8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in November
From Bosco Sodi’s new oxidized copper paintings paired with his glazed red volcanic rock sculptures to GaHee Park’s surreal paintings of figures and still lifes that double as landscapes
Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie journeyed from New York and Houston to San Francisco and Los Angeles to highlight the top solo shows for November. From Bosco Sodi’s new oxidized copper paintings paired with his glazed red volcanic rock sculptures at Olney Gleason in New York and Jorinde Voigt’s conceptual mixed-media drawings at Houston’s Sicardi Ayers Bacino to GaHee Park’s surreal paintings of figures and still lifes that double as landscapes at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman and David Lynch’s LA photographs at Pace Gallery in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.
1. Bosco Sodi | Olney Gleason, New York
Mexican artist Bosco Sodi is widely known for large, textured monochrome paintings and raw, elemental sculptures. Rejecting conventional paints and tools, he works with natural materials, letting nature and time shape his art. His work reflects the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in impermanence and imperfection, as well as the movements of Minimalism and Arte Povera. He hand-builds his paintings by repeatedly layering sawdust, raw pigment, wood pulp, fibers, water, and glue. For his sculptures, he glazes volcanic rock and fires solid clay spheres, cubes, and bricks in traditional outdoor wood kilns, then arranges and stacks them into meditative displays.
His “Verdigris” exhibition pairs new oxidized copper paintings, made over the past year in his Brooklyn studio, with a new series of glazed volcanic rock sculptures. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings, Sodi’s canvases develop vibrant verdigris patinas as the copper-chemical mixture reacts with the atmosphere. He repeatedly throws his pigmented material onto the surfaces, creating striking contrasts. Drawn to copper’s energy-conducting properties and beauty in decay, he stages the paintings around red, ceramic-glazed volcanic rocks. Together, the works construct a garden-like dialogue among organic forms, offering visitors a sublime setting to contemplate the artist’s imaginative creations.
Through December 19
2. Izumi Kato | Perrotin, New York
Izumi Kato, a prominent Japanese artist born in Shimane Prefecture in 1969, creates haunting humanoid figures that blur the boundaries among humans, plants, animals, and spirits. Drawing on Shinto animism, folklore, totemic art, and regional myths, he repeatedly depicts expressionless, embryonic hitogata (Japanese for dolls or human shapes) with bulbous heads, circular eyes, elongated limbs, and indistinguishable hands and feet. He intuitively applies pigments with gloved hands, building textured layers in his colorful paintings. He also carves and paints three-dimensional sculptural figures from camphor wood, soft vinyl, natural stones, found fabrics, and cast aluminum.
Coinciding with Kato’s monumental commission for the reopening of the Hirshhorn Museum’s Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, this exhibition brings together an enigmatic and potent selection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Expanding his exploration of form, color, and spatial properties into new realms, Kato creates two- and three-dimensional works in oil on canvas, cast aluminum, plastic models, lithographic collages, and wood. A colorful blend of sci-fi characters from Japan’s pervasive manga and anime cultures and of beings rooted in the country’s indigenous beliefs, Kato’s otherworldly creatures connect us to the ancient past while inviting us to wonder what lifeforms the future might spawn.
Through December 19
3. Annie Hémond Hotte | Margot Samel, New York
Brooklyn-based Canadian artist Annie Hémond Hotte creates intricate, labyrinthine paintings that blend dreamlike imagery with structured patterns to explore mythology, psychology, and the inner self. Working with oil and vinyl paint on canvas, she uses dense, distinctive brushstrokes to create an optical-tactile effect that closely simulates the textures of quilts or woven textiles. She often arranges her canvases in intricate geometric compositions of repeating parallel lines and maze-like patterns. The designs evoke controlled chaos and explore the intersection of inner and outer worlds, featuring stylized, dreamlike humanoid figures, deities, and animals moving through fantastical settings.
Her first solo exhibition with the gallery, “The Divine Comedy: Hell,” draws inspiration from Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. A lasting vision of the afterlife as a moral framework and a mirror of earthly society, Hémond Hotte’s vivid, intricate paintings revisit its subterranean geometry through imagery informed by her study of the poem. At the exhibition’s center is a large painting depicting Hell as an hourglass, accompanied by other paintings that portray its symbols and guides. Before descending into Hell, Dante loses his way in the woods and encounters a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf—moral allegories that foreshadow Hell’s three divisions. In her patterned paintings, Hémond Hotte makes each beast a prime subject, portraying each separately and using distinct narrative styles to depict their bodies within mystical woodland settings.
Through November 14
4. Elaine de Kooning | Berry Campbell, New York
A prolific American Abstract Expressionist and expressive figurative painter, Elaine de Kooning played a central role in the postwar New York School. At a time when women were often marginalized in the male-dominated abstract art movement, she was a fierce, independent voice. Unlike many of her peers, who favored pure, nonrepresentational abstraction, de Kooning combined Abstract Expressionism’s raw, energetic, slashing brushstrokes with recognizable figures and forms. To ensure her work was judged on its own merits, rather than by her gender or her husband Willem de Kooning’s notoriety, she famously signed her pieces with her initials, “E. de K.”
She was a dedicated professor at Yale and an art critic for ARTnews, introducing and translating abstract art for the public while championing contemporaries such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. The gallery’s survey exhibition features a curated selection of paintings and works on paper from four decades of her career, spanning 1948 to 1988. Many rarely seen works are on view for the first time since her 1989 death, showcasing her range across abstraction, representation, and portraiture. The exhibition reflects her lifelong commitment to painting, from early abstractions and celebrated portraits of family, friends, and artists such as Alex Katz and Toni Ross to expressive sporting scenes. It also includes her famous John F. Kennedy series, created in 1962 after she was commissioned to paint an official presidential portrait.
Through December 19
5. Jorinde Voigt | Sicardi Ayers Bacino, Houston
Jorinde Voigt, a renowned German multidisciplinary visual artist based in Berlin and Hamburg, is celebrated for her large-scale conceptual drawings and detailed notation systems. Her work blends Conceptual Art and Minimalism, transforming complex, intangible phenomena into striking, analytical visual maps composed of fine ink lines, sweeping arcs, pencil marks, and energetic handwriting. She develops systematic thought models and experimental visual matrices to explore how inner perception connects with external reality. Her signature works are large-scale paper pieces that combine the look of musical scores, architectural blueprints, and scientific charts, using ink, graphite, watercolor, and pastel to plot variables such as time, distance, speed, and frequency.
“Trust and Rain,” the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, brings together a dozen works on paper created between 2012 and 2023. From large-scale drawings in ink, pencil, pastel, graphite, and chalk, often enhanced with gold leaf, to smaller cut-paper and mixed-media collages mounted on mirrors, her works chart weather patterns, the Earth’s rotation, gravitational pull, and geographic features, alongside a record of her biological presence and movement through space. Two works from her 2020 Potential series reference ongoing changes in natural phenomena, and another piece alludes to Niklas Luhmann’s sociological text Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy—transforming words and abstract intellectual arguments into rhythmic lines, splotches, and loops.
Through November 28
6. GaHee Park | Jessica Silverman, San Francisco
A Montreal-based artist who creates fascinating, erotic paintings in a flat, naive art style, GaHee Park was born in Korea and raised in a conservative religious home. Interested in art but seeing little opportunity for an artistic career as a woman in her homeland, she moved to Philadelphia to study at Tyler School of Art, where she earned her BFA and found the freedom to express her previously suppressed self. After earning her MFA from Hunter College in New York, she emerged with a sustained body of surreal paintings and drawings that explore distorted still lifes and interior views, themes of desire and intimacy that subvert the traditional male gaze, and witty juxtapositions of seduction and decay.
Titled “Soft Shell,” after what Park calls “the containers of life that we inhabit to feel safe, but which do not protect us completely,” her first solo show with the gallery features 13 new oil paintings of her signature figures and still lifes that often double as landscapes. Throughout the show, protection appears in diverse physical forms, including conches, fruit skins, fingernails, and fish scales. Curtains and clothing both conceal and reveal, while martini glasses and aquariums suggest life in a fishbowl. Every object is at once distant and exposed—a tension embodied by the enigmatic women in Park’s chimerical worlds, as her neo-surrealist paintings blur the boundaries among interior and exterior, fantasy and reality, and viewer and viewed.
Through December 19
7. David Smith | Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles
David Smith was a pioneering American sculptor and painter associated with Abstract Expressionism, widely recognized as the first artist in the United States to create welded-metal sculptures. Drawing on the industrial torch-cutting and welding techniques he mastered at an automobile factory, Smith revolutionized 20th-century art, replacing traditional stone carving and bronze casting with raw metalwork. During his 33-year career, he created more than 500 sculptures, seamlessly blending European modernist movements such as Cubism and Surrealism into a distinctive American style.
Originally trained as a painter at New York’s Art Students League, Smith saw sculpture, drawing, and painting as a single creative current, sculpting by day and painting at night. “Night Window. David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958 – 1964” showcases his pioneering, rarely seen Sprays and their innovations in form, color, space, and time. The works grew from his sculpture practice: welding left scorched silhouettes on his shop’s whitewashed floor. Recognizing their potential, Smith arranged metal scraps, paper, and found materials on canvas and coated them with commercial spray enamel, a medium new to fine art. He often added white paint for contrast. The results invert his precise sculptural process, as negative space becomes structure, color becomes atmosphere, and absence becomes presence.
Through January 16
8. David Lynch | Pace Gallery, Los Angeles
David Lynch was an American filmmaker, screenwriter, visual artist, and musician, celebrated as one of cinema’s most influential visionaries. His blend of dream logic, surreal imagery, and psychological tension popularized the term “Lynchian,” which describes the mundane as unsettling and darkly humorous. Over five decades, he challenged mainstream storytelling by exploring human nature and American suburbia, directing landmark films and a groundbreaking television series, spanning genres from avant-garde horror to humanistic drama. He also painted dreamlike works with heavy textures and limited color, and released solo albums and haunting scores with longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti.
“David Lynch: LA,” the first exhibition of his work in his home city since his death in 2025, brings together photographs from five series created between 1979 and 2008. By placing these series in dialogue for the first time, the show highlights his distinctive artistic sensibility through a medium that bridges his significant contributions to painting and film. Atmosphere and storytelling were central to his artistic vision and run throughout each body of work. Five large-scale color photographs from Figures and Smoke anchor the exhibition, tightly cropping women’s faces in moments of ecstasy. Smoke curls from their red-stained mouths, both fleeting and vivid. Lynch’s scenes of Los Angeles capture its distinctive architecture, cinematic terrain, industrial edges, and overlooked areas; the exhibition also includes a major body of his nude photography.
Through December 22