7 Must-See Art Exhibitions in February 2022

1. Hiejin Yoo at Half Gallery in New York

Ironically titled “The Best Things To Hold Onto,” Hiejin Yoo’s third solo show at Half Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side presents a new series of paintings with hands playfully fingering people and objects in natural settings. Outlined in white, the disembodied hands strum a guitar, strike a keyboard, grasp chopsticks, and pull back hair in the Los Angeles-based artist’s recollections of everyday events. Closely cropped to highlight the most important memories, Yoo’s paintings visualize her daily diary entries while providing viewers privileged insight into her inner self. Through February 12 

2. Marlo Pascual at Casey Kaplan in New York

A memorial exhibition highlighting a selection of hybrid photographic and sculptural works by the conceptual artist Marlo Pascual, whose life was cut short at age 48 from ovarian cancer in 2020, this succinct show shines a light on her imaginative vision and perceptive way of working with appropriated images and objects. Inspired by movies, literature, art and life, the Nashville-born, Philadelphia-based artist transformed vintage pictures and found furnishings—sourced from eBay and thrift stores—into conceptual constructions with a surreal twist. Organized by Pascual’s estate and her artist friend Wade Guyton, this sparse presentation offers eleven unique and editioned pieces, with some that are already in museum collections, and others destined to be. Through February 26 

3. Bernard Frize at Perrotin in New York

A Paris- and Berlin-based painter who’s widely known for his vibrant, process-oriented abstractions, Bernard Frize is back at Perrotin for his third solo show at its New York gallery. Commanding the first two floors of its sprawling downtown building, the exhibition “Come to Me Again” offers a dynamic overview of his recent work, presenting 20 colorful canvases in a variety of sizes painted over the past six years. Working with a set of predetermined rules, Frize mixes a palette of lively colors with white resin, which dilutes the hue, before mechanically applying the paint by hand, one brushstroke after the next. Taking an industrial approach to making art, he ends up, however, with fluid canvases sparkling with experimentation and elements that have been lightheartedly left to chance. Through February 19 

4. Etel Adnan at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York

Appropriately titled “Discovery of Immediacy,” Etel Adnan’s eighth solo show at Galerie Lelong picks up where her recent Guggenheim Museum retrospective ended. Painted by the Paris-based, Lebanese-American visual artist, poet and essayist during the last year of her life (she died at age 96 in November 2021), the mostly black-and-white canvases and accordion-style books depict everyday objects and views that were immediately in sight. Sparingly brushed with an urgency—primarily drawing with black paint on small white canvases—the thoughtful works capture the essence of places and things with the minimal amount of movement of the wrist. Spot on—painted without any retouching— Adnan created succinct still lives and seascapes as though they were visual haikus. Through February 19 

5. Tomokazu Matsuyama at Kavi Gupta in Chicago

Constructing lusciously detailed paintings that reflect a global, intercultural community of nomadic people, of which he is a part, Tomokazu Matsuyama draws upon the consumerist nature and celebrity focus of American Pop art mingled with the more decorative Edo period aesthetics of his native Japan in his imagatively shaped-canvases. For “The Best Part About Us,” his first solo show with Kavi Gupta, the New York-based artist portrays a cast of young, fashionable characters in dreamy, floating world environments. In his recent paintings, stylishly dressed hipsters pose in colorful, flora-and-fauna-filled, manga-like realms, while his larger-than-life stainless-steel sculptures dissect the figures by pulling them apart and then strikingly restructuring them, like the robotic Transformer toys from our not-too-distant past. Through March 19 

6. Gideon Rubin at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco

Powerfully capturing his subjects with just a few sure brushstrokes, Gideon Rubin sensually portrays faceless figures and repeated elements of fashion in the recent paintings on view in his seventh one-person exhibition with Hosfelt Gallery. Titled “Red Boys and Green Girls,” the show is named for two groups of four paintings that similarly portray a boy in a red shirt and a girl in a green dress, as seen from behind, on different size canvases, which uncannily makes the paintings seem unalike. The Israeli-born, London-based artist culls his anonymous subdued subjects from internet imagery, vintage magazines and cinema stills from the French New Wave; but he makes them his own—almost like members of a multiplying family—by sublimely reducing the forms and isolating the figures in patches of subtle colors on austere linen canvases. Through February 19 

7. Jennifer King at The Pit in Los Angeles

Making her solo show debut with The Pit, Jennifer King has sculpted her largest ceramic pots to date for the energetic exhibition “Beckoning Towards A Greater Horizon.” Created in her Los Angeles home studio during the Covid-19 lockdown, her hand-coiled vessels are more about painterly experimentation and less about function. Capturing anxious women at play with visual narratives that wrap around the surface of the sculptures, her colorful ceramics required multiple layers of glazing and painting with repeated firings in a kiln to achieve their highly expressive effect. Comedic in content and liberated in form, King’s imaginative pots portray frolicking female nudes with birds, flowers, cigarettes and crystals to paint an animated picture of life in the midst of an alarming pandemic. Through February 26