5 Must-See Exhibitions Revisit Icons Who Bridged Art And Design

Recent exhibitions from Milan to New York to Porto, Portugal, honor influential 20th-century creatives whose output merged art and design to spark broader cultural shifts.

Verner Panton

project “Verner Panton: Form, Color, Space.”

site Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany.

standout The Danish designer was so ahead of the curve, it’s hard to believe he was born a century ago—a milestone the museum, in collaboration with Verner Panton Design AG, is honoring with a retrospective of archival highlights through May 9, 2027. The works on view demonstrate the breadth, technical complexity, and delightful trippiness of Panton’s portfolio, from his earliest manufactured pieces—including the Cone chair that put him on the international map—to his immersive interiors, among them Varna restaurant in Aarhus and Der Spiegel’s Hamburg, Germany, headquarters. An architect by training, Panton proposed a radical vision for domestic space, an example of which is the exhibition’s walk-through reconstruction of Fantasy Landscape, from 1970, supremely colorful in both senses of the word.

“With swings and living towers, Verner Panton used domestic space in playful and informal ways, while light, patterns, and carefully applied color scales helped him modulate the mood and character of his interiors”

PrevNext

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

---

Isamu Noguchi

projects “Noguchi’s New York” and “Isamu Noguchi at Lever House”

sites Noguchi Museum in Queens and Lever House in Manhattan. standout The Japanese-American talent was 80 when he unveiled a museum dedicated to his oeuvre, the first such institution in the U.S. conceived and installed by a living artist. Oriented around a sculpture garden, the facility, a site-specific work in its own right, feted its 40th with a half-year-long exhibit that closed earlier this month examining Noguchi’s relationship with the city via stage sets, playground equipment models, and photos of his Red Cube and Sunken Garden public-art commissions, showcasing his dexterity in varied medi­ums and broader ambition to shape civic space and dia­logue. Furthering this dialoge is the just opened Lever House exhibit, which honors the 75th anniversary of both architect Gordon Bunshaft’s invitation to Noguchi to create a sculpture garden for his building’s court­yard, an unrealized project, and Noguchi’s Akari light, which will be clustered, along with his sculptures and courtyard models, in Lever’s glass-box lobby through summer 2027.

“Though he traveled the globe and forged meaningful connections to numerous cities, Noguchi considered himself a New Yorker and envisioned spaces of civic possibility there”

PrevNext

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

---

Frank Gehry

projects “The Century of Gehry”; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

sites Serralves Museum of Art, Porto, Portugal; U.A.E. standout The late Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate’s postmodern structures were as much sculpture as architecture, with experimental forms that challenged how a building should look and function. Gehry was a language of complex curves and rippling exoskeletons—seemingly fanciful silhouettes in fact derived from a project’s constraints, contexts, and narrative content. Through models, drawings, and photographs the show surveys 19 projects, from his own house to the stainless steel–shrouded Walt Disney Concert Hall, both in Los Angeles, plus products such as the Cardboard furniture series. Also included—and opening December 11—is one of Gehry’s final projects: the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum, a kinetic, deconstructivist collage of stainless steel–mesh cones.

“The exhibition reveals Gehry’s longstanding dialogue with artists and other architects”

PrevNext

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

---

Lella and Massimo Vignelli

project “Lella and Massimo Vignelli. A Language of Clarity.”

site Triennale Milano.

standout This marks the first major retrospective dedi­cated to the designs of the Italian-born duo, prominent fixtures of the global creative scene who founded their practice in Milan in 1960, before relocating to New York. Conceived in collaboration with the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which houses the studio’s archives, the exhibit, which ran March to September, captures the full scope of their vast, multifaceted work in visual communications and product design, which encompassed identity studies for Ford and American Airlines, the New York subway map, graphics for Benetton, melamine tableware for Heller, and showrooms for brands like Brueton. The through line? A sui generis essentialism born from—but not beholden to—Swiss rationalism.

“We imagined the space as if it were part of a story, where things are not quite what they seem—as with Alice in Wonderland, the environment itself is alive”

“The Vignellis belonged to the generation of architects and designers responsible for shaping the image of modernity in Italy via timeless work distinguished by clarity and communicative power”

PrevNext

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

---

Hélio Oiticica

project Magic Square #3 (1977-79/2026).

site Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex, U.K.

standout A founder of the late-’60s Tropicália movement, the Brazilian provocateur was an early proponent of liberating art from the canvas, the pedestal, the gallery walls, and, indeed, elitism, instead favoring immersive installations and participatory happenings with a decidedly accessible bent. Oiticica was especially known for work that took on an almost architectural character—spatial experiences such as his habitable paintings and what he called “ambient” art. Emblematic of this approach is this ex­periential walk-through environment, recreated on the grounds of a historical estate turned contemporary-culture venue. On view through November 1, it unfolds as a maze of vibrantly painted cement planes—a sort of populist, interactive spin on European geometric abstraction.

“Hélio Oiticica was a countercultural figure and an underground hero, foregrounding bodily interaction with spatial and environmental concerns over pure aesthetics”

PrevNext

• 

• 

• 

•