8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in June
From Will Cotton’s paintings and drawings of cowboys, unicorns, and mermaids in confectionery landscapes to the recreation of Diane Arbus’s seminal 1972 Museum of Modern Art retrospective
Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from New York to Chicago and Los Angeles to discover the top solo shows for June. From Will Cotton’s paintings and drawings of cowboys, unicorns, and mermaids in confectionery landscapes at Templon in New York to the recreation of Diane Arbus’s seminal 1972 Museum of Modern Art retrospective at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.
1. Will Cotton at Templon | New York
Celebrated for his realistic Candyland compositions featuring confectionery landscapes and fantastical portraits of femme fatales floating in cotton candy clouds, Will Cotton creates contemporary art with a classical flair. Constructing representational objects of desire from symbolic sweets, Cotton blurs the lines between childish cravings and adult fantasies. His art direction for Katy Perry’s music video “California Gurl” earned him pop culture acclaim, while his recent transformation of Rockefeller Center’s public spaces with large-scale murals and sculptural installations captivated the Midtown tourist and business crowd.
The New York-based artist’s recent paintings and drawings of cowboys, unicorns, and mermaids in the exhibition “Between Instinct and Reason”—his first solo outing with Templon New York, after showing with the gallery in Europe for 15 years—present fantasy realms that transcend Hollywood’s film fairy tales. Cotton portrays trident-wielding mermaids as manipulative narcissists and seductive sirens who lure macho Marlboro men—when they aren’t trying to tame wild unicorns—to their demise. He casts his characters into delightful dreamscapes filled with tempting treats, creating surreal “Venetian Hour” scenes featuring guests who could undoubtedly upstage almost any bride and groom.
Through June 28
2. Salman Toor at Luhring Augustine | New York
A standout in the 2024 Venice Biennale exhibition “Foreigners Everywhere,” Salman Toor has been garnering praise for his expressive paintings and drawings since his 2020 solo show at the Whitney Museum. Born in Pakistan and educated in the United States, Toor is renowned for his narrative and allegorical works that depict gay South Asian men living in the diaspora. Painted wet-on-wet or drawn quickly, his paintings and drawings have a sketchy, washy quality that enhances the intensity of his depictions of an immigrant’s urban life.
His biggest solo show to date, the exhibition “Wish Makers” features new paintings at the gallery’s Chelsea space and works on paper at its Tribeca location. The New York-based artist’s theatrical works capture brown males publicly gathering on street corners or cruising in parks and on beaches, as well as privately interacting in beds, clubs, and dreamlike museum spaces. Rendered from memory, they provide viewers a glimpse into the marginalized realms of New York and Lahore. His painterly portraits of family and friends highlight a support network that fosters confidence, while his still lifes of objects and limbs piled in puddles reveal a pervasive sense of vulnerability.
Through June 21
3. Beverly Fishman at Miles McEnery Gallery | New York
Constructing abstract paintings that skillfully reference the history of hard-edge abstraction and minimalism, while addressing the impact of new technologies and the pharmaceutical industry on human life, Beverly Fishman creates hybrid sculptural paintings that provoke thought while providing visual pleasure. After earning an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1980, she became an artist-in-residence and later served as Head of Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit, where she continues to live and work.
The multi-part, three-dimensional shaped paintings in her exhibition “Geometries of Hope (and Fear)” act as visual metaphors for the damage caused by society’s dependence on addictive medications, particularly when taken in cocktail form. The color combinations in the painted wood pieces create a visual disturbance, while the shifting forms introduce psychological tension to the geometric mix. Through a poetic lens, Fishman’s sculptural paintings address the issue of prescribing multiple medications to a single individual. They explore the promises of pharmaceuticals as a means to healing while sparking discussions about the rising health concerns associated with Big Pharma and our growing reliance on drugs.
Through June 21
4. Pablo Picasso at Gagosian | New York
A master of many mediums, Pablo Picasso is most famous for his enigmatic 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which combines influences from Iberian and African art with a bathers’ motif from Paul Cézanne, now housed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He is equally renowned for the 1937 anti-war canvas Guernica, a dramatic portrayal of the bombing and destruction of an entire town during the Spanish Civil War, currently on view at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Arguably the most celebrated artist of the modern art period, his work has been exhibited in 40 exhibitions since 1998 at Gagosian, making it fitting that this is the final exhibition in the gallery’s Madison Avenue flagship space.
Presented in partnership with the artist’s daughter, Paloma Picasso, the exhibition “Tête-à-tête” features over 50 paintings, sculptures, and drawings, including several that have never been exhibited before. Highlighting works that span the artist’s career, from 1896 to 1972, displayed in conversation with one another, in a style that references Picasso’s first retrospective exhibition, which he helped install in 1932. Occupying the sixth-floor gallery and two fifth-floor spaces, the sensational show features self-portraits by Picasso, numerous depictions of his wives and lovers, and several paintings, drawings, and sculptures of Paloma as a child, including a delightful collection of woodblock figures representing her as a doll.
Through July 3
5. Caroline Kent at PATRON Gallery | Chicago
A painter who works in expanded forms, Caroline Kent was born in a small city in Illinois and earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where her abstract art first developed during her 15-year residence and work there. Based in Chicago for the past nine years, she has advanced her idea of “painting as a site for the projection of desire, wonder, and dreams” through solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the University Galleries at Illinois State University; mural projects at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Queens Museum; the Modern Window at MoMA; and group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles.
Her second solo show at the gallery, “The Sentimental Hand,” features 16 small- to large-scale mixed-media paintings and drawings by the artist. Working on blackened paper, canvas, and Belgian linen with acrylic paint, as well as with cut walnut and dyed or pigmented cement, Kent assembles her hybrid paintings using modified rectangles, lines, dots, and coded language. By presenting the pieces in a unique way that interacts with the architecture of the space while transforming it, she encourages a dialogue between the works on display. With improvisation at the heart of her practice, Kent consistently pushes the boundaries of abstract art without fear of repetition. Through a play of color and form, she creates both balance and imbalance, keeping her work fresh.
Through June 21
6. Awol Erizku at Sean Kelly | Los Angeles
On the fast track since earning an MFA from Yale in 2014, Awol Erizku made a name for himself as an emerging artist in the art world before being tapped to make iconic editorial photos of pop culture celebrities like Amanda Gorman and Beyonce. Never taking his eye off the ball on the gallery scene’s court, the multidisciplinary artist has a current solo show at the California African American Museum and is part of a group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His inaugural one-person exhibition, titled “Moon, Turn the Flames…Gently Gently Away” with the gallery’s West Coast locale.
Creating his own vernacular, dubbed Afro-Esotericism, which encompasses a spiritualized view of Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art, and Pan Africanism, the Addis Ababa-born, L.A.-based conceptual artist employs photography, sculpture, painting, installation art, and film to expand upon the Black radical tradition. Drawing on much of this media, the engaging exhibition showcases new photographs, neon installations, and sculptures that highlight his distinctive perspective on symbolism and cross-cultural dialogue. Taking that dialogue a step further, Erizku shares his perspective on “The Most influential Hip-Hop Albums of all time” through a series of album covers inkjet printed on stone and presented as paintings, complete with a linked curated mixtape.
Through July 3
7. Diane Arbus at David Zwirner | Los Angeles
A game-changer for the art of photography, the 1972 retrospective exhibition of Diane Arbus’s photographs at the Museum of Modern Art not only established the late artist as a recognizable name in the art world but also prompted a reevaluation of photography as a medium in modern and contemporary art. In the press release for the show, John Szarkowski, Director of the Department of Photography at MoMA, declared, “These pictures challenged the basic assumptions on which most documentary photography of the period had been predicated. Her work was concerned primarily with psychological rather than visual coherence, with private rather than social realities, with the prototypical and mythic rather than the topical and temporal.”
Controversial for its depiction of nudists, strippers, and transvestites alongside babies and businessmen, the posthumous presentation garnered both praise and criticism from the city’s media elites, making it immensely popular with the general public. David Zwirner’s “Cataclysm” exhibition (co-organized with San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery) recreates the seminal show with all 113 photographs, offering today’s audience a rare chance to experience this impactful exhibition—the first significant survey of the artist’s work in Los Angeles since “Diane Arbus: Revelations” was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago—anew.
Through June 21
8. Jason Fox at David Kordansky Gallery | Los Angeles
Celebrated for his psychologically charged paintings and drawings of musicians, Jason Fox has been blending portraits of notable figures with images of dogs, demons, and angels for over 30 years. Inspired by myths, sci-fi movies, popular music, and underground comics, he goes one step beyond reality to conjure an imaginary extraterrestrial realm on paper and canvas. Drifting between visions and nightmares, his interest in cyborgs and extreme figuration intriguingly blends the shock of David Cronenberg’s body horror genre with R. Crumb’s satirical nostalgia for American folk culture.
The 35 paintings, drawings, and sculptures in his exhibition, “Why Are You Sitting In The Dark,” include surreal portraits of dogs and human skulls merged with likenesses of Bob Marley smoking a jumbo marijuana spleef and images of Joni Mitchell astonishingly fused with goats. Portraits of Tom Petty and Homer Simpson are also combined with other wild beasts, while Willie Nelson is uniquely honored by a sculptural cross adorned with a bandana and synthetic hair attached to a wooden beam—making one wonder if the artist from Yonkers was once picked up by aliens and then dropped back down in Upstate New York, where he now lives and works, to illustrate their perspective on American culture.
Through June 28