Installation view, Francesco Clemente: Summer Love in the Fall, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York.
Photo: Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan
8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in December
From Francesco Clemente’s paintings, watercolors, and frescoes exploring the self and longings to Sabine Moritz’s abstract canvases capturing moments suspended in time
Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from New York to Los Angeles to discover the top solo shows for December. From Francesco Clemente’s paintings, watercolors, and frescoes exploring the self and longings at Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York to Sabine Moritz’s abstract canvases capturing moments suspended in time at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, these are the shows that are not to be missed this month.
Francesco Clemente, Cigarette, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan
1. Francesco Clemente at Lévy Gorvy Dayan | New York
Journeying from Italy to India when he was 19 and settling in New York 10 years later, Francesco Clemente is one of the best examples of an artist who merges the philosophies of the East with the West in his representational art. Working in different poetic series conceived for an imaginary place, he forgoes a signature style to capture the sacred and the silent in hazy, transitional states. His “Summer Love in the Fall” exhibition presents new paintings, watercolors, and frescoes exploring the self and longings, with most of the pictures depicting the artist in symbolic, self-reflective situations. Painted alla prima, a painting technique in which wet paint is applied to wet paint in a single sitting, these new works spontaneously capture fluid, dreamlike moments made marvelously still.
Through December 21
Hiroki Tsukuda, Master of puppets, 2024. Photo: NANZUKA. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel.
2. Hiroki Tsukuda at Petzel | New York
Influenced by science fiction stories, video games, manga, and industrial sites, Japanese artist Hiroki Tsukuda creates digital collages with appropriated and fabricated imagery that he meticulously renders by hand with charcoal, acrylic ink, and pencil on paper. Colorblind since childhood, he constructs a monochromatic world for his phenomenal portraits of bionic characters, which he presents like giant Pokemon cards with rounded corners and silkscreened frames. Sampling eroticized bodies, ranging from scantily clad women and tattooed weightlifters to haphazardly assembled robots, the Tokyo-based artist frighteningly fuses them with pictures of prosthetics, motors, machines, and airplane parts. Likewise, his cyborg action figures, imaginatively fashioned from handcrafted and manufactured toy parts, are not to be missed in the gallery shop.
Through December 21
Kara Walker, The Enemy, 2024. Photo: Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
3. Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. | New York
Celebrated for her room-size installations exploring race, gender, sex, and slavery, Kara Walker has been making controversial art since her grad school days in the early 1990s at the Rhode Island School of Design. Through cut-out silhouettes, light installations, animated films, and hand-drawn works on paper, Walker has recalled the cruelty and violence of the Antebellum South while drawing parallels to contemporary issues like the plight of the New Orleans poor after the deluge of Hurricane Katrina. Her long but poignantly titled exhibition, “The High and Soft Laughter of the Nigger Wenches at Night, in the Colorless Light of Day,” features a new, dynamic body of colored watercolor and ink collages and mixed-media works on paper, alongside a series of bronze busts. Presenting collages of fragmented figures scattered across colossal white planes with smaller sketches of subjugated people caught in threatening situations, peppered with sublime sculptures of noble folk, the powerful show offers a troubling look at America’s terrifying past—deconstructing and illustrating a human condition that sadly persists.
Through December 14
Clementine Keith-Roach, Herm, 2024. Photo: Damian Griffiths. Courtesy Clementine Keith-Roach; Ben Hunter Gallery, London; and P·P·O·W, New York
4. Clementine Keith-Roach at P·P·O·W | New York
A British artist who lives on a rural farm outside of London, Clementine Keith-Roach worked as a set designer before turning to ceramics as her creative medium. Inspired by travels through Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East, she began collecting old terracotta urns, which she transforms by casting her body parts, covering the plaster cats with clay, and attaching them to the aged storage pots. Painting her physical parts to mimic the patina of the distressed vessels, she constructs a dialogue between the past and the present, connecting her laboring limbs with the Mediterranean urns, which were once utilitarian objects. Bodies and hands now support the old urns, evoking acts of collective care. In a related series of reliefs, which do not incorporate older objects but are painted to look equally aged, comforting hands cast from family and friends come together to form a compassionate community—a task that is timeless.
Through December 21
Cecilia Vicuña, La migranta, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of the artist.
5. Cecilia Vicuña at Lehmann Maupin | New York
A standout in the 2022 Venice Biennale and the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement that year, Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, and activist. Born in Chile and based in New York, the artist has experienced a lifetime of migration and witnessed the inhumane treatment immigrants face, which informs the work in her exhibition “La Migranta Blue Nipple.” Occupying all three gallery floors, the show features a series of new paintings, a selection of her Precario (Precarious) sculptures, and a suite of drawings. Large-scale portraits recreate drawings of Indigenous deities she discovered during a journey from Bogota to Rio de Janeiro in 1978, while a newer canvas confronts immigration along the Rio Grande, with a migrating butterfly crossing freely as people dangerously traverse the river below. With wall works and drawings upstairs and films on view on the lower level, Vicuña’s precarious NAUfraga ( (SHIPwreck) installation takes center stage. Featuring found materials and debris from the fisherman’s neighborhood of Venice suspended from the ceiling with thin white threads, the installation points to the instability of nature and life, a central theme of the artist’s meaningful work.
Through January 11
Hans Op de Beeck, Zhai-Liza ( mother's shoes), 2024. Photo: Courtesy Studio Hans Op de Beeck and Templon
6. Hans Op de Beeck at Templon | New York
A Belgian multidisciplinary artist, Hans Op de Beeck is widely known in Europe for his sensorial installations, monochromatic sculptures, drawings, and related paintings, photographs, films, and texts. Creating visual fictions large enough for visitors to enter and navigate, he presents a cast of symbolic characters and imaginary locales to construct metaphorical tales. His immersive “Whispered Tales” exhibition features 28 new representational sculptures, watercolors, and an animated film. Envisioned as a life-sized cabinet of curiosities, it evokes a sense of mystery as viewers walk through a colorless realm filled with fanciful figures and objects—both still and kinetic—from different periods and places. The first two rooms are like penetrable paintings, followed by two large landscapes that provide places to escape the world beyond the gallery. Finally, there is a room projecting his enchanting film, Vanishing Point, which allows the audience to momentarily drift away.
Through December 21
Sabine Moritz, Pacific (LA), 2024. Photo: Georgios Michaloudis. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
7. Sabine Moritz at Gagosian | Beverly Hills
Born in East Germany 20 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sabine Moritz has been creating coveted paintings, drawings, and prints based on personal memories, documentary imagery, and her direct surroundings even before earning a graduate degree from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1994. More recently, the Cologne-based artist has been making psychological landscapes, resulting from her deep observations to understand the world. Densely composed and rich in color, these abstract works reference the world’s current condition. Her “Frost” exhibition, the artist’s second solo show with the gallery and first on the West Coast, offers 15 new paintings of her memories and emotions made visible. Rendered by adding layer upon layer of color and form, Moritz’s paintings are grounded in the natural world, with each canvas capturing a moment suspended in time.
Through December 21
Walead Beshty, 3300 Block to 4400 Block, Union Pacific Avenue, between South Grande Vista Avenue and South Marianna Avenue, Los Angeles/Commerce, California, December 2020, 2024. Photo: Courtesy Regen Projects
8. Walead Beshty at Regen Projects | Los Angeles
A conceptual artist working in a wide array of materials and media, Walead Beshty is best known for his experimental photographic projects and copper and glass sculptures shipped and damaged/altered by FedEx. Born in London and based in Los Angeles, he studied at Bard College and received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2002. Since then, he has had more than 40 solo museum and gallery shows examining the matrix of production and circulation of art worldwide, with “Profit & Loss” being his fifth one-person exhibition with Regen Projects. Exploring issues related to migration and worth, Beshty is exhibiting photographs of improvised shelters and RVs inhabited by urban transients, altered banknote collages that redistribute the key features of the dollar bills, and mixed-media drawings on newspapers of cigarette butts and “bandit” street signs soliciting financial transactions of all sorts. On a larger scale, his inventive paintings and collaged wall-works take the ubiquitous street signs to a new level of being in your face.
Through December 21
Cover: Installation view, Francesco Clemente: Summer Love in the Fall, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York.
Photo: Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan
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