8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in November

Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from the East Coast to the West Coast to highlight the top solo shows for November. From celebrated critic and curator Robert Storr’s public return to painting with a striking group of geometric canvases at Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York, to strong exhibitions featuring powerful paintings by women artists such as Katherine Bradford at CANADA in New York and Flora Yukhnovich at Hauser & Wirth in Downtown Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. Robert Storr | Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York

A prominent figure in modern and contemporary art discourse, Robert Storr served as a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1990 to 2002, was Dean of the School of Art at Yale University from 2006 to 2016, and was the Artistic Director of the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. He began his career as an artist, earning an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. Returning to painting in 2016, he rekindled his exploration of geometric abstraction from the late 1980s, blending hard-edged shapes with intentional brushwork while balancing symmetry and asymmetry. Over the past year, the Brooklyn- and New Haven-based artist has created more than two dozen new paintings of various sizes, starting with sketches on his iPhone to explore different shapes and colors before completing the final canvases. Titled “Fits and Starts,” the expansive exhibition guides the viewer’s eye across the dynamically arranged geometric grounds, engaging the mind with Storr’s striking visual games.

Through January 24

2. Katherine Bradford | CANADA, New York

An artist with studios in Brooklyn and Maine, Katherine Bradford started her career as an abstract painter, but over time, her work became more figurative as she began depicting athletic women in motion—women who were flying, floating, swimming, and diving. Blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, she never renders her characters realistically, instead viewing them as universal figures linked to stories from her own life. Known for her luminous color fields, which she layers with multiple transparent coats of acrylic paint, Bradford creates a rich, light-filled, and atmospheric effect in her work, often evoking the sea, sky, or outer space. Loosely painted, her figures are partly memories of people whose paths have crossed and partly projections of who we could be. Featureless, her characters go about repeating activities in communal and natural settings, like animals that stay with their pack while embodying a sense of oneness with the world.

Through December 13

3. Robert Kobayashi | Susan Inglett Gallery, New York

A bricolage artist who created paintings and sculptures from repurposed metal ceiling tin, discarded cans, and nails, the late Robert Kobayashi was a fixture in New York’s Lolita neighborhood for 40 years. From the late 1970s until his death at age 90 in 2015, Kobayashi exhibited his work in his studio and gallery, located in a former storefront butcher shop on Elizabeth Street called Moe’s Meat Market, where he developed his neo-pointillist style paintings and inventive assemblages. His third solo show at the gallery since 2020, curated by his daughter Misa Kobayashi, features more than a dozen paintings and textured, mosaic-like tin pieces created between 1979 and 2012. Titled “Take It Easy, Kid,” after a phrase her father would say to friends when leaving, the works in the show are a feast for the senses, depicting scenes from the neighborhood of the past alongside classic portraits, still lifes, and nudes, with the curator/daughter’s poetic recollections and insights accompanying each enchanting piece.

Through November 26

4. Erika Somogyi | Kristen Lorello, New York

Best known for her distinctive watercolor paintings on paper that blend figuration, abstraction, and decorative patterns, Erika Somogyi transforms still lifes and outdoor scenes into reflective and lively visions. Creating dreamlike layered compositions, the Brooklyn-based artist uses bright colors and repetition to evoke an atmosphere that is both calming and energizing. Working with water-based oil on canvas to produce the 11 new paintings in her engaging “Verdant Dream” exhibition, Somogyi visually combines faces and figures into garden scenes filled with blooming flowers and surreal skies. Evoking a Garden of Eden-like setting, where the shifting figures seem to enjoy themselves sensually while remaining hidden to avoid exposure and expulsion, her paintings invite flights of fantasy and joyful thoughts.

Through December 20

5. Jiha Moon | Mindy Solomon, Miami

Jiha Moon draws inspiration from a wide range of sources, including Eastern and Western art traditions, Korean temple paintings and folk customs, popular culture, internet emojis and icons, and packaging from different countries to create captivating layered paintings, ceramic sculptures, and mixed-media works. Exploring the intricacies of global identity and cultural exchange, the South Korea-born, Florida-based artist mixes high art with kitsch to craft a worldwide mashup, calling herself a “cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” With a current solo institutional exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary, Moon returns to the gallery for her third one-person show, amusingly titled “Purgatory Mutt.” Showcasing 16 new ceramic sculptures and wall pieces, the artworks continue the artist’s exploration of hybrid and mythical creatures through objects and characters—ranging from birds and bananas to temple dogs, dumplings, and Keanu Reeves—that connect folklore, personal stories, and contemporary life.

Through November 22

6. Motoko Ishibashi | Cheremoya, Los Angeles

A Japanese-born artist based in London, where she earned an MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, Motoko Ishibashi is known for her provocative and playful works that explore the female body, gender, and digital culture mainly through painting and ceramics. Addressing themes of power, gender, self-identity, and the body in a society influenced by technology, she critiques and satirizes the traditional objectification of women in art and media by showcasing hyper-sexualized, often tightly cropped images of women’s bodies. For her debut solo exhibition with the gallery, titled “A Broken Net Has Fewer Holes,” and her second solo show in Los Angeles, Ishibashi exhibits six new canvases that deconstruct images of young women from ads and pornography, repeating and layering body parts in grid-like, pixelated fields—impishly referencing juicy burgers, rehydration drinks, weather, and prized chickens along the way.

Through November 29

7. Flora Yukhnovich | Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles

Drawing on the languages of French Rococo, Italian Baroque, and Abstract Expressionism, Flora Yukhnovich creates lush, layered paintings that beautifully blur the line between representation and abstraction. With bold, gestural brushstrokes, the young British artist blends historic imagery to produce contemporary takes on the past. Vibrantly referencing 18th-century painters like Watteau, Tiepolo, and Boucher, she explores ideas of femininity by ambiguously merging women’s bodies with elements of nature. Echoing the fête galante style of Rococo painting in her large-scale canvases, her first solo show in Los Angeles and debut with the gallery, appropriately titled “Bacchanalia,” offers an Abstract Expressionist vision of frolicking figures in parkland settings beneath celestial skies. With a site-specific mural created as a contemporary response to Boucher’s iconic Four Seasons series currently on view at New York’s Frick Collection, her L.A. show features nine new paintings that, to paraphrase the artist, capture a tipping point by layering imagery until structure yields to excess.

Through January 18

8. Rupy C. Tut | Jessica Silverman, San Francisco

An Indian-born, Oakland-based artist known for her contemporary take on traditional Indian miniature painting and calligraphy, Rupy C. Tut’s work frequently features lush landscapes and powerful feminine figures, addressing themes of identity, migration, gender, and environmental issues. Using labor-intensive traditional techniques, such as hand-mixing her own pigments from raw materials and employing specific squirrel-hair brushes for fine line work, Tut combines the detailed style of traditional Indian painting with a modern eco-feminist perspective in her storytelling artworks. For her second solo show with the gallery, the “The Eight Color” exhibition features five new paintings on handmade hemp paper and eight paintings on linen created with a limited palette of eight natural colors, made by the artist from various minerals. Reflecting on migration and the psychology of diaspora, the exhibition honors one of Tut’s heroes, pioneering poet Amrita Pritam, who describes “the eighth color of love” as a spiritual passion for the equality of all humankind.

Through December 20