8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in July

Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from New York to California to discover the top solo shows for July. From Nancy Dwyer’s paintings and sculptures that smartly turn words into images at Ortuzar in New York to Marcel Dzama’s storytelling drawings of anthropomorphized animals and dancing characters and his surreal film that pays homage to Federico García Lorca at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. Nancy Dwyer at Ortuzar | New York

Linked to the Pictures Generation—a group of artists in the 1970s and ‘80s who used newspapers, advertisements, films, and television to explore these media as representations of reality—Nancy Dwyer is renowned for turning words into images and highlighting ironic meanings within them. One of the co-founders of Hallwalls, a Buffalo nonprofit where Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo also started their careers, Dwyer has used song lyrics, slang, colloquialisms, and idioms to craft clever paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and animations over the past 40+ years.

Fresh off a survey at the Kunsthalle Winterthur in Switzerland, where several works from the gallery’s “ALWAYS” exhibition were displayed, the New York–born, Santa Fe–based artist is showcasing a lively selection of paintings and sculptures from 1982 to today. From an early canvas depicting a girl in a contorted yoga pose and Picabia-inspired Neo-Dadaist paintings of poetic phrases portrayed as mechanical gears, to sculptural furniture and wall reliefs that comment on themselves, and sayings graphically rendered on panels installed on television mounts, Dwyer smartly transforms words into captivating pictograms—creating a form of infotainment that keeps the audience engaged.

Through August 1

2. Francis Picabia at Hauser & Wirth | New York

A prominent figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, the French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia also created works in various other artistic styles, including Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, while predicting the Pop, Conceptual, and Postmodern art movements of the late 20th century. Highly influential through his paintings and drawings of the 1930s and ‘40s on later generations of contemporary artists, he depicted Hollywood starlets in his penciled portraits long before Andy Warhol featured Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor in his silkscreen paintings and introduced Sigmar Polke and David Salle to new ways of visually layering the female figure.

After World War II, the only viable option for European artists was to turn to abstraction, and Picabia chose this path as well. The first major show to highlight his Art Informal period, the gallery’s “Eternal Beginning” exhibition features more than two dozen abstract paintings created between 1945 and 1951, the year before he died. Facing tough economic times and looking for a new beginning, Picabia returned to Paris, where he began exploring a “third path” between Surrealism and abstraction, the two dominant styles in postwar European art. The resulting canvases, which were sometimes—either in hasty excitement or for financial reasons—repainted over earlier works, are both mechanical and organic, demonstrating his equal fascination with Neo-Dadaist trends and early European cave art.

Through August 1

3. Igshaan Adams at Casey Kaplan | New York

A South African artist working with tapestries, textile-based sculptures, installations, and performances, Igshaan Adams gained international recognition at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 with his large-scale tapestries, inspired by the geometric patterns of linoleum floors found in the homes of friends and neighbors throughout Cape Town. Made from fragments of locally sourced wood, plastic, beads, shells, string, and rope, they were closely linked to commodity trading and community footpaths used during the Apartheid era. Featured in the 2023 São Paulo Bienal and several exhibitions focused on a renewed approach to textile arts since then, Adams based part of this gallery show on his recent lobby installation at ICA/Boston, which he deconstructed and reimagined as individual pieces here.

His third solo exhibition at the gallery, “Verkenning,” which means exploration in Afrikaans, features a series of wall-based tapestries, hanging sculptures, and three-dimensional weavings created from 2023 to the present, that explore movement as a medium. At the museum, he crafted a multi-part weaving inspired by the architecture and his childhood memories of intersecting footpaths and dust clouds caused by their use in the area where he grew up. At the gallery, he recontextualized these pieces and combined them with a series of dynamic dance print tapestries, in which he captured the dancers’ footwork as catalysts for change, using regionally sourced materials such as glass, wood, plastic beads, mohair, rope, tiger tail wire, and gold and silver chains—creating a meaningful mix of Adams’ mapping of space, human interactions, and remembrance. 

Through July 25

4. Christina Nicodema at Kravets Wehby Gallery | New York

Blurring the line between Golden Age vanitas and Instagram food porn, Christina Nicodema crafts delightfully decadent desserts that straddle the boundary between perfection and decay. Painting her own “Pictures of Dorian Gray” like a rebellious pastry chef transitioning to an art career, she turns icing into impasto brushwork and makes mold a metaphor for the passing of time. With a BFA from the Parsons School of Design, the New York–based artist has been creating enticing confections on canvas for more than a decade. By adding a degrading twist to her realistic still lifes of cakes, flowers, and fruits, she invites a variety of interpretations—from the loss of childhood and fading memories to the decline of society and abandoned dreams—of her captivating work.

An amateur boxer turned painter, Nicodema delivers a powerful punch to her prior work in the gallery’s “Primeval Tapestries” exhibition. Presenting five new tapestry-style paintings depicting delicious displays of treats in Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom–type settings, she adds telling touches, such as raccoons and monkeys invading civilized scenes. In a nod to the Internet’s power to create addictions as strong as sugar, which the artist has said was her first habit-forming drug, her Cockatoo Photobomb canvas features a white bird perched on a decaying apple photobombing an abandoned, moldy cake. Meanwhile, her Waterfall painting catches the eye with a stream of cherry syrup oozing from a layer cake, whose crystallizing mold beautifully blends with the decorative surroundings.

Through July 11

5. Stephen Pace at Altman Siegel | San Francisco

Inspired to pursue painting by a Works Progress Administration (WPA) artist in Indiana when he was 17, Stephen Pace trained at New York’s Art Students League and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris before studying independently with artist Hans Hofmann in the early 1950s. He first gained recognition as an Abstract Expressionist before returning to representational art—mostly outdoor scenes, interiors, and nudes—from the 1960s until his death, at the age of 91, in 2010.

The “Nudes & Birds” exhibition at the gallery highlights two themes that captivated and motivated Pace throughout his extensive career. Featuring 14 paintings created between 1964 and 1993, this curated selection showcases the artist’s ongoing fascination with and exploration of the female figure and bird forms. Transforming simple scenes of rural life with bold strokes and bright colors, Pace’s depictions of nude women lounging at the beach and on lush lawns, alongside black and white swans swimming in rivers and lakes, transcend their visual aspect, capturing themes of freedom, vitality, and serenity. A master colorist, the late Maine-based artist used the expressive energy of his abstract style to alluringly capture the rural and coastal realms of his adopted state.

Through July 19

6. Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner | Los Angeles

Originally from Winnipeg, Marcel Dzama is widely known for his imaginative drawings, sculptures, dioramas, mosaic murals, costume and stage design, and quirky films. He started his career with the Royal Art Lodge, a group of students from the University of Manitoba, and has continued his collaborative work by creating album art for Beck, making films starring Kim Gordon and Amy Sedaris, and designing costumes and sets for the New York City Ballet. Since gaining fame in the late 1990s, the Brooklyn-based artist has developed a distinctive visual style that explores human behavior and desire, as well as the complex boundary between reality and the subconscious.

Drawing inspiration from folk traditions, art history, and popular contemporary sources, Dzama’s art creates a surreal universe filled with childhood dreams and fantastical tales. His “Empress of Night” exhibition features a new series of colorful narratives on paper, ranging from large to medium-sized, with a recent film screened as the show’s centerpiece. Inspired by Francisco Goya’s art, Dzama’s mixed-media drawings portray anthropomorphized animals and dancing characters amidst jungle landscapes and vast skies. His short film pays homage to Federico García Lorca, exploring themes of life, death, violence, and resurrection from the surrealist poet’s never-produced screenplay, Trip to the Moon. Blending Oscar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballets and the playful spirit of Pee-wee’s Playhouse with Georges Méliès’ magical films and 1950s trippy space movies, the talented artist’s film symbolically examines the political, social, and ecological upheavals of our time.

Through August 8

7. Kaoru Ueda at Nonaka-Hill | Los Angeles

Born in 1928 in Tokyo and trained in painting at Tokyo University of the Arts, where he earned a fine arts degree in 1954, Kaoru Ueda has built a distinguished artistic career in Japan and Europe. Having exhibited his work in galleries since the late 1950s and at major museums since the 1970s, initially as an abstract artist and later as a hyperrealist, he is known for his photographic-like depictions of objects and food, such as a knife cutting and dispersing jelly or a knife and fork splitting a sponge. Still active despite suffering from dementia, the 97-year-old Kanagawa-based artist continues to draw and paint, but in a more naive style.

Presenting a selection of paintings of household objects and food suspended in space and time from 1972 to 2018, this remarkable show introduces his surprising Japanese Pop art sensibility to an American audience. Adding trompe l’oeil lettering that resembles an embossed label to some of his canvases reveals his interest in graphic design, which he successfully pursued after leaving college, while presenting objects in a clinical manner exposes his early interest in medicine. Working meticulously from photographs, Ueda created precise paintings of objects in flux. Ranging from close-ups of the tops of broken bottles and a cup, saucer, and teaspoon with spilled coffee to a raw egg spilling from its shell and an egg yolk balanced on a kitchen utensil, his uncanny images hold our attention as we marvel at their super-realistic details.

Through July 26

8. Jorinde Voigt at Marc Selwyn Fine Art | Los Angeles

A multidisciplinary visual artist based in Berlin, Jorinde Voigt is best known for her expansive drawings that investigate intricate notation systems inspired by music, philosophy, and phenomenology. Since her early work, she has adopted an analytical approach, seeing her subjects as dynamic situations whose states are constantly evolving. Her large-scale drawings often follow a set of guidelines and rules, leading to comparisons with Minimalist and Conceptual art.

The gallery’s “Works on Paper” exhibition features 18 immersive drawings, ranging from medium to large scale, created between 2009 and 2023. These works interpret complex, intangible ideas—such as music and philosophy—into lyrical abstractions, layered with fine lines and detailed notations in a variety of media. Works dedicated to Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas capture the ethereal, while other music-related drawings use elements of musical theory and sound to create flowing, wave-like diagrams. Drawings exploring weather systems, emotions, dream states, and perception complete this complex and enlightening show, the German conceptual artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, but most likely not her last.

Through August 2