Five Small-Gallery Exhibitions to Know Now, From London to Chicago
A door cut into a blank wall can feel like an invitation or a warning. In Spanish artist Ramón Enrich’s (b. 1968) paintings, those openings puncture sun-bleached courtyards and flattened facades, turning architecture into a quiet riddle. Enrich is one of several artists currently getting a focused spotlight in a new wave of exhibitions at smaller and rising galleries, where experimentation and material intelligence often take center stage.
In London, Cadogan Gallery is presenting Enrich’s solo exhibition “Dos Verds | Un Blau” through April 25. The show gathers his geometry-driven scenes: pared-back buildings, hard-edged shadows, and empty plazas that read like stage sets for an event that never arrives. Works such as “PORTA 3” (2026) tighten the frame around a single entryway that juts from a larger structure, its scale sharpened by an oval, blade-like tree. “CNALB 2” (2026) pulls back to reveal a more labyrinthine complex, a maze of planes and passages that heightens the sense of dislocation.
Enrich has been candid about the source of that tension. “My true passion is architecture,” he has said, describing painting as a looser arena where he can invent impossible atmospheres, including landscapes “illuminated by two or three suns.” The remark helps explain the peculiar light in these canvases: muted, late-day palettes that suggest heat held in stone, with shadows that fall like measured cuts.
Born near Barcelona, Enrich studied at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona before graduating in graphic arts at Gremi d’Arts Grafiques de Catalunya in 1990. In the 1990s, he moved to New York and worked as Julian Schnabel’s assistant, an experience that sits in the background of his current practice as a reminder of painting’s physicality even when the image is rigorously controlled. More recently, he has had solo exhibitions at Cadogan’s Milan location in 2025 and at Singapore’s Richard Koh Fine Art in 2024.
Elsewhere, an online presentation underscores how materially inventive small-gallery programming can be. Galerie P6 Berlin is showing Indian artist Sumit Mehndiratta’s “Nailed-It” through May 2, a tightly edited selection of his geometric textile wall sculptures. Mehndiratta is largely self-taught and describes his practice as driven by improvisation and the pleasure of pattern-making. In the “Nailed-It” series, he places nails into teak wood panels with meticulous precision, then weaves multicolored textiles through them to build optical rhythms that hover between drawing, relief, and textile tradition.
In “Nailed It series no. 160” (2021), three V-shaped peaks anchor a waveform of neon yellow, pink, green, and orange, the color stacking into a kind of engineered vibration. “Nailed It series no. 180” (2025) shifts the mood: grayscale fibers form a contorted shape that recalls battered metal, as if the work were translating industrial stress into soft material. Mehndiratta’s path into art runs through fashion — he earned a master’s degree in fashion marketing from Manchester Metropolitan University — and he held a solo show at Paris’s galerie bruno massa in 2023.
In Chicago, Joy Machine is introducing Korean artist Janny Baek in her debut solo exhibition “Life Forms,” on view through May 9. Baek’s ceramics arrive in candy-bright hues that flirt with the cute before tipping into something stranger: bulbous, reef-like bodies, protrusions that read as eyes, and surfaces that suggest mutation as much as ornament. “Flower Power” (2024) exemplifies that push-pull, with an undulating blue skin and small, emblematic details — a red heart, a single eye — that make the sculpture feel both playful and faintly unsettling.
Baek builds these forms using nerikomi, a Japanese pottery technique in which colored clays are layered to create striated patterns that run through the body of the work rather than sitting on top as glaze. For Baek, gradients become a way to think about “natural processes,” a conceptual frame that suits objects that look as if they’re mid-evolution.
Taken together, these exhibitions point to a familiar truth in the contemporary ecosystem: some of the most precise, risk-friendly work is often found in smaller programs — where a painter can turn architecture into a metaphysical puzzle, a textile relief can behave like a drawing in space, and ceramics can carry both sweetness and unease in the same breath.
Exhibitions:
• Ramón Enrich, “Dos Verds | Un Blau,” Cadogan Gallery, London — through April 25
• Sumit Mehndiratta, “Nailed-It,” Galerie P6 Berlin (online) — through May 2
• Janny Baek, “Life Forms,” Joy Machine, Chicago — through May 9
