The Exhibitions Not to Miss in November 2026

London showcases Nan Goldin’s most recent films, Andrew Cranston takes over a temple in Kyoto, three LA institutions remember the work of architect Paul R Williams and more of the best shows to see this month, according to Ocula’s editors. 

Paul R Williams, Architect for Living (15 November 2026–31 May 2027) at LACMA, Los Angeles / Architecture Across the Colour Line (15 December 2026–14 March 2027) at the Getty Centre, Los Angeles / An Architect Considered (until 13 March 2027) at the USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles 

When it comes to buildings, Los Angeles is famous for its dingbats and hill houses, but any visitor to the city encounters an eclectic menu of architectural styles. From east to west, see the Spanish Colonial façades of the 28th Street YMCA, the cooly floating white planes of Frank Sinatra’s Beverly Hills residence, and the spindly Googie saucer in the middle of LAX airport. Paul Revere Williams, one of the first Black professional architects in the US, and one of LA’s most prolific, had a hand in all these projects. From the 1920s through to the 1960s, as the region’s population almost quintupled, Williams also drew up plans for homes, hospitals and houses of worship in California and around the world. His career also spanned social upheavals: his first buildings, like the YMCA, were segregated, and he lived to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. An Architect Considered, the most comprehensive retrospective of his work to date sprawls across three museums in LA: LACMA, the Getty, and the Fisher. This seems fitting for an architect whose hometown was also LA; the Fisher for example, focuses on domestic designs, and includes commissions from contemporary artists including David Hartt and Edgar Arceneaux, who promise to bring his legacy into the present.—Travis Diehl 

Gordon Matta-Clark, Not the Work... The Worker (13 November 2026–28 February 2027) at MAXXI, Rome

In the summer of 1974, Gordon Matta-Clark took a chainsaw to a detached suburban New Jersey home and cut it in two. This was the culmination of his ‘cuttings’ series, begun three years earlier, in which he sawed and spliced domestic environments into strange new spaces. It was in New Jersey that he enacted on a larger scale than ever before this impulse to transform modes of living through a sculptural intervention into the architecture itself. Working with the foundations below an abandoned home that had been scheduled for demolition, he successfully bisected the house and lowered the rear of the building so that the front section’s sliced rooms were exposed to the open air and sunlight. It was a surreal, entirely analogue experiment, captured by the artist in photographs, collages and a film, that feels odder still to encounter in the age of digital image manipulation. At the MAXXI in Rome, a new exhibition explores Clark’s ‘cuttings’ by tracing the series to an earlier 1973 experiment in Genoa, Italy, which marked the artist’s first intervention on an entire residential building. In the artist’s transformation of domestic space, easy assumptions about the walls, doors and windows of the home as fixed environments in which their inhabitants find safety and privacy are upended. Instead, the harder edges of otherwise invisible social structures—of who is welcome to make a home or step across the threshold in a quiet, suburban neighbourhood, and who is not—are brought sharply into view.—Louise Benson

Gareth Cadwallader, Goodnight Moon (6 November 2026–9 January 2027) at GRIMM, New York City 

Solitude has a solid quality in Gareth Cadwallader’s paintings: trees in dim light, a lone figure holding fruit beside a table, or just a piece of fruit. Within these quiet scenes, lines keep moving, curling across garments, becoming branches, or spreading across an entire face or torso. In Goodnight Moon (2024–2026), a father lies beside a cot, his body stretched and knotted like wood, as though exhaustion has altered its substance. This is the titular painting of Cadwallader’s first solo with GRIMM, comprising nine small watercolours about birth, parenthood and grief. Goodnight Moon also refers to Margaret Wise Brown’s 1947 bedtime story of the same name though, unlike the book, Cadwallader gives considerable space to the physical demands of parenting, from infant hands tugging at a sleeping father’s hair and probing his face in Little Hands (2025), to the mother’s body forming a nest around her nursing child in Night Feed (2025–2026). In these scenes, bodies seem to take their shape from the needs of others.—Shanyu Zhong 

Nan Goldin, You Never Did Anything Wrong (24 November 2026–14 March 2027) at Hayward Gallery, London 

Much appears to have gone wrong in the six decades covered by Nan Goldin’s prolific practice, which has borne witness to the profound anguish of the AIDS era, cases of domestic and sexual abuse and the corporate roots of the opioid crisis. In a departure from the artist’s characteristic focus on such societal ills, her short film You never did anything wrong, Part I (2024) turned to the lives of animals—its apologetic title evoking their perceived innocence in contrast to their human counterparts. This phrase, which doubles as the title of Goldin’s forthcoming solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, first appeared engraved on a gravestone in a pet cemetery in a 1998 photograph by the artist. You never did anything wrong, Part II (2026) presents a series of photographic stills from Goldin’s archive, and promises a timely reflection on vulnerability and culpability. In light of Goldin’s outspoken political commitments, the title’s remorseful tone no doubt extends to the humans most vulnerable among us: communities whose lives are shaped, and often crushed, by systemic injustices over which they have little control.—Maja Renfer 

Choe Sooryeon, Mustard Seed Garden Grave (10 October–9 December 2026) at Gallery Chosun, Seoul  

Choe Sooryeon’s solo show Mustard Seed Garden Grave originated from a disquieting thought: could some of the small, serene hills depicted in the famous 17th-century Chinese ink painting manual, Mustard Seed Garden, have been burial sites? Like the Bargue-Gérôme Drawing Course in France, this manual has taught generations to paint through copying. In this exhibition of new paintings, Choe’s conjecture gives the work’s familiar landscapes an unsettling undercurrent, while they are also informed by her study and translation of Chinese classical stories. Passages from ghost stories appear alongside Korean translations, pronunciation guides and marginal comments, allowing corrections, uncertainties and unexpected associations to shape her compositions. Choe’s canvases have the intimacy of marked-up notebooks on a much larger scale: bright foliage blurs, while writing fades into linen or crowds the margins. The works reminded me of Yuan Jai and Evelyn Taocheng Wang: all three make inherited languages of ink painting feel highly personal—an achievement that grows out of, and pushes against, traditions where learning to paint begins with copying.—Zian Chen 

Ana Vaz, A câmera é o corpo (The Camera is the Body) (13 November 2026–2 May 2027) at MUDAM, Luxembourg 

If we look beyond the technological apparatus that has come to define it, cinema is an encounter between a filmmaker and their subject. For Ana Vaz, this perspective is paramount. Throughout her practice, the filmmaker has developed what she calls “embodied cinema”, foregrounding affect and corporeality in response to the rationalised gaze of Western filmmaking. The title of her first major institutional exhibition at MUDAM takes up this ethos as a bold declaration: A câmera é o corpo (The Camera is the Body). Indeed, like the body itself, Vaz’s films are never static. The camera moves with the body that carries it, responding to the worlds that unfold before it; from the soils of the Brazilian Amazon unearthed by deforestation, to a monkey solemnly wandering the nocturnal streets of Brasilia, to Parisian garbage workers dealing with the incessant production of waste. By addressing the repercussions of colonial modernity with vivid and embodied immediacy, Vaz’s cinema emerges as an active agent of intervention in the world. Spectatorship, too, becomes a bodily and consequential encounter. As the artist puts it: “Our negation of the body is our negation of our belonging to this world. This negation is the basis for the destruction of our world that we witness vertiginously today.”—Maja Renfer 

Andrew Cranston, Birds, beasts and flowers (6–22 November 2026) at the Ryosokuin Temple, Kyoto. (The opening days coincide with Art Collaboration Kyoto.) 

Under the stewardship of its current vice abbot Toryo Ito, the Ryosokuin Temple in Kyoto has hosted several exhibitions by contemporary artists which explore, in some way, the idea of Zen. Following on from Hiroshi Sugimoto and Elizabeth Peyton, Scottish painter Andrew Cranston will be showing his paintings inside the temple this month. The exhibition features several new paintings inspired in part by DH Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), a collection of poems about the natural world. Cranston is interested in their “observational approach, recording what is being seen and thought, meandering, seemingly unedited, unpoetic, uneven, circular, even repetitive”. Cranston’s deep-toned oil paintings have a similar texture: small forms along a branch emerge as birds, a heron waits for the right point at which to snatch a fish from the water.—Baya Simons 

The Quantum Effect, and Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room—The Eternally Infinite Light of the Universe Illuminating the Quest for Truth (31 October 2026–25 February 2027) at OGR Torino, Turin 

In 1993, Yayoi Kusama transformed the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale into an immersive yellow-and-black environment, using mirrors to multiply spotted pumpkins into an apparently endless field—a way of making viewers feel like they were in the middle of it. Mirror Room: Pumpkin (1991) introduced Kusama to a new generation of international audiences, marking a turning point in her career. A posthumous presentation of her Infinity Mirrored Room series accompanies The Quantum Effect, a group exhibition featuring works by Cerith Wyn Evans, Isa Genzken and Rirkrit Tiravanija among others, now at OGR Torino after opening at SMAC Venice. Curators Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies take a boldly interpretive, cinematic approach to space and time: in the show’s Venice iteration, mirrored galleries became parallel realities, while a Man Ray photograph of Duchamp’s glass work was echoed by Davies’ filmed imagining of another world beyond its surface. Kusama’s multiplying lights extend that invitation to see beyond space’s physical limits.—Zian Chen 

Were It Not for Shadows… (12 November 2026–29 August 2027) at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town 

In the architect Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s seminal essay In Praise of Shadows (1933), on traditional Japanese aesthetics, he writes that lacquerware, handled over many years, possesses “a depth and richness like that of a still, dark pond”. Tanizaki’s observations on the relationship between beauty, accumulation and time has served as a scaffold for the group exhibition Were It Not for Shadows… at Zeitz Art Museum, which gathers together the installations, photographs, sculptures and textile works of six Cape Town-based artists who completed residencies at the museum as part of the Koyo Kouoh Atelier between 2019–2025. Tanizaki’s essay serves as a metaphor for the ways in which artistic production necessarily happens in the half-formed, shadowy realms of everyday application, away from the public sphere. Zeitz itself is in a moment of transition, with Elvira Dyangani Ose having taken over its artistic directorship in August, a role formerly held by the late Koyo Kouoh. Perhaps this exhibition signals an ongoing commitment to a pluralistic institution that similarly bears the imprint of many hands.—Nell Whittaker 

Leah Ke Yi Zheng (9 November 2026–10 January 2027) at Antenna Space, Shanghai 

A calculating machine takes the place of Christ’s body—or so the title of Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s Leibniz’s Calculus Machine (Holbein’s Dead Christ) (2024) invites us to imagine. This long, narrow painting is the work I’m most curious to see in Zheng’s first solo exhibition in China, which brings calculation, belief and mortality into the same frame. Elsewhere, Zheng paints clock mechanisms and I Ching hexagrams on translucent silk stretched over irregular wooden supports. These are compelling subjects for a painter: geometric forms that promise to register time, change or a particular state of affairs. Yet Zheng’s paintings are not all abstraction but remain responsive to their surroundings. Three hang against Antenna Space’s windows overlooking Suzhou Creek, taking in the shifting daylight, while in her new Wave Paintings, overlapping silk meshes leave rippling moiré patterns. I like the possibility that something so carefully constructed might still give an unpredictable account of the world.—Zian Chen 

Main image: Andrew Cranston,The Nightfishing (2026). Courtesy the artist, Ingleby, Edinburgh, and Modern Art, London.