1. Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution

Museum of Fine Arts (MSK), Ghent, 1 February – 30 April 2020
Only around 20 works by Van Eyck have survived and more than half of these will be brought together for a major exhibition of the 15th-century Flemish painter at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts. Among the highlights will be the recently restored outer panels of his masterpiece from 1432’s The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (often referred to simply as The Ghent Altarpiece), a complex polyptych that took the artist over half a decade to complete. To witness up close Van Eyck’s ability to alchemise paint into a vibrating vision of redemption is worth the journey. KG

2. Raphael 500

Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, 5 March – 14 June 2020 (provisional dates) Although today’s taste salivates more for Leonardo and Michelangelo, the third member of the High Renaissance trinity, Raphael, had extraordinary gifts of composition and colour that, once you get your eye in, take the breath away. Gaze at the visual fireworks of his dramatic Deposition (1507), in Rome’s Galleria Borghese: bright drapery zigzags across the canvas as the weight of the dead Christ, and the personalities of his followers, feel palpable. In 2020, the city’s Scuderie del Quirinale marks 500 years since the master’s death with what should be a memorable show, provisionally scheduled for March, that draws significant loans from the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence. SP

4. Hilma af Klint

Moderna Museet, Malmö, 4 April – 6 September 2020
It was in 1896, with four friends known as the Friday Group, when Hilma af Klint first began to commune through séances with a mysterious syndicate of ‘"high masters". Before long, she was instructed to create a vast body of abstract work for a mystical Temple, years before her better-known contemporaries (Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian) began experimenting with non-figurative paintings. Moderna Museet’s comprehensive survey brings together perhaps the most remarkable series she created for the ethereal sanctuary – a group of enormous paintings called “The Ten Largest”, which gyrate with an enigmatic geometry all their own. The show follows the hugely successful exhibition of the Swedish artist’s work in New York last year, which shattered records by drawing over 600,000 visitors to the Guggenheim Museum, becoming the most visited show in its history. KG

5. Grand Egyptian Museum

Giza, opening date to be confirmed
Everything about the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) promises to be epic, from its size and scale (the complex will be close to 500,000 square metres) to the spectacular objects that will be on show. The museum has been under construction since 2005, and Egypt’s Ministry of Culture has vowed it will finally open its doors in 2020. Located on the Giza Plateau not far from the site of the Great Pyramids, the GEM will be the world’s largest archaeological museum. Designed by Ireland’s Heneghan Peng Architects, the state-of-the-art building will reportedly house all 5,400 objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb, a selection of which have been on a blockbusting world tour while work on the museum continues. AM

7. Joan Mitchell: Fierce Beauty

Baltimore Museum of Art, 13 September – 13 December 2020
From fierce, jagged scrawls of clashing tones to more careful accumulations of balanced colour, the mark-making of Joan Mitchell crackles with energy in every canvas, testimony to a genius of Abstract Expressionism who – while celebrated – has never received the acclaim of her male peers. With scholarly interest in, and market action around, Mitchell increasing over the last few years, an expansive touring retrospective (from Baltimore to San Francisco to New York) is set to solidify her reputation as one of the very best painters of the last century. SP

10. Diego Rivera’s America

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 24 October 2020 – 31 January 2021
A synergy between cultures energised the easel paintings, drawings and frescoes of Diego Rivera, whose links between his native Mexico and the United States in the 1920s to ’40s invigorated his imagination. Diego Rivera’s America in San Francisco centres on the artist’s vision of a shared future for the neighbouring nations and features the largest display of work by the Mexican muralist to be organised in a generation. KG