Seven Exhibitions to See in July | The Art Journal

Art Basel might be almost over and the artworld prepping for its unofficial industry-wide summer break, but there are still plenty of shows to catch beyond the fair circuit. The Art Journal’s editors and contributors have picked seven of their favourites – from Gateshead to Manila, London to Mexico City.

The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection
Christie’s King Street
London
16 July–21 August 2026

Two angular, mask-like figures with hatched textures and wide-set eyes dominate this expressionist oil painting by Souza, set against a pale blue ground with purple and olive forms below.

Francis Newton Souza, Man and Woman Grinding Their Teeth, 1957. Courtesy: KNMA and Christie’s

Founded in 1766, Christie’s was established more than 90 years before the beginning of the British Raj in 1858 and nearly 200 years before the Partition of India in 1947, two events that continue to shape many of the histories explored in The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection. This July, the auction house will dedicate its London galleries to works from the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, placing art from across South Asia within an institution whose history spans the colonial period, Independence and the decades that followed Partition. The exhibition also marks a significant international presentation for the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, founded in New Delhi in 2010.

The show places resonant modernist figures such as M.F. Husain and F.N. Souza alongside contemporary artists, with highlights including Nalini Malani’s multimedia works exploring displacement and exile, Arpita Singh’s paintings that weave together domestic life, conflict and modern Indian history, and Jitish Kallat’s works examining mass urbanisation. The exhibition signals that Indian institutions such as KNMA are increasingly presenting their collections to audiences beyond their country, and on their own terms.

- Tom Seymour, Editor

Objects of Glory: Iconic Moments in the History of Football
Museo Jumex
Mexico City, Mexico
10 June–30 August 2026

A long illuminated glass display case in a darkened museum exhibiting historic football shirts in various national colours, match balls, and a trophy against a deep wooden backdrop.

Objects of Glory: Iconic Moments in the History of Football, 2026 (installation view, Museo Jumex, organised in partnership with Qatar Museums and 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and

Sports Museum). Photo: Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy Museo Jumex

Timed to coincide with matches taking place in Mexico City during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and organised in partnership with Qatar Museums, Objects of Glory brings together some of football’s most iconic artefacts, including Diego Maradona’s jersey from the 1986 World Cup quarter-final, Pelé’s boots from the 1970 tournament and a hand-painted football commemorating the 1888 FA Cup Final.

Football unifies like little else. Yet, rather than presenting the dramas of the sport as a ripe subject for interpretation, Objects of Glory applies the display conventions of a traditional art museum to sporting artefacts, repositioning jerseys, boots, trophies and match balls within systems of collection and preservation more commonly associated with design history. In doing so, the exhibition also demonstrates how major sporting events increasingly operate as platforms of cultural capital, extending the influence of states and cultural organisations far beyond the din of the stadium.

- Tom Seymour, Editor

Prunella Clough, Out and About: Prunella Clough paintings from the 1980s and 1990s (curated by Jenni Lomax)
Thomas Dane Gallery
London, UK
5 June–25 July 2026

Four paintings of varying sizes — featuring soft organic forms in red, blue, black, and green — are sparsely hung across interconnecting white gallery rooms with pale wood floors.

Prunella Clough, Out and About: Prunella Clough paintings from the 1980s and 1990s (curated by Jenni Lomax, installation view, Thomas Dane Gallery) © Estate of Prunella Clough. Photo: Eva Herzog. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery

Prunella Clough is a prominent figure in postwar British art, however, her last major exhibition was at Tate Britain nearly two decades ago, and her work isn’t well represented in international public collections. For the time being, rare showings like Out and About offer a precious glimpse of the artist’s strangely beautiful ‘urbscapes’, which depict the edgelands of postwar British industry, preferred by Clough to the rural picturesque. Refusing the label of abstraction, Clough was a collector of overlooked objects, moments and perspectives, layered to depict the gritty, liminal beauty of urbanity and its entanglement with nature. Her paintings are a reminder to remain curious despite the distractions of technology and the bustle of metropolitan life.

- Ella Slater, Assistant Editor

Rosalind Nashashibi, Get Me A Stone
Artium Museoa
Araba, Spain
12 June–01 November 2026

A film still with warm, vintage colour tones showing a young woman with long wavy auburn hair and a silver pendant necklace gazing directly at the camera with a composed expression.

Rosalind Nashashibi, Occupation of the Inner Life, 2026, 16mm film transferred to HD, 8.30 minutes. Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Gallery

Should you happen to find yourself in the Basque Country, pay a visit to Get Me a Stone, a solo exhibition at Artium Museoa by British-Palestinian painter and filmmaker Rosalind Nashashibi. The show, 40 miles south of Bilbao, extends Nashashibi’s characteristically tender portraits of the politics of personal relationships to the genocide in Gaza. In the film, Occupation of the Inner Life (2026), Nashashibi links her creative process to the ongoing Nakba and the influence of politics on familial relationships. The artist’s ethereal, jewel-coloured paintings offer similarly complex moments of quiet defiance, forming a poignant antithesis to the spectacular images of violence that appear on our screens and newspapers everyday.

- Ella Slater, Assistant Editor

Martha Atienza, The Coconut Tree Methodology
Silverlens
Manila, Philippines
30 May–11 July 2026

A dual-channel video installation projecting large black-and-white footage of a tropical riverbank with palm trees, houses, and a boat onto two floor-to-ceiling screens in a darkened gallery.

Martha Atienza, Malbago 11°17'18.2"N 123°44'49.6"E, 2019/2026 (installation view, Silverlens). Courtesy the artist and Silverlens

Dutch-Filipino artist Martha Atienza’s work is a witness to the transformation of Bantayan Island, a small island located just beyond the northern tip of Cebu. Atienza’s practice is inspired by the gradual erosion of the island’s coastline, illustrated by coconut trees, whose roots have been dislodged by rising sea levels. The show’s highlights include a local fisherman encased in a small tank, puffing on a compression diving tube (a dangerous, but essential trade due to dwindling fishing stock in the Visayan Sea), coconut roots and cement suspended from the ceiling and the constantly shifting illumination of net bags. Atienza documents a place, people and way of life in flux.

- Katherine Elliott, Social Media Manager

Suzanne Jackson, What Is Love
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, US
14 May–23 August 2026

Suzanne Jackson, El Paradiso, 1981–84, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D.Abrams © Suzanne Jackson. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel. Courtesy Ortuzar, New York

Suzanne Jackson’s latest exhibition at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center poses a simple question: what is love? The show is a new iteration of SFMOMA’s previous retrospective, which was the first devoted to the entirety of the artist’s career. Across painting, poetry, and dance, Jackson’s works have touched upon ideas spanning memory, nature, beauty and notions of Blackness. Yet, at its core, her practice is informed by love. Much like bell hooks’s assertion that ‘love is as love does’, for Jackson, love is the act of making; of creating art.

- Katherine Elliott, Social Media Manager

Tish Murtha & Kuba Ryniewicz, Close to Home
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead, UK
4 July 2026–4 April 2027

A black-and-white photograph of a barefoot figure in a white vest and dark shorts bending sharply backwards in a corner between a wall and a door in an institutional interior.

Thanks to the work of her daughter, Tish Murtha’s tender yet unyielding photographs of impoverishment and community in the West End of Newcastle are being rediscovered by a new generation. It’s fitting that one of the region’s postindustrial relics is the setting for her biggest retrospective yet, drawing on four large bodies of work she made about the people who inhabited the same area she grew up in. And in an inspired choice of curatorial thinking, it will be shown alongside recent and newly commissioned work by Newcastle-based photographer Kuba Ryniewicz, inspired by Murtha and a lineage of queer portraiture, presenting his own intimate take on the resilience of his own community.

- Simon Bainbridge, Contributor