8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in May

Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from New York and Chicago to San Francisco and Los Angeles to highlight the top solo shows for May. From Domenico Gnoli’s hyper-realistic paintings that magnify everyday details at New York’s Lévy Gorvy Dayan and John Stezaker’s surreal, minimalist collages created from found materials at Gray in Chicago to Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s wood inlay paintings and multimedia works on paper exploring young women’s social worlds at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman and a mix of Charles Ray’s newest and earlier sculptures at his double-header at Matthew Marks Gallery and Jeffery Deitch in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. Domenico Gnoli | Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

A celebrated Italian artist, Domenico Gnoli is best known for his monumental, hyper-realistic paintings that magnify everyday details. He spent much of his adult life as a stage designer and illustrator before turning to his signature large-scale paintings, gaining international recognition just before his untimely death in 1970 at age 36. Characterized by a metaphysical perspective and meticulous attention to the mundane, his most recognized pieces feature extreme close-ups of everyday objects, stripping them of context to transform them into abstract explorations of pattern and form. “The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli,” the largest exhibition of the artist’s works in the United States in more than five decades, offers a fascinating selection of paintings, drawings, etchings, notebooks, and letters. His canvases, in particular, are captivating and eerie, revealing hidden aspects of modern life that often go unnoticed.

Through May 23

2. Jose Dávila | Sean Kelly, New York

A prominent Mexican multidisciplinary artist, Jose Dávila creates sculptures and installations that explore precarious balance, gravity, and the histories of modern art and architecture. Based in Guadalajara, he often uses heavy industrial or natural materials held together by physical tension, giving the impression of being on the brink of collapse. His practice is defined by a structural intuition that transforms the laws of physics into a creative medium. His fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, “The Simple Act of Positioning,” showcases a series of new sculptures that examine how objects are arranged in relation to one another. Using stones, concrete forms, industrial materials, steel beams, sandbags, and geometric shapes, his designs appear both precise and unlikely. Each piece retains its material identity, yet its arrangement conveys weight, gravity, and balance in uncanny ways.

Through May 30

3. Peter Hujar | Ortuzar, New York

Peter Hujar was an influential American photographer who played a key role in the New York underground downtown art scene during the 1970s and ’80s. He is best known for his candid, stark black-and-white portraits that depicted the era’s queer community, avant-garde artists, and bohemian subcultures. A master of the darkroom, he was a highly competent technician who printed all his own work to attain a particular tonal depth, conveying psychological intensity and raw honesty.

Restaging the artist’s final solo exhibition, “The Gracie Mansion Show” features 70 photographs displayed in a two-row grid, mirroring the original 1986 layout. This approach allows modern viewers to experience Hujar’s work as he initially envisioned it, with a non-hierarchical sequence that fosters open-ended connections and provides rare insight into how he perceived the relationships among his images. Portraits of friends and fellow artists are displayed alongside nudes, landscapes, animals, and images of abandoned buildings, with genres and subjects blending freely. Accompanying the show, an exhibition curated by Andrew Durbin brings together works by nine of Hujar’s friends—artists whom Peter admired, photographed, loved, and grew alongside.

Through May 30

4. Marcel Duchamp | Gagosian, New York

Marcel Duchamp, a French-American artist, revolutionized modern art by emphasizing ideas over visual appeal. He is best known for creating the readymade—everyday mass-produced objects designated as art through his selection. Originally trained as a painter, Duchamp quickly rejected what he called retinal art, which focuses solely on visual pleasure. Recognized as the father of Conceptual Art, he believed that an artist’s intent and choices matter more than technical skill, using irony and absurdity to challenge traditional societal norms.

The gallery’s new Upper East Side space features a selection of Duchamp’s works, including all his most famous readymades, and returns to the site where these editions first appeared in America during a 1965 exhibition. Coinciding with Duchamp’s first U.S. retrospective since 1973, now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition showcases the readymades Duchamp created in 1964, since many of the original pieces had been lost or destroyed over the years. In these works, Duchamp paid tribute to his own body of work while challenging notions of artistic integrity, authorship, and originality.

Through June 27

5. Marina Adams | Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Marina Adams is an American artist celebrated for her vibrant, large-scale abstract paintings that examine the relationship between color, form, and movement. Her works, featuring bold, saturated hues and flowing, interconnected shapes, are created with loose, expressive brushstrokes and drips, emphasizing spontaneity and improvisation reminiscent of the New York School. Her compositions often incorporate organic, asymmetrical forms that generate an internal rhythm and sense of breathing space. Primarily working with acrylic on linen or canvas, Adams also produces works on paper using gouache, charcoal, and crayon, showcased in “Works on Paper: A Survey.” Spanning from 1994 to 2025, this exhibition is the first dedicated to surveying her works on paper and marks her first major show in New York and Italy. Inspired by nature, textiles, and the rhythmic patterns of poetry and music, Adams engages in a dialogue with Modernist artists while maintaining a distinct, contemporary voice.

Through May 29

6. John Stezaker | Gray, Chicago

A British conceptual artist known for his surreal, minimalist collages created from found materials, John Stezaker is widely recognized for his influence on the Young British Artists (YBAs). Employing old film stills, publicity portraits of B-movie actors, and postcards from the 1920s to the 1950s, his work mainly involves manipulating vintage images, often through a single cut or juxtaposition to completely change the meaning of the original material. Stezaker often rotates landscape photos 180 degrees, freeing them from their original context and transforming ordinary scenery into “otherworldly” or “spectral” images. This approach is featured in the exhibition “Raft,” which showcases a new series of landscape works that combine two images from his large archive to form a single, uncanny composition. Developed in 1977, this strategy was inspired by his experience seeing the sky reflected in the “mirror-like wet sands” on the beach in front of his East Sussex studio.

Through June 13

7. Alison Elizabeth Taylor | Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor is a Brooklyn-based American artist celebrated for modernizing the ancient marquetry (wood inlay) technique, creating complex, contemporary paintings made primarily from wood veneer. Born in Alabama and raised in Las Vegas, she is known for a unique style she calls marquetry hybrid, which fuses traditional woodcraft with painting and collage. Taylor’s work is characterized by meticulous detail and the tension between her opulent medium and gritty subject matter. Her dystopian scenes often feature desert landscapes, trailers, and misfit characters. Taylor’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast, “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” showcases new wood inlay paintings and multimedia works on paper that explore the social worlds of young women, especially moments where performance and vulnerability intersect. In these pieces, she captures lively, charged atmospheres—ephemeral moments of laughter and liberation—preserved in time.

Through May 30

8. Charles Ray | Matthew Marks Gallery and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles

One of the preeminent sculptors of our time, Charles Ray is recognized for his intriguing, mysterious sculptures that challenge viewers’s perceptions and judgments. Based in Los Angeles, this American artist is noted for his meticulous detail and high technical skill, often spending years on a single work. His diverse body of work includes early performance photography and large sculptures of humans, animals, and ordinary objects. His self-titled two-gallery exhibition features three new sculptures at Matthew Marks and three earlier works at Jeffrey Deitch. Notable pieces at Marks include Fallen Horse, carved from a single large block of granite and worked on by Ray for nearly ten years, and Junk 2, a sculpture made of industrial debris painted in bright colors like a child’s toy. At Deitch, the display includes Firetruck, a toy truck enlarged to life size, and Pepto-Bismol in a Marble Box, a marble container filled with the dense pink stomach medicine.

Through June 13