8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in February

1. Thomas Schütte at Gagosian | New York

One of the most important sculptors working today, Thomas Schütte rejects the notion of repeating a style to build a brand. Instead, the German artist prefers to return to previous themes, motifs, and forms to develop further and transform them. Working for the past five decades from a personal archive of small-scale figurative sculptures and architectural models, Schütte experiments with materials and techniques to create new interpretations of evolving ideas.

Fresh off a career-spanning survey at the Museum of Modern Art, Schütte has six monumental works on view in the aptly titled “Major Sculptures” exhibition. Primarily presenting abstracted figures from his seminal Frauen (Women) series, which were highly featured in the MoMA show by several large-scale works and shelves displaying smaller clay maquettes, the pieces portray seated and reclining females atop steel tabletops. Cast in bronze and aluminum, the women’s curvilinear forms are strikingly re-emphasized by the artist’s brutalist plinths. If you missed the MoMA show, this exhibition offers a quick look at some of his best works.

Through February 22

2. Dora Jeridi at Perrotin | New York

A recent MFA grad from the esteemed École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dora Jeridi is making her American solo show debut with eleven new paintings, which beautifully blur the boundary between figuration and abstraction. Painted at her New York studio over the past several months, the expressive canvases in her “Humanity” exhibition combine heads, limbs, and fuller figures in surrounding abstract realms. Mixing gestural brushwork and spray painting with flourishes of oil sticks, charcoal, and ball-point pens, Jeridi’s lively compositions possess a straight-off-the-street sensibility of graffiti, filtered through the developed eye of an artist who maintains a playful balance between freedom and constraint.

Through February 19

3. Etel Adnan at White Cube | New York

An influential Arab-American visual artist, poet, and essayist who died in her home in Paris at age 96 in 2020, Etel Adnan studied philosophy, which she later taught as a college professor, before turning to painting and journalism. Painting abstractly with oil on canvas, she is best known for her poetic landscapes and simple geometric compositions. Applying the paint in blocks or bands of color with a palette knife, she worked quickly to produce colorful canvases, which she saw as related to writing and an escape from it. She also produced tapestries fabricated by artisans from her paintings and made durational folded books with extended watercolor pages.

“This Beautiful Light” exhibition presents a dynamic selection of Adnan’s small-scale paintings, alongside tapestries produced in her lifetime and others created posthumously from the artist’s 1960s drawings by French artisans, under the supervision of her longtime partner, artist Simone Fattal. Other standout works in the stellar show include a massive ceramic mural made from an earlier drawing of an apple tree—skillfully reproduced on 88 square ceramic tiles joined in an encompassing grid—and two prime examples of her fascinating folding books.

Through March 1

4. François Rouan at Templon | New York

A prominent French contemporary painter, François Rouan was associated with Supports/Surfaces—a 1960s movement examining the formal elements of painting—at the beginning of his career but developed a more distinctive way of working through experimentation with collage techniques. Deconstructing his abstract paintings, he began weaving strips of the cut-up canvas into new structures, which set the eye of the viewer in constant motion while seeing the overlapping elements anew.

The “Recorda” exhibition, concisely curated by former Centre Pompidou director Alfred Pacquement, presents 30 significant works created by the artist between 1969 and 2024. Paintings composed with oils on braided canvases, like Recorda III, feature impressions of nude female bodies (a reference to Yves Klein) and male faces (resembling the artist), while other canvases from 2012 to 2015 simulate the weaving effect through a different layering technique. Several of the 81-year-old artist’s works on paper—employing wax painting, marble powder, braided photographs, and drawing—complement the compelling show while illuminating another aspect of Rouan’s critical contribution to contemporary art.

Through March 1

5. Louise Nevelson at Pace | New York

Celebrated for her monochromatic wood sculptures, Louise Nevelson studied at the Art Students League in the 1930s. She continued to develop a practice through the 1940s and ‘50s based on scavenging New York for found objects, which she would assemble into painted box-like structures. Her career took off when she was featured on the cover of Life magazine in 1958 and included in the seminal “Sixteen Americans” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art the following year. She had her first solo show with Pace in Boston in 1961 and joined the gallery, where she has been represented for over six decades, in 1963.

Presenting an arresting selection of works that have never been seen or previously exhibited by the Russian-American artist, who died at 88 in 1988, the solo show “Shadow Dance” offers a focused view on her black and white painted sculptural pieces from the 1970s and ‘80s, alongside some mixed-media collages. Highlights include Artillery Landscape, a sculptural installation consisting of recycled wooden artillery boxes, reconstructed and painted black by Nevelson in the last few years of her life; a rare pair of white painted wood sculptures; and several diagonally structured black wooden sculptures, which added new energy to her widely recognized Cubist and Constructivist-inspired wall works.

Through March 1

6. Ulala Imai at Karma | New York

Although she has a degree from the doctoral program at Tama Art University, Ulala Imai looks no further than the everyday objects in her home and those in her suburban Tokyo neighborhood as the point of departure for her representational paintings. A third-generation artist who is also married to an artist, Imai paints still life, portrait, and landscape paintings of food, stuffed animals, and popular toy characters in domestic settings and rural realms. Using pop culture iconography, she breathes life into inert objects while creating colorfully autobiographical works.

The artist’s entrancing “CALM” exhibition captures everyday family life and adventures through her children’s toys. The avatars play and fight, get lost in nature while exploring caves and seaside areas, and gather to celebrate birthdays.  In her Party painting, Imai captures ET, Chewbacca, a honey bear, and other toys and household objects assembled before a Hiroshi Sugito painting in the family’s home. Working with subject matter and scenes that are close at hand, she focuses on light and shadow, lively brushwork and color combinations, and pictorial intrigue to invite the viewer into her enchanted domain.

Through February 22

7. Doug Aitken at Regen Projects | Los Angeles

Exhibiting internationally since the 1990s, Doug Aitken is genuinely a 21^st-century artist. Working in a variety of media, ranging from photography and print to film, video, performance, installation, sound, and architectural interventions, the Los Angeles-based artist is fearless in his approach to visualizing contemporary observations and ideas.

Returning to the gallery for his sixth solo show, Aitken explores ecological issues and how people degrade the environment in his engaging “Psychic Debris Field” exhibition. In Aitken’s vigilant vision, buffalos fabricated from foam computer packaging become domestic planters; mountain lions that once freely roamed the Hollywood Hills are assembled with debris recycled from the urban landscape; sheet-metal cacti sprout from discarded tires; and fabric-collaged images capture people and modernist houses encroaching deeper into nature. Married with light and sound works, the striking show serves as a wake-up call to protect the environment rather than conquer it.

Through February 22

8. Sam McKinniss at David Kordansky Gallery | Los Angeles

Born in Minnesota and educated in Connecticut, Scotland, and New York, Sam McKinniss paints from popular culture imagery found on the internet. His paintings portray the spirit of the time, ranging from floral still lives and portraits of dogs to iconic images of movie stars, musicians, presidents, and first ladies.

For The Perfect Tense exhibition, his first solo show with the gallery, the Kent, CT-based painter presents a look back at recent events that have resonated through American media. In his paintings, Mark and Patricia McCloskey are seen threateningly toting guns on the lawn of their Saint Louis home during a Black Lives Matter protest and the cast of the TV show Friends is gathered together in an editorial photograph revealing the dating histories of the actors (an image that got renewed attention after the death of Matthew Perry). Typically peaceful landscapes also serve as reminders of a troubling past, as Forest Fire evokes the deadly blazes in Los Angeles, while French King Bridge portrays a cherished Connecticut bridge that recently had barricades installed to prevent suicide jumps.

Through February 23