8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in July
From Andreas Schulze’s colorful canvases of awkward cars, inflated household objects, and trains made entirely of pastries, fruit, and baking decorations to Makiko Kudo’s paintings that merge real-world observations with childhood memories, anime aesthetics, and surreal dreamscapes
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 July. From Andreas Schulze’s colorful canvases of awkward cars, inflated household objects, and trains made entirely of pastries, fruit, and baking decorations at Sprüth Magers in New York to Makiko Kudo’s paintings that merge real-world observations with childhood memories, anime aesthetics, and surreal dreamscapes at Perrotin in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.
1. Andreas Schulze | Sprüth Magers, New York
A prominent German artist, Andreas Schulze is best known for large-scale paintings, immersive installations, and playful sculptures that blend abstraction with everyday life. His clean, smooth style features rounded, bulbous forms that lend his paintings a perceptible quality. Using exaggerated color gradients, he creates glossy, tubular shapes influenced by Surrealism, Pop Art, and Naïve painting. Schulze’s creation is driven by a blend of comfort and menace, celebrating the cozy, everyday normalcy of domestic life while also satirizing it with deadpan, absurd humor.
His colorful canvases, including those in his current “Cake” exhibition, depict humorously awkward cars, inflated household objects typical of middle-class life, and trains made entirely of pastries, fruit, and baking decorations. His approach to the motif ranges from paintings that emphasize cake-like details to scenes in which objects are transformed into cakes. The large, three-part Untitled (Cake Train) spans a gallery wall, while works like Untitled (Torta Ettore) focus on cake details, turning familiar objects into forms that hover between abstraction and realism. Presented on sublime yellow walls in the gallery’s domestic setting, alongside a display of vintage cake plates from Schulze’s private collection, the paintings offer a welcome escape from the world’s pressing problems.
Through July 31
2. Giuseppe Penone | Gagosian, New York
Giuseppe Penone is a celebrated Italian conceptual artist whose work spans large-scale sculptures, performance art, photography, and drawings. Widely recognized as a leading figure in the Arte Povera movement, he investigates the connections between the human body and nature, highlighting organic processes such as growth, breath, touch, and the passage of time. Penone is known for employing diverse media, including industrial and natural materials like wood, bronze, stone, clay, leaves, and impressions of his own body.
His first exhibition with the gallery in New York, The Reflection of Bronze, curated by Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s director emeritus, showcases two major new series of installations and sculptural works, spread across three rooms, that poetically blend ancient myths with the lives of trees. Featuring impressive bronze castings of trees that reference different aspects of Penone’s work, along with a remarkable, cork-walled sculptural installation inspired by the Greek myth of Marsyas—the satyr who lost a musical contest to Apollo and was condemned to be flayed alive while hanging from a tree—the exhibition showcases the 89-year-old Turin-based artist at his best.
Through July 17
3. Firelei Báez | Hauser & Wirth, New York
An acclaimed Dominican-American artist known for large-scale, vibrant paintings, drawings, and immersive installations that explore African diasporic histories, colonial legacies, and Afro-Caribbean folklore, Firelei Báez creates work that aims to recoup power, subvert historical narratives of victimhood, and envision equitable futures. Rather than starting with a blank canvas, Báez often paints over enlarged reproductions of historical artifacts like 19th-century colonial maps, architectural plans, and deaccessioned library books—reclaiming history by layering bright colors over documents originally used to control and colonize.
In her first New York show with the gallery, Báez unveils new paintings, works on paper, and bronze sculptures across two full floors of the expansive space, as her work transitions from recognizable figures to a more atmospheric style. Highlights include an eight-panel painting inspired by a 19th-century engraving showing climatic and geographic shifts; two large bronze sculptures of anthropomorphic tricksters from Dominican folklore; a new series of large works on paper featuring cosmic abstractions; and a colorful cluster of smaller drawings imagining a river’s renewed vitality.
Through July 31
4. Kelly Akashi | Lisson, New York
Kelly Akashi, an artist based in Los Angeles with Japanese heritage, is celebrated for her experimental sculptures and installations that employ a variety of materials. She works across media, favoring traditional craft techniques over rapid digital production. Initially trained in analog photography, she has a documentary interest in capturing tangible records of time and touch, transforming the transient human lifespan into a broader geological and ecological context.
Building on her influential 2025 gallery presentation in Los Angeles, where she addressed the loss of her home and studio in the devastating fires, her first New York show shifts its focus to exploring how absence is conveyed. With a related sculpture in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, her “Heirloom” exhibition draws inspiration from a garden she cultivated at her former home. She turns organic forms from that site into bronze roses, irises, and branches, often embraced by casts of her own maturing hand, while transforming an inherited stone ring she once wore into a monumental gemstone-and-steel sculpture and her grandmother’s handmade lace tablecloth into a pair of suspended steel panels, creating a space of interruption that resists closure.
Through July 24
5. Farah Atassi | Almine Rech, New York
A prominent Belgian-born painter living and working in Paris, Farah Atassi creates vibrant, highly organized, geometric paintings that hover between figuration and radical abstraction. Her work is celebrated for reimagining classic 20th-century art themes through a unique flat, patterned, and grid-inspired visual style. Rather than painting from reality or live models, Atassi creates fictional scenes, filling her canvases with female figures set in abstract environments and still-life objects reduced to basic geometric shapes.
Atassi’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, “Metamorphosis,” presents eight new paintings in various sizes, depicting abstracted vegetal and human forms, surrounded by white, fluffy clouds, as they drift through interior and exterior realms. Doors and windows frame several of her flower women, creating Magritte-like surreal settings, while color combinations shift the scenes from day to night and to dreamy department store displays. Loosely inspired by Ovid’s mythological tales, the paintings are unified by the theme of bodily transformation, conveyed with imagination.
Through July 31
6. Mark Manders | Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Mark Manders, a renowned Dutch artist and sculptor, is famous for his lifelong project, Self-Portrait as a Building. Based in Belgium, he creates mysterious, poetic installations that seem timeless. His work serves as an evolving blueprint for a fictional alter ego, exploring human consciousness and identity through physical spaces. Since 1986, Manders sees his art as an expanding structure; each exhibition adds a new room or level. Instead of using found objects, he carefully crafts or reconstructs nearly everything by hand, making them appear anonymous and free of real-world references.
For his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, Mark Manders introduces new works, including towering bronze busts, abstract sculptural landscapes, and smaller paintings and works on paper. Two large-scale figurative bronze sculptures anchor the downstairs gallery, with the largest, Bonewhite Clay Head with Vertical-Cloud, resembling a cracked clay head in the process of being made, propped up by a board and boxes. Nearby, the other sculpture, Monument—a giant, crumbling female head—suggests an ancient ruin. Smaller sculptures on plinths in the upper and lower galleries reinforce the idea of objects found in an archaeological dig, while a group of paintings with offset images and texts, as well as a simulated newspaper hanging on a café rod, remind the viewer that this is a thoughtful, poetic show, where what one thinks is a find is an illusion created by a philosophically playful mind.
Through July 31
7. Lavar Munroe | Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago
A Bahamian-born interdisciplinary artist, Lavar Munroe produces textured mixed-media works that blur the boundaries between painting and relief sculpture, delving into the human condition through immersive travel, cultural research, and innovative material exploration.
He operates with an anthropologist’s approach, immersing himself in communities across Africa to observe local rituals, ceremonies, and belief systems firsthand. His experiences, along with his upbringing in The Bahamas, inform a practice firmly grounded in storytelling, folklore, and mythology. Living and working across Baltimore and Nassau, he is widely recognized in the contemporary art scene, notably co-representing the Bahamas at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
DANCE WITH MY FATHER AGAIN, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, stems from research for his Venice show, which focused on an intergenerational dialogue between Munroe and the late Bahamian artist John Beadle. Profoundly influenced by Bahamian Junkanoo traditions with costumed processions, music, improvisation, and collective effort, Munroe created works that honor Beadle’s legacy. This exhibition continues the younger artist’s exploration of posthumous collaboration, while also serving as a return to an unrealized project with his late father, presenting a series of unstretched, mixed-media paintings that create a dialogue between makers connected by a shared understanding of material transformation.
Through August 1
8. Makiko Kudo | Perrotin, Los Angeles
Best known for creating expressive, large-scale oil paintings that merge real-world observations with childhood memories, anime aesthetics, and surreal dreamscapes, Japanese artist Makiko Kudo first gained prominence after appearing in Takashi Murakami’s landmark 2002 Tokyo Girls Bravo exhibition. Working on one major painting at a time, she employs bold, dynamic brushstrokes to create a sense of chaotic movement and vibrancy on her canvases, using vivid, highly saturated colors to convey the light of spring. Despite her paintings showcasing adorable (kawaii) figures and cheerful colors, they are deeply infused with feelings of nostalgia, longing, and loneliness.
Kudo’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Reincarnation, depicts a harmonious world among animals, humans, and nature, inspired by the life and death of her cherished pet cat. Magical and mystical, yet grounded in real experiences, her fantastical and often monumental scenes all originate from Kudo’s own life. She immortalizes meaningful moments, transforming her initial impressions of a place into paintings, layered with fragments of other stories — from conversations with friends to the novels she has read. From large-scale canvases of happy children immersed in lush nature to small paintings of forlorn kids in isolated realms, the Tokyo-based artist reminds us that childhood leaves a lasting impression, one that shapes us as adults.
Through July 11