Art
Maxwell Rabb
In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.
Matèria, Rome
Through June 27th
On Medieval maps, uncharted territories were often marked with the phrase “Here be dragons”—a warning of peril and possibility. For Francisca Valador’s first solo show with Matèria, “A partir daqui só há dragões” (From here on, there are dragons), the Portuguese artist uses this phrase as a metaphor for the risks of perception and the uncertainty of how we see the world. Through layered collage works and small surreal paintings, she channels this sense of discovery by piecing together images that feel tactile yet enigmatic.
Behind a row of dim hanging lightbulbs, Valador presents a constellation of collage works made from carpet, stainless steel, bronze, and plaster. Salamandra (2025), for instance, is a collage of zigzagging steps with a cut-out lizard and a bronze dried seed pod arranged around them. These white carpet works are shown alongside a series of bright oil paintings on stainless steel, depicting surreal scenes of fruits, flowers, birds, and insects. With a two-tone backdrop of yellow and orange, Rest (2025) features a bone, a shell, a dried pod, and scattered black and pink forms. It’s a sparse, oddly flat composition, evoking a horizon line, a kind of still life in a desert terrain. By placing unexpected elements together, Valador makes familiar objects feel strange, inviting viewers to question what they think they see.
Valador studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, where she graduated in 2015. She lives and works in the Portuguese capital.
Canopy Collections, London
Through June 13th
In Emerson Pullman’s figurative works, the artist layers thinned oil paint, which is applied and then partially removed in careful gestures. Faces fade, bodies are interrupted, and the surrounding interiors dissolve, each made up of colorful flicks of paint against a sharp white background. In “What was left behind” at Canopy Collections, Pullman explores the fleeting nature of memory in a series of new intimate figurative paintings.
In works like Wherever I Am and Nicolás (all works 2025), Pullman presents close-ups of half-rendered subjects who appear to turn inward or away, their expressions unresolved, as if caught mid-thought. The figures in Feels Like You’re Here Again and I Can’t Find It, But I Know It’s Here are more clearly visible, yet the surfaces around them dissolve into swaths of orange, teal, and violet. Pullman’s painterly language—spare, gestural, and often leaving areas of the canvas untouched—invites the viewer to imagine what’s missing. “I leave out a lot of visual context in my work, because I like to leave the viewer to fill in the gaps and impart their own narrative to the scene in front of them,” the artist said in an interview with the gallery.
Based in London, Pullman graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Leeds Arts University in 2020 before graduating with a master’s degree in 2022 from City and Guilds of London Art School. His first solo exhibition was mounted by New Normal Projects in London in 2023.
Ronchini Gallery, London
Through June 27th
Jacob Hashimoto’s wall-mounted collages are composed of hundreds of disks made from paper and bamboo sourced from a kite maker in China. Each is a suspended, three-dimensional sculptural system. Constructed from layers of circular “kites,” as he calls the disks, attached to short wooden dowels, these intricate pieces create mesmerizing colors, patterns, and shadows. A selection of these collages appears in “Analogue Death, etc.” at Ronchini Gallery.
In The Keystone (all works 2025), rows of graphic motifs, like pink plaid grids and green geometric patterns, stack into a cascading, three-dimensional wall work. As the viewer moves around the mesmerizing piece, it shifts from rigid geometry to visual overload. Hashimoto’s process is deeply precise, using different sizes of kites to create hypnotic grids that can also be disorienting. Catastrophic Failure, for instance, features kites in a more chaotic arrangement. Patterns oscillate across the surface—some evoking pixelated distortions, others recalling oceanic horizons. Despite their meticulous construction, these works are difficult to interpret in one go, echoing the unstable flow of our perception.
A resident of Ossining, New York, Hashimoto graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. He presented four solo exhibitions in 2024 at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Miles McEnery Gallery in New York, Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas, and Galerie Forsblom in Helsinki.
Ferrara Showman Gallery, New Orleans
Through July 19
Alexander Stolin grew up near the banks of the Dnipro River in Kyiv and now lives near the Mississippi River in New Orleans. Despite their distance, these two places are united by that panoramic waterfront horizon. Stolin draws on these similarities, using rivers as a symbol for his personal journey from the Soviet Union (as it was then) to the United States. For instance, in Old and New (2024), a sweeping diptych of the New Orleans waterfront, translucent ship schematics are superimposed on the surface of a riverside scene. The paintings capture rivers as a place of travel but evoke his own longing, as they juxtapose his experiences in his homeland and adopted home. This diptych is a key work in his second show with Ferrara Showman Gallery “CHER пам’ять : DEAR MEMORY.”
In these works, Stolin also reflects on his role as a parent, and many explore how history and values are passed from one generation to the next. History Lessons (2024) centers on a young boy surrounded by toy knights and a castle made from alphabet blocks arranged to spell the words “Cold,” “War,” and “Peace.” “For myself, starting a family and becoming a parent in a new country initiated a lifetime journey and reconciliation of my own memories and experiences from growing up in very different social and cultural circumstances,” he wrote in an artist statement.
Stolin received a masters of fine arts from the State Institute of Art in Kyiv in 1988 before immigrating to the United States, eventually settling in Louisiana. His first show with Ferrara Showman Gallery was held in 2022. He has presented shows with Marguerite Oestricher Fine Arts and Taylor Bercier Fine Art in New Orleans.
Marc Straus, New York
June 19–Jul. 25
How do you build with precision while leaving room for imperfections to lead the way? This is the question that the two artists grapple with in the latest show at Marc Straus. New York–based artist Caleb Weiss creates frenetic abstract paintings that are collaged with newspaper and layered in streaks of pigment, distorting the original meaning of the paper by superimposing the colorful geometric forms. These are shown alongside Brooklyn-based designer Luke Malaney’s hand-carved wooden furniture. By working in different media, both artists embrace the irregularities that emerge through their distinct approaches. Each practice treats art as a process that is actively shaped by error and intuition.
Weiss’s Untitled (2024) consists of a grid of torn newspaper, over which crimson and yellow pigment has been applied with brushes and sponges. From a distance, the painting evokes modernist façades, but up close, its fragile surface reveals a process of layering and revision. This is juxtaposed with the idiosyncratic structure of Malaney’s furniture. For instance, Rocking Chair (2025) is a fully usable yet playful chair made from ash, maple, and cherry wood. The legs bend unexpectedly, and its wooden pieces are carved into bulbous forms adorned with visible chisel marks. Curious, beautiful, and oddly compelling, these works gesture to the power of instinct in how artists work.
MR
Maxwell Rabb
Maxwell Rabb is Artsy’s Staff Writer.
