Five Small-Gallery Exhibitions Worth Watching This Summer
A summer round of exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Brussels, Santa Monica, and Edinburgh is drawing attention to galleries that are still relatively young, but increasingly confident in their curatorial range. The presentations span American women artists, fantastical painting, textile-based sculpture, and meditative abstraction, with each show using a distinct material language to think about memory, labor, and form.
At Lincoln Glenn in New York, “Making Space: American Women Artists and the Century of Change” runs through Aug. 22 and brings together 25 women artists of the 20th century. The exhibition includes well-known names such as Louise Nevelson and Lee Bontecou alongside artists who deserve wider recognition, including Sonia Gechtoff and Nell Blaine. It is Lincoln Glenn’s third annual summer exhibition devoted to women artists, and one of its quiet revelations is Sally Michel Avery’s “Woman Recumbent” (1980), a nude rendered in clean, lucid passages of color. Avery, who was born in 1902, worked as an illustrator while painting throughout her life and remained closely linked to Milton Avery, her husband of nearly 40 years.
In Berlin, Migrant Bird Space is showing Ruoyu Gong’s “Le Premier Homme: After the Long Way Around, the Journey Begins” from July 18 to Aug. 18. Gong’s paintings combine flame-like abstractions with detailed, chimerical creatures, creating scenes that feel less apocalyptic than generative. In “Mountain Spirit” (2026), a hunched figure appears to study its own reflection, a small moment of self-recognition inside a larger, unsettled world. The exhibition title borrows from Albert Camus’s unfinished novel “Le Premier Homme,” though Gong’s work is less about plot than about origin, reflection, and the formation of a worldview.
At Galerie Sept in Brussels, “Failles” pairs Korean artist Lee Hyun Joung and German artist Joana Schneider through Aug. 30. The French word in the title can suggest fault lines or personal flaws, and both artists take that ambiguity seriously. Hyun Joung uses hanji paper and muk ink to build rhythmic drawings that bridge Korean aesthetics and contemporary abstraction. Schneider works with maritime rope, weaving large sculptures that evoke oyster beds, cellular structures, and other organic systems. Both artists rely on repetition, turning accumulated gesture into a record of time and labor.
Two additional exhibitions extend the same attention to material and atmosphere. Claire B. Cotts’s “Unfolding” is on view at Nüart Gallery in Santa Monica, California, through July 11, while David Quinn’s “Kyoto” is at &Gallery in Edinburgh through July 29. Quinn’s recent paintings draw on the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, while Cotts’s layered compositions move through recurring geometric motifs and soft, cushion-like forms. Taken together, the five shows suggest how much formal invention is happening outside the largest commercial centers — and how often it begins with galleries willing to take risks on artists still in the process of being fully seen.
