5 Standout Exhibits to See at Small Galleries in March 2025

On this month-to-month roundup, we highlight 5 stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.

DREI, Cologne

Via Apr. 12

In German artist Mira Mann’s Cinémathèque Moranbong (2025), two Kodak Carousel slide projectors show pictures of North Korean dancer Ahn Seung-hee performing a standard “swords” dance. Initially captured by French photojournalist Chris Marker throughout his 1958 go to to North Korea, these pictures have been reinterpreted by Mann, who used magnifying glasses to {photograph} the small print. Offered in a twin projection slideshow, the projections simulate the dancer’s actions. This work is the guts of Mann’s exhibition “Solo” at DREI.

Many works in Mann’s exhibition are associated to the performances and affect of Choi Seung-hee, the mom of Ahn and a world-famous Korean dancer. Via the usage of electrical motors and expertise, Mann’s kinetic sculptures resonate with the motion of dance. As an example, Poison Fan (2025) options two brightly coloured followers hooked up to motorized windshield wipers, evoking the normal Korean buchaechum fan dances. In the meantime, Solitary Dancer (2025)—a chunk combining a gong, intercourse toys, a microphone, a speaker, and a movement detector—underscores the auditory expertise of bodily motion, amplifying the sounds of the gong all through the gallery.

Born in 1993 in Frankfurt, Germany, Mann at the moment lives and works in Düsseldorf. Final 12 months, their work was a standout within the fifteenth Gwangju Biennale in Korea. The artist is the recipient of the Peter Mertes Stipend 2025, which can culminate in a solo exhibition on the Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn, Germany.

Maybaum Gallery, San Francisco

Via Mar. 13

Hundreds of rolled-up, hand-dyed mulberry papers make up the intricate wall works of South Korean artist Ilhwa Kim. She meticulously arranges these tubes of paper, which she endearingly refers to as “seeds,” to create textural, rippling colour fields that jut out from the wall. A brand new sequence of those kaleidoscopic assemblages includes her first solo exhibition with Maybaum Gallery in San Francisco, titled “The Geographic.”

From a distance, Kim’s Geographic Matter (2024), an summary assortment of purple, blue, teal, inexperienced, and yellow hues surrounded by undyed white papers, could possibly be mistaken for a frantic summary portray. Up shut, the various sizes of the mulberry papers create a three-dimensional work that ebbs and flows, mimicking the undulating contours of a topographic map. “I create artworks that mix sculpture and portray in an effort to discover the richness, dynamism, and depth of sensory expertise on canvas,” Kim mentioned in a assertion. “These layered, entangled, and ever-evolving sensory experiences, taking place in a world outlined by nature’s infinite potentialities, are what I attempt to seize in my works.”

An MFA graduate from Hongik College in Seoul, Kim has beforehand held solo exhibitions on the Home of Fantastic Artwork in London and several other venues throughout South Korea, together with Gallery Okay and Insa Artwork Heart.

Swivel Gallery, New York

Via Mar. 22

Every of the three artists featured in Swivel Gallery’s Tribeca group present, “Interspecies: New Situations Of Symbiotic Coexistence,” probes the intersection of expertise and human life. Alien sculptures, from Italian artist Camilla Alberti’s “The Alchemy of Melted Our bodies” sequence, are constructed from twisted pigmented plaster and cellulose-based modeling paste. Suspended inside their lengthy, sharp metal legs is a lichen pattern contained in glass, drawing a juxtaposition between natural and artificial supplies.

Surrounding the sculptures are summary work by New York–based mostly artist Anastasia Komar. Her work options sinuous, root-like constructions fabricated from silver electroplated polymer that entwine across the canvas. Striatum II (2024), for instance, illustrates this method with a canvas of undulating blue brushtrokes framed by tentacle-like silver limbs.

The center of the exhibition is Shanghai-based painter Bai Yiyi’s Crowds Drift With The Wind, Progressively Dissipating Like A Whisper (2024), measuring roughly 10 ft by 13 ft. This sprawling colour subject includes frenetic, distorted imagery, from fields of flowers to disparate eyeballs. This huge-scale work captures the chaotic essence of the digital age, the place the relentless inflow of data overwhelms our senses.

L’Atelier 21, Casablanca

Via Mar. 22

The Casablanca Aquarium shuttered within the Nineteen Eighties, but its legacy has remained embedded within the Moroccan metropolis’s cultural material. The historic web site is now the topic of Mohamed Fariji’s “L’aquarium imaginaire, épisode #2” at close by artwork area L’Atelier 21. Since 2012, Fariji has championed the aquarium’s legacy, now doing so by means of a brand new physique of labor that pays homage to its authentic ceramic installations.

Fariji has crafted replicas of the marine-inspired ceramic murals that had been initially proven on the aquarium utilizing cardboard, resin, and copper on wooden. For instance, Les requins qui dansent IV (2024) options stylized shark kinds in opposition to an emerald-green mosaic. In the meantime, Les prédateurs des abysses I (2024) contains a geometric sawfish amongst an advanced design consisting of a whole lot of small inexperienced, orange, and white squares. By reviving the aquarium’s inside aesthetics, the artist intends to faucet into the town’s historical past.

“I’ve been diving into the archives of this collective reminiscence, looking for what has been forgotten and erased by the waves of time,” he mentioned in a assertion. “My challenge will not be restricted to the rehabilitation of an deserted place; it aspires to recreate what has been misplaced and to offer a second life to this aquarium.”

Born in Casablanca in 1966, Fariji is the co-founder and director of Atelier de l’Observatoire, an artwork and analysis area devoted to uplifting inventive tasks in Morocco. He studied on the Nationwide Institute of Fantastic Arts in Tétouan, Morocco, and the Llotja College of Artwork and Design in Barcelona.

sangheeut, Seoul

Via Mar. 29