My picks of 2025: Tracing the global art mood

Art history is rarely shaped by isolated masterpieces. It is shaped by years in which artists across geographies begin to ask similar questions, often without coordination, sometimes without even awareness of one another. 2025 was such a year.

What connected the most significant exhibitions, fairs and institutional programs around the world was not a shared aesthetic, but a shared attitude: a decisive movement away from excess, certainty and spectacle toward precision, ethics and responsibility. This shift did not arrive through manifesto or rupture. It emerged quietly, through specific works that resisted immediacy and instead asked for time, attention and moral presence.

I experienced 2025 not as a calendar of events but as a continuous intellectual landscape, one in which contemporary art seemed less interested in declaring positions and more invested in holding complexity. The works that stayed with me were often restrained in scale yet expansive in implication. They did not attempt to summarize the world. They focused on fragments and trusted those fragments to speak.

This sensibility was particularly evident at the Venice Biennale. Among the most resonant works was the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s multi-channel installation built from fragmented oral histories of Mediterranean migration. Rather than depicting bodies, borders or boats, images that contemporary art has arguably exhausted, Shawky removed the human figure almost entirely. Voices hovered over eroding architectural forms, turning migration into an environmental and historical condition rather than a spectacle of suffering. The absence of bodies was not formal minimalism. It was an ethical decision.