Acausality #13, 2025
Dario Maglionico
Antonio Colombo
In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.
Zé Tepedino
“Keep This Between Us”
Ysasi Gallery, Los Angeles
Through Apr. 28
Sem título, 2025
Zé Tepedino
Ysasi Gallery
garupa, 2026
Zé Tepedino
Ysasi Gallery
Brazilian artist Zé Tepedino’s upcycled artworks made a splash at last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach. His hotly awaited stateside debut finally opened at Ysasi Gallery during Frieze Los Angeles last month.
Tepedino traveled from Rio de Janeiro to install the show, collaging the inside of the gallery’s windows with pages from old books to create an aura of mystery from the outside and a sense of intimacy within. The artworks on view demonstrate Tepedino’s material range—he’s known for repurposing found rubber, sails, beach bags, and more into wall-hanging relics like Sem título (2025) and garupa (2026). In the process, Tepedino reasserts the poetic, rather than functional, possibilities of everyday objects. Some works were shipped from Tepedino’s studio; others he made on site, placing Rio in conversation with L.A.
The whole show centers on an unedited film Tepedino shot at Brazil’s world-renowned Carnival with a handheld camera, since this year’s edition coincided with his exhibition’s opening. Ysasi Gallery’s portion is one in a two-part presentation with Brazilian design platform ESPASSO, which hosted an artist talk ahead of the opening.
Alejandra España
“TUNNEL AND THE GLIMPSE”
CAM Galería, Mexico City
Through Apr. 10
Mar de sal, 2026
Alejandra España
CAM Galería
La montaña también es universo, 2026
Alejandra España
CAM Galería
Human perception typically emphasizes objects, or positive space, rather than the negative space surrounding them. Mexico City–based artist Alejandra España is inverting this tendency by harnessing the recognizable motif of the tunnel and the light at its end. In her latest wall-hanging collages, these tunnels are dark swaths of cut paper. Their lights are glistening 24-karat gold leaf.
These collages cluster throughout CAM Galería, punctuated by several oil and chalk paintings like Mar de sal (2026), a transcendent natural scene which also evokes an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud. España’s more figurative scenes offer a kind of visual key to her comparatively opaque collages, which are the most complex additions yet in a body of work she’s pursued for nearly 15 years, inspired by Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell. Ceramic vases embossed with birds, moths, and other fauna anchor the lineup of works, with help from a large triptych reprising their critters. “The exhibition proposes an interconnected vision of existence,” CAM Galería stated in a press text. For España, that means positive and negative space—light and dark—are one.
Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov
“A Rough Cut”
BBA Gallery, Berlin
Through April 18, 2026
Sofa, 2024
Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov
BBA Gallery
It’s impossible to experience all of Berlin in a week. Nevertheless, the artist twins Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov have attempted to condense their hometown of 15 years into a single show. BBA Gallery, situated in the duo’s own neighborhood, provides a fitting venue for such a love letter.
The Petschatnikovs’ forthcoming exhibition, named for the first, choppy draft of a film, encompasses several disparate series of their acclaimed hyperrealistic oil paintings. “A Rough Cut” will feature numerous examples from their “Cardboard Furniture” series, crafted “as both still lifes and landscapes,” the twins stated. Massive renditions of discarded seating like Sofa (2024) will accompany these, offering indirect portraits of their former owners. Glistening portrayals of leaves will appear as well, alongside a 2023 series in which the twins painted crumpled calendar pages from 2032, treating the future “as a discarded relic of the past,” per the gallery.
Graffiti, which figures in several pieces, is specific to any given city. Still, the playful simplicity permeating the Petschatnikovs’ paintings proves universal. The artists, who call themselves “anthropologists of the ordinary,” have discovered an infinite store of inspiration on Berlin’s streets.
Emilie Houldsworth
“Chiaroscuro”
PARRI BLANK, Stuttgart, Germany
Through Mar. 13
After Reni, Bologna, 2025
Emilie Houldsworth
PARRI BLANK
Co-op Isle 2, 2025
Emilie Houldsworth
PARRI BLANK
Velvet meets steel in the sumptuous artworks of London-based artist Emilie Houldsworth, who’s closing out her first-ever solo show on mainland Europe. Houldsworth has brought together sculptures and textiles in this manner since earning her MA from the prestigious Royal College of Art in 2023. Her works portray digital imperfections using a labor-intensive process inspired by the underground dance beats that Bristol, England, where she was born, is known for. After screenshotting glitches that she witnessed while scrolling photos on her phone, Houldsworth developed an algorithm “that generates patterns from randomly selected pixels, fragmenting the image into coded structures,” according to the gallery. These patterns plot her abstract topographies of richly-hued velvet.
The works in “Chiaroscuro,” though, wield newfound drama. Houldsworth made most of them while participating in Italy’s esteemed Palazzo Monti residency last year. Both the 13th-century palazzo and the city of Brescia, Italy, beyond bear scores of historic frescoes. Houldsworth has turned their cinematic scenes into sparse segments of color, divided by steel traces. For example, After Reni, Bologna (2025) trades the artist’s more signature jewel tones for the brooding palettes of Italian Baroque legend Guido Reni, melting his moving scene into something minimal and obscure, suited to contemporary culture’s muddled cacophony.
Dario Maglionico
“Dis-sequenze liminali/Liminal de-sequences”
Colombo’s Gallery, Milan
Through April 3
Reificazione #95, 2025
Dario Maglionico
Antonio Colombo
Since 1998, art dealer Antonio Colombo has brought a fresh perspective to Milan’s storied art scene, showing contemporary Italian artists like El Gato Chimney and Zio Ziegler, American stars like Jacob Hashimoto and Barry McGee, and even musical legends like Moby and Daniel Johnston. In 2017, Colombo gave self-taught Neapolitan painter Dario Maglionico his first Milanese solo show. Now, to mark the gallery’s rebrand—featuring a new gallery name, logo, and website—the newly-minted Colombo’s Gallery is presenting Maglionico’s latest body of work in its project room.
This exhibition, curated by critic, journalist, and professor Arianna Baldoni, centers on Reificazione #95 (2025), a large, enigmatic oil painting that depicts a stylish woman alone at a dinner table. Her face remains hidden—she’s peering at the floating stool, caged jellyfish, and clones of her reflection in the warped surface behind it all. Maglionico has honed his surreal style for nearly a decade. Last year, he was shortlisted for the annual Premio Cairo—a leading prize for ascendant Italian artists, which has been previously awarded to talents like Giulia Cenci and Paolo Bini. The resulting series emphasizes Maglionico’s emergent experiments with mirrors. The results are electric, haunting, tantalizing.
