Rounding up the top gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from the East Coast to the West Coast with a stop in the Midwest to showcase the best solo shows for February. From Gregor Hildebrandt’s immersive installation of thousands of cut colored record tiles interpreting iconic stained-glass windows at Perrotin in New York and Lui Shtini’s anthropomorphic sculptures and paintings that blur the lines between abstraction and figuration at Chicago’s Corbett vs. Dempsey, to Rebecca Manson’s sculptures of butterfly wings and flowers made of thousands of hand-shaped, glazed porcelain pieces at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.
3. John Kelly | P·P·O·W, New York
An American performance and visual artist known for creating character-driven visual theater that combines dance, music, and song, John Kelly has remained a prominent presence in New York’s East Village art scene since the 1980s. Creating work that often dramatizes the lives of historical figures, social outsiders, and the artistic process, he has performed entire concert pieces as Joni Mitchell, produced a dance-theater piece based on the Viennese Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, and explored the life of Italian painter Caravaggio through song and video, among other intriguing performance works.
The exhibition “A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK” showcases his epic 182-panel hand-illustrated graphic memoir and a multi-channel video performance of the same name. Much of his work focuses on the AIDS epidemic, queer identity, and the development of self through art, highlighting the character-channeling artist’s use of historical and pop-culture personas to explore ideas of gender, truth, death, and the pursuit of creative identity. The graphic memoir—created between 2016 and 2025—retells a trapeze fall where he broke his neck, blending personal trauma with a reflection on lives lived fully despite estrangement, loneliness, and death.
Through February 21