Art
Maxwell Rabb
In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.
Family photographs are turned into fragile glass sculptures in Ali Tahayori’s “Archive of Longing,” a solo exhibition probing how memory ripples across generations. Drawing on an inherited trove of images, the Sydney-based artist enlarges and reprints them on glass before fracturing and reassembling the surfaces. These sculptural reliefs reanimate her personal history, interrogating what is lost in translation and over time.
Tahayori’s work is linked to the Persian mirror craft Āine-Kāri, where finely cut mirrors and glass create geometric or calligraphic forms. The black-and-white works also reference 19th-century photography techniques such as daguerreotypes. For instance, Untitled 9 (2024) features the body of a woman sitting with her arms crossed on a chair. The broken yet luminous glass plane embodies the contradiction in these potent family memories; they are simultaneously sharp and fragile. Each scene is rendered again in Tahayori’s careful treatment of these images, as she attempts to piece together her personal history through each sculpture.
Tahayori holds a doctorate in medicine and an MFA in photomedia from the National Art School. In 2024, she won the Burwood Art Prize, one of the most significant awards in Australia.
There is a lyrical quality to Canadian artist Michael Batty’s abstract, geometrically arranged paintings. Often described by the artist as “visual haikus,” his “Tone Poem” series combines nine color swatches into harmonious grid-like compositions. In his latest online exhibition, Batty introduces his “Ladders” series alongside the “Tone Poems.” These minimalist works stack blocks of pigment in vertical sequences that suggest both architectural scaffolds and musical notation. Each composition incorporates the surrounding negative space, so that the wall itself becomes part of the work.
While Batty’s practice is grounded in a rigorous study of color theory, these new works carry the spontaneity of improvisation. “Ladders” function like scores, their patterned repetitions ranging from muted earths to sharp neons, punctuated by subtle shifts that suggest syncopation or tonal variation. In the 10-part wall piece Ladders-In Four (2025), bands of green-yellow and ochre punctuate the work like notes in a scale, distributed with measured cadence. With this body of work, Batty extends his ongoing inquiry into the poetry of color and structure, using pared-down forms to generate unexpected, lyrical and visual rhythms.
Batty’s work is featured in collections across North America, including the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Fine Art at the University of Las Vegas and The Art Institute of Capilano College in North Vancouver.
Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica, California
Through Sep. 29
Three decades after Robert Berman Gallery first introduced Los Angeles audiences to William S. Burroughs’s gestural abstract paintings, the gallery returns with “REDUX 1995–2025,” a survey that reconsiders the Beat writer’s visual experiments. Originally shown in the 1995 exhibition “Concrete and Buckshot,” Burroughs’s works feature several unruly techniques, including spray paint, gestural abstract markings, and, occasionally, shotgun blasts. Among the featured work will be the “Seven Deadly Sins” series—seven screenprints and woodcuts, each representing a deadly sin, that were made from wood blocks that the artist shot with a shotgun.
The exhibition also positions Burroughs’s paintings within the avant-garde context shaped by his contemporaries. Alongside his canvases, viewers encounter a photographic tribute to Burroughs and his peers: rare silkscreens by American filmmaker Dennis Hopper and portraits by Christopher Felver, John Colao, and fellow Beat writer Allen Ginsberg. “REDUX” reveals Burroughs as a restless experimenter, not only in his writing, but also in his artistic practice through his rebellious, manic paintings.
Chilean painter Pablo Benzo’s paintings revel in ambiguity. It’s not clear what’s happening, for example, in And Then She Did What She Did (all works 2025), where a fleshy sofa evokes a reclining body. Nor in Vestige Of An Imagined Encounter, where trippy paintings populate the walls of a bright room. These illusory scenes are part of the artist’s New York debut solo show, “Time Traveller And Other Fragile Detours,”at The Hole. This suite of surreal interiors includes five new paintings and six additional works on paper.
Benzo took cues from Peggy Guggenheim’s legendary 1940s gallery Art of This Century, which had a roster of Surrealist and Cubist artists who inspired Benzo. His illusory canvases—rendered in muted greens, pinks, and blues—reimagine interiors that he recalls from memory as playful, shifting environments that unsettle perception. These works echo the disorienting impact of Guggenheim’s exhibitions of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. “I’m constantly searching for balance: between abstraction and figuration, softness and structure, silence and suggestion,” he said in a press release.
Now based in Berlin, Benzo studied graphic design at the University of Chile. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Galeria NAC in Chile and Steve Turner in Los Angeles.
Talismans and reliquaries fill the gallery walls for Beth Krensky’s “The Trees Will Love You and the Earth Will Hold You” at Material in Salt Lake City. For instance, her “Plant Talisman” series features 13 bronze plaques etched with small poetic phrases and images of plants, then finished with 23-karat gold leaf.
Much of Krensky’s practice engages with this sense of spiritual collection and transformation. In Keys to Open the Beginning Before the End (2025), 60 antique skeleton keys are adorned with materials gathered from oceans to city streets, such as feathers or pinecones, in an electroplating process, in which thin metal layers connect the objects. Encased in a commercial display case, these keys play on ideas of what has been lost and hint at what might be salvaged. “These remnants have been alchemized into ritual objects through reverence, love, and perhaps a little magic,” Krensky said in a statement.
Accompanying the exhibition is what Krensky calls “The Store of Wishes,” an evolving collection of objects gathered or crafted across decades and continents. Modeled on Cabinets of Curiosities, it functions as an archive and an emporium. Visitors will be able to purchase items, including hand-made wands, such as Wish (2025), made from driftwood from Port Orford, Oregon.
Based in Utah, Krensky is a professor of art at the University of Utah. She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. In 2022, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music mounted a 20-year retrospective for Krensky, titled “Between Spirit and Matter.”
MR
Maxwell Rabb
Maxwell Rabb (Max) is a writer. Before joining Artsy in October 2023, he obtained an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Georgia. Outside of Artsy, his bylines include the Washington Post, i-D, and the Chicago Reader. He lives in New York City, by way of Atlanta, New Orleans, and Chicago.
