Installation view, "Jean Dubuffet: The Hourloupe Cycle" at Pace, New York.
Photo: Courtesy of Pace.
8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in April
From emerging painter Dustin Emory’s double show of voyeuristic visual narratives to Jean Dubuffet's “anticultural” approach to everyday life
Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie journeyed from New York to Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to discover the top solo shows for April. From emerging painter Dustin Emory’s double show of voyeuristic visual narratives at Fredericks & Freiser and Margot Samel in New York to Sophie Calle’s look back at projects that failed at Fraenkel in San Francisco, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.
Thomas Scheibitz, Cinema, (2024). Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
1. Thomas Scheibitz at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery | New York
Thomas Scheibitz blurs the boundary between abstraction and figuration by mixing elements of classical painting and architecture with contemporary urban landscapes and popular culture. Drawing from his extensive collection of archival imagery, the Berlin-based German artist combines elements from a broad cultural spectrum, filtering them through sketching, collaging, photographing, and reworking the components to construct a new reality. Taking the mythological multi-eyed Greek giant Argos as the point of departure for the paintings, sculptures, installation-like tableau, and slide show in the exhibition “Argos Eyes,” Scheibitz creates a colorful realm of contemplation, where audiences view his art as the works simultaneously gaze back at them.
Through April 18
Dustin Emory, Shadowed Skin, 2025. Photo: Cary Whittier. Courtesy of Fredericks & Freiser.
2. Dustin Emory at Fredericks & Freiser and Margot Samel| New York
A self-taught artist who began sketching and creating watercolors at age 17 while recovering from a football injury, Dustin Emory produces dreamlike, grayscale images of figures in confined and self-reflective situations. Navigating the challenges of an incarcerated father and an addicted brother, the Atlanta-based painter draws on personal experiences to create voyeuristic and surveilled narratives of isolated characters in allegorical settings. Employing oil, acrylic, and pumice, Emory interacts with the canvas and his personal life through a haunting style of realism that is sharply lit and uniquely cropped to enhance the unfolding dramas. A play on words in the title “Mourning Sun” for his double solo show at Chelsea’s Fredericks & Freiser and Tribeca’s Margot Samel opens an empathetic portal for his audience while expressing hope in the transformative power of art.
Through April 19
Nianxin Li, Gentle touch, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of Harper’s
3. Nianxin Li at Harper’s Apartment | New York
Born in China and educated in Florence and New York, where she earned her MFA from the New York School of Visual Arts in 2023, Nianxin Li paints surreal scenarios featuring everyday objects and organisms. Exploring family relationships, gender roles, and societal norms, the New York-based artist expresses her emotions and experiences through vibrant, seductive colors and forms. She transforms candies, snails, fruits, flowers, and shells into curvilinear shapes that interact with one another, staging intimate scenes, often on a grand scale. In her solo show, titled “MacGuffin,” the shells and flowers in her sublime selection of paintings and drawings do precisely what the title implies: they trigger a plot. Suggestive of shifting shapes and body parts, they embrace and softly touch, yet at other times, they pull away.
Through April 26
Keita Morimoto, Green Room, (2025). Photo: © Keita Morimoto. Photo: Shin Inaba. Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech
4. Keita Morimoto at Almine Rech | New York
Celebrated for his cityscapes and portraits, Japanese painter Keita Morimoto reinterprets contemporary urban life, transforming everyday people and city streets into unexpected narratives. By symbolically employing light, the Tokyo-based artist merges its holy and organic associations with the stark realities of consumerism and industrial culture, crafting works that echo with historical depth and contemporary complexity. Focused on traditional methods yet permeated with modern sensibilities, his creations elevate everyday moments into cinematic vignettes, balancing between the realms of reality and fantasy. Based on his own photographs, the paintings in “To Nowhere and Back” capture recognizable spots and hidden sections of Tokyo’s inner city, lending charm to youthful gathering places such as 7-11 stores and ubiquitous vending machines.
Through April 26
Jean Dubuffet, L'Incivil (after maquette dated 2 August-December 1973), 1973-2014. Photo: © Jean Dubuffet / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Pace.
5. Jean Dubuffet at Pace | New York
A French artist who seriously began creating art at the age of 41, Jean Dubuffet experimented with nontraditional materials and methods in painting, sculpture, and printmaking to challenge conventional notions of beauty, culture, and taste. He adopted what he termed an “anticultural” approach, rejecting refined aesthetics while emphasizing instinct and raw emotion through the use of natural textures and forms. In line with his exploration of everyday life, his mature work from the 1960s showcased a redefined approach to line and color, particularly evident in his famous Hourloupe series, which serves as the focal point of this captivating show. It was the lengthiest cycle in the artist’s oeuvre, lasting from 1962 to 1974, with the gallery offering a curated selection of significant paintings, sculptures, and architectural models from it, including one of his most considerable paintings, Nunc Stans, a striking 26-foot-wide work on loan from the Guggenheim Museum.
Through April 26
Gary Lang, CS #10, (2009–2020.) Photo: Courtesy of the McClain Gallery
6. Gary Lang at McClain Gallery | Houston
Widely known for his concentric circles, squares, and star paintings, Gary Lang creates art that pulsates with vibrant sequences of color and energy. Born in Los Angeles and based north of the city, Lang improvises his paintings with various hues to make his geometrically shaped canvases radiate from within. His “Fourfold Glow” exhibition showcases a series of Concentric Square canvases completed between 2019 and 2024. Painted with glowing bands of color that shift in density and tone, his paintings keep the eye in motion, oscillating between variations of pigment and scale. Painted in succession from the outer edge inward, the canvases are subject to chance operations, as Lang covers the earlier applications before progressing toward the center, with the final painting only revealed in the end. Displayed as a series, the paintings transform the gallery into a meditative realm where visitors become immersed in each visually vibrant square, one after the next.
Through May 3
Glenn Goldberg, An Other Place (77), 2024. Photo: Courtesy of Chris Sharp Gallery
7. Glenn Goldberg at Chris Sharp Gallery | Los Angeles
Glenn Goldberg crafts meditative paintings and works on paper that reflect a fusion of spiritualist cultures, influenced by years of travel and research, resulting in a distinctive style that is both abstract and figurative. Creating highly graphic works, the New York-born and based artist paints repeated, ghostly images of birds in invented landscapes, where everything is composed of thousands of tiny painted dots that sublimely suggest stitches in woven textiles. Constructed primarily from imagination, without observing either nature or images of nature, the works are propelled by what exists in nature. Layered with transparent brushwork above vibrantly painted grounds, the paintings in the exhibition “For You” evoke vernacular game boards, aboriginal art, and the pixelated imagery of early computers while mesmerizingly capturing the steadfast labor involved in their creation.
Through May 10
Sophie Calle, Calle-Joconde (Wrong turn), (2025). Photo: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Fraenkel.
8. Sophie Calle at Fraenkel | San Francisco
A conceptual artist whose work transcends most conventional art historical categories, Sophie Calle is one of the best examples of a creative practitioner who beautifully blends art with life. Presenting a series of odd artworks in her signature style of photographs and texts, this show offers more than 20 pieces made between 2013 and 2025. Highlights include works from her Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished, which features pieces that Calle initially planned but never completed, where she combines aspects of the projects with texts about why they were never developed. Another standout series focuses on photographs she made of covered artworks during the Covid-19 lockdown at the Musée National Picasso Paris, which relate to her groundbreaking exhibition that took over the whole museum in 2023. And keeping her life in the mix, a third group of photo/text pictures in the show deals with death and remembrance, with her deceased parents woven into the works.
Through April 12
Cover: Installation view, "Jean Dubuffet: The Hourloupe Cycle" at Pace, New York.
Photo: Courtesy of Pace.
More from Galerie
