In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.
Instead of a brush, Marco Emmanuele grips a spatula to create his paintings, spreading a mixture of glass and sand across the canvas to form textured surfaces. One of his most ambitious iterations of this technique is ISO #250 (2025), the centerpiece of “Palmo Panorama” at LABS Contemporary Art. This work stretches across five panels in sweeping, abstract bands of blue and earth tones that shift like light moving over terrain.
In front of ISO #250, Emmanuele has placed five aluminum sculptures, each shaped after the profile of a different 20th-century Italian poet’s face. These are created by pressing laser-cut iron plates into sand to carve their silhouettes, which are then cast in aluminum. These works point to a practice rooted in mapping identity onto physical materials.
Based in Rome, Emmanuele started painting after studying engineering and architecture in Catania, Italy. His recent solo shows have been presented by Daniele Agostini Gallery in 2023, LABS Contemporary Art in 2022, and Operativa arte contemporanea in 2021.
Anuk Rocha studied at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris before working in the fashion industry for Maison Martin Margiela and Croatian designer Damir Doma. Although she left the fashion world behind, clothing remains central to her figurative paintings, gesturing to the works’ most important themes. A selection of these paintings is part of the German artist’s solo show with Nibelungen Gallery, “A Place Beyond Her Eyes.” She depicts stoic figures in bold attire, from the scarlet-toned outfit of Red Velvet (2024) to the blue floral dress of Jasmina (2025). “[Clothes] are symbolic of what I’m trying to convey and often reappear in my work,” Rocha has said.
Rocha refers to her works as “patchwork portraits,” drawn from several memories rather than one source image. Here, garments act as the primary markers of identity. Each figure is relatively unemotive; instead, the narrative relies on the clothing depicted, which even provides the titles of the works. The yellow headscarf in Babushka (2025) creates a sense of protection, whereas the bird-patterned robe in The Crane Kimono (2024) conveys a more poised, ornamental grace.
Her paintings have been featured in group shows around Europe, including at Helsinki’s Delphian Gallery in 2024 and Paris’s Cohle Gallery in 2023.
Titled after part of Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel about post-independence disillusionment, “The Beautyful Ones” at DADA Gallery presents Black artists’ visions of a more hopeful future. This show inaugurates the gallery’s new permanent location in Lagos.
The gallery brings together six artists—Nigerian artist Yagazie Emezi, British painter Sahara Longe, Brazilian artist Silvana Mendes, American painter Taylor Simmons, Brazilian painter Larissa de Souza, and Austrian Nigerian sculptor Ebako Ugbodu—whose works approach identity and memory from different angles.
Simmons, an Artsy Vanguard 2025 alum, paints Black men with loose, expressive brushwork and saturated tones, as in FOUND PHOTO HANDSOME YOUNG BLACK MAN FASHION (2023). Mendes overlays photographic portraiture with symbolic gold motifs, as in her digital collage Iemanjá (2023), where a serene, moonlit figure is adorned with sculptural forms that reference Afro Brazilian spiritual iconography. Together, these artists show how Black life can be seen on its own terms.
After years in corporate graphic design, Carolin Kreutzer channels her training into minimalist, geometric paintings concerned with structure and spatial tension. A series of new works, known as her “Unfolding” series, explores how a single plane can tilt, overlap, or rotate to create subtle spatial shifts. These are the subjects of her debut solo exhibition with Escat Gallery in Barcelona.
For instance, Unfolding 3 (2025) shows a brown form folded in on itself, overlapping to create a new interior edge. Elsewhere, the artist reveals these subtle movements in diptychs, including Unfolding 5, 10 (2025), where the same shade of blue is folded in on itself in different variations. These studies support the artist’s idea that “shapes, colors, and spaces interact, much like people do.” The artist wrote on the gallery website: “It’s about finding balance and harmony while leaving room for individuality and freedom.”
Kreutzer lives near Stuttgart in southern Germany, where she established her own studio practice. The artist completed a master’s degree in media from the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. in 2006.
Pan-frying eggs, a shimmering soap bubble on a kitchen counter, and a close-up of flower stems in a vase are just a few subjects of 13 new paintings in Brad Nelson’s latest solo show. “Bubble” at New York’s Frosch&Co mostly focuses on the American artist’s photorealistic still lifes, alongside one sculpted brick.
Nelson selects his subjects from the moments and objects that serendipitously enter his life. “I’m interested in exploring how a daily ritual or rhythm can bring me things that are at times outside my sphere of control,” the artist once said. One of three paintings that reference the show’s name, Large Bubble (2025) is a delicate depiction of a glossy soap bubble. At any moment, the object might pop and disappear, evoking a sense of ephemerality. Nelson treats each of his subjects as if they might suddenly vanish as fast as they appeared.
Nelson is now represented by Frosch&Co, where he has previously presented four of his solo exhibitions. Nelson graduated with a master’s in art from Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2000. He has also staged a solo exhibition with Massachusetts-based gallery Room 68 in 2022.
Update: This article has been updated to reflect that the artist previously known as Cameron Ugbodu now goes by the name Ebako.
