Installation view, "Franziska Goes: Polarity", Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.
Photo: Courtesy Moskowitz Bayse
From New York to Los Angeles, 8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in March
From Stephen Friedman Gallery’s presentation of Sarah Ball’s paintings to Alex Anderson’s exquisite ceramics at Sargent’s Daughters
Rounding up the most fascinating solo gallery shows across the country each month, Galerie journeyed from New York, where Stephen Friedman Gallery is presenting Sarah Ball’s paintings of modern-day British dandies, to Los Angeles, where Alex Anderson is expressing what it’s like to be alive today through his exquisitely crafted ceramics at Sargent’s Daughters. Below, check out the must-see solo gallery exhibitions in March.
Eric White, Druiding (Fantasy Island), (2024). Photo: Max Yawney. Courtesy the artist and GRIMM
1. Eric White at GRIMM | New York
A realist painter who adds a conceptual spin to his pictures, Eric White returns to the gallery for his fourth solo show with a psychological study of television and people’s spiritual attraction to it. Many have read and seen programs and movies about the power of TV to provide religion for the masses and deliver consumers to advertisers, but White has turned his artistic eye toward television game shows, TV Guide magazine and a woman dangerously obsessed with them. After seeking a cultish thrill from watching Hollywood Squares, Wheel of Fortune, and $10,000 Pyramid, she goes down a psychosomatic rabbit hole by ritualistically reconfiguring the covers of the popular programming magazine to create a personal guide for a spiritual journey to a deeply delusional place. With nostalgic imagery and twisted texts, White constructs a gripping visual narrative about a medium that’s ironically known for presenting suspenseful stories to us.
Through March 30
Sarah Ball, Alys, Laurel and Hardy, (2023). Photo: Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery
2. Sarah Ball at Stephen Friedman Gallery | New York
Focused on modern-day dandies as subjects for her Old Master–inspired portraits, Sarah Ball brings the gender-bending eccentricities of today’s youth to life in her fascinating paintings. Born in South Yorkshire and based in Cornwall, the British artist paints family friends, people she meets through street casting and young urban dwellers she finds on Instagram. Painting from photos of androgynous characters with strong identities, she takes them as they are—with nose rings, exaggerated hairstyles and makeup, and dressed in thrift store outfits, as well as in fine fashions. Portrayed with rosy cheeks against blank backgrounds in a tightly cropped, photobooth-style format, her enchanting subjects convey a contemporary charm while equally appearing timeless.
Through March 23
Raymond Saunders, Flowers from a Black Garden no. 51, (1993). Photo: Courtesy the artist, Andrew Kreps and David Zwirner
3. Raymond Saunders at David Zwirner | New York
Employing painting, drawing, collage, and assemblage to make subtle social observations while experimenting with the various forms that a painting can take, Raymond Saunders is both a celebrated artist and a lesser-known one. A teacher for most of his life, the 90-year-old artist had his first New York solo gallery show in 1966, exhibited regularly on the West Coast throughout the following years and has artworks in the collections of museums across America. However, this comprehensive overview—featuring nearly 40 of his mixed media paintings made between 1968 and 2012 at David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps Gallery—should help to make his chalkboard style of edgy Pop Art more widely appreciated. Like Joseph Beuys, who was also an artist and professor, Saunders uses chalk on a black field to add thoughts, imagery, and an erasable emphasis to his visually engaging works.
Through April 6
Haley Josephs, Something That Grows, (2024). Photo: Daniel Terna. Courtesy the artist and Jack Barrett
4. Haley Josephs at Jack Barrett | New York
One of the most talented young figurative painters working today, Haley Josephs studied in Rome and Philadelphia before earning an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale in 2014. Creating youthful fantasies that often turn surreal, the Brooklyn-based talent doesn’t shy away from the use of bold imagery or vibrant colors. The paintings for her fourth solo show with the gallery since 2018 delve into a darker realm, where young mothers and nymphs appear to be in limbo, in a domain between life and death, in a sort of purgatory. Rendered with thin, translucent applications of paint, her emotional landscapes capture nude figures in both dreamlike and nightmarish states. Drawn completely from the artist’s wild imagination rather than from sourced imagery, Josephs’s canvases transport us to a sphere where fairies might feel at ease yet one in which most humans would yearn to escape.
Through March 30
Alex Anderson, A meeting, (2024). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Sargent’s Daughters
5. Alex Anderson at Sargent’s Daughters | Los Angeles
A ceramicist and painter of African-American and Japanese descent, Alex Anderson is best known for intricately crafted works exploring issues of race and cultural identity. Widely exhibited and collected over the past several years, the Los Angeles–based artist creates exquisite free-standing sculptures and wall-mounted works that express what it’s like to be alive in today’s world. Employing ceramics as storytelling objects, he uses the language of Surrealism to visually construct an experience of emotion—one in which sex, violence, pleasure, and consumption conceptually intermingle. For his first solo show at the gallery’s intimate L.A. location, Anderson has aimed to harness the energy that animates and connects all living things. Inspired by the music and writings of the 12th-century polymath Hildegard von Bingen, he has created an imaginary garden where cats, floating halos, portals, and mystical daisy chains revitalize viewers in a cleverly installed and spiritually lush domain.
Through April 6
Rodney Graham, Tattooed Man on Balcony, (2018). Photo: Courtesy Lisson Gallery
6. Rodney Graham at Lisson Gallery | Los Angeles
A Canadian artist and musician associated with the photo-conceptual Vancouver School, Rodney Graham—who passed away at age 73 in 2022—used historical, literary, and popular references in his witty photographs, films, paintings, and sculptures. Assuming different roles and playing various characters, he cast himself in ironic and absurd scenarios to explore everyday events from our collective cultural memory. Creating fictional, light-box self-portraits in costumes and with props yet always remaining recognizable, he portrayed a vast array of characters, such as Tattooed Man on Balcony, which depicts a working-class guy lost in his thoughts. Meanwhile, the abstract canvases in the show were painted by Graham assuming the role of a modernist artist. Generated from paintings of abstract artists by cutting up and transforming their works in Photoshop, he made the paintings his own through digital manipulation and an exceedingly serious studio practice.
Through March 23
Franziska Goes, Your Gaze / Yellow ochre Wavy, (2023). Photo: Courtesy the artist and Moskowitz Bayse
7. Franziska Goes at Moskowitz Bayse | Los Angeles
An abstract painter who was born and lives and works in Berlin, Franziska Goes has been exhibiting her multifaceted abstractions in Europe since the late 1990s, but this is only the third viewing of her art in America and her second solo show of paintings with the L.A. gallery. Starting with a series of compositional elements developed in the studio, she creates a sketch in the computer before recreating it on the canvas. Applying analog brushwork while simulating blurred pixels related to digital brushes, Goes explores the polarities of painterly techniques through her highly skilled handling of them. Selecting her color palette before beginning a new canvas, she mixes flat planes of paint with patterns and simulated textures to playfully keep the eye in motion while constructing a harmonious yet complex composition.
Through March 23
Izumi Kato, Untitled, (2023). Photo: Kei Okano. Courtesy the artist and Perrotin
8. Izumi Kato at Perrotin | Los Angeles
Born in a coastal area of southwest Japan in 1969, Izumi Kato creates enigmatic figures, which he renders in paint with his hands; sculpts out of wood, stone, vinyl, and plastic; and assembles from painted fabric, chains, strings and rocks. He first gained international attention when his works were included in Takashi Murakami’s curated exhibition “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture” at New York’s Japan Society in 2005 and at the 52nd Venice Biennale’s central exhibition “Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense,” curated by Robert Storr in 2007. The perfect artist to inaugurate Perrotin’s Johnston Marklee–designed transformation of a Los Angeles movie theater into a sublime white box, his eerie, androgynous, wide-eyed figures show off the proportions of the space while making it a playful arena for his zombie-like figures to haunt.
Through March 23
Cover: Installation view, "Franziska Goes: Polarity", Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles.
Photo: Courtesy Moskowitz Bayse
