We held on, we said "so long, it's time to begin again", 2026
Renée Estée
COMA
In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.
Nayan Patel
“Object Permanence”
NEVEN, London
Through Feb. 28
Hallucination II, 2025
Nayan Patel
NEVEN
Nayan Patel’s debut solo show at East London’s trendy NEVEN gallery spans sculpture, typography, and woven paper, echoing Pop art and Op art at various moments and across various scales.
The whole affair is named for a foundational phenomenon in childhood development—the knowledge that things still exist even while out of sight. But “Object Permanence” holds multiple meanings. The show started taking shape, for example, as the London-based artist dreamt of Aotearoa, New Zealand, his rapidly urbanizing homeland. Patel found himself wondering whether he could ever truly return to the place he knew, or if it had transformed too much. The checkered patterns of his woven paper works evoke object permanence as well. Even when you can’t see their strands, they’re still there. Beneath two of these sits Guillotine (2025), a large steel feather evoking both the artist’s paper-cutting process and New Zealand’s embattled Wildlife Act of 1953.
Meanwhile, Patel’s new text-based drawings portray words with each letter in its own distinctive font, disrupting the terms’ meanings—thus turning language into image. These politically and personally charged reflections raise fascinating points in the context of quantum theory, which challenges our basic assumptions about the certainty in the world around us. Is object permanence real, or merely learned?
Abraham Lacalle
“Contraluz”
VETA by Fer Francés, Madrid
Through Feb. 14
Naufragio, 2025
Abraham Lacalle
VETA by Fer Francés
With five decades of painting and scores of institutional exhibitions on his CV, Abraham Lacalle ranks amongst Spain’s leading living painters. “Contraluz” (which translates to “backlit”) is his fourth show at VETA, which is operated by curator Fer Francés, who included Lacalle in his buzzy Truck Art Project.
Lacalle’s paintings continue evolving, in both subject matter and style. Nature’s lawless side has proven a perennial muse. Here, Lacalle’s efforts look thicker, simpler, though no less dynamic, leaning into the artist’s long-running Fauvist tendencies. Domestic elements like a quaint hut and saddled horse highlight how domesticity and wilderness coexist. The wide, white-walled gallery displaying the series is dim, with dramatic spotlights trained on each sizable canvas—emphasizing the viewer’s sense of reaching a captivating clearing.
Oddities arise amid these sylvan thickets. A recurring bent tree trunk, for instance, appears eerily anthropomorphic. In Naufragio (2025), freshly felled timber echoes a capsized boat half sunk in a vivid green pond. Imagine if these woods could speak. According to a statement from the gallery, Lacalle’s love for nature’s chaos constitutes “a struggle against the hegemony of light.”
Andre Barker
“Rest Is”
M Contemporary Art, Detroit
Through Feb. 14
Clark Kent Waiting to Be…, 2025
Andre Barker
M Contemporary Art
Ready for the Weekend, 2025
Andre Barker
M Contemporary Art
Several recent studies on neuroaesthetics proclaim the health benefits of looking at art. Of course, it’s not hard to imagine that beholding Andre Barker’s debut solo show at his hometown’s M Contemporary Art gallery would produce a calming effect. Laid-back people populate the sunny space, honoring Black culture at ease.
Barker only began considering art as a career path in 2021. He earned an MFA from Columbia College Chicago three years later. Since then, he rapidly honed a recognizable style of Black portraiture charged with chiaroscuro and symbolism “to capture a feeling of the poetic weirdness of the Black Experience through the lens of Afro-Surrealism,” according to Barker’s biography.
The faces in “Rest Is” capture a particularly wide spectrum of relaxation. In Clark Kent waiting to be…(2025), a young man resembling the artist, wearing a paint-streaked apron over a Superman T-shirt, loses himself to tunes in his headphones. Ready for the Weekend (2025) immortalizes a timeless “TGIF” brow furrow.Barker painted all of these bold acrylic scenes last year—except for Unbothered (2026), which features a fierce figure wearing orange shades, big jeans, and cowboy boots savoring a snack. In all of these works, Barker leaves his cityscape background scenery simply sketched out, so it reads like background noise. Indeed, rest is radical, and with a bit of conviction, abundant.
“The World As Glass”
COMA, Sydney
Through Feb. 21
That which is the same, 2025
Justin Williams
COMA
A good group show needs a strong central premise. This month, 10 of Australia’s hottest artists convene at COMA, which anchors The Harbour City’s bustling art scene in an old coffee warehouse. Here, they unpack “how a layering of the act of presenting fact provides multiple points for reality to fracture and shatter,” per the gallery. In other words, is consensual reality actually real?
As an exhibition, this conversation takes the shape of a multidimensional wonderland filled with characters. A motley crew congregates around an ambiguous drama in That which is the same(2025). It’s a frenzied canvas, even by the standards of the colorful Santa Fe, New Mexico–based folk painter Justin Williams, who Esquire Australia called “one of the most significant Australian figurative painters working right now.” In a separate screening room, a family poses sternly in I am remembering (2024), a single-channel video by ascendant Fijian Australian artist Shivanjani Lal. Standout sculptures offer active settings. Hard and soft meet in the sinuous, silicone, and stainless steel blooms of As I stagnate, I ponder silent waters (2024) by Melbourne and Adelaide–based sculptor Steven Bellosguardo. Meanwhile, Sydney-based artist Anna May Kirk’s crystalline chandelier Whale Fall (II) (2025) suspends ocean water in hand-blown glass. Endless stories arise from these works, unsettling the notion of truth.of the most significant Australian figurative painters working right now.” In a separate screening room, a family poses sternly in I am remembering (2024), a single-channel video by ascendant Fijian Australian artist Shivanjani Lal. Standout sculptures offer active settings. Hard and soft meet in the sinuous, silicone, and stainless steel blooms of As I stagnate, I ponder silent waters (2024) by Melbourne and Adelaide–based sculptor Steven Bellosguardo. Meanwhile, Sydney-based artist Anna May Kirk’s crystalline chandelier Whale Fall (II) (2025) suspends ocean water in hand- blown glass. Endless stories arise from these works, unsettling the notion of truth.
Ileana Alarcón
“From The Earth”
Kouri + Corrao Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Through Feb. 21
You Are Nature, Too, 2025
Ileana Alarcón
Kouri + Corrao Gallery
Candelabra I, 2025
Ileana Alarcón
Kouri + Corrao Gallery
Two years ago, sculptor Ileana Alarcón’s debut exhibition at Kouri + Corrao Gallery highlighted the artist’s design bent, offering bright furnishings like standing screens and seating made from wood, foam, paper pulp, and more.
The comparatively miniature ceramics in Alarcón’s latest show mark a serious switchup. Sure, “From the Earth” has its practical pieces, but this time they bear earthier tones, more archetypal of magical realism. The tiled Moss Table (2025) provides a usable surface, punctuated by a patch of moss with legs fashioned from a bike frame. A wooden mirror embellished with ceramic script lilts, “You are nature.” Eight pieces even sing—little clay figurines from a tarantula to New Mexico’s state bird, the Roadrunner, function as whistles, inspired by Alarcón’s study of pre-Columbian Andean and Mesoamerican sculpture.
Like this, the exhibition wrests spirituality from organized religion, and recenters it on the Earth. In one area, floral candelabras, moss towers, and other little sculptures cluster atop clean, white plinths. A blankly smiling sun sculpture shines from the wall above. In an Instagram post about the work, Alarcón recounts asking her father why they had to go to church. “I think god is more likely to be outside with the trees and the flowers, not inside a building,” she declared.
