May’s must-see exhibitions: ancient Indian religions, Rebecca Horn’s legacy and the artists who paint their peers

As the art world prepares to head to Frieze New York, museums and galleries are unveiling a new host of summer blockbusters. These are the exhibitions opening in May that caught our eye.

Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

17 May-2 November

Friendship, love, inspiration and rivalry are running themes in an exhibition at Pallant House Gallery that charts how artists have portrayed one another. Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, photography, drawing and printmaking, Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists includes depictions of more than 130 artists by at least 80 different hands, all working in Britain from the early 20th century until now. More

Ancient India: Living Traditions, British Museum, London

22 May-19 October

“This kind of imagery is now part of day-to-day life,” says the curator Sushma Jansari of the types of objects included in the British Museum’s new exhibition Ancient India: Living Traditions, which presents devotional art of three of India’s great religions: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. “These are faiths practised by almost two billion people around the world. Our show is about the commonalities, our shared cultural heritage,” she says. For Jansari, this commonality is expressed most articulately through devotional art that goes back to the ancient roots of the religions, which still finds its way into current ritual and practice—hence the show’s title. More

Rebecca Horn: Cutting Through the Past, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin

23 May-21 September

A motorised spear turns at the centre of Rebecca Horn’s installation Cutting Through the Past (1992-93), housed at the Castello di Rivoli near Turin. It pierces five wooden doors in a 360-degree motion somewhere between “a caress” and “a surgical cut”, says the museum’s chief curator, Marcella Beccaria. This is not only the first major exhibition in Italy to be dedicated to Horn, but the first since her death last September, aged 80. “We felt an urgency to look at the legacy of Rebecca’s work—for the first time without the possibility of counting on Rebecca herself,” Beccaria says. More

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, Jewish Museum, New York

23 May-12 October

A major retrospective opening this month at The Jewish Museum in New York, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, honours the artist’s lifelong activism. The show includes 175 artworks and objects from the 1930s to the 1960s, divided into sections dedicated to Shahn’s early Social Realism; art made for the US government’s New Deal agencies; mid-1940s posters and graphics; works created during and after the Second World War; responses to McCarthyism and the Atomic Age; his support of the civil rights movement; and his later interest in spirituality and Jewish identity. More

On Displaying Violence: First Exhibitions on the Nazi Occupation in Europe, 1945-48, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

24 May-23 November

When does the past end and the present begin? That is the difficult question posed this month at Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum, in an exhibition that revisits how Europeans in the period immediately following the Second World War tried to make sense of the catastrophe in a number of remarkable, ambitious and often wildly popular museum shows. More