8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in June

Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie journeyed from the East Coast and the Midwest to the West Coast to highlight the top solo shows for June. From Lisa Yuskavage’s provocative figurative oil paintings and collages that challenge traditional depictions of the female form at David Zwirner in New York and Jennifer Bartlett’s monumental installation pairing large canvases of ocean scenes with related three-dimensional objects at Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery to Frank Gehry’s dynamically crafted animal lamps and sculptures at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. Lisa Yuskavage | David Zwirner, New York

New York-based American artist Lisa Yuskavage is renowned for her provocative figurative oil paintings that challenge traditional depictions of the female form. Rising to prominence in the early 1990s as a key figure in the resurgence of figurative painting, she is celebrated for blending classical art techniques with contemporary pop-culture influences. Her tenth solo exhibition at the gallery in 20 years features 18 new oil paintings in various sizes on linen, aluminum, and wood, as well as eight mixed-media collages—her first time working with this medium. A master colorist, she employs saturated, luminous, and glowing color palettes, with color serving as the primary catalyst for emotional expression and mood. The beautifully installed collection offers a compelling mix of lush, atmospheric subjects that blur the line between high art and low-culture erotica, highlighting voluptuous female figures who inhabit a space between innocence and psychologically charged sensuality.

Through June 26

2. Fred Tomaselli | James Cohan, New York

Fred Tomaselli is an American artist widely known for his intricate, psychedelic paintings encased in thick, clear resin and for current-events collages culled from the front page of the New York Times. His art features hallucinatory patterns and a distinctive mix of organic elements, counterculture, and art history. Instead of just using paint and canvas, the Brooklyn-based artist builds complex compositions by attaching physical objects to wooden panels and then covering them with a shiny sealer, creating a fascinating floating appearance. Raised near Disneyland and immersed in 1970s Southern California counterculture, he is intrigued by artificial realities, utopias, and the ways drugs, art, and nature serve as tools to alter human perception.

In the exhibition “Blooms Disrupted,” the Brooklyn-based artist focuses on the garden as his central subject, using it to explore the natural world as a contrast to the rapid flow of news and media that often disrupts our personal lives. His new resin paintings portray the garden as a space as vibrant, energetic, and full of potential as the universe itself. Additionally, a series of New York Times collages continues Tomaselli’s longstanding practice of transforming everyday news into raw material, employing new approaches to both disrupt and honor fleeting moments.

Through June 27

3. Karla Knight | Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

A maker of mysterious, two-dimensional artworks that feature invented languages, cryptic diagrams, alien iconography, and otherworldly symbols, Karla Knight is an American artist who merges early 20th-century abstraction and Surrealism with elements of science fiction, historical mapping systems, and the occult. Her writing, which generates entire alphabets, ciphers, and hieroglyphic-like scripts, looks highly structured and legible, yet it is entirely incomprehensible. Presenting a lively array of paintings, works on paper and wood, and mixed-media embroideries on cotton, her “Orbit” exhibition highlights playful inventions loosely inspired by reality yet entirely about the unknown. Beyond her uncanny spaceships and symbols, the exhibition features a fascinating laboratory-like room that offers insight into her mind through objects such as rocks, books, drawings, and studies for her paintings.

Through June 20

4. Arghavan Khosravi | Uffner & Liu

Arghavan Khosravi is an Iranian artist known for creating multidimensional, surrealist sculptural paintings. Born and raised in Tehran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, she studied illustration and graphic design in her homeland before moving to the United States in 2015 to pursue a fine art education, earning an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. By juxtaposing art histories, the Connecticut-based artist’s work stands out for its distinctive physical form and richly symbolic narratives, heavily influenced by her personal experiences of living a double life under Iran’s oppressive patriarchal theocracy. The exhibition “What Remains” showcases large-scale wall pieces, a freestanding sculpture, and a series of intimate, small-scale works from a new collection inspired by altarpieces. Her art combines personal and political themes, celebrating female power and agency while exploring the historical and contemporary structures that control the body and constrain autonomy.

Through July 2

5. Jennifer Bartlett | Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Blurring the boundaries between Minimalism, Conceptual art, and Neo-Expressionism, Jennifer Bartlett—who passed away in 2022—was a prominent American artist, best known for her large, wall-filling installations composed of small, one-foot-square enameled steel plates arranged in precise grid patterns. Widely exhibited and collected, her work systematically explores foundational elements of art (such as dots, lines, and shapes) alongside figurative motifs (including houses, trees, and oceans). On its expansive second floor, the gallery is exhibiting her monumental 1985 installation, Sea Wall, a marvelous room-sized work that pushed her practice into three dimensions by pairing large canvases of ocean scenes with related lifelike objects, such as houses, rowboats, and a seahorse chair made with shells placed on the floor in front of the canvases.

Through June 27

6. Nour Malas | Patron, Chicago

Nour Malas, a Syrian-Canadian artist, creates large, expressive paintings and mixed-media installations that explore personal identity, cultural hybridity, and political history. Born in France, the New York-based artist grew up in the United Arab Emirates and has lived in Dubai, London, and Chicago. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Goldsmiths University in London and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her art is highly physical and intuitive, moving between abstraction and delicate figurative forms. It features layered compositions with energetic, gestural brushstrokes and earthy colors. Named after a 1971 song by Max Roach and The J.C. White Singers, the paintings in her “Garden of Prayer” exhibition capture jazz’s improvisational approach to form and gospel’s spiritual fervor, featuring a series of large-scale works in oil and pastel on linen, paper, and silk. Guided by her grandmother’s spirit, she sees her paintings as portals into spiritual worlds.

Through June 13

7. Frank Gehry | Gagosian, Beverly Hills

Frank Gehry, a celebrated Canadian-American architect and designer who passed in 2025, is recognized as one of the most influential figures in modern architecture. As a pioneer of Deconstructivism, a style that breaks apart traditional geometries to produce fluid, fragmented, and seemingly weightless structures, Gehry revolutionized architecture, moving it from strict, formulaic patterns to an expressive, engaging, and sculptural art form. Gehry’s career, spanning more than 70 years, earned him the Pritzker Architecture Prize—the highest honor in architecture—and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He designed some of the world’s most iconic civic landmarks, celebrated for their flowing forms, shimmering titanium surfaces, and daring use of unconventional materials.

At the gallery, which was the first to exhibit Gehry’s unique lamps in 1984, a presentation of later animal sculptures and drawings, including a life-size stainless-steel bear sculpture and lamps in the form of fish, a snake, and a crocodile, has been realized in collaboration with the artist’s family and designed by the Gehry studio. Gehry’s famous furniture and art creations showcase a lifelong merging of architecture and sculpture, transforming inexpensive industrial materials into dynamic, practical works of art. Well before gaining worldwide recognition for his gravity-defying buildings, Gehry experimented with furniture and standalone gallery pieces to develop his distinctive Deconstructivist style.

Through June 27

8. Edgar Arceneaux | Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles

A Los Angeles-based American artist and community organizer best known for his conceptual, multidisciplinary approach to art, Edgar Arceneaux creates work that explores the connections among history, memory, identity, and the shortcomings of traditional systems of truth. Rather than conventional linear storytelling, his work combines diverse cultural and historical references—such as civil rights movement archives, FBI surveillance files, science fiction, Detroit techno, and urban architecture. He uses multiple artistic media to produce a range of works. His “We Are Gods” exhibition features a new series of process paintings that blend abstraction and materiality, with the exhibition title alluding to a metaphysical continuum linking life and death. Composed of layers of silver nitrate skinned from mirrors and acrylic paint on canvas, Arceneaux’s abstractions evoke the aura of pink and blue celestial realms, a world more inviting than the daily realities many folks face.

Through June 27