8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in March

Rounding up the top gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from New York to Los Angeles to highlight the best solo shows for March. From Gagosian’s museum-quality survey of Jasper Johns’s groundbreaking crosshatch paintings and drawings from the 1970s and ‘80s in New York to Hauser & Wirth’s presentation of Christina Quarles’s new paintings and drawings inspired by her loss and resilience following the devastating fires in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. Jasper Johns | Gagosian, New York

One of America’s most renowned artists, 95-year-old Jasper Johns is celebrated for his Pop Art paintings and sculptures of flags, maps, targets, paintbrushes, and beer cans. However, his extensive body of work spanning seven decades is much more nuanced. The subject of an acclaimed 2021 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Sharon, Connecticut-based artist is returning for the final show at Gagosian’s flagship, which opened in 1989 with an exhibition of his map paintings. This new exhibition offers a museum-quality survey of his work from 1973 to 1983.

Featuring important works loaned from MoMA, The Broad, and his personal collection, including paintings on long-term loan to the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibit—titled “The Between the Clock and the Bed,” after his series of paintings that reference Edvard Munch’s self-portrait and incorporate the crosshatch pattern of Munch’s bedspread as a memento mori—provides a rare opportunity to explore these all-over compositions. Characterized by parallel lines arranged in interlocking patterns and created using encaustic, collage, acrylic, oil paint, watercolor, ink, and sand, the paintings and works on paper are praised for their visual, material, and conceptual depth, as well as their vivid, intuitive beauty.

Through March 14

2. Yuko Mohri | Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

A Tokyo-based installation artist known for creating kinetic sculptures and self-contained ecosystems, Yuko Mohri reimagines everyday objects and machine parts that interact with invisible forces like magnetism, gravity, sound, and light. Representing Japan at the 60th International Venice Biennale of Art in 2024, she developed two sound and kinetic art installations for her country’s pavilion in the Giardini. She is also the recently announced winner of the 2025 Calder Prize, awarded for her innovative work in kinetic and ephemeral sculpture.

The exhibition “Falling Water Given,” featuring nearly 20 works in various media, marks her debut solo show with the gallery. Ranging from early photos of makeshift leak solutions used in Tokyo subway stations, which inspired part of her Venice Biennale exhibit, and three sculptural works referencing Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass that incorporate ad hoc methods, to improvisational paintings on speaker covers and still life arrangements with fruits and found objects that produce light and sounds, the captivating debut highlights the artist’s experimental approach to creating art.

Through April 18

3. Gabriel de la Mora | Perrotin, New York

Celebrated for creating paintings without paint, Mexican conceptual artist Gabriel de la Mora creates intricate, minimal artworks using materials such as human hair, bird feathers, butterfly wings, and discarded objects like eggshells, shoe soles, matchbox strike strips, and speaker screens. Originally trained as an architect before transitioning to visual arts in 2004, the Mexico City-based artist powerfully challenges the traditional role of the artist by emphasizing the reconstruction of objects that have already served their functional purpose.

Fresh off a 20-year survey of his enchanting works at the Museo Jumex in his hometown, the committed artist returns to the gallery for his fourth solo show, “Repeated Original,” since joining in 2019. Revisiting the roots of his paintless paintings, de la Mora explores fragmented shells in a new series of works, assembling monochromatic canvases from thousands of broken shell pieces, along with another collection of paintings using bits of spherical, aluminum-coated glass bulbs that are fractured and reassembled to create shimmering, hypnotic works. Other paintings combine the two materials to create stunning, contrasting forms, while several new sculptures covered in eggshells and glass elevate his original technique to new heights.

Through April 11

4. Sterling Ruby | Sprüth Magers, New York

One to watch since bursting onto the scene while still earning his MFA at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena in the early 2000s, Sterling Ruby had his breakthrough institutional exhibition with “SUPERMAX” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles just three years after graduation. Featuring his striking abstract SP (Spray Paint) series of large-scale Color Field canvases inspired by L.A.’s graffiti in the industrial outskirts of the city, the show also highlighted his Monument Stalagmite sculptures, made with poured urethane in vivid colors to evoke the appearance of frozen, flowing gestures—both aspects of his art that have been continuously coveted by collectors.

Following a solo show at Gagosian in Switzerland last summer, featuring experimental nature studies, this exhibition at Sprüth Magers’s stylish Upper East Side gallery continues to highlight Ruby’s interest in the natural world. His art, often characterized by grand gestures, has been reshaped by a renewed focus rooted in his rural childhood, a sprawling studio garden, and daily notebook sketches, revealing new possibilities. The “Atropa” exhibition showcases expressive drawings of flowers and plants, photographic collages of deconstructed trees, and mixed-media paintings of meditative landscapes. The icing on the cake, however, is a series of unique bronzes of dried flowers and plants, created using a variation of the lost-wax casting process. In this method, the plant material is burned away by the molten metal alloy—transforming nature into a different form before returning it to the earth as dust.

Through March 28

5. Christina Quarles | Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles

Christina Quarles distorts depictions of limbs, torsos, and faces into vibrant compositions. Combining elements of race, gender, and sexuality on shifting planes of pattern and color, her gestural canvases challenge traditional notions of eroticism. Instead of illustrating a body’s appearance, she seeks to evoke the experience of inhabiting a racialized or gendered body. This is frequently conveyed through contorted figures with elongated limbs that twist, blend, or press against the edges of the canvas. Her emphasis on hands and feet highlights the body parts we can see and use to engage with the world.

After experiencing a devastating electrical fire at her Altadena home in 2024 and then losing the house she and her family were rebuilding, along with their family home, the Airbnb they were renting, and their pets in the Eaton Fire, Quarles rallied herself to create new paintings and works on paper that confronted the loss while expressing her resilience over eight months. Exploring themes of strength, instability, and the toxic earth left in the aftermath of the fires, the eight new large-scale paintings are denser and more frenetic than her earlier canvases. Conveying the impact of the fires on her inner landscape, Quarles gradually blackened the gallery’s columns with pigment, covered the skylights to sharpen shadows, and created a series of layered charcoal drawings, reflecting loss while expressing a reality that rises from the ashes.

Through May 3

6. Amoako Boafo | Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

Famous for creating intimate portrait paintings that celebrate Black identity, subjectivity, and joy, Amoako Boafo applies oil paint directly to the canvas with his fingertips instead of brushes to depict his subjects’s skin, resulting in a textured, sculptural quality that suggests movement and vitality. Typically portraying people that he knows or admires, including friends, family, fellow creatives, and public figures, the Ghana-born, Accra- and Vienna-based artist focuses on his subjects’s personal style and clothing, using fashion to express their identity and serve as a form of self-expression.

His third solo show with the gallery since 2019, “I Bring Home with Me Everywhere I Go,” re-creates his Accra studio to scale within its space, showcasing a selection of new paintings and furnishings integrated into an architectural setting. Created by Boafo in partnership with architect and designer Glenn DeRoche of DeRoche Projects, the installation embodies the creative spirit rooted in his cultural heritage, emphasizing how his community shapes his work and carries deep emotional meaning for him. Using patterns, paper transfers, distinctive gestural mark-making, and bold colors, he depicts his subjects looking directly at the viewer, creating a sense of confidence and presence in a conceptual space—one that invites contemplation and conversation among visitors.

Through March 21

7. Isabel Rower | Marta, Los Angeles

An artist and designer based in Brooklyn, Isabel Rower works at the crossroads of sculpture and furniture. Graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design with a focus on furniture design, she is best known for her ceramic pieces that blur the line between function and art. She reimagines everyday objects—such as chairs, vessels, and lamps—as expressive forms that look familiar yet subtly altered, giving them a sense of being slightly turned away from their typical uses. Her influences range from Dutch still-life paintings and Roman frescoed rooms to natural elements and domestic settings.

For her second solo show at the gallery—following the exhibition “Box Works” in 2024, which featured stoneware pieces sculpted to resemble repurposed cardboard boxes—Rower presents an extensive collection of new works, including seating, tables, vessels, and paintings, in the more diverse “Imago.” New to her practice are a series of shadowy nature paintings on vintage bedsheets, washcloths, and tablecloths pinned to the surrounding walls, complementing her functional-sculptural pieces and creating a garden-like environment. Her display of chairs, stools, and tables is arranged like formal plantings, while an antique cabinet showcases vessels, and a corner features inlaid, resin-coated paper-pulp furniture, forming a captivating exhibit. 

Through April 4

8. Melissa Ríos | De Boer Gallery, Los Angeles

Trained as an architect and advertising designer, Melissa Ríos started painting as a hobby but quickly became completely fascinated and fully committed to the medium. By creating collages that evoke feelings rather than ideas, the Costa Rica-born, Mexico City-based artist transforms her graphic works into surreal paintings and drawings that beautifully blend abstraction and figuration. She uses a non-linear visual logic where foreground and background often switch places, challenging the viewer’s perception of time and space.

Her debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles, titled “Tan Solo un Rumor de Fondo (Just a Background Murmur), features new paintings that explore the point at which subjectivity begins to detach from external frameworks of recognition, expectation, and gaze. The compositions apear abstract and non-linear, with structural interruptions that suggest vision is provisional. Recurrent motifs such as birds, butterflies, flowers, and disembodied anatomical parts move across the canvases, not as symbols to decode but as vessels conveying feelings. Inspired by feminist, literary, and surrealist influences, her dream-like compositions rely on intuition and emotion to create parallel, rule-breaking worlds.

Through April 11