8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in August

Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie journeyed from the East Coast to the West Coast—with stops in Chicago, Houston, and Aspen—to discover the top solo shows for August. From Andy Warhol’s early line drawings focusing on his fascination with fashion at Anton Kern Gallery in New York to Wendy Park’s pop culture paintings honoring her Korean-American roots at Various Small Fires in California’s Orange County, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. Andy Warhol | Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Displayed across two floors of the Midtown gallery, near the stores that commissioned Andy Warhol’s commercial work in the 1950s, the artist’s early line drawings of stylish men and women from that era are featured in the captivating exhibition “Andy Warhol: Fashion.” Grouped by subject matter, these works on paper demonstrate Warhol’s skill with pen and pencil while revealing his experimentation with different drawing techniques, such as the blotted-line illustrations he borrowed from Ben Shahn and made his own through his work in advertising.  

Curated by Vincent Fremont, the former Vice President of Andy Warhol’s Enterprises, who was also the celebrated Pop Art artist’s executive studio manager and a founding director of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the show features groups of fashionable women posing with statues and flowers, pared-down portraits of famous females and unknown young men, and male nudes highlighting privy parts and feet. Along with screenings of four interspersed episodes of Warhol’s 1979-80 TV show Fashion, which Fremont produced, the exhibition reveals a rarely seen side of the artist’s fascination with style. 

Through August 13 

2. Steve Keister | Derek Eller, New York

Inspired by Pre-Columbian art and mythology, Steve Keister creates incredible creatures from clay, cement, wood, and paint. Imaginatively combining fabricated modules to simulate birds, insects, animals, and flowers, he glazes his ceramic details, which are derived from voids in Styrofoam packaging, and paints his geometrically designed wooden parts to energetically animate his characters. In the exhibition “Split Level,” the New York-based artist features a cast of symbolic characters, including a crocodile to represent Earth, bats to symbolize fertility, a giant demonic mask to signify the god of death and the underworld, and hairless Mexican dogs to guide souls on their journey to the afterlife. Mimicking Mesoamerican architecture and sculpture, Keister transports viewers to a cosmic realm—an ancient culture that once thrived centuries ago but now only exists in our thoughts, spirits, and—without a doubt—his art.  

Through August 22 

3. Kees Goudzwaard | Nunu Fine Art, New York

A master of trompe l’oeil painting techniques, Kees Goudzwaard creates illusionistic canvases that appear as if he is constructing abstract compositions with masking tape rather than realistically rendering this artifice by hand. He begins by constructing a model using paper, transparent acetates, and tape on a colored background. Afterward, he dedicates numerous hours to refining the composition before producing a scaled painted illusion. Inspired by the detailed realism typical of Golden Age still lifes, the Antwerp-based Dutch painter combines this classic style with an apparent interest in post-war minimalism and conceptual art movements.  

His marvelous “Light Matter” exhibition features sixteen paintings created over the past three years, continuing his exploration of perception, materiality, and abstraction. Capturing something temporary in paintings like Rearranging Green, from 2023, Goudzwaard swaps one material for another as his applied paint takes the place of the thin paper layers to achieve the non-material preciousness—an elementary state—he perceptually seeks. 

Through August 23 

4. Carmen Winant | Patron, Chicago

Gathering instructional images from books, magazines, and pamphlets found in women’s health clinics, educational centers, and advocacy communities, Carmen Winant creates photomontages and installations that challenge and broaden our understanding of historical and cultural narratives. The Columbus, Ohio-based artist explores how photographs convey stories and reflect societal attitudes toward bodies, work, and identity, highlighting the role of images in shaping feminist movements and questioning traditional notions of women’s power, healing, and freedom.  

Her “Manuals for Living” exhibition features two immersive wall installations of concentric photocollages, each composed of hundreds of instructional images cut from publications in the artist’s extensive collection. It also features eight framed collages that similarly extract black-and-white instructional images from their original contexts. Submerged in vivid food colors, the images are arranged in horizontal sequences to suggest new ideas of movement, action, or steps forward, while their overall appearance becomes nearly abstract. Lastly, Winant displays a new series of suspended glass sculptures, cast from the artist’s own hands and fired in colored glass. Summarizing their importance to her impactful show and unique practice, the artist says, “Hands are how we make things, including ourselves.” 

Through August 16 

5. Lidya Buzio | Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, Houston 

Born in Uruguay in 1948, sculptor Lidya Buzio studied in Montevideo with artists of Taller Torres-Garcia, a group that promoted constructivism to create meaningful modern art. A notable figure in ceramics, the late artist learned to craft and mold clay sculptures from Spanish ceramicist José Collell, utilizing techniques rooted in indigenous traditions. She continued working in the same way, cutting earthenware slabs into geometric shapes and assembling cylinders, cones, and hemispheres to form her sculptures. She applied hand-mixed pigments directly to her pieces and burnished them before firing, which helped fuse the paint into the clay, creating the shimmering surfaces and distinctive hues that characterize her art.  

Moving to New York in 1971, Buzio was inspired by the urban environment to paint pots with cityscapes using bright primary colors. In 2005, she began exploring the architectural features of rural villages near her new home on the eastern end of Long Island. By 2009, she had transitioned to creating abstract geometric shapes, where bold, unexpected color combinations took center stage. The exhibition “Lidya Buzio’s Painted Ceramics: Color and Fire” features ten vibrant ceramic pieces, ranging from colorful cityscapes to bold abstractions, created between 1990 and 2013, just a year before her death at age 65. 

Through August 30 

6. Laurie Simmons | Baldwin Gallery, Aspen

Celebrated for her surreal photographs of dollhouse figures, ventriloquist dummies, life-size love dolls, and everyday objects on legs, Laurie Simmons has been a prominent figure in the New York art scene since the late 1970s. a member of the postmodernist art movement known as the Pictures Generation, which featured artists appropriating imagery and styles from movies, magazines, and other media sources, Simmons has long used surrogate figures in her photos and films to cleverly comment on gender, domesticity, tourism, love, fashion, and design.  

Simmons’ “cocktails and cake” exhibition presents mixed-media photographic works from two recent series, Autofiction and Deep Photo. The former revisits themes from earlier works through artificial intelligence, with the New York and Connecticut-based artist using AI text-to-image models to depict lifelike dolls in urban and rural settings, while the latter features suburban scenes constructed with photos and toys in shadow boxes. Pictures portraying fashionable young women celebrating birthdays in the woods and stylish ladies who lunch gossiping while relishing cigarettes and cocktails are exhibited alongside a figure and camera surreally becoming one. Exploring new frontiers in photography by experimenting with collage techniques—integrating fabric, glass, paper, paint, and other materials to pigment-printed images on linen and silk—Simmons continues to expand the possibilities of the medium in captivating ways. 

Through September 1 

7. Kevin Beasley | Regen Projects, Los Angeles

A material-focused artist, Kevin Beasley is best known for creating sculptures and installations from found objects, including clothing, sports gear, personal artifacts, and cultural ephemera. 

Beasley uses polyurethane foam and resin to add structure and form to these objects, transforming them into wall assemblages and freestanding sculptures. Colorful T-shirts, casual dresses, and durags take on ghostly forms, evoking the bodies that might have once worn them. These pieces blend the Virginia-born, New York-based artist’s personal memories and experiences with historical and cultural references to examine the influence of power and race in American society. 

In the exhibition “What delineates the edge,” Beasley displays a variety of new wall-mounted slab pieces and standalone sculptures that highlight key elements of his style, such as his innovative use of resin to create translucent surfaces and luminous artworks rich with history and memory. Exploring the roots of his material language on both a formal and conceptual level, the multidisciplinary artist has crafted thresholds, transition spaces, and portals to emphasize this aspect of his work in the show. The freestanding screens, made from materials and resin, organize the exhibition spatially in a way that invites improvisational exploration, while the wall-mounted panels, embedded with raw Virginia cotton, resin, and other materials, reflect shared experiences of history and collective memory—prompting a complex engagement with ideas of materiality, time, and the personal and social significance of everyday objects. 

Through August 16 

8. Wendy Park | Various Small Fires, Orange County

Born and raised in Los Angeles by first-generation South Korean immigrants, Wendy Park creates vibrant representational paintings of everyday objects and family routines that honor her Korean-American roots. Sharing her stories about social and economic nuances that recall her childhood while illustrating her family’s pursuit of the American Dream, she hopes her portrayals of personal Asian-American nostalgia will inspire curiosity about the culture of marginalized communities.  

The exhibition “Of Our Own” showcases seven new paintings inspired by the social infrastructure and commercial landscapes that shaped Park during her early years. The L.A.-based artist’s visual style, marked by bold, flat perspectives and sharp contours, draws from her animation background and pays tribute to American Pop and Korean folk art. Sourced from memory and a visual archive of family photos, Park’s compositions depict the storefronts and shared urban spaces of Los Angeles that have evolved over time. Created during a period of heightened ICE activity, her paintings honor immigrant labor, love, and local economies that help shape the American landscape. 

Through August 16