Nianxin Li, Gentle touch, 2025
Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie journeyed from New York to Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to discover the top solo shows for April. From emerging painter Dustin Emory’s double show of voyeuristic visual narratives at Fredericks & Freiser and Margot Samel in New York to Sophie Calle’s look back at projects that failed at Fraenkel in San Francisco, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.
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3. Nianxin Li at Harper’s Apartment | New York
Born in China and educated in Florence and New York, where she earned her MFA from the New York School of Visual Arts in 2023, Nianxin Li paints surreal scenarios featuring everyday objects and organisms. Exploring family relationships, gender roles, and societal norms, the New York-based artist expresses her emotions and experiences through vibrant, seductive colors and forms. She transforms candies, snails, fruits, flowers, and shells into curvilinear shapes that interact with one another, staging intimate scenes, often on a grand scale. In her solo show, titled MacGuffin, the shells and flowers in her sublime selection of paintings and drawings do precisely what the title implies: they trigger a plot. Suggestive of shifting shapes and body parts, they embrace and softly touch, yet at other times, they pull away.
Through April 26—Paul Laster