5 Standout Shows to See at Small Galleries in May 2025

Art

Maxwell Rabb

In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.

Francis Gallery, Los Angeles

Through July 12

South Korean artist Jessica Woo Jung Ghil describes her painting technique as a form of engraving: She pushes at least eight thin washes of oil into coarse linen with forceful brushwork. This process embeds pigment deep into the weave to produce hazy, atmospheric colors that appear both etched into and suspended above the painting’s surface. This month, a selection of new and older works is on display at Francis Gallery in Los Angeles, titled “Condensation of Memories.”

Many of these works feature an ovoid shape. In Reclaim XII (2025), for instance, a soft blue egg is cradled by a gray landscape, whereas Savouring Silence II (2022) transforms the same shape into a portal through which the viewer can see a distant, hazy landscape. Meanwhile, Eternal State of Mind (2024) features a pearl-like shape, framed by a scallop shell halo, evoking Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (ca. 1486). For Ghil, each work embodies a personal emotional quality. “I really want to visualise how I feel about myself inside—hence why my work is like an inner self portrait,” she said in an interview.

Based in London, Ghil received her master’s in painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023. The artist, who was born in 1992, recently presented her first solo show in the U.K. with Kearsey & Gold.

Isabel Croxatto Galería, Santiago

Through May 24

Joaquín Reyes began his career as a video artist, studying at Finis Terrae University in Chile, but a formative experience assisting painter Ismael Frigerio—and later studying under Natalia Babarovic—led him to pursue painting. Reyes’s background in cinema lends his latest body of work a charged theatricality through vividly patterned paintings with flatly portrayed figures and faces at odd, sometimes humorous, angles. A selection of these works is on view in “Mirar Desde Frente” at Santiago’s Isabel Croxatto Galería.

Reyes always starts his paintings by standing directly in front of the canvas with his arm at a right angle, repeating gestures outward from the center in opposing directions to create a patterned background. His subjects are drifting bodies and disembodied heads in countryside or suburban scenes, reminiscent of those of David Hockney. In En el Campo (2024), a man in a blue jumpsuit pets a cow, while Gloria (2024) depicts a woman sunbathing with eight sets of hands appearing to hold her up on a striped blanket. Reyes’s surreal paintings often interject perpendicular figures among crowds of kaleidoscopically clothed figures, as seen in Cielo estrellado (2024).

The Santiago-based artist graduated from Finis Terrae University in Chile with a BA in visual arts. His work has been featured in shows at the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, the National Library of Buenos Aires, and Savvy Contemporary in Berlin.

Astra Art, Shanghai

Through June 29

In the Greek myth of Orpheus, the titular poet descends into the underworld to retrieve his lost love, only to lose her again by glancing back too soon. Over time, this fateful turn has become a lasting image of the boundary between life and death. “Reflection of Orpheus” at Astra Art in Shanghai gathers four artists whose works echo these liminal states through painting, sculpture, and installation.

Chinese artist Pang Bin’s blue-toned painting, Return, O Return! (2023), stages a corridor that recedes toward a window, beyond which a lone white horse stands. The composition suggests a passage between worlds. Meanwhile, Tang Linglong’s An Elusive Twinkle (2024) features a faceless figure swarmed by glaring spectral beasts with piercing white eyes. In both works, the figures appear volatile, as if they could suddenly wake up from these melancholic nightmares.

These haunting paintings are accompanied by Jansword Zhu’s video installations, mounted on the wall in tubular stainless steel frames. Please allow me flicker When You Call My Name (2025) features a digital video that moves abstract forms from right to left, off-screen. The work references the Orpheus myth’s central tension—between presence and disappearance—in a mechanical, ghost-like way.

THE TAGLI, London

Through June 1

In Heeyoung Noh’s paintings, the Korean ritual of Ttaemiri—a vigorous exfoliation practice performed in communal bathhouses—is a metaphor for inherited trauma and the uneasy relationship between care and pain. This is perhaps the most evident in A Mother and Her Daughter (2024), an oil painting depicting two women staring at one another and holding hands in a bath. These intimate paintings of bathing rituals are the core of her solo show “Submerged Attachment” at THE TAGLI.

The centerpiece of Noh’s exhibition is Ttaemiri series (2023), a collection of 13 oil paintings on small wood panels depicting disembodied parts of a female body, arranged almost anatomically. There is, however, no face, as in many of her anonymized, figurative works. Here, she references the alienation of being a Korean woman living abroad: In works like Face 4 and Face 5 (both 2025), the subject’s skin appears to be inflamed and covered in water droplets, with facial features reduced or obscured—conveying the way diasporic identity can feel incomplete.

An MFA graduate from the Glasgow School of Art, Noh hosted her first solo exhibition at Salt Space in Glasgow in 2023. She was the recipient of the Tagli Mentorship Award in 2024.

Hurst Contemporary, London

Through May 28

“A Third Hand” at London’s Hurst Contemporary is named after a quote from Philip Guston: “Everyone who creates anything knows there is a moment when a third hand is doing it.” Here, the American artist was referencing the importance of artists allowing intuition, accident, and external forces to shape their art. This six-person group show offers a study in improvisation—focusing on works that embrace uncertainty and allow process to take precedent.

In Phoenix Wind (2025), South Korean painter Ji Won Cha channels sweeping arcs of color—turquoise, ochre, crimson—into a layered abstraction. Thin, transparent washes intersect with looping brushstrokes and scattered dots, creating a sense of energy just on the verge of dispersal. The painting feels guided more by rhythm than by plan, embodying “a loss of control,” as she has described it. Meanwhile, Paul Verdell’s Butterfly As Landscape (2024) features gestural lines in deep crimson and earthy pinks against a backdrop of bright yellow, blue, and ochre. A crimson line resembles a half-buried butterfly form, but reads less as a literal image and more as the artist’s painterly instinct.

Mounted on a stand in the middle of the gallery floor, Julia Bennett’s After Devastating Each Hallowed Haunted Landscape, Still We Ask The Earth Why She Weeps (2025) consists of woven canvases painted with clay and earthy pigments. The painting features a checkered structure in which individual squares form a disjointed mosaic, proving that geometry, too, allows for artistic surprises.