There are 7 exhibitions on in Lisbon worth the trip. I checked the dates, the venues and the opening hours one by one, on the museums’ own pages.
Last checked: 17 October 2026
22 October 2026 to 24 January 2027
João Pina’s grandfather was a political prisoner at Tarrafal, the camp the regime opened in Cape Verde in 1936. Some 800 family letters and photographs lead to around 250 images and documents. The title is a line from a letter sent to his grandfather.
22 October 2026 to 7 February 2027
Délio Jasse, born in Luanda in 1980, works with photos, passports and aerogrammes found at the Feira da Ladra, often from Portuguese returnees from Africa, to question the colonial archive and what it leaves to oblivion. Part of the Imago Lisboa festival.
10 October 2026 to 8 February 2027
The title comes from a 1989 photograph by Antoni Muntadas of a sign outside a building-supplies shop. From there the show, curated by João Maria Gusmão with the la Caixa Foundation collection, follows fifty years of art about work and leisure.
11 February 2026 to 15 February 2027
Ninety works pulled from the 2,450 pieces in the EDP Foundation’s art collection, the Portuguese energy utility that has quietly bought contemporary art for two decades. Second half of a two-part project for MAAT’s tenth anniversary, without a tight curatorial thread.
16 September 2026 to 15 February 2027
Nearly two hundred unseen works, paintings, drawings and sculptures made for MAAT’s Oval Gallery, where Cabrita Reis returns to the masters from the Renaissance to Romanticism. The title comes from Hesiod’s Golden Age. Some works contain explicit sexual content.
2 October 2026 to 22 February 2027
More than forty haute couture and ready-to-wear pieces by Valentino Garavani beside works by Joana Vasconcelos: the Marilyn shoes made of saucepans, the artificial-flower maze Garden of Eden and the new textile sculpture Valkyrie Venus. It comes from Rome.
18 May 2023 to 2 January 2028
Over 1,500 pieces from the Fundação Oriente never shown before: devotional objects, statues, prints and installations on Japanese festivals. Open since 2023 and extended repeatedly, it is the richest Japanese holding on view in Lisbon.
One exhibition that has not opened yet, but whose dates are already announced.
7 November 2026 to 29 March 2027
More than fifty artists from the CAM collection, from the 1950s to today, on the idea of place: marking out, building, inhabiting, mapping. Vieira da Silva, Almada Negreiros and Lourdes Castro hang beside Fiona Rae and Mark Wallinger. In the Nave and Mezzanine.
It is always these 5, and I check them one by one. When a venue has nothing on I say so, with the date I checked: it is something you would otherwise have to look up museum by museum.
Dates and prices change, and this page may not reflect the latest updates: before you travel, always check the museum’s own page, linked under each exhibition, which is the most reliable source.