8 Must-see Solo Gallery Shows in March

1. Camille Henrot at Hauser & Wirth | New York

A multidisciplinary French artist, Camille Henrot studied film animation at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts in Paris before assisting artist Pierre Huyghe, working in advertising, and making music videos. Awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, she’s been exhibiting at museums and galleries worldwide ever since. Her first major solo show with Hauser & Wirth in New York (Henrot joined the mega-gallery in 2021) presents a fascinating array of mixed-media sculptures and collage paintings in a site-specific flooring intervention, conceived and designed by Henrot in collaboration with Charlap Hyman & Herrero.

The sculptures in “A Number of Things” include a series of leashed dogs abstractly crafted with steel wool, carved wood, aluminum, and various resin compounds and giant bronze and polyurethane abacuses with highly exaggerated forms, while the paintings playfully provide life lessons on societal dos and don’ts. Taken as a whole, the engaging exhibition graphs the difference between freedom and control, as well as an artist’s creative immunity from the rules, which Henrot’s captivating works visually convey.

Through April 12

2. Sarah Charlesworth at Paula Cooper Gallery | New York

A conceptual artist associated with the 1970s and ’80s art movement known as The Pictures Generation, a loose group of artists mining mass media for representational imagery that could be appropriated to make new work that critiqued the current culture, Sarah Charlesworth used photography to laconically re-present her times. Focusing on isolated imagery, which she sometimes repeated from different media sources and at other times captured on a related color field, she dealt with specific concerns in studied series, such as black and white newspaper photos of people jumping from buildings to commit suicide or escape fires and cutout color fragments from fashion magazines, porn publications, and ethnographic books. The exhibition “Desire and Seduction” explores how the groundbreaking artist, who died more than a decade ago, poetically employed signs and symbols to vividly capture the turn of the century zeitgeist.

Through March 23

3. Laura Owens at Matthew Marks Gallery | New York

Probing the history of painting while exploring the boundaries between representation and abstraction, Laura Owens employs a diverse range of references while drawing on her own personal biography and reoccurring themes in her eccentrically beguiling paintings, installations, and artist books. Born in Ohio and educated at the Rhode Island School of Design and Cal Arts, the painter has lived and worked in Los Angeles for nearly 30 years. Returning to New York for her first solo show since her mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum in 2017, the sprawling exhibition turns two of the gallery’s three Chelsea spaces into a delightful Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art.

The largest gallery presents paintings of collaged abstract forms layered with brushed bits of paint on smartly papered walls in the front room and a wall-to-wall, wraparound immersive painting of a patterned garden with sound, video, and movable elements in the nearly hidden backroom. Next door, the smaller of the two gallery spaces offers an intriguing group of boxed artist books, conceivably referencing Marcel Duchamp’s Box in a Valise, displayed on tabletops in the entry area and another immersive painterly space behind an old, wabi-sabi style, found door. Pushing the boundaries of what painting is, or can be, Owens has a more is better approach, where one medium gets translated into another and all kinds of things get filtered in.

Through April 19

4. Julian Opie at Lisson Gallery | New York

Graduating in 1983 from London’s Goldsmiths School of Art, where he studied under Michael Craig-Martin, Julian Opie quickly became part of the New British Sculpture movement, a group of artists championed by Lisson Gallery that included Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, and Richard Wentworth. Initially known for his neo-pop art assemblages reproducing everyday objects, he later transitioned to geometric sculptures informed by industrial design and architecture before finally settling on his signature-style, silhouetted sculptural figures defined by bold lines at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Inspired by classical portraiture, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Japanese woodblock prints, manga, advertising, and street signs, the London-based artist is captivated by urban life, frequently drawing from photographs of individuals traversing the city and other populated spheres. Exhibiting new and recent sculptures, animations, and paintings in this sensational solo show, the gallery greets visitors with four monumental figures from a seaside setting walking through the center of the columned space. Graphically rendered in high-gloss auto paint on aluminum, the pedestrians look at phones or leisurely swing their arms as they crisscross the space toward massive paintings and looped animations on large-scale LED screens of colorfully clad children continuously passing by.

Through April 19

5. Shuling Guo at Mindy Solomon | Miami

A Chinese artist who graduated with a BFA in painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2010 and immigrated to the United States in 2019, Shuling Guo makes mesmerizing abstractions from memories of birth, death, and mystical influences. Splitting her life and work between sailing the Atlantic Ocean with her husband and daughter and a home and studio in Philadelphia, she draws spiritual inspiration from the ambiance of the open seas and the experiences with her pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood.

Exhibiting her paintings and drawings in solo and group shows in China over the past decade and in New York and Los Angeles over the last five years, Guo’s is having her first one-person exhibition in Miami with the gallery. Titled “Temple,” the show’s symmetrically structured pieces explore themes of the body’s transformation and regeneration through vibrant color, curvilinear forms, and radiant light. Weaving together the sight and spirit of her journeys, she constructs a bond between the world outside, her inner self, and the canvas. With color pencil drawings like Body-upper, Body-middle, and Body-lower and sublime oil paintings like White Hills and Temple, Guo brings her sensory experiences to life.

Through March 29

6. Claire Tabouret at Night Gallery | Los Angeles

Recently named the winner of the French Ministry of Culture competition to design six new stained-glass windows for Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, Claire Tabouret is a figurative painter who lives between France and Los Angeles. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she paints with loose, expressive brushstrokes and a broad palette, mimicking both artificial and natural hues. Referencing the natural and artificial ingredients of representation, her figures, still lifes, and landscapes—sometimes based on photographs and sometimes not—can be both dark and acidic.

For her “Moonlight Shadow” exhibition, the artist’s third solo show with the gallery, Tabouret used personal and found photographs as the points of departure for several self-portraits and group portraits of children and friends. Employing DayGlo underpainting and layered washes of acrylic, she paints dreamlike pictures of her daughters in a small boat, tucked tightly into bed, and gazing at reflections in a mirror. Their bodies bounce to life from darkened domains in their pink blouses and red-and-white striped shirts, while equally disappearing into pale and purple scenes. Depicted holding a child while posing in paint-splattered pants before a ghostly assembly of draped children, her painting In the Studio tenderly captures Tabouret in the liminal state of being a caring mother and a thoughtful artist.

Through March 29

7. Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner | Los Angeles

One of the most provocative artists associated with a re-emergence of figurative painting in the 1990s, Lisa Yuskavage has been labeled a feminist and a misogynist. Blurring the boundary between high and low art, her lush paintings and drawings of nudes have been influenced by the Italian Renaissance Masters, whom she studied during a year in Rome while earning her BFA from the Tyler School of Art, and Bob Guccione’s exploitive pinups from Penthouse magazine in the 1970s. Receiving an MFA grad from Yale in 1986, where one of her classmates was John Currin, she worked as a life model for art classes, which likely gave her a better understanding of—and a desire to control—the male gaze.

Celebrated as a master colorist and an excellent composer of pictures, Yuskavage puts her well-learned skills to good use in her ninth solo show with the gallery and her first in Los Angeles in thirty years. Presenting a series of small and large-scale paintings of the painter, models, and props in the studio, the canvases draw on the New York-based artist’s interest in the cinema of David Lynch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and David Cronenberg as much as it does her deep knowledge of art history. Staged like scenes from films, her autobiographical paintings marvelously reveal her thinking and working processes, the diversity of sources and subjects, and Yuskavage’s intense love of the medium.

Through April 12

8. Woody De Othello at Karma | Los Angeles

A Miami-born artist of Haitian descent, Woody De Othello is best known for his ceramic and bronze sculptures of domestic objects filtered through surreal and ethnographic lenses, where the manipulated figures and objects featured are deemed to hold and release spiritual forces. Expanding his practice over the past decade from small-scale ceramic sculptures of distorted vessels and paintings of figurative subjects to abstractions on paper, anthropomorphic bronzes, and immersive installations of trippy objects, the San Francisco Bay Area-based artist has become an international marvel.

For his exhibition “Tuning the Dial,” his first solo show in Los Angeles, De Othello proposes a space for contemplation and reflection. Considering “emotion as energy in motion,” the artist presents his new ceramic and bronze sculptures and mixed-media paintings and drawings in immersive light and sound installations and a modulated, sand-floored room. Staged to guide visitors through a desert realm on a spiritual journey of self-discovery, the engaging exhibition makes marvelous morphological and psychological associations between instruments and our bodies.

Through April 5