Letters, Games, and Saint Fools: The Art Exhibitions of August 2025

August is usually a sleepy month in the art world. Museums are busy plotting their blockbuster autumn shows, galleries are polishing wall labels, and curators are secretly on holiday (possibly pretending to “research” in Tuscany). But that doesn’t mean your cultural calendar has to gather dust. We’ve found a handful of gems worth stepping into cool museum halls for, from games played between East and West, saints and sinners, to portraits of children with eyes both innocent and knowing. There are letters that were never sent, golden journeys between Crete and Venice, and even a game of trictrac that would make a Renaissance moralist blush.

EUROPEAN EXHIBITIONS

ITALY

In Gioco. Illusion and Fun in Italian Art 1850-1950

Palazzo Cucchiari, Carrara –  until 26 October 2026

Eighty Italian artists, more than a hundred works, and one question: what is “play,” after all? In art, games are never just games. In the late 19th century, play was a shared language for everyone: peasants and aristocrats, priests and children alike. By the early 20th century, it had become a nostalgic vision of childhood’s lost paradise. Modernity transformed it into organized leisure: theater, music, and carnivals charged with a social edge.

This exhibition looks at a century of Italian history through the lens of a child’s perception of reality. In their eyes, play becomes a mirror of modern Italian life, alive with joy, irony, and the contradictions that make it so compelling. Children imitating adults form a recurring motif, inviting us to read the historical, social, and cultural layers of Italian life through these playful scenes. It’s a journey where curiosity meets history, and one that is as revealing as it is delightful.

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Painted Gold: El Greco and the Art between Crete & Venice 

Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace), Venice –  until 29 September 2025

Gold in art has always been more than pigment or metal, it is the symbol of divine light, heavenly authority, and eternal sanctity. From Byzantine mosaics to Baroque altarpieces, the golden background created an illusion of eternity, a place where the earthly and the celestial met.

This idea lies at the heart of L’oro dipinto (“Painted Gold”) at the Doge’s Palace, where around 60 works from local museums, the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, and private collections trace the story of artistic exchange between Venice and Crete from the late 15th to the late 17th century. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Candia (modern Heraklion) became the leading center of Byzantine icon painting, home to more than a hundred madoneri workshops. Venice, in turn, emerged as a “new Byzantium”,  a hub welcoming artists and artworks from across the Aegean, forging a unique fusion of the Byzantine court tradition and Western art, evolving from late Gothic to Renaissance styles with a more human, naturalistic, and dynamic approach.

Seven thematic sections guide visitors through centuries of stylistic transformation, from gold-suffused icons to paintings where gold dissolves into the warm radiance of Venetian light. The exhibition closes with a deep dive into the icon itself, its materials, techniques, and artistic language.

One note: photography is prohibited. If you want to see every shade of gold between Crete and Venice, you will have just one chance, and it is here, at the Doge’s Palace.

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GREECE

Francisco Goya: Los Caprichos 

National Gallery, Athens – until 30 September 2025

Spending your summer in Greece? Wonderful choice. Between the beaches, sunsets, and feta-laden salads, you might want to slip into Athens’ National Gallery, where Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos is waiting with a very different kind of heat.

The title Los Caprichos translates loosely as “The Caprices” or “Whims”, but don’t expect lighthearted fantasies. This 80-print series, published in 1799, is one of the boldest artistic statements of the Spanish Enlightenment, exposing human folly with a mix of biting satire, nightmarish visions, and moral allegory.

The Athens National Gallery’s complete Los Caprichos set was acquired in 1961 along with Goya’s other print series. Beneath each original print, visitors will find photographs of Goya’s surviving preparatory drawings (mostly from the Prado Museum). Studying these drawings often reveals meanings the artist chose to mute in the final etching, leaving only a cryptic title as a clue.

This series marked a turning point for Goya: freed from the constraints of royal commissions, he turned his gaze on the social and political shadows of late 18th-century Spain. Inspired by Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, and liberty, he attacked vanity, hypocrisy, prostitution, poverty, and the ignorance of a populace trapped in superstition.

Here, fantasy is never escapist.  It’s a mirror. And if you stare long enough, you may notice it’s staring back.

 

The NETHERLANDS

Artus Quellinus: Sculptor of Amsterdam

Royal Palace of Amsterdam–  until 27 October 2025

Few cities love their marble as much as Amsterdam does. And no one carved it with more flair than Artus Quellinus (1609–1668)­­ the Flemish sculptor who turned the city’s Town Hall (today’s Royal Palace) into a baroque stage set of gods, virtues, and civic pride. This summer, the Palace itself hosts the first major exhibition devoted to Quellinus, reminding us why he was called the “sculptor of Amsterdam.”

The exhibition brings together over 100 works – statues, busts, terracotta models, and drawings. Highlights include monumental figures like Saint Peter and Pallas Athena, as well as more than 60 loans from the Rijksmuseum, which reveal the sculptor’s working process.

But the show is about more than virtuoso carving. Quellinus helped Amsterdam brand itself during its Golden Age: his marble gods and civic leaders projected wealth, authority, and cultural ambition to anyone walking into the Palace. By blending Flemish baroque drama with Dutch self-confidence, he created a visual language that still defines the city today.

And here’s the best part: you’ll be standing in the very building that Quellinus himself filled with marble centuries ago. It’s not just an exhibition. It’s a homecoming.

Even if sculpture isn’t usually your thing, this is one exhibition where awe is guaranteed.

 

Old Masters from Kyiv in The Hague 

Museum Bredius, the Hague –  until 28 September 2025

A rare chance to see Ukrainian treasures far from home. Until the end of September 2025, Museum Bredius in The Hague is hosting fourteen masterpieces from the Khanenko National Museum of Arts in Kyiv, shown together with twelve gems from its own collection. Portraits, still lifes, landscapes, even dramatic “men in oriental dress” appear here in dialogue with Dutch works by the likes of Rubens, Jordaens, and Samuel van Hoogstraten.

The Khanenko Museum has endured war, closures, and even a missile strike in 2022. Remarkably, its art survived, preserved in storage, safeguarded, and now traveling abroad. This exhibition is as much about resilience as it is about brushstrokes. It tells a story of cultural survival, of two collectors (Bredius and the Khanenkos) whose visions now meet across centuries and borders.

Back in 1897, museum director Abraham Bredius visited Kyiv and filled notebooks with sketches of the Khanenko collection. Those very notebooks are on display here, bridging a 19th-century encounter with today’s fragile cultural exchange.

 

GERMANY

European Realities: Realism in the 1920s and 1930s

Kunstsammlungen, Chemnitz – until September 2025

If you’ve ever wished for a time machine, here’s the next best thing: step into Europe between two world wars. Poverty and prosperity, scientific progress and nightclub jazz, emancipation and fear of the future all collide on the walls of this extraordinary exhibition.

European Realisms is the first large-scale show dedicated to the kaleidoscope of realist movements across the continent in the 1920s and 1930s. From Neue Sachlichkeit in Germany to Novecento in Italy, the labels are many, but the mood is unmistakable: artists wrestling with the anxieties and promises of their age.

The exhibition brings together 300 works by 190 artists from 20 countries, tracing the networks of ideas that crossed borders and shaped a shared visual language. It builds on Gustav Hartlaub’s legendary 1925 Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition and expands it into a panoramic view of realism as a truly European phenomenon.

This is not just a history lesson; it’s a mirror of emotions, contradictions, and survival strategies in the fragile space between two wars. And if you’d like to carry the exhibition home with you, there’s a 400-page catalog that captures every shade of realism from this turbulent era. Richly illustrated and carefully researched, it’s not just a souvenir — it’s a visual feast. For art lovers, this one is firmly on the must-have list.

Explore the exhibition catalog

UNITED KINGDOM EXHIBITIONS

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting

National Portrait Gallery, London – until 7 September 2025

London calling. The National Gallery stages the largest exhibition to date of Jenny Saville, one of the most influential contemporary painters in the world. Saville rose to prominence in the 1990s as part of the Young British Artists and has since become known for monumental canvases that confront flesh head-on, raw, distorted, sensual, and unavoidably human.

The exhibition brings together 45 works spanning her entire career, from early explorations of the female body to recent paintings that push figuration into new emotional territory. Highlights include the iconic Propped, her cult canvas that embodies her fearless approach and commanding presence in figurative art. It is not just a painting, it is a manifesto in oil. When it sold at Sotheby’s in 2018, it set a record as the most expensive work by a living female artist, a title later overtaken in 2025 by Marlene Dumas’s Miss January.

If you cannot make it to London, do not despair. The flesh of Saville will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth for its only U.S. stop, on view from October 12, 2025, to January 18, 2026. And trust us, you will want eyes of steel for this one. Saville does not go easy on the viewer.

Explore the exhibition catalog

 

 

NEW ZEALAND EXHIBITIONS

Ngā Taonga Tūturu: Treasured Māori Portraits 

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki – until 29 November 2026

The Māori are the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, whose culture is rooted in whakapapa (genealogy), mana (prestige and authority), and mauri (life force). Their visual traditions, from intricate wood carvings to portraiture, have long been a way of preserving and transmitting identity, lineage, and spirituality.

At the heart of this exhibition are the portraits of tūpuna (ancestors) by Gottfried Lindauer, a Czech-born artist who settled in New Zealand in the late 19th century. His sensitive and powerful paintings captured the dignity and presence of Māori leaders at a time of enormous social change. These works are presented alongside whakairo (ancestral carvings), creating a dialogue between two art forms that both honor and embody cultural memory.

Visitors will encounter stories from different iwi (tribes) and hapū (sub-tribes), brought together in one gallery space that resonates like a wharenui  — a traditional ancestral meeting house. The effect is immersive: the portraits are not just images but presences, each carrying the mana (prestige and authority) of the individuals they depict. Rich in symbolism, they speak to identity, heritage, and survival.

Missing this exhibition would mean missing an extraordinary chance to stand face-to-face with history, art, and living cultural heritage.

Explore the exhibition catalog

NORTH AMERICA EXHIBITIONS

CANADA

Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks 

⭐Our Favorite

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada – until January 2026

Canada closes the curtain on a traveling triumph. Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks, organized by The Phoebus Foundation (Antwerp) in collaboration with museums across North America, has toured Denver, Salem, Dallas, and Montreal. Its final stage is the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where it will remain on view until January 18, 2026.

We’ve already written about one of its most striking works, Portrait of a Couple Playing Trictrac by Jan Sanders van Hemessen, a painting that teases with both playfulness and moral ambiguity. Here, it finds new company among more than 80 masterpieces and objects, ranging from Early Netherlandish painting through the Northern Renaissance to Baroque drama.

From the sacred to the profane, this show revels in the contradictions of the Flemish Golden Age, a period when bustling cities, wealthy patrons, and restless artists gave birth to new genres and styles that rippled across Europe. Think of it as a philosophical stage play, where faith collides with desire, irony masks power, and everyday life becomes the stuff of eternal art. Expect saints with troubled eyes, fools with unsettling wisdom, and lovers caught between virtue and vice.

Skipping this exhibition isn’t exactly a mortal sin, but let’s just say it would be terribly foolish. In the coming years, it’s unlikely that such a dazzling collection of Flemish treasures will cross the Atlantic again, so catch it in Toronto while you can.

Explore the exhibition catalog

The USA

Fault Lines: Art, Imperialism, and the Atlantic World 

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh –  until 25 January 2026

It all begins with two portraits that capture the essence of the exhibition. Portrait of Marianne Celēste Dragon (1795) shows a Creole woman of Greek, French, and African heritage, elegantly posed and asserting her identity in a world defined by racial boundaries. In another work, Francis Williams, the Jamaican polymath, commissions a portrait to mark the return of Halley’s Comet, with Newton’s Principia open before him. This is more than a likeness; it is a declaration of intellect, visibility, and dignity.

Fault Lines builds its story around such moments. At the Carnegie Museum of Art, visitors encounter more than 70 works, including paintings and artifacts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The show explores what historians call the Atlantic World, a vast web of connections that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Think of it as a network of sea routes and intersecting destinies, where migration, trade, and colonization reshaped cultures and lives. It was a world shaped by both exploitation and exchange, and its legacy still resonates today.

The exhibition asks us to look again at familiar art. Some works reinforced the colonial assumptions of their time, while others undermined those very ideas. Together they remind us that fault lines are not simply boundaries but places of fracture, tension, and change. Rich in symbolism, the portraits and objects speak to identity, heritage, and survival.

It is a fascinating show, and for us it firmly belongs on the must-visit list.

 

Vermeer’s Love Letters

The Frick Collection, New York – until August 31, 2025

You can watch Vermeer’s paintings the way you watch water flowing: endlessly, without ever tiring. The Frick has brought together three of his most intimate works: Mistress and Maid from its own collection, The Love Letter on special loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Each portrays the act of writing or reading a letter as a moment charged with secrecy, longing, and emotional subtlety.

Rich in delicate detail yet hushed in tone, these canvases remind us that Vermeer could make a sheet of paper feel as alive as a heartbeat. It is the first Vermeer show in New York in decades, and it inaugurates the new Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Galleries with a quiet but profound intensity. Three paintings, infinite worlds. And don’t forget to book tickets in advance, this exhibition is not one you can just stumble into on a museum visit.

 

So there you have it: letters you can’t send, games you can’t win, and saints who might just out-fool the jesters. August’s exhibitions are proof that art has always known how to laugh at itself  and at us. So go on: book the tickets, pack your notebook, and pretend you are the type who always knew what “Atlantic world” means. We’ll be here waiting for you next month, ready to whisper about more art you didn’t know you needed to see.

 

Header image credits:
This collage was created by the author using details from the following artworks:

The girls who play the ladies by Silvestro Lega; Serenade by Jacob Jordaens; Mistress and Maid  by Johannes Vermeer; Model for “Remorse” by Artus Quellinus.

All original works are in the public domain. The collage composition © 2025 exhibitioncatalogs.com. All rights reserved.