8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in April

Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from New York to Chicago and Los Angeles to highlight the top solo shows for April. From David Smalling’s paintings using the visual language of the Old Masters to show how social rules and gender expectations influence identity and actions at Templon to Cheryl Pope’s fabric landscape paintings that explore the spiritual and emotional significance of land as a space of memory, silence, and shared human experience at Monique Meloche and Jack Pierson’s word sculptures and drawings crafted from sentiments and phrases collected throughout his life at Regen Projects, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. David Smalling | Templon, New York

A Jamaican-born, New York-based artist, David Smalling creates satirical and autobiographical figurative paintings that connect classical art history with contemporary social issues. While studying mathematics at Yale University, he took art classes at the Yale School of Art before earning a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. Approaching painting with a blend of scientific and aesthetic views, he studied the properties of linen, canvas, and wood to find the best surface for each piece or series, and collaborated with a chemist at an Italian university to develop the color recipes he needed. Using both digital and traditional methods, he starts with a sketch, refines it, then creates a digital scan to produce Photoshop studies for the final piece, designing a composition on the computer that guides the detailed work in the studio.

In his debut at the gallery, Smalling investigates how cultural hierarchies and taboos shape identity by using the visual language of the Old Masters to show how social rules and gender expectations influence identity and actions. Focusing on detailed domestic and ceremonial scenes, he examines themes of belonging, aspiration, and restraint. Titled after the veterinary device that prevents pets from self-mutilation, his exhibition “Elizabethan Collar” features a new series of paintings that represent entry into a space offering safety and prestige while restricting freedom. Incorporating layered symbols of heteronormative expectations, such as pearls, ribbons, violins, and horns, his scenes suggest the presence of a woman or a man, with distortions and choke points indicating bodies—or identities—struggling to fit into incompatible roles simultaneously.

Through April 25

2. Zhang Huan | 125 Newbury, New York

A celebrated Chinese artist based in Shanghai and New York, Zhang Huan began his art career as a pioneering performance artist in China and the U.S., capturing his actions with photography and video before branching into sculpture and painting, often using unconventional materials such as incense ash and cowhide. Exploring themes of Buddhism, collective memory, ancestral heritage, and the limits of the human body, he initially gained fame for visceral, often masochistic performances that pushed physical endurance. Since 2005, Zhang has primarily used ash from Buddhist temples in Shanghai, considering it the collective soul and blessing of millions. His assistants sort the ash by shade to produce large monochromatic ash paintings that portray historical events, propaganda, or everyday scenes.

His first solo show in New York in over a decade, the exhibition “Ash Paintings and Performances” features never-before-seen film footage of the artist’s legendary performances from the 1990s and 2000s, displayed alongside his works in photography, painting, and sculpture. Highlights include documentation of his seminal 1994 durational performance art piece, where he sat naked, covered in fish oil and honey to attract flies, on a stool for 60 minutes inside a dirty public outhouse in Beijing; his first performance in America, where he lay naked and face-down on a traditional Chinese wooden bed covered with blocks of ice while tethered to nine dogs at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in 1998; and his 2002 Whitney Biennial performance, where he wore a suit made of raw meat and walked barefoot through the city handing out white doves—along with an impressive collection of ash paintings.

Through April 11

3. Vian Sora | Bortolami, New York

An Iraqi-American artist born in Baghdad and based in Louisville, Vian Sora creates large-scale, richly layered abstract paintings that explore themes of destruction and renewal, blurring the line between non-representational abstraction and subtle figuration. Drawing on her personal experiences of multiple wars in Iraq, her immigrant journey, and her interest in ancient Mesopotamian history, her work examines the trauma of war and displacement at both individual and collective levels, often highlighting beauty in decay. She combines styles such as expressionist abstraction and mixed media, using a physical approach that involves splashing, spraying, pouring, and scraping paint—often up to 50 layers—to build three-dimensional textures.

Her first solo exhibition at the gallery, “Tepe Gawra,” named after an ancient Mesopotamian settlement in what is now Iraq, features seven new abstract paintings, ranging from medium to extra-large sizes. She begins by pouring liquid acrylics onto face-up canvases, then adds pigments to the medium and blends them to create kaleidoscopic streams of rich, saturated color. While still wet, these colors flow like hot lava over the surface. This process is repeated in dozens of layers, resulting in a variety of textures, from dense, crystalline areas to light, atmospheric color fields. Sora then uses oil paints to create freehand, sharp-edged shapes that resemble fractured handwriting or Arabic script. Although her imagery is non-representational, her works include fragments of figuration and text that reference mythologies and histories from both ancient and modern worlds.

Through April 18

4. Robert Mapplethorpe | Gladstone, New York

An internationally renowned photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe is known for his highly stylized black-and-white images that celebrate classical beauty and demonstrate technical mastery. His work spans subjects from delicate flowers and still lifes to explicit erotic scenes. He captured iconic images of celebrities and artists like Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, and his close friend and muse, Patti Smith, with his 1975 photograph for her album cover, Horses, being among his most famous works. He also used a sculptural, formalist style for his floral images, characterized by clean lines, dramatic lighting, and a focus on geometric balance. Additionally, he documented his own life through a series of self-portraits, including powerful final pieces that reveal his struggle with AIDS.

This exhibition debuts Mapplethorpe’s photographs in a new, large-scale format, fulfilling a long-held wish of the artist. Created in partnership with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, it features a selection of his most famous images. The display presents a variety of his signature themes: flowers, classical sculptures, male and female nudes, portraits of artists and celebrities such as Smith and Debbie Harry, seascapes, a leather-clad crotch, and a torn American flag. Collectively, these works emphasize Mapplethorpe’s fixation with perfection, a central theme throughout his entire body of work. In his 1980 Self-Portrait, he depicts hypermasculinity, wearing a leather jacket and holding a cigarette in his mouth, while his 1988 Self-Portrait, a year before his death from AIDS, shows him facing death solemnly, holding a skull-topped cane.

Through April 18

5. Margaret Curtis | Post Times, New York

A standout in the renowned 1994 “Bad Girls” exhibition at the New Museum in New York, Margaret Curtis returns for her first solo show in the city in over 20 years. Based between North Carolina and New Mexico, Curtis is a feminist painter who creates large-scale, narrative oil paintings that explore power dynamics, national identity, and environmental crises. Her work features energetic brushwork and a complex layering technique that often uses unconventional tools like cheese graters and cake decorators to manipulate paint. Examining how interpersonal power relationships reflect larger societal structures, she describes her subject matter as “feminist, personal, and political,” often focusing on the body as “occupied territory.”

Fresh from her 2025 artist residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, her “’S” exhibition features five recent paintings and four works on paper. These pieces depict expansive landscapes filled with larger-than-life figures crafted from bits of neon signs and plywood billboards. Her paintings emphasize familiar American symbols—a sheriff star, cowboy hats and boots, guns, Uncle Sam’s striped legs, and oil pipes—appearing as towering structures that dominate the landscape, assembled and supported by delicate wooden scaffolding. The images act as facades, both literally and figuratively, revealing the fragile architecture behind ideas of gender politics and national identity.

Through May 17

6. Cheryl Pope | Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago

An interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersections of identity, race, gender, and community, Cheryl Pope’s practice includes sculpture, installation, performance, video, and textiles. Often using everyday objects to address complex social and personal themes, the Chicago-based artist has used unconventional materials such as fine china to symbolize domestic instability and athletic equipment like gold-leafed boxing bags to explore power and vulnerability. Recently, Pope has created a distinctive technique using needle-punched wool roving on cashmere to produce vibrant fabric paintings that explore domestic scenes, motherhood, and memory.

Her seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, titled “ALL THERE IS,” showcases nine new fabric landscape paintings that explore the spiritual and emotional significance of the land as a space of memory, silence, and shared human experience. The show’s title is connected to a personal family story—words engraved by the artist’s grandmother inside her grandfather’s wedding band—as Pope now creates layered terrains as metaphors for how love grows, changes, and endures. Started after a residency at the Contemporary African Museum in Marrakech, the new series was inspired by her travels to the Atlas Mountains and desert landscapes, which immediately evoked feelings of recognition and connection. After returning home, Pope continued her journey to the Abiquiú region in New Mexico, a place of personal importance to her, where she spent summers with her father and grandmother.

Through May 16

7. Jonas Wood | Gagosian, Los Angeles

Recognized for his vibrant, graphic style that combines representational art with flat, layered abstraction, Jonas Wood creates work that functions as a visual diary, reinterpreting everyday scenes from his life, such as his home, studio, family, and hobbies, into richly patterned compositions. Prolific across various media, including oil and acrylic painting, drawing, and printmaking, the Los Angeles-based artist typically works in four main categories: lush interiors and still lifes, botanical patterns, sports imagery, and stylized portraits. Inspired by Modernist pioneers such as Henri Matisse and David Hockney, Wood rejects conventional illusionistic depth in favor of a flattened perspective. He often starts with photographs of his environment, cutting and rearranging them into paper collages that serve as blueprints for his expansive paintings.

For his tenth exhibition at Gagosian and his first with the gallery in Los Angeles, Wood is displaying paintings of tennis courts from matches held at prominent Association of Tennis Professionals, Women’s Tennis Association, and Olympic tournaments. From behind the baseline, each court is shown in foreshortened perspective, without including players or officials. Spectators, however, are depicted with repetitive brushstroke patterns in some canvases. Part of a series he began in 2011 that explores sports while incorporating elements of abstraction and Pop art, the paintings use consistent court sizes and varied color schemes to create a form of serial abstraction where each piece combines both unique and recurring elements. Using vibrant, saturated colors, he illustrates the look and feel of different courts, whether grass, clay, or hard courts.

Through April 25

8. Jack Pierson | Regen Projects, Los Angeles

A multidisciplinary artist and gallerist based in New York and Southern California, Jack Pierson is celebrated for his evocative word sculptures crafted from vintage signage and his personal, diaristic photography. His work often explores themes like nostalgia, longing, desire, and the melancholic glamour of everyday life. The word sculptures are typically large-scale installations that reuse mismatched letters salvaged from junkyards, old movie marquees, and roadside diners—creating emotionally charged words or poetic phrases with mismatched colors, shapes, and textures. His photography is known for capturing raw, intimate, and casual moments among his circle of friends. In other assemblages and collages, he produces dense, mural-scale works by layering found posters, printed materials, and personal photographs to map both physical and mental landscapes.

With a survey of his Miami years on view at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Pierson returns to Regen Projects with the exhibition “Curtains,” his eleventh solo show at the gallery. The exhibition highlights his ongoing exploration of the formal, philosophical, and ironic facets of language through a series of drawings and new sculptures, emphasizing nostalgia and the pursuit of beauty as key themes. Featuring a selection of Pierson’s signature word sculptures crafted from sentiments and phrases collected throughout his life, it reveals the artist’s poetic nature through words like “Pure Stoke,” “Famous Last Words,” and “Beauty.” These feelings are also present in a collection of 70 works on paper that were originally published in a book for the gallery’s first exhibition with Pierson in 1994. Using a dream-like, regretful language, the drawings convey both hope and loneliness, as seen in the phrase “Maybe never.”

Through April 18