Installation view of "Johan Creten: Strangers Welcome" at Perrotin, New York.
Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli; Courtesy the artist and Perrotin
8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows Around the Country in June
Among them are Johan Creten at Perrotin in New York and Jordan Nassar at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles
Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie journeyed from New York to California to discover the top solo shows for June. From an intimate exhibition of fascinating portraits of famous female artists from across the ages by self-taught Italian artist Elisabetta Zangrandi at Keyes Art in Sag Harbor to Jordan Nassar’s embroidered landscapes and tile mosaics exploring his Palestinian roots at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, these are the shows that are not to be missed this month.
Elisabetta Zangrandi, After Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun, (2024). Photo: Jonathan Morse; Courtesy the artist and Keyes Art
1. Elisabetta Zangrandi at Keyes Art, Sag Harbor
A self-taught artist who paints visionary landscapes inhabited by flora and fauna, Elisabetta Zangrandi made her way into the international art world from her home in the Italian countryside via Instagram. Creative since childhood, she began to embroider at seven years old and later, as an adult, painted on rocks, bottles, and anything else she had on hand. She didn’t have an audience, however, until she joined Instagram in 2017. From that point on, her life as a painter blossomed.
For the exhibition, “Musée Imaginaire,” curated by the talented Alison M. Gingeras, Zangrandi has painted 15 fascinating portraits of famous female artists from across the ages. Ranging from the 12th-century German nun and illuminator Guda, who was one of the first women to depict her own image in a manuscript, to the artist Alice Neel, one of America’s greatest portrait painters of the 20th century, the Italian artist has interpreted each of the past artists’ self-portraits in her charming, naïve, imaginative style.
Through June 26
Xingzi Gu, Landline, (2023-24). Photo: Justin Craun; Courtesy the artist and Lubov, New York
2. Xingzi Gu at Lubov, New York
Born in China and educated in both New Zealand and the United States, Xingzi Gu received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. She then spent some time honing her skills in her homeland before moving to the East Coast to earn her MFA at New York University in 2023. Experimenting with a variety of painterly styles while in school, the Brooklyn-based artist finally hit upon one completely her own. Fusing an understanding of the history of Asian art with the Western artistic styles she learned in college, Gu paints soft, dreamlike images of androgynous young people visually portrayed in romantic yet vulnerable situations.
The eight large-scale canvases in the exhibition “Pure Heart Hall,” her first solo show with the gallery, capture lone figures reflecting on memorable moments from the past and couples cuddling as they dream of uncertain futures—all depicted with a delicacy of line and the misty reality of a ghostly tale. Smudging her colors in a Rothko-like manner, her scenarios become blurred as her youthful subjects hauntingly drift through mystical realms in trance-like states. Erotic and poetic, her intimate scenes, which are sourced from films, literature, the internet, and daily life before being thoughtfully modified, project the aura of wistful figures finding their way in the world while still filled with doubt.
Through June 22
Joanne Greenbaum, Untitled, (2023). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash
3. Joanne Greenbaum at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
A talented New York artist who has become known for her wildly complex abstract paintings and drawings as well as her trippy, hand-built ceramics, Joanne Greenbaum utilizes color, line, and form like a Michelin-star chef uses food from the farm to whip up a tasty dish. Described as inventive, chaotic, psychological, and electrifying, her energetic paintings are defined by intuitive mark-making, which Greenbaum achieves in a variety of arresting ways.
For “Scaffold,” her first solo exhibition with the gallery, the artist offers eight new, large-scale paintings—including her largest canvas to date—and five shapely, monochromatic ceramic sculptures, which are strikingly arranged in Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s spacious setting. Fluidly mixing flashe, oil, acrylic, and marker on canvas, the Tribeca-based artist layers areas of dense paint with frenetic marker scribblings and solid shapes of playful brushwork to create colorful, eye-catching paintings while her metallically glazed, sublime ceramics provide a place for the eye rest when surveying her smaller three-dimensional forms.
Through June 15
Johan Creten, The Hypocrite, (2021 - 2023). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Perrotin
4. Johan Creten at Perrotin, New York
A pioneer in the revival of modern ceramics, Johan Creten is celebrated for his allegorical sculptures in ceramic and bronze. Born in Belgium and based in France, the Flemish artist was trained as a painter but transitioned to working with clay in the late-1980s. Dubbed “The Clay Gypsy,” he has created his imaginative sculptures in craft studios and artist residencies around the world—only recently adding a kiln to his substantial studio in Montrueil, a bohemian suburb of Paris.
His “Strangers Welcome” show transports mythical creatures, lustrous gold forms, and circus-style stool seating from the artist’s critically acclaimed “Le Cœur qui déborde” (An overflowing heart) exhibition at the Beaulieu-en-Rouergue Abbey in the forests of Southwestern France in 2023 to the white-box space of the gallery’s Lower East Side building. Complete with floor-to-ceiling photographic views of the exhibition at the abbey, the thoughtfully arranged display presents large glazed stoneware seahorses on circular ceramic pedestals, a bronze mermaid patinated with the sparkle of the Mediterranean Sea and shiny gold-glazed ceramics that hint at architectural elements, sea creatures, and erotic body parts while projecting a heavenly glow into a different sort of sacred space.
Through July 26
Martin Eder, Death (is a Candy), (2024). Photo: Courtesy Marlborough Gallery
5. Martin Eder at Marlborough, New York
A Berlin-based artist who broke out on the international art scene with a new wave of figurative German painters in the early 2000s, Martin Eder is widely celebrated for his realistic, semi-surreal paintings and drawings of naked young women and fluffy house pets. Employing costumes, staged settings and symbolic objects, he creates goth, surreal, and kitsch realms for his flamboyantly posed, realistic subjects. Raised in a Catholic home in Bavaria, he embraces the religious subject matter of the Old Masters while applying oil on canvas in similar ways. Painting from photographs that he has taken, Eder uses collage-like techniques to add painted elements, which increases his subjects’ enchanting strangeness.
The artist has gone all out for “DETOX,” his first and last solo show at Marlborough (the venerable gallery recently announced it will cease operating after 80 years at the end of the month), with dozens of paintings and watercolors in an assortment of sizes that are dynamically displayed on photographic murals of rainbows and clouds. Ranging from saccharine-sweet images of praying puppies and kittens going over Niagara Falls to female nudes in bondage while surrounded by butterflies and naked men masturbating, the bad-boy artist’s paintings take viewers on a wild rollercoaster ride through art history, filled with astonishment and wit.
Through June 29
Jordan Nassar, Surge, (2024). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, James Cohan and The Third Line
6. Jordan Nassar at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles
Best known for his exquisitely embroidered landscapes exploring his Palestinian roots, Jordan Nassar has expanded his craft-related artistic practice to include home textiles, furniture designs, glasswork, and metalwork. Created to visualize his ancestors’ stories of an idyllic Palestine and the projection of a utopian future, where the conflicts are a distant memory, Nassar considers these landscapes, “versions of Palestine as they exist in the mind of the diaspora, who have never been there and can never go there.”
The New York–based artist’s “Surge” exhibition continues his inventive use of techniques and materials rooted in Levantine craft through a new series of embroidered landscapes of mountain ranges exhibited on the gallery’s walls, as well as four recent tile mosaics of symbolic scenes presented on large platforms elevated from the expansive gallery’s floor. Taking its title from a collection of poetic writings by Etel Adnan, who also made small abstract paintings of related landscapes, Nassar’s vibrant patterned pieces construct an imaginary view of the beloved homeland he still hopes to someday see.
Through July 20
Lucy Bull, 4:31, (2024). Photo: Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery
7. Lucy Bull at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Graduating with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, Lucy Bull has been exhibiting her expressive yet decorative abstractions in solo shows since 2017. Painting colorful, large-scale canvases with intricate brushstrokes that produce visceral forms and explosive patterns, her work is featured in a new book of women artists from the Shah Garg Collection and was recently highlighted in a group show of abstractionists at the Olivia Foundation in Mexico City.
Presenting 13 new large-scale paintings in her exhibition “Ash Tree,” which is her third solo outing with the gallery and the second at its flagship Los Angeles space, the New York–born, Los Angeles–based painter shares her visionary states to the viewer through fields of impressions, material experiments and color-based meditations that bring ephemeral and obscure phenomena to life. Inspired by music, film, and other ambient information, the artist’s beautifully layered compositions invite our eyes to wander while our minds relax.
Through June 15
Vanessa Beecroft, Untitled (Yellow line body), (2017). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Wilding Cran Gallery
8. Vanessa Beecroft at Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles
Best known as a performance artist who stages tableaux vivants with nude and scantily dressed models, which are presented live before museum and gallery audiences and photographed and videotaped for works that can be offered for sale, Vanessa Beecroft shot to fame in the mid-1990s with her strict performances featuring barely-clothed women in high heels and wigs who had to stand without movement while avoiding any eye contact with the audience.
A little-known side of the Italian-born, American artist’s broad body of work is her painting and sculpture, which the gallery’s “Broken Arm” exhibition is out to change. Presenting ceramic, plaster, and bronze sculptures of bodies and heads dating from 2012 to ’24, as well as figurative paintings on linen and canvas from ’15 to ’19, Beecroft reveals a more introspective point of view. Her textured and monochromatically colored heads, which proudly sit on raw wooden pedestals, present contemplative subjects, while her abstract figure paintings seem more like psychological studies of the female body. The artist often portrays these women as headless or oddly contorted, yet they’re still surprisingly appealing through their mysteriousness.
Through June 22
Cover: Installation view of "Johan Creten: Strangers Welcome" at Perrotin, New York.
Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli; Courtesy the artist and Perrotin
