5 Standout Shows to See at Small Galleries in July 2024
In this monthly roundup, we shine the spotlight on five stellar exhibitions taking place at small and rising galleries.
Italian painter Agostino Iacurci is fascinated by the cyclorama, a 19th-century form of visual entertainment designed to immerse viewers in vast, panoramic scenes shown in circular spaces. Following its debut at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood in 2023, his latest exhibition adapts the artist’s graphic, blocky style to the walls of Robert Grunenberg’s more traditional gallery architecture. Central to the exhibition are motifs of the palm tree and cactus, which are shown in a flat, geometric style with crisp tones and satisfying symmetry, a stylistic twist on the chaotic immersion of the cyclorama. The same tall palm trees, in simple monochrome-like shadows, are also painted onto the gallery’s walls.
Iacurci’s work, which was also shown at M77 Gallery’s booth at miart recently, mostly consists of paintings and murals, often created in site-specific adaptations. For example, he recently collaborated with Hermès on the Hotel il Faubourg, a temporary Wes Anderson–esque hotel covered in bright, postmodern patterns where performances and concerts were held. He has worked with several other international brands, such as Apple, Adidas, and Herman Miller.
Born in 1994 in Pomfret, South Africa, Berlin-based painter Helena Uambembe pays homage to her father and uncles in her new show “On the site of the Okavango” at Galerie Anton Janizewski. In the ’70s and ’80s, her family lived in Buffalo, a military camp located on the southern bank of the Okavango River in what was then South West Africa. Her uncle, who fled the civil war in Angola, became responsible for guarding the crocodile-filled river, the border between Angola and Namibia.
In this exhibition, Uambembe reflects on the violent history of colonial geographies and the personal memories entwined with them. It features archival photographs, drawn on with charcoal and color pencils, as well as six watercolors that depict crocodile outlines with charcoal pencil, covered by fluid strokes of color. The exhibition also includes the installation Fountains from the common house (2024), consisting of bricks and buckets filled with water. This installation represents how communities without running water along the Okavango River retrieve water daily, a task made dangerous when high water levels attract crocodiles to the river banks.
Uambembe, who is a member of the collective Kutala Chopeto alongside partner Teresa Kutala Firmino, has recently had solo shows at MMK in Frankfurt and The Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts (CIRCA) in Cape Town.
Todd James spent his young adulthood tagging the streets and subways of New York City with his graffiti moniker, REAS, and creating album art and graphics for musicians like Beastie Boys and Mobb Deep. As the graffiti artist transitioned to painting on canvas, his style remained rooted in street art, in flat, polychromatic, almost collage-like compositions, which were included in the 2001 Venice Biennale. In his new show “Near and Dear” at Ross+Kramer Gallery, James has shifted into a new phase of his practice to depict intimate domestic settings in nine large-scale paintings.
The exhibition features richly saturated scenes of quiet interiors made with oil sticks and oil paint. These works are populated with familiar iconography for the artist, such as cats, teapots, chairs, and windows. Friends and Family (2024), for instance, is bathed in reds, greens, and blues, illustrating an empty, colorful house, a touching reflection on solitude and familiarity.
Painter Joshua Raz’s glistening, nearly unpopulated landscapes challenge how the world around us is meant to be interpreted. Living and working in London, Raz graduated with a fine arts degree from Newcastle University in 2016. The same year, the 31-year-old artist received the prestigious Hix Award. Since then, the artist has staged six solo exhibitions, including a 2022 show with Ronchini Gallery and a 2023 exhibition at Blue Shop Gallery in East London.
At Ronchini Gallery, the artist’s latest exhibition, “Mistaken Shores,” shows several hypnotic, fantastic landscapes, such as Hear, Said (2024), which depicts a psychedelic sunset over an ocean horizon rendered in luminous, swirling colors. This show transports the viewer into a starry world where the colors of natural or city scenes are illuminated and exaggerated, changing how we perceive these otherwise familiar landscapes. He often compares his paintings to language, an interpretation of the world around him. At Ronchini, building on this focus, Raz’s paintings are accompanied by a collection of poems written in response to the paintings in collaboration with poet Ben Ridley-Jones.
Everyone sees the world through a personal lens, shaped over the years by experience. At Galeria Fermay, “Space In Between” brings together three emerging artists—São Paulo–based Julia da Mota, Brussels-based Sebastien Pauwels, and Dutch artist Evi Vingerling—to explore how space is interpreted through their own personal viewpoint.
An MA graduate in visual poetics at the University of São Paulo, da Mota is inspired by the Brutalist architecture of her home city in her pale canvases with sharp geometric shapes. Meanwhile, Pauwels employs ordinary materials like cardboard and fiberglass to create futuristic sculptures, like the white abstract Passe muraille #3 (2023). Elsewhere, Vingerling, who lives and works in Amsterdam, renders simple landscapes stripped of the clutter of daily life, seeking emotional purity in the spaces she attempts to capture.
