Daily Art Brief — 19 October 2026
New exhibition announcements map a lively route from Tokyo’s centennial programme to photographic views of the sea and Galicia’s urban landscape. The dates are close: CGAC opens this Friday, Villa Tamaris follows on 30 October, and Tokyo’s free exhibitions begin on 19 November.
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum closes its centennial with two free exhibitions, including ‘Ways of Reading’ with Giacometti and Bikky Sunazawa
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum will close its centennial year with two free exhibitions opening on 19 November and running through 11 January 2027. “Ways of Reading” brings together five artists across different periods and disciplines, linking each to a way of engaging with the world. Alberto Giacometti is represented by works once owned by Yanaihara Isaku and Usami Eiji, while Bikky Sunazawa’s more-than-two-metre oak sculpture God’s Tongue (1980) comes from Sapporo Art Park Museum. New work by Momo Yamanishi and Elena Tutatchikova also features, alongside Shuntaro Tanikawa’s photographs, notebooks and radio. A second exhibition examines the museum’s century through its archives, activities and people.
Jean Gaumy’s “Jean Gaumy et la mer” opens at Villa Tamaris Centre d’Art TPM in La Seyne-sur-Mer on 30 October, following a vernissage the evening before. Produced with the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, the exhibition brings together maritime photographs spanning fishing, the open sea, oil-spill trauma, submarine interiors and polar exploration. The photographs move across Normandy, Greenland, Andalusia, Long Island and the Gironde, shifting from documentary reportage toward more contemplative images. Gaumy is a Magnum member, a member of the Académie des beaux-arts and an official painter of the French Navy. The exhibition runs through 17 January 2027.
Image: Galicia Contemporary Art Center, Santiago de Compostela
Manolo Laguillo’s ‘Galicia urbana’ to Be Inaugurated at CGAC on October 23
CGAC will inaugurate “Galicia urbana” by Manolo Laguillo on 23 October in Santiago de Compostela. The exhibition gathers photographs made by Laguillo between 2025 and 2026, commissioned by the Galicia Contemporary Art Center for incorporation into its collection. The announcement gives the project a clear institutional frame: a new body of work presented at the center that commissioned it and will retain it. The opening arrives this Friday, ahead of Gaumy’s vernissage in France and Tokyo’s centennial exhibitions in November.