5 Standout Shows at Small Galleries to Discover This July
Sculpture by Bela Silva in “Spazio Nobile At Home - Plein Air, Summer Group Exhibition,” Tervuren, Belgium, 2023. Courtesy of Spazio Nobile.
Abbey Golden, installation view of “Golden Age of Fluidity” at LAUREN POWELL PROJECTS, Los Angeles, 2023. Courtesy of LAUREN POWELL PROJECTS.
In this monthly roundup, we shine the spotlight on five stellar exhibitions taking place at small and rising galleries in five cities worldwide.
“Spazio Nobile At Home - Plein Air, Summer Group Exhibition”
Spazio Nobile, Tervuren, Belgium
June 17–September 17
Sculptures by Päivi Rintaniemi in “Spazio Nobile At Home - Plein Air, Summer Group Exhibition,” Tervuren, Belgium, 2023. Courtesy of Spazio Nobile.
Sculptures by Amy Hilton and in “Spazio Nobile At Home - Plein Air, Summer Group Exhibition,” Tervuren, Belgium, 2023. Courtesy of Spazio Nobile.
This summer, Brussels–based gallery Spazio Nobile has taken its dynamic art and design program into the stunning private home of its co-founders and directors, Lise Coirier and Gian Giuseppe Simeone. Located on the outskirts of Brussels and accessible by appointment, the exhibition fills their 20th-century Art Nouveau home with sculptures, works on paper, design objects, and photography, plus a vast array of sculptures installed across its gardens.
With works by some 40 artists, the exhibition offers an extensive look into the Belgian gallery’s rich program and the founders’ distinctive vision, while also giving a rare glimpse into what living with such works could look like. Highlights include ceramics by Lisa Hellrup, Päivi Rintaniemi, and Ann Beate Tempelhaug; the impressive marble work of Sébastien Caporusso; and dazzling sculptures in the garden by Fabian Von Spreckelsen, Kiki van Eijk, Amy Hilton, and Bela Silva, among others.
Abbey Golden, installation view of “Golden Age of Fluidity” at LAUREN POWELL PROJECTS, Los Angeles, 2023. Courtesy of LAUREN POWELL PROJECTS.
In this new series of figurative paintings, Los Angeles–based painter Abbey Golden shares her personal experiences with identity and sexuality, using water as a metaphor for fluidity. “Coming of age in suburbia during [the] early aughts felt like a sexually repressive time,” Golden explained. “Sexuality and identity were binary, and anything astray would lead to a terrifying and lonely otherness. In this context, the backyard pool represented wealth and hushed late-night rendezvous; the trying on of different skins and identities. Natural bodies of water were often gathering grounds magnetically pulling everyone together, yet the moment you dive into the deep end…total isolation.”
The 20 oil paintings on view, created over the past three years, portray figures submerged in water or by the sea, their bodies and faces distorted by washes of aqua and blue or illuminated by the water’s reflective light. In several striking works, the protagonists’ eyes are just above the surface, gazing at the viewer intently. In the exhibition essay, Cintra Wilson writes: “Golden’s strengths in this series are her own fluidities—her empathy, which enables her to throw her feelings, her non-binary sexuality, and her egalitarianism into new floating bodies.”
Installation view of “MY KID COULD DO IT” at La Bibi Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 2023. Courtesy of La Bibi Gallery.
As the title suggests, La Bibi Gallery’s current summer group show toys with the age-old belief that much of modern and contemporary art looks as though it could have been created by children. And while this notion is certainly not new, the show’s curator Ludovica Capobianco has picked up on a trend that has been particularly pronounced in recent years: contemporary artists returning to the primal ideals of the 20th-century faux-naïf artists and embracing the raw, energetic aesthetics typically found in children’s drawings.
The featured works come from a range of artists, from familiar names who are synonymous with this style, including Katherine Bernhardt, Szabolcs Bozó, and Felix Treadwell, to emerging artists like Manu García, Christina Sucgang, and Marco Paul Lorenzetti.
“Between” brings together two promising painters with distinctive practices and backgrounds, but a mutual interest in portraying distance and boundaries through their work.
The Arkansas-born, Brooklyn-based artist Lee Maxey considers the distance between the mundane and the mystical in her work. Influenced by her upbringing in a Christian fundamentalist household, she transforms everyday slices of life—like an iron railing before a bright blue sky, or a dying bush beside a brick building—into spectral, foreboding scenes. She paints in egg tempera, a medium commonly associated with medieval religious paintings with persuasive intentions. “My work highlights the pervasive unease that can come with seeing signs of a larger ‘plan’ in the everyday, while also demonstrating that the ordinary world is a plenty interesting place to exist without outsize meaning,” Maxey explained. “The paintings of this show continue my task of highlighting how highly personalized (and fraught) perception is.”
The Tokyo-based Chinese artist Bo Yang is interested in the distance between popular culture and our everyday lives. The artist’s enigmatic, intriguing works draw on the products of popular culture—music, fashion, social media, celebrity, and brands—and how they influence us. Several new heart-shaped works riff on the “like” icon on Instagram and other social media sites, and the way it’s become an ingrained part of everyday life. Several works also feature the word “mood,” in response to the way our mental state, more than logic, may drive our actions.
Murray Clarke, Sunday Morning (2023) in “STRIPES” at La Causa Gallery, Madrid, 2023. Courtesy of La Causa Gallery.
This playful summer group show takes its inspiration from the striped garments that are often worn in the warmer months. This simple premise brings together a wide range of figurative painters; some have subtly incorporated stripes into their work, while others paint their figures in bold bands of color.
Highlights include a dazzling painting by the rising British artist Murray Clarke, featuring a figure repeated three times across the canvas, wearing perfectly matching blue-and-white pajamas, rendered in painstaking detail. Notable, too, are the warm, sundrenched paintings of Moritz Moll, in which women in sunglasses and striped clothes relax in glowing orange environs.
