In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.
Dutch artist Justus de Rode studied the writings of 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt to create his new cyanotypes. Drawing on Humboldt’s 1808 travelogue Ansichten der Natur, which he translated for the title of the exhibition, de Rode uses von Humboldt’s ideas as starting points for his artworks. Using cyanotype—a process associated with botanical research—he tones the prints with natural tannins. His subjects, ranging from mushrooms to dogs, appear with varying degrees of abstraction. These muted, haunting works comprise “Views of Nature” at Open Doors Gallery.
In the show, the Amsterdam-based artist also presents several cyanotypes in which the setting remains legible, as in We left the cave at nightfall (2025), which depicts a rocky floor receding into a dark, cavernous depth. Elsewhere, de Rode narrows his focus to animals and insects: In the cracked bark of trees (2025) offers an intimate view of an insect, rendered within a mystical, sparkling environment. Other works move in the opposite direction, deliberately obscuring their imagery and giving way to more expressive, tempestuous compositions, such as the storm-like abstraction In the early days of our planet (2024).
De Rode completed his master’s degree in film and photographic studies at Leiden University in 2022. His photography frequently turns to nature and organic forms to evoke emotions.
Gwen Evans recasts ordinary domestic scenes as subtly destabilized spaces in her dreamy paintings. In a recent interview with artist David Hancock, Evans revealed she wants to “provoke a sense of unease in the viewer,” echoing Sigmund Freud’s description of the uncanny as “a class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” In “The Space Between” at Monti8, Evans explores this tension by rendering day-to-day activities with surprising distortions or haunting encounters, unsettling the viewer.
In Visitor (2025), an oil painting, a woman holding a basket faces a haunting silhouette partially concealed behind a patterned blanket billowing on a clothesline. The scene creates a horror-movie sense of foreboding, as the obscured figure seems to hide in plain sight. Many of her works focus on domestic frames, whether that’s the opening of a kitchen cabinet in the crayon-on-paper work Impasse (2025) or a stained glass window in Threshold (2025), where a ghostly figure peers through the sunlit aperture. Across these works, Evans captures the fleeting moments where strange, otherworldly elements can enter our personal space.
Based in Manchester, United Kingdom, Evans graduated from the Manchester School of Art in 2019. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at William Hine Gallery in London and HOME in Manchester.
Working in dense, accumulated layers, South African artist Sera Holland treats paint as a physical material to be built up in three dimensions. After studying graphic design at Stellenbosch University, Holland lived and worked in Dublin before returning to Cape Town, where she ran a textile design business for a decade prior to refocusing on painting. Her background in textile design shapes the four bodies of highly textured, mostly color-soaked impasto paintings on view in her first solo show at Cape Town’s THEFOURTH, “Kaleidoscope.”
Holland’s “Chromatopography” series presents thickly sculpted abstract surfaces with large ridges and folds intended to catch shifting light. Meanwhile, her “Tapestry” works adopt the logic of weaving, building abstract images through smaller, layered, thread-like marks, reminiscent of cloth. “Monochromania” limits her color palette to foreground texture, occasionally using gold leaf to dot the white or black surfaces. Lastly, the “Onomatopoeia” series repurposes leftover studio paint into instinctive, disordered canvases, reminiscent of used palettes.
What happens when the background of an artwork is just as important as the foreground? “Figure in the Field,” curated by Brooklyn painter Jan Dickey at New York’s Morgan Lehman Gallery, brings together nine artists who draw attention to the background as an active part of the image. The exhibition shows how each of the nine painters negotiate the relationship between figure and field differently.
New York–based artist Dan Gausman’s Volaris Vortex (2025) uses professional tennis-court paint on concrete in a work that redraws court lines into spiraling arcs. Here, he turns the playing surface itself, usually seen as a backdrop, into the primary subject. Meanwhile, French painter Claire Nicolet’s Nocturne: What the Bee Has Seen(2023) depicts stylized plants and clouds in layered blues, flattening the landscape almost as if it were a pattern. On the other hand, American artist Amy MacKay lets the background consume her figure. A Loving Embrace(2025) consists of layered pastel oil paint that depicts two translucent figures, which seem to appear gradually within the surrounding color field rather than standing apart from it.
Many of the sculptures in Concetta Modica and Ignazio Mortellaro’s two-person exhibition, “All Fall Down,” appear perpetually on the verge of collapse. Works are placed onto the ground, suspended in the air, or leaning precariously on the wall, leaving most of the white walls at Palermo’s Francesco Pantaleone bare. The entire exhibition shows this perilous balance, where metal rods lean and golden sculptures float in the gallery space.
Works such as Mortellaro’s nella carne dei giorni (2016), composed of brass and iron rods, and Modica’s Testimone (2026), a bronze-cast rod suspended between two stone blocks and held by a rope, emphasize fragility through their unstable arrangements and material contrasts. One of the standout works of the exhibition is Modica’s composizione intrepida – fearless composition (2025), a steel structure rising 5-and-a-half feet and fitted with four ceramic elements. Three of these—shaped like a teapot, a lamb, and what resembles a smushed brain—hang at different heights. Here, the exhibition’s title is made literal. For these artists, falling evokes the inevitability of time, with each object caught in action before an inevitable release.
