Christmas at Niguliste has become an eagerly awaited tradition and marks the beginning of the winter holiday season at the museum. To celebrate the season of Advent, the interior design company Shishi is decorating the museum’s Christmas tree for the ninth time.

Opening in the Niguliste Museum on 22 November, the exhibition Dives Toletana: Treasures of Toledo Cathedral from Medieval to El Greco presents masterpieces from the 10th to the 17th century. For the first time, works by one of Spain’s most remarkable artists, a Greek-born painter El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) (1541–1614), will be shown in Estonia. The curators of the exhibition are Merike Kurisoo and Carlos Alonso Pérez-Fajardo.

The Art Museum of Estonia, which celebrates its 106th anniversary on 17 November, offers art lovers extraordinary experiences at its exhibitions, including masterpieces by such great artists as Lucas Cranach, El Greco, Gerhard Richter, and Flemish and Dutch painters. The entire anniversary-week programme emphasises the museum’s role as an engaging partner for a wide and diverse audience: art speaks to all ages and in all languages.

The performance VIIS et modis premieres on Friday, 14 November as the second part of the dance series Life Dances to Eternity, initiated by the renowned choreographer and director Teet Kask. In the St Anthony chapel the solo dance of Teet Kask combines with the music of the Argentine composer Gustavo Twardy.

The Pledge of Freedom: The Art Collection of Mykolas Žilinskas exhibition will open at the Mikkel Museum on 8 November, introducing the audience to the best works from the collection of Lithuania’s foremost art collector of the 20th century, from magnificent paintings by Old Masters to 20th-century art.

Merike Kurisoo, Director of the Niguliste Museum and the Adamson-Eric Museum, was the invited keynote speakers at NORDIK 2025, held in Helsinki from 20–22 October. The event is the largest scholarly forum for art historians in the Nordic countries, organised by NORDIK – The Nordic Association for Art Historians, this year in collaboration with the University of Helsinki.

From Friday, 24 October, the Great Hall of the Kumu Art Museum will host a high-profile joint exhibition by the Art Museum of Estonia and the Dresden State Art Collections, Spiegel im Spiegel: Encounters between Estonian and German Art from Lucas Cranach to Arvo Pärt and Gerhard Richter. After a successful run in Dresden over the summer, the exhibition will now open in Estonia. It is being curated by Kadi Polli, Marion Ackermann and Sergey Fofanov.

Starting on Friday, 17 October, Kumu will host the exhibition Tu and Whozzy, created especially for children. This playful exhibition expands on the permanent exhibition of older Estonian art, Landscapes of Identity: Estonian Art 1700–1945, and invites visitors to join the characters Tu and Whozzy in discovering how art reflects who we are, helping them to understand themselves and others better.

The exhibition Twilight Geometry, which opens in the Kumu Art Museum on 26 September, presents the oeuvre of the artist and interior designer Mari Kurismaa (b. 1956) from the end of the 1970s to the early 2000s, revealing the diversity of the artist’s creativity.

Opening on 19 September at the Adamson-Eric Museum, The Politics of Slowness is a compelling new exhibition that explores what it means to be human in today’s fast-paced, productivity-obsessed world. Curated by Brigita Reinert and Karin Vicente, the exhibition presents slowness as both a survival strategy and a form of resistance in the face of constant acceleration.

On 5 September, the most comprehensive survey exhibition ever of the oeuvre of the feminist artist and activist Anna-Stina Treumund (1982–2017), How to Recognise a Lesbian?, will open to the public in the Kumu Art Museum. The exhibition and the accompanying book map her activities as a photographer, artist and activist. The curators of the exhibition are Piret Karro-Arrak, Magdaleena Maasik and Triin Tulgiste-Toss (1987–2024).

This autumn, the Kadriorg Art Museum in Tallinn presents Garden of Delights: The Seventeenth Century in Bloom, a major exhibition organised in collaboration with The Phoebus Foundation (Antwerp). From 30 August 2025, more than 300 works from the Foundation’s collection will be on view in Tallinn, offering an unprecedented exploration of nature and flowers in seventeenth-century art of both the Northern and Southern Netherlands.