects, cats, and rabbits all protrude from her sculptures. Together, they weave narratives and allegories about the artist's personal stories and private daydreams.

We can relate to Ruttenberg's ideas of ecofeminism, animal liberation, and sexuality. As well as her allusions to historical pieces. In one piece called Biophilia, a female figure lies submerged in water and is surrounded by water lilies. Recalling John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52), she captures the ecstatic energy and illimitable power of nature in bloom. Whereas It’s All in the Mind depicts the body of a woman with the head of a giraffe, evoking the hallucinatory aspect of Surrealist art.

Benthic Zone, 2024 by Kathy Ruttenberg. Courtesy of Anat Egbi Gallery

Rita Ackermann. Splits: Printing | Painting

Hauser & Wirth, New York

May 02 - July 26 

This much anticipated exhibition presents Hungarian artist Rita Ackermann’s latest series of paintings and prints in simultaneous exhibitions spanning the gallery’s two West Chelsea locations. At 542 West 22nd Street, the artist will debut a suite of new canvases expanding upon the techniques, themes and imagery she has explored over the course of her career since the early 1990s, while at 443 West 18th Street she will unveil a series of complex large-scale silkscreens. Heralding a significant leap in her artistic practice, these prints represent a dramatic convergence of the technical processes of printmaking with Ackermann’s sustained exploration of form, movement and erasure. 

Titled Splits, Ackermann’s latest series of rhythmic paintings adhere to her language of dynamic, moving images. In these canvases, forms cascade downward and upward, at times merging seamlessly into one another. These lines often meander onto multiple screens; breaking the confines of one canvas. In Shut Eye (2023), for example, two screens brimming with fragments of drawn shapes entice the eye to actively pull open the middle register and thereby show more of the painted forms within. This occurs even as the upper and lower screens seem to press inward, creating a dynamic tension between revelation and concealment. To enhance this impression, Ackermann occasionally used luminous yellow pigment to further instil in these paintings a sense of lightness and transparency. 

 13 Takes by Rita Ackermann, 2023