8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in October

Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie journeyed from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles to highlight the top solo shows for October. From Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s surreal, symbolic drawings and sculptural paper installations at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York and Clotilde Jiménez’s layered mixed-media collages exploring his personal experiences and complex family history at Marianne Ibrahim in Chicago to Keith Sonnier’s early experiments with neon and argon for his innovative light sculptures at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. Sandra Vásquez de la Horra | Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

A Chilean artist famous for her surreal, symbolic drawings and sculptural paper installations, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra grew up under Augusto Pinochet’s oppressive military dictatorship, which led her to emigrate to Germany in the 1990s, where she studied with renowned artists Jannis Kounellis and Rosemarie Trockel. Living and working in Berlin, she has achieved major international acclaim, winning the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2023 and having her work featured in major solo exhibitions worldwide.

Fresh off her first extensive European museum survey at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, which concluded in June, the artist is presenting her first solo exhibition with the gallery. The bewitching show features immersive scenography with spatial interventions, suspended structures, and her signature accordion-style pieces, such as La Regeneradora (The Regenerator), that explore connections among art, spirituality, and ecological awareness. Drawing on spiritual mythologies, folklore, religious symbols, and Latin American popular culture, she uses her anthropological focus on healing traditions and indigenous wisdom to foster a deeper understanding of humanity’s interconnection with nature.

Through October 29

2. Arlene Shechet | Pace Gallery, New York

Arlene Shechet is an American artist widely recognized for her innovative, multi-material abstract sculptures that have significantly influenced contemporary ceramics. Born in New York, she divides her time between Manhattan and the Hudson Valley, working in multiple studios to explore media including clay, wood, and metal. Her best-known work comprises improvisational, boundary-challenging sculptures that reject a fixed perspective, instead emphasizing hybrid materiality, biomorphic and paradoxical forms, the visible architecture of making, and creative pedestals.

In her latest New York exhibition, following her critically acclaimed 2024 presentation at Storm King Art Center, Shechet showcases new large-scale metal sculptures alongside smaller yet equally engaging ceramic pieces. Monumental sculptures like Jewel reflect the spirit and strength of her Storm King pieces, highlighting the artist’s energetic arrangement of forms. Metal planes form organic, biomorphic curves that span various volumes, creating open spaces and letting her craftsmanship be felt. Likewise, her spirited clay sculptures foster openness and encourage interaction among the viewer, the object, and the space through movements such as looking around and peering through these mesmerizing works.

Through October 24

3. Tania Franco Klein | Yancey Richardson, New York

An acclaimed Mexican artist and photographer, Tania Franco Klein focuses on staged photography, digital media, and immersive multidisciplinary installations, producing carefully crafted, cinematic images that delve into the psychological anxieties of contemporary life.

Initially trained in architecture in Mexico City before earning her MA in Photography from the University of the Arts London, she often uses herself as her subject, employing wigs and costumes to portray anonymous characters and investigate how identities are performed and scrutinized in public or digital spaces.

Following her inclusion in New Photography 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art, which concluded on January 26, the Mexico City-based artist returns for her second solo show at the gallery, featuring a new series titled “RAGE™.” This alluring body of work explores the multifaceted nature of rage—as collective action, individual choice, and cultural construction—through images drawn from advertising, news reports, cinema, and photography. Each piece in the exhibition employs a distinct representational and symbolic style drawn from art history and mass media, ranging from classical paintings to iconic advertising imagery. Through these references, the images support one of Franco Klein’s central ideas: that the emotions we experience strongly or the thoughts we ponder deeply are impressions we take in rather than create ourselves.

Through October 17

4. Vojtěch Kovařík | Mendes Wood DM, New York

A Czech painter and sculptor based in Brno, Vojtěch Kovařík is celebrated for his large-scale, monumental figurative paintings that challenge classical iconography and conventional ideas of masculinity. He creates bold, heavily stylized works that blend his formal training in ceramics and sculpture with a distinctive painting practice, capturing heroic figures in moments of vulnerability, melancholy, or introspection, while cramping and contorting their bulbous bodies within the narrow frames of his canvases.

In the exhibition “In Between,” Kovařík explores universal themes through a mix of small- and large-scale paintings, chamber works, terracotta reliefs, and glass sculptures, creating spaces that highlight monumental intimacy and blend the past and present. His imagined style draws on Ancient and Classical Greece, featuring a frieze profile, the rigid front-facing pose of a votive figure, and a marble statue on a plinth. His captivating imagery also includes solid, blocky forms and sharply contoured faces, reminiscent of Eastern European monuments and war memorials, as in the seductive siren in his painting Born of the sea. This visual language aligns with Socialist Realism, an art style that already integrated classical and mythological motifs into its distinctive expression of strength.

Through October 24

5. Emily Mae Smith | Petzel, New York

Emily Mae Smith is an American artist known for her distinctive narrative oil paintings that blend a polished, cartoon-like style with pointed feminist critique, using symbols and signs to challenge the traditionally male-centric stories of art history. Smith creates vibrant, humorous, and occasionally disturbing works that draw heavily on classic art styles such as Symbolism, Surrealism, Art Nouveau, and Pop. Her paintings employ visual illusions, dark humor, and anthropomorphism—key elements of René Magritte’s surrealist style—and were showcased alongside his in the 2024 “Emily Mae Smith x René Magritte” exhibition at the Magritte Museum in Brussels. Like Magritte’s pipes or bowler hats, Smith distorts familiar objects to challenge their conventional meanings.

In her second solo exhibition with the gallery, “Transit of Venus,” the New York-based artist’s hybrid figures and symbolic objects—including her anthropomorphic broomstick, grapes, eyeballs, and open-mouthed frames—undergo further transformations, evolving into forms that blend human, animal, and plant characteristics. These new forms resemble tricksters in their instability, resisting fixed identities and simple labels. The characters function more as propositions than as metaphors—questioning the links between labor, class, and gender, not only through historical norms but also within today’s social and political landscape. Smith’s new paintings, including The Changeling, directly address the present moment, emphasizing that living with dignity is increasingly challenging and highlighting the importance of connection to others and the natural world for survival.

Through October 24

6. Clotilde Jiménez | Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago

A multidisciplinary American artist recognized for his layered mixed-media collages, paintings, ceramics, and sculptures, Clotilde Jiménez was born in Honolulu to Puerto Rican and African-American parents and grew up in Philadelphia. His fascinating art frequently draws on his personal experiences and complex family history to explore the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and cultural memory. Best known for his textured, narrative-driven pieces that explore identity and form, the Mexico City-based artist creates complex collages from found materials, an approach that began out of financial necessity when he ran out of paint in art school and started ripping colored paper from magazines. 

Jiménez treats each exhibition like a book, revealing a visual memoir that evolves as he develops as an artist. At this stage, he has presented characters and symbols representing himself, family, and archetypes of Blackness and masculinity, along with still lifes and natural elements. This exhibition continues that exploration, delving into intergenerational relationships, silences, and stories passed down. In the collage Invitation to the Altar, an older man plays a cuatro while a nun raises the Bible, overlooking three women who are bent over a child lying on the floor, reaching out to him with reverence and care. Throughout the show, Jiménez poetically explores how Blackness signifies across different contexts and environments.

Through October 31

7. John Baldessari | Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

John Baldessari, who died in 2020 at age 88, was an innovative American conceptual artist who redefined contemporary art by blending conceptualism’s disciplined, rule-driven approach with dry humor and wit. Originally a painter, he grew disillusioned with traditional handiwork and spent more than 50 years exploring the relationship between language and imagery. Based in Southern California, he worked across a wide range of media, including text-based paintings, altered photography, video, sculpture, printmaking, and artist books, producing thousands of works over his long career. He was also a renowned educator at CalArts and UCLA, mentoring generations of distinguished visual artists.

While widely recognized for his inspired visual experiments with language, photography, and painting from the 1960s to 2020, his sculpture—the focus of this exhibition—is less well known. Aptly titled “Sculpture,” the exhibition brings together projects that examine how Baldessari used space and scale to create dramatic effects—highlighting the sculptural aspect of his work. From colorful patterned wallpapers featuring black-and-white photographs of lamps and plants to a reproduction of Beethoven’s listening device on an oversized ear, Baldessari expanded the physical bounds of his two-dimensional practice. In other engrossing works, he highlighted facial features, reframing them through absurdist contrasts, and exaggerated a penguin’s height to whimsically mimic his own tall stature.

Through December 19

8. Keith Sonnier | David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

A pioneering American post-Minimalist sculptor and light artist, Keith Sonnier transformed contemporary sculpture by treating light as a standalone physical medium. He gained recognition in the late-1960s New York art scene and became internationally famous for innovative neon sculptures that skillfully integrated color, form, and the surrounding architecture. By bending glass tubes to resemble his copper-wire layouts, he used neon to symbolically draw three-dimensional shapes in open space. Sonnier, who died in 2020 at age 78, was not only involved with light but also an early experimenter in performance and video art, producing significant multimedia works.

The gallery’s second solo exhibition for the artist, titled “Inside Light, 1968 – 1970,” showcases Sonnier’s early experiments with neon and argon, marking the start of his ongoing exploration of innovative technologies and materials. The entrancing exhibition spans three years, from 1968 to 1970, during which Sonnier began experimenting with incandescent gas and achieved breakthroughs that shaped his career. He showed an early fascination with unconventional materials that were unstable, malleable, and suited for radical spatial experiments. The various neon sculptures presented in the show—works such as Arced Neon (Violet) from 1968—expanded on that exploration and have since become hallmarks of his work.

Through October 24