The Fondation Beyeler is pleased to announce its 2025 exhibition programme. Visitors can look forward to a fascinating group exhibition entitled Northern lights (26 January – 25 May 2025). The exhibition will focus on around 80 modern landscape paintings by artists from Scandinavia and Canada, including Hilma af Klint and Edvard Munch, who all drew inspiration from the boreal forests, the world’s largest primeval forest. In February, the exhibition The key to dreams (16 February – 4 May 2025) will for the very first time present Surrealist masterpieces from the Hersaint Collection. In the summer (15 June – 21 September 2025), the artist Vija Celmins will be honoured with a large solo exhibition, bringing to vivid life the mesmerising effect of her pictorial worlds. It will be the most significant presentation of Celmins’ work in Europe in almost 20 years. The first retrospective devoted to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in Switzerland will be on view at the Fondation Beyeler in autumn 2025. The artist, one of contemporary art’s superstars, has achieved cult status with her exploration of repetitive patterns and structures that carry viewers away into infinite worlds. In parallel to these temporary exhibitions, throughout the year the Fondation Beyeler will present selected works from its collection in changing thematic displays. This carefully curated array of exhibitions has been conceived to thrill and delight art lovers and visitors from all over the world.

More information on next year’s exhibitions:

Northern lights. 26 January – 25 May 2025

At the beginning of the year, the Fondation Beyeler will present the group show Northern lights, focussing on around 80 landscape paintings by artists from Scandinavia and Canada created between 1880 and 1930, among them masterpieces by Hilma af Klint and Edvard Munch. These artists all share the boreal forest as a common source of inspiration. The seemingly boundless expanses of the forest, the radiant light of endless summer days, the long winter nights and natural phenomena such as the northern lights gave rise to a specifically Nordic way of modern painting that to this day exerts enduring appeal and fascination. The boreal forest, which stretches south and north of the polar circle, forming one of Earth’s largest primeval forests, was increasingly represented as a spiritual landscape. The exhibition will be the first of its kind in Europe in terms of the constellation of works on display. It will provide an opportunity to trace the development of Nordic landscape painting in modern art through selected works by Helmi Biese, Anna Boberg, Emily Carr, Prince Eugen, Gustaf Fjæstad, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lawren Harris, Hilma af Klint, J.E.H. MacDonald, Edvard Munch, Ivan Shishkin, Harald Sohlberg and Tom Thomson, as well as discover artists likely still unknown to many visitors. An exhibition by Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo/New York.

The key to dreams. Surrealist Masterworks from the Hersaint Collection. 16 February – 4 May 2025

In a worldwide first, the Fondation Beyeler will present Surrealist masterpieces from the Hersaint Collection. The exhibition will feature around 50 key works by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Dorothea Tanning and many more. The works reflect major themes of Surrealism such as dreams, the unconscious, metamorphoses or the forest as a site of mystery. The collection was established by the banker Claude Hersaint, who purchased his first painting by Max Ernst at the age of only 17. His lifelong passion for led him to assemble one of the most significant collections of Surrealist art. Paintings from the Hersaint Collection will be displayed in dialogue with works from the Fondation Beyeler. The exhibition is made possible by the support of Claude Hersaint’s daughter Evangéline Hersaint and her wife Laetitia Hersaint-Lair.

Vija Celmins. 15 June – 21 September 2025

The Fondation Beyeler will devote a comprehensive solo exhibition the artist Vija Celmins (*1938, Riga), who masterfully works in painting, drawing, and sculpture. Celmins’ visual language is both subtle and powerful. Initially, Celmins focussed on everyday objects as well as scenes of disaster and war. She then turned to the surface structures of spider webs, oceans and deserts, and later more particularly the night sky and galaxies. Her images resist the cursory gaze; yet once we engage with them, they deploy a fascinating beauty, between intimacy and distance. The exhibition will display a selection of works produced by Celmins from the 1960s to the present day, bringing to vivid life the mesmerising effect of her pictorial worlds. It will also feature a small selection of sculptures—which Celmins herself qualifies as “three-dimensional paintings”. Finally, the exhibition will present a new group of works that carry forward Celmins’ long-standing and intense engagement with surfaces and spatial depth. The exhibition will be the most significant presentation of Celmins’ work in Europe in almost 20 years.

Yayoi Kusama. 12 October 2025 – 25 January 2026

In the autumn of 2025, the Fondation Beyeler will be the first museum in Switzerland to devote a retrospective to renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (1929, Matsumoto). Organised in close collaboration with the artist and her studio, the exhibition will offer a complete overview of Kusama’s more than seven-decade career. Alongside some of her most iconic artworks, the exhibition will feature early works never seen in Europe before as well as new productions and one of the artist’s celebrated *Infinity mirror rooms. The artist, one of contemporary art’s superstars, has achieved cult status with her exploration of repetitive patterns and structures, notably her characteristic polka dots and mirror rooms, which carry viewers away into worlds that seem to expand without limits. The exhibition will highlight the wealth of artistic media Kusama has worked with over the years, among them painting, sculpture, installations, drawing, collage, happenings, live performances, fashion and literature. The exhibition is jointly organized by Fondation Beyeler with Museum Ludwig in Cologne (14 March 2026 – 2 August 2026) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (11 September 2026 – 17 January 2027).