At the Artnet Gallery Network, it’s our goal to discover new artists each and every month. We search through the thousands of talented artists on our site to select a few we find particularly intriguing right now.

Last March, the busy-in-spring art world abruptly shuttered up. One year later, it’s slowly starting to plan toward some semblance of normalcy (masks still included for time being). Amid the many new shows, we’ve chosen six artists working in Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and beyond who we’re watching this month. Check them out below. 

Ayana V. Jackson at Baudoin Lebon 

Ayana V. Jackson, Anarcha (2017). Courtesy of Baudoin Lebon.

American artist Ayana V. Jackson’s photographs explore colonialism’s impact on the history of photography. Presenting Black women dressed in styles that reference 19th- and early 20th-century fashions, these images reference, directly or obliquely, canonical paintings, early photography, and colonial archival images. The evocative images often possess the intimate feeling of daguerreotypes, while reorienting the relationships between photographer, subject, and viewer. In doing so, Jackson raises questions of race, gender, and reproduction in the history of the medium.

Garance Vallée in “Portrait de Famille,” Carvalho Park

Garance Vallee, Tripod. Courtesy of Carvalho Park.

In this first exhibition Paris-based artist, designer and architect, Garance Vallée in the United States, presents a series of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that capture the artist’s distinct, unforgettable visual language. Her Surrealistic interior spaces teeter between representation and abstract, precise shapes while toying with volume and silhouette.

Shai Azoulay in “Building Bridges” at Galerie Stefan Vogdt

Shai Azoulay, Folk (2014). Courtesy of Galerie Stefan Vogdt.

Jerusalem-based artist Shai Azoulay fills his paintings with narrative scenarios that buzz with the intimacy of everyday life, whether it’s a scene of someone watering plants or the cluttered interior of a studio. “My work outstandingly ranges between drawing to painting, between the fluent to the inarticulate, the sophisticated to the naïve, and between the omnipotent to the limited,” the artist has said of his practice. Azoulay has shown in Israel and the US extensively: In 2011, he had his first major museum show at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art and, in 2018, he had a major solo show at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Kate Barbee at Kohn Gallery

Kate Barbee, Brush Fire (2020). Courtesy of Kohn Gallery.

Los Angeles-based, Dallas-born artist Kate Barbee creates expressive, wildly colorful large-scale paintings filled with tumbling human figures amid domestic settings. To make her works, Barbee often starts out drawing onto the canvas on her studio floor. The works end with Barbee sometimes sewing patches of fabric or discarded canvases onto the new works. 

Barbee’s latest works, “Feral Floral,” are currently on view with Kohn Gallery and were made entirely during the pandemic. Here, the tangles of her figures’ forms are interspersed with houseplants, ceramics, and the various nicknacks of a home. At times, the works capture the energy of the German Expressionist, other times the dreaminess of Marc Chagall’s atmospheric scenes, but are filled with a very contemporary sense of longing. 

Kendell Geers in “OrnAmenTum’EtKriMen” at M77 Gallery

Kendell Geers, Les Fleures du mal 1318. Courtesy of M77 Gallery.

This is the last month to see South African artist Kendell Geers’s lavishly, even aggressively, detailed long-term exhibition at Milan’s M77 Gallery. The show takes its name from Adolf Loos’s seminal 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” which argued against the decorative use of ornament in architecture as excessive indulgence. The essay would be fundamental in the development of Minimalist architectural trends, including the white-cube gallery setting. Here, Geers dramatically intervenes into the gallery space, incorporating elements of installation art, video, sculpture, and painting to visually disrupt convention and juxtapose disparate materials, intense colors, and bold patterns in an ornamentally decadent and intentionally provocative way.

Rosie Ranauro in “Grow More Eyes” at LaMontagne Gallery

Rosie Ranauro, Your Vision is Clear. Courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery.

Interdisciplinary artist Rosie Ranauro’s canvases assume a bodily presence—figures appear to chat and interact across canvases as they shift in and out of focus. At times there is a ghostly feel to her works, and certainly the themes Ranauro addresses are serious: grief and healing. But a deep faith and budding sense of renewal underscore the images and seem to say that spring is on the way.