Small-Gallery March Shows Spotlight Carnival Film, Berlin Street Lore, and Baroque Shadows
March’s most persuasive gallery-hopping isn’t always found under the brightest institutional lights. A handful of small spaces are using the month to stage tightly focused presentations that feel both local and outward-looking — from a handheld film shot inside Brazil’s Carnival to paintings that treat a future calendar as already weathered history.
At Ysasi Gallery, Tepedino anchors his exhibition with an unedited film he shot at Brazil’s world-renowned Carnival. The timing is part of the point: this year’s Carnival coincided with the show’s opening, and the artist filmed with a handheld camera, keeping the footage immediate and unvarnished. Around that central moving-image work, Tepedino extends his interest in the poetic potential of everyday objects, pushing them away from utility and toward a more lyrical, associative register.
The presentation also carries a geographic charge. Some works arrived from Tepedino’s studio, while others were produced on site, setting up a conversation between Rio and Los Angeles. Ysasi Gallery’s portion forms one half of a two-part collaboration with Brazilian design platform ESPASSO, which hosted an artist talk ahead of the opening — a reminder that design and contemporary art often share a common language of material intelligence.
Elsewhere this March, Alejandra España brings forward a body of work that underscores the long arc of her collage practice, which she has pursued for nearly 15 years. The show pairs figurative scenes with her most intricate collages to date, using representation as a kind of entry point into compositions that can otherwise read as deliberately oblique. The result is a presentation that rewards sustained looking: images that feel at once legible and withheld, as if meaning is being assembled in real time.
The Petschatnikovs, who describe themselves as “anthropologists of the ordinary,” turn to the street as both archive and studio. Their paintings incorporate graffiti that is specific to particular cities, even as the work’s buoyant directness travels easily across contexts. In one 2023 series, the artists painted crumpled calendar pages from 2032, treating the future, as the gallery puts it, “as a discarded relic of the past.” It’s a small conceptual twist with a lingering aftertaste: time rendered as something already handled, folded, and thrown away.
A darker, more theatrical mood arrives with Emilie Houldsworth, who shifts away from her more familiar jewel-toned sensibility toward the brooding palettes associated with Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni. The centerpiece is a large oil painting: a stylish woman sits alone at a dinner table, her face obscured as she confronts a scene of quiet surrealism — a floating stool, a caged jellyfish, and repeated reflections that multiply in a warped surface behind her.
That interest in optical instability also animates Maglionico’s recent work. After being shortlisted last year for the annual Premio Cairo — a major prize for emerging Italian artists that has previously recognized figures such as Giulia Cenci and Paolo Bini — he has sharpened a series of experiments with mirrors. The new paintings lean into reflection as both subject and structure, using the device to complicate space, identity, and the viewer’s own position in front of the image.
Taken together, these March shows make a case for the small gallery as a laboratory: a place where artists can test ideas at close range, and where viewers can encounter ambitious work without the buffering scale of a museum. The month’s strongest presentations don’t just offer variety — they propose distinct ways of seeing, from street-level observation to Baroque shadow and the glare of a mirror.
