October 2026
October at a glance: 18 exhibitions opening, 6 closing, and 17 more on view across the city.
Permanent guide to October 2026 →

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam · Free
Two-part Foam project in Amsterdam-West: Yomna El Beyaly solo at Mercatorplein (to 29 Oct) and a group show at MAQAM (to end of December), curated with Romaisa Baddar.

Van Gogh Museum
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's print series 'One Hundred Aspects of the Moon' shown at the Van Gogh Museum for the first time: warriors, lovers and mythical beings in bold colour.

H'ART Museum
Over eighty works from the Centre Pompidou trace Matisse's hunt for balance between colour, form and simplicity, alongside Picasso, Rothko and Barnett Newman.

Rijksmuseum
A century after de Kooning left the Netherlands for New York, a retrospective of more than 120 drawings with celebrated paintings and sculptures, made with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Rijksmuseum
Photographer and filmmaker Kadir van Lohuizen documents the Dutch energy transition: towering wind turbines, thick undersea cables and colossal platforms on the open sea.

STRAAT Museum
Photographer Henry Chalfant's documentation of graffiti culture, curated by SUSO33 with archival material from the Dutch Graffiti Library linking his lens to the Dutch graffiti scene.

Het Scheepvaartmuseum
Choreographer Sedrig Verwoert traces dance in the diaspora, pairing a travelogue of his research into Winti, Kawina and Tambu in Suriname and Curacao with the dance film Strange Fruit 2.0.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Pendleton's first museum exhibition in the Netherlands: eleven paintings and eight large-scale drawings exploring abstract form, most of them never shown before.

Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
A tribute to disco's roots in Black, Latino and queer underground clubs, with tracks, videos, art, fashion and design celebrating freedom.

Het Scheepvaartmuseum
Five years of photographing the coastline from northern France to the southern Netherlands: Vanfleteren's sea shifts room by room from glassy calm through misty drift to storm.

Van Gogh Museum
The first retrospective in the Netherlands devoted to James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903): painter, printmaker, aesthete and enfant terrible.

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
Solo show by Lebanese photographer Myriam Boulos, 19th Foam Paul Huf Award winner, drawing on What's Ours: intimate, politically charged photography from Beirut.
Amsterdam Museum
Stories of people and power: how Amsterdam's grand canal houses were financed through colonial trade and plantation slavery, told through residents and descendants of the enslaved.

Museum Willet-Holthuysen
Explores how two of the house's 18th-century residents built their wealth on plantation trade, with an audio tour guided by a descendant of an enslaved woman from Suriname's Jagtlust plantation.

Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
The first European museum show of a rediscovered set of 75 photographs by fashion pioneer Adolphe de Meyer, documenting his life in Venice's Palazzo Balbi-Valier between 1904 and 1909.

Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
A first Dutch introduction to Andrzej Steinbach's meticulously composed photography, treating seeing itself as an aesthetic problem across typologically organised series.

Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
The French-Algerian artist's first solo Dutch museum show, presenting digital collages built from hundreds of photographs that explore migration, motherhood and displacement.

Rembrandt House Museum
Tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher and his team set up studio inside Rembrandt's house, inking original Rembrandt-inspired designs on visitors — the tattoo as the affordable old master.

Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
Five outfits by artist Bas Kosters celebrating diversity and self-expression, created for the Dutch Museum Association's centenary and WorldPride.

Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
A retrospective of Martine Gutierrez's self-portraiture and cinematic performance work, pairing never-before-seen childhood pieces with reinterpretations of Renaissance masterworks exploring identity.

Joods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)
Photographer Diana Blok's project "Time Tells" traces her father's hidden Jewish past, from escaping the Holocaust to Buenos Aires, in photos, texts and film.
Amsterdam Museum · Free
Free outdoor exhibition of 16 portraits and interviews with Amsterdam Moluccans, marking 75 years since their arrival and four centuries of ties to the Moluccas.

Rijksmuseum · Free
Thirteen monumental steel sculptures by Carel Visser (1928-2015), the most influential Dutch sculptor of the twentieth century, brought together for the first time in the museum's free-to-enter gardens.

NEMO Science Museum
Temporary exhibition on video games and their role in play, social connection and creativity, with playable consoles from the Super Nintendo to the PlayStation 5.

Allard Pierson
Over 200 ancient glass objects from Egypt to Rome, paired with TU Delft research into production techniques from core-winding to glassblowing.

H'ART Museum
Congolese collective CATPC shows 30 sculptures cast in cacao, palm oil and sugar, plus embroideries on cacao sacks, funding the buy-back of exhausted plantation land.

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
The London-based photographer's first museum exhibition, portraying female bodybuilders in Kerala with equal strength and softness to unsettle regional ideas of gender and beauty.

Allard Pierson
A theatre-history show on crossdressing, the Slingelandt theatre and revue star Louisette, exploring how costume and staging reshape identity.

STRAAT Museum
A show tracing graffiti's cultural roots through names, tags, lines and repetition — the building blocks of a visual language born from movement and marking presence.

Rembrandt House Museum
Over 80 works on paper, from Rembrandt to living artists, tracing how printmakers and draughtsmen kept pushing techniques and materials. Visitors can draw their own work in the gallery.

Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
Steps into the live restitution debate, exploring dilemmas and stories behind contested colonial-era objects.

Nxt Museum
A group show with LI-MA tracing the first years of MonteVideo, the Netherlands' pioneering video-art gallery, from 1970s electronic imagery to today's immersive artists.

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Landmark retrospective spanning more than seven decades of Kusama's work — painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, fashion, collage and happenings.

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
Four decades of Nadav Kander's photography, from his Prix Pictet-winning Yangtze River series to portraits of Obama and David Lynch, drawn together by fragility, time and quiet intensity.

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
The Chinese photographer's first major solo show outside China: recent series on family, youth and daily style in Xinjiang, where fashion becomes a lens for social observation.

Allard Pierson
A World Pride show drawing on the archaeology, book and theatre collections to surface forgotten LGBTIQ+ stories across history.

Eye Filmmuseum
The first comprehensive Dutch exhibition on Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl, gathering early, little-known and newly commissioned film works about ordinary lives in late-capitalist society.

Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam (Dutch Resistance Museum)
37 paintings and two sculptures by Hella de Jonge exploring war, family trauma and collective memory rooted in her Jewish family's history.

Rijksmuseum
Twenty-four worn, altered and reused garments dating from 1640 to 1930, from embroidered 17th-century mules to a dress passed down through generations of the Six family.

Het Scheepvaartmuseum
An installation of more than a thousand knitted strips in gold and crimson conjures the ghost of the East Indiaman Amsterdam: gold for trade and prosperity, red for colonialism and exploitation.

Joods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)
The golden age of magic through its Jewish illusionists, from Harry Houdini to Hans Klok, with tricks visitors can try themselves.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.