8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in December

Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from New York to Los Angeles to highlight the top solo shows for December. From Alex Da Corte’s sculptures and installations featuring children’s TV characters to explore the complexities of modern life and identity at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York to Marilyn Minter’s lush portraits of Jane Fonda, Jeff Koons, and Lizzo at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. Alex Da Corte | Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

A conceptual artist working in video, sculpture, painting, performance, and large-scale installations, Alex Da Corte is recognized for creating vibrant, immersive works that combine pop culture, consumerism, and art history to explore the complexities of modern life and identity. He draws inspiration from various sources, including his childhood dream of becoming a Walt Disney animator, using children’s TV characters like Mister Rogers and Big Bird to explore themes of empathy, vulnerability, and identity, while also examining how personal memory intersects with mass media.

For his first solo exhibition in New York in over five years, after showcasing artwork on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and holding solo shows at institutions worldwide, the Philadelphia-based artist presents 11 new sculptures within a narrative setting. Da Corte divides the gallery’s two adjacent spaces into separate chambers, featuring three life-size sculptures of himself. One depicts him as the Pink Panther, painting the gallery pink. Another shows him as Popeye sitting on a brick piano with his feet on the keys, staring at a pumpkin. The third shows him as a life-sized effigy of his own corpse lying inside a pink ziggurat, inspired by Paul Thek’s 1967 provocative sculpture The Tomb, a critique of the Vietnam War and American art world commercialism that’s now considered one of the most important lost artworks of our time.

Through December 20

2. Sylvia Snowden | White Cube, New York

Born in 1942 in Raleigh, North Carolina, Sylvia Snowden moved to Washington, D.C., as a teenager. She later enrolled at Howard University, where she studied art with David Driskell and other prominent Black artists, earning her BFA and MFA degrees in the 1960s while pursuing further studies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Inspired by the European expressionist painters Oskar Kokoschka, Chaïm Soutine, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner during a study trip to Paris in 1962, Snowden adopted their painterly styles to create richly textured, emotionally powerful works that explore the universal human condition. Praised as an art professor at Howard, Cornell, and Yale Universities, the D.C.-based artist has exhibited regularly at galleries and museums since finishing her college education in 1965, but has been showing with more prestigious galleries since her acclaimed solo exhibition at the American University Museum in 2016.

The exhibition “On the Verge” features 20 paintings from the 83-year-old artist’s career, emphasizing various aspects of human life—its struggles, triumphs, pains, and joys—through textured, sculptural impasto paintings on Masonite that depict her subjects’ physical and psychological hardships. Her vibrant paintings communicate raw emotion, blurring the boundaries between figuration and abstraction through distorted or monumental figures that serve as vessels for universal feelings rather than literal portraits. Her work is deeply personal and often reflects significant life events, such as her “M Street” series, featured in the show and inspired by the residents of the historically Black Washington, D.C., neighborhood where she has lived and worked since 1978.

Through December 19

3. Darren Bader | Matthew Brown, New York

A New York-based conceptual artist renowned for his clever and provocative work that questions conventional notions of authorship, value, and the definition of art, Darren Bader’s practice employs a wide range of media, often including found objects, language, and unexpected combinations to push the boundaries of the art world. Focusing on the concept rather than the physical object, he employs humor and absurdity to challenge how and why we value some objects more than others.

Working across various media, the artist has assembled 20 undated pieces in the aptly titled exhibition “Youth,” which seems to evoke a sense of poetic play with found objects. Offering what Bader calls, “Words and objects and images. A whole mess of them, some striving for cogency and limpidity, and others attempting to be somewhat fearless in the face of being too legible,” the works on view continue a conceptual dialogue the artist has been captivatingly sharing since earning his BFA in Film/TV and Art History from New York University in 2000. With artworks titled with numbers like CS28 and content descriptions such as Zsa Zsa Gabor’s adoption certificate, Bob Keeshan’s welding gloves, Milton Berle’s health insurance card, and Amy Winehouse’s felt roll, this exhibition engages the eye while amusing the mind.

Through January 10

4. Clare Rojas | Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

An artist and musician, Clare Rojas is a prominent figure in the San Francisco-based Mission School art movement, which emerged in the 1990s. Earning a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998 and her MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, she began exhibiting her work even before graduation. Since then, the multidisciplinary artist has gained recognition for her vibrant artwork, which combines figurative storytelling and geometric abstraction while examining gender roles, human relationships with nature, and the universal quest for harmony and balance.

Showcasing 14 new, graphically rendered oil paintings on linen, the “Pilgrimage” exhibition was created in relation to the artist’s move from Northern California to her home state of Ohio, documenting and exploring the process of finding and returning home. Joyfully blending humans and animals, clouds and lightning, in stark, abstract fields and geometric mindscapes, her paintings take viewers on a metaphorical journey, with a red sailboat—or, at times, two sailboats going in opposite directions—charting the course through symbolic realms.

Through December 20

5. Megan Bogonovich |  JLG Projects, New York

Inspired by her rural New England environment, ceramic sculptor Megan Bogonovich crafts whimsical tabletop pieces that examine the clash between nature and human influence. Constructing otherworldly botanical forms, the Vermont-based artist blurs the lines between natural growth and man’s impact on the environment. Incorporating elements of flowers, fungi, coral, and suggestive anatomical shapes, her pieces are created through a careful process of making small, hand-built organic forms, which she then casts in plaster molds to produce a variety of shapes she can spontaneously assemble and layer.

The “Fertile Ground” exhibition, which is her first show with the gallery, features 13 beautifully crafted, ceramic plants displayed on shelves surrounding a larger cluster of ceramic flora on a pedestal in the center of the room. Creating a surreal, hybrid form of nature, her colorful, plant-like sculptures have a Dadaist, Rube Goldberg appearance, reflecting their cobbled-together, stream-of-consciousness process, where finely crafted, repeated forms are used to produce entirely unique artworks.

Through December 13

6. Marilyn Minter | Regen Projects, Los Angeles

A painter, photographer, and filmmaker, Marilyn Minter is known for images that openly explore sexuality and erotica. Starting as a photographer in Florida, Minter moved to New York in 1976 and quickly became a fixture on the downtown art scene. In the 1990s, she promoted eroticized food with advertisements on late-night TV shows and then shocked the art world by painting close-up images of hardcore porn. Unfazed, she continued her work in the 2000s by exposing the darker side of fashion through a new collection of powerful photographs, paintings, and films. A feminist at heart and longtime advocate for women’s rights, the New York-based artist is unafraid to depict subjects often considered taboo.

Returning for her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Minter is presenting four separate but interconnected groups of figurative paintings, including large-scale portraits, the Odalisque and After Guston series, and a selection of her iconic magnified mouths. Featuring nearly 40 hyperrealistic paintings and photographs of various sizes from recent years, her portrait subjects include Nick Cave, Jane Fonda, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons, while Lizzo and Padma Lakshmi are portrayed as odalisques—all originating from staged photoshoots where subjects are seductively captured behind panes of wet or steamy glass. Complementing her stylized portraiture, Minter’s After Guston series features a selection of gritty still lifes that reference Philip Guston’s motifs, such as shoes, lightbulbs, and cigarettes, as well as red MAGA hats and the hand of God—a painting ironically depicting a woman’s hand wielding an active paintbrush.

Through December 20

7. Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack | Night Gallery, Los Angeles

Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack is a self-taught artist who explores the social and spiritual sides of everyday objects, using found materials to ritualize personal stories and critique societal systems. A grant recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation and a former NXTHVN fellow, he is best known for his impactful work in assemblage, painting, and performance art. Self-described as a polymath and fisherman, the Los Angeles-based artist gathers and combines materials from his environment to create deeply personal and culturally meaningful works.

Dedicating his second solo show with the gallery to “the wonderful people who have supported me through thick and thin, to my family and friends, and to the beloved city of Los Angeles,” his “YOU CAN HATE ME NOW” exhibition features 30 poetic assemblages and expressive canvases made from wrapped and stretched painterly rags, amusingly titled From Rags to Riches, along with a photo of a statue of a priest with a coat draped over his shoulders, possibly as a tribute to the influential Black artist Pope.L., who recently passed. From dirty plastic car bumpers stacked to form a wall piece referencing artworks by Donald Judd and John Chamberlain to a shapely antique wooden chair with two large rubber spheres stuck between its legs, the works in the show offer puns and suggest innuendos related to both art and life.

Through February 14

8. Mark Ryden | Perrotin, Los Angeles

A painter and pioneer of Pop Surrealism, also known as the Lowbrow art movement, Mark Ryden is widely admired for his skillfully crafted, dreamlike, and often disturbing imagery that combines pop culture with classical art techniques. Exploring the connection between the spiritual and the physical, the innocent and the macabre, the Oregon-born and Portland-based artist employs a rich, symbolic vocabulary to craft a world that is simultaneously nostalgic, tender, and unsettling. His paintings frequently depict wide-eyed, cherubic girls dressed elaborately, paired with strange, mysterious figures or objects, establishing a tension between innocence and a darker psychic realm.

His exhibition “Eye Am” features 12 paintings and a selection of drawings, showcasing an eccentric series of staged scenarios that defy easy explanation. Consisting of paintings in ornate frames depicting a one-eyed yam lying in bed at night, a carrot-shaped totem pole topped with a grouchy man’s head being bullied by two young upstarts, a group of young Christian girls collecting Jesus’s blood in wine glasses from his wounds, and other similarly surreal scenes, Ryden’s Old Master-style paintings evoke the ghost of Hieronymus Bosch. Mixing mysticism and symbolism, Ryden’s aim for the show is summarized in an excerpt from an accompanying statement: “In making the work for ‘Eye Am,’ I did my best to let go of conscious restraints. I tried not to paint what I thought I should paint. I tried to make art only for myself. Paradoxically, I believe that’s the most honest way to reach anyone else.”

Through December 20