Art
Maxwell Rabb
In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.
NUNU Fine Art, New York
Through Mar. 15
Artist Jill Downen often thinks about lightning. As a child, a lightning bolt struck their home, sparking an intense awareness of the body, architecture, and the vulnerability of both. Using building materials like plaster and concrete, Downen now explores this susceptibility in their practice. In the wall-based work Fissure (2024), for instance, a gold, lightning-like streak dramatically cuts through gray concrete. This work is part of the 30 plaster and concrete works Downen refers to as “reimagined drawings” featured in “Weightless” at NUNU Fine Art.
Each piece employs traditional wall construction methods, and many are cracked down the middle to reveal shimmering gold and lapis lazuli. A large, standout piece, Weeping Wall (2018–24), resembles a deteriorating plaster wall, revealing glimpses of gold leaf as if peeling away from the gallery wall. The plaster used in Gravity (2024), meanwhile, is layered, appearing to sag off its wall fixture.
A professor of sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute, Downen received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010. In recent years, Downen has presented solo exhibitions with Studios Inc, The Hown’s Den, and Bruno David Gallery, the latter of which represents the artist.
YveYANG GALLERY, New York
Through Mar. 1
As a child growing up in Chengdu, China, in the late 1990s, Xiang Huidi would watch bootleg DVDs of classic Disney films like Cinderella. Since then, she’s been fascinated by the scene in which animals craft Cinderella’s dress. Mice weave the needle and thread of the dress, while small blue birds tie the ribbons. Looking back now, the 29-year-old artist reinterprets this as a commentary on marginalized labor for her show “goes around in circles, til very, very dizzy” at YveYANG GALLERY. The back room of the gallery is turned into a human-scale version of the dressmaking scene. One work, got no time to dilly-dally (2024), features a giant sewing needle suspended from the ceiling, crafted from 3D-printed aluminum alloy, polyvinyl chloride, and carbon fiber PET-G.
Another standout triptych, there is nothing to it really (2024), depicts a fairy godmother–like figure with a sewing needle and thread dancing around in stitched together wood-and-resin panels.
With YveYANG Gallery, Xiang also presented another reimagination of Disney narratives at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2024. There, her defeated broom sculpture, magic burnout 魔法枯竭 (2024), was inspired by The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1940) and explores similar themes of labor and enchantment. This is the first solo exhibition for Xiang with the gallery in New York. Xiang, who is based in Brooklyn, holds an MFA in art from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA in architecture from Rice University.
Soluna Fine Art, Hong Kong
Through Mar. 8
To celebrate the start of the year, Hong Kong gallery Soluna Fine Art is mounting a nostalgic exhibition. “Re:Connect” features a body of work from eight artists previously shown at the gallery, celebrating the first seven years of the space. Among the artists shown is South Korean painter Park Yoon-Kyung, who hosted his first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2018, and is presenting his graffiti-style painting Endeavor (2022). Elsewhere, Kim Duck Yong is showing a series of wooden panel works adorned with mother-of-pearl that adds glittering texture to depictions of books on shelves.
A standout selection of paintings is presented by Spanish painter Javier León Pérez. His series “Where Stars Are Born” portrays nebulous mountain-like landscapes that burst with bright oranges and cool blues. Meanwhile, Sundoo Kim’s series “Daytime Stars” presents a less frenetic approach to nature, depicting flowers against star-speckled backdrops using ink and color pigment on Korean jangji paper.
As part of the show, Soluna Fine Art is also introducing two new ceramic artists to the program. Kim Ho-Jung creates ceramic vessels using a mixed molding technique, whereas Kang Min-Soo’s “Moon Jars” are made from white porcelain sourced from the Yanggu region in Korea.
Nina Johnson, Miami
Through Mar. 13
Each of Sara Siestreem’s “minion” sculptures is crowned with what the artist calls the “Aretha cap,” a ceramic dance cap named after Aretha Franklin. Draped beneath these crowns are strings of red abalone, glass beads, and plastic buttons, as well as strips of Japanese indigo-dyed and woven industrial cotton. According to the gallery, these minions are designed to resemble “protective beings,” with the domes serving to “protect women and young people.” Four of these minions are featured in the work fiesta, forever (blue nights and rattlesnakes) (2023–24), displayed on the walls of Nina Johnson’s library in Miami for her exhibition “yes/and (yellow is the medicine).”
A member of the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, Siestreem weaves traditional practices into her art, as seen in skyline (2024), a series of seven slip-cast ceramic baskets with a golden rim. Another piece, release the dead fire basket (2024), crafted from red cedar bark, sedge, and sweetgrass, pays homage to her community’s basket-weaving traditions while promoting modern-day healing, community building, and empowerment.
Siestreem, who earned an MFA from Pratt Institute in 2007, has hosted recent exhibitions at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in 2023 and Cristin Tierney in 2024.
Whitehouse Gallery, Brussels
Through Mar. 8
At first glance, Belgian artists Witold Vandenbroeck and Marie Zolamian make an unlikely pair. Vandenbroeck’s shadowy, industrial landscapes, filled with neon hues, starkly contrast with Zolamian’s enchanting fairytale scenes. Yet Whitehouse Gallery places these two artists in conversation, framing their divergent styles as a unified exploration of color and material. Drawing on Amy Sillman’s insights into the inseparable nature of color and paint—echoed in the dual meaning of the German word farbe—the exhibition picks up the similarities in the two artists’ methodology.
Vandenbroeck’s Generosity II (2024) captures industrial smokestacks under a haunting red glow, using a glue-size technique, further refined with gouache to achieve bold colors. In contrast to Vandenbroeck’s harsh industrial tone, Zolamian’s Sedition (2019) depicts two figures against a tranquil, natural landscape. However, she also uses glue size to prepare her canvases. This sets the foundation for her meticulous wet-on-wet oil painting technique. Her approach takes advantage of the slow-drying properties of the oil paint, enhancing its transparency and texture. Her works have an ethereal, haunting quality, a testament to this age-old painting practice.
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Maxwell Rabb
Maxwell Rabb is Artsy’s Staff Writer.
