5 Standout Shows to See at Small Galleries This February
In this monthly roundup, we shine the spotlight on five stellar exhibitions taking place at small and rising galleries worldwide.
Emerging Korean artist Kiwha Lee is inspired by ancient Asian printmaking. By reinvigorating these historical techniques, she creates beautiful, kaleidoscopic paintings. Her densely patterned canvases are subsequently bathed in several coats of pastels and bright paints to achieve a shimmering effect, playing with both traditional and contemporary aesthetics. These paintings are on view at Tribeca tastemaking gallery CHART for her first New York solo exhibition, “Light Punch.”
In her work, Lee emphasizes the materiality and malleability of paint. Inspired by her global travels, she also integrates elements of Chinese and Korean landscape painting with traditional Western art norms. Her paintings often resemble jali—an ornamental latticed screen that functions as a window—allowing light to pass through the layers. In works like Noble Discontent (2023), Lee employs textile resist techniques and architectural tiling patterns to add this depth to her canvas.
The term “spleen” was often used in the 19th century to describe a feeling of profound melancholy, a concept featured in Charles Baudelaire’s morose poem named after the organ. Inspired by Baudelaire, French painter Laure Mary-Couégnias created a series of oil paintings that visualize the poet’s introspective and somber themes. At Athens’s beloved Dio Horia gallery, her exhibition, correspondingly titled “Spleen,” invites viewers into a space to contemplate this existential dread.
Mary-Couégnias, who often paints these dreamlike still lifes, focuses on puzzling yet constrained settings. Inspired by René Magritte, the rising artist cultivates an ethereal, thought-provoking dialogue with the viewer in paintings such as Did Something Happen Here? (2024), which depicts an empty room with a hallucinatory window view and a floor made of water, all complete with a floating red paper boat. Still, this body of work departs from her previous style by incorporating human figures and origami motifs.
Her chosen palette of deep grays, blues, and pinks sets a contemplative mood reminiscent of works by filmmakers like Steve McQueen or Mike Leigh. In her second solo exhibition at the gallery, she prompts viewers to reflect on the ephemerality of life and the search for meaning within it.
Nikesha Breeze approaches historical restoration through paintings, sculpture, and photography in her solo exhibition “Black Archive,” at Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Breeze, an Assyrian and African American artist nominated to represent New Mexico in the National Museum of Women in the Arts’s “New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024” exhibition, engages historical narratives of Black Americans by integrating archival materials into her work, including antique stereographs depicting African American life in the late 1800s. Indeed, later this year, Breeze’s work will inaugurate the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama, alongside 26 other artists, including Theaster Gates and Rashid Johnson.
At Richard Levy, the centerpiece of her exhibition is the site-specific sculpture Land Effigy (2024), a humanoid figure made from bronze, bone, antler, cottonwood, cotton, wire, silk textile, roses, salt, black sunflower seeds, and birch on a bed of soil. This provocative sculpture brings together various organic and historical elements to symbolize the resilience and complexity of Black heritage and identity, ultimately reevaluating how these narratives are preserved and represented in contemporary art.
Living and working between Cape Town and Bergen, Norway, Oda Tungodden captures her personal memories of people and places in tender, often extremely colorful canvases. For her newest exhibition at 99 Loop Gallery, which represents the artist, Tungodden’s sun-drenched canvases are a tribute to the people that surround her. Unlike her more muted previous works, “All the Wisest Things I’ve Heard” is a bright celebration of those human connections.
These works, awash with yellow and orange hues, primarily focus on single individuals, many of whom are playing in or around a body of water. The numerically ordered series depicts expressive figures in motion (in II and IX, both 2024, for instance), as well as figures standing still—some in water against a lush green background. Throughout, the emerging 31-year-old artist evokes a palpable sense of affection towards her figures, who bask in the sunlight, taking pleasure in swimming on a summer afternoon.
Drawing on Simone Weil’s idea that attention is akin to prayer, “Ceremonies in Light” brings together the work of Berlin-based Maximilian Rödel and Brussels-based Julien Saudubray to explore this concept through luminous paintings. Presented by Carvalho Park in its newly expanded Brooklyn space, the exhibition invites viewers to experience bright, ethereal color palettes inspired by Weil’s ideas, where the act of observing art becomes a contemplative practice.
Making his New York debut, Saudubray presents several parallel sequences, including a selection from his “Watching” series. These works encourage prolonged observation, stacking shapes and colors to echo Weil’s call for sustained attention. Likewise, Rödel’s paintings, such as Steinhimmel (Stone Skies) III (2023), are canvases covered in radiant veils of color, where close attention reveals subtle movements in his brushstrokes. Taken together, these two bodies of work examine the spiritual dimensions of art.
