Looking for some inspiration for your next museum visit? This month, we're taking a tour of six of the world's most exciting and innovative museum exhibitions with Tim Marlow, Director of the Design Museum, London.

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen
21 May–17 September 2023

Salcedo is a Colombian-born artist, whose central subject is human trauma and tragedy. Though much of her work emanates from the violent conflict over the last three decades in her native land, its resonance is universal. Doris Salcedo presents eight major series of works from across her career – from untitled pieces of wooden furniture filled with concrete to the remarkable Palimpsest in which the names of over 300 refugees and migrants who died at sea quite literally weep before our eyes.

The Art Institute of Chicago
14 May–4 September 2023

Van Gogh and the Avant Garde takes the modern landscape as its central subject and looks at how the artist – along with Seurat, Signac and others – turned his attention from urban Parisian life to wrestling with the surrounding countryside with a formal inventiveness that set the tone for the development of Modernism.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
22 May–27 August 2023

From the religious connotation of trees in graveyards to their role as the backdrop of his incarceration at the asylum in Saint-Remy, the artist’s flame-like evergreens will be presented with all their evocative resonance in Van Gogh's Cypresses.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
12 May–3 September 2023

The unsurpassable Van Gogh Museum will celebrate its own 50th anniversary with Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months – an exhibition delving into the tremendously productive final period of his life, in which he made several of his most renowned masterpieces.

Centre Pompidou, Paris
10 May–7 Aug 2023

Lord Foster is taking on the hallowed spaces of the Pompidou Centre, itself a landmark of the High Tech architectural movement of which he is a co-pioneer. Norman Foster will feature over 130 major projects, showcasing everything from his reputation-making HSBC Building in Hong Kong from the early 80s, to airports, transport networks, museums and the visionary circular headquarters created for Apple in Cupertino.

The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
5 May–16 July 2023

Given the great German-born designer’s stylistic vocabulary emerged through sketching, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty seeks to draw lines – both conceptually and literally – along a career that began in the 1950s and ended as recently as 2019. Featuring epoque-defining designs for Chanel, Chloe, Fendi and the eponymous Karl Lagerfeld fashion house, the tension between his romantic impulses and modernist tendencies should spark a spectacular dialogue within a show designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando.