Shows to See This Summer, According to Ocula

As the northern hemisphere continues on its way through a record-breaking summer, this month brings us an intriguing cast of exhibitions across the continents: reinterpretations of a classic work by Hieronymus Bosch, creative explorations of blindness, first-time shows, and career surveys. Here are 11 of the must-sees among Ocula’s member galleries, as picked out by our team.

1. Kaoru Ueda (4 June–26 July 2025) at Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles

Japanese ‘superrealist’ Kaoru Ueda is showing at L.A.’s Nonaka-Hill until 26 July, offering Angelenos and visitors the chance to experience his unique brand of the realistically unrealistic.

Ueda uses photo negatives as the starting point for hand-painted images, rendering clearly depicted micro-worlds of quotidian objects in daydream colour palettes. The result is a sui generis mix of hyperrealism and psychedelia.

2. Anca Munteanu Rimnic, Treatise on Bruises (6 June–26 July 2025) at Galeria Plan B, Berlin

Berlin’s Galeria Plan B is running the second solo exhibition by Romanian-born artist Anca Munteanu Rimnic until 26 July.

Munteanu Rimnic uses bronze and marble sculpture, laser engravings, and digital video to explore the job of the skin as a protective layer against the world and as a separator of bodies. There’s a palpable discomfort to the bubbling, skin-like texture of works such as Palermo (2025), an archival pigment print which is just one element of a show very much worth catching.

3. Minyoung Choi, Midnight Walk (9 July–9 August 2025) at Gallery Baton, Seoul

Seoul’s Gallery Baton plays host to the disquieting dreamscapes of Minyoung Choi until 9 August, with an exhibition of the London-based artist’s new works, titled Midnight Walk.

It’s an array of oil paintings that seem to act as windows into alien yet somehow familiar worlds of pea-soup mists swirling through natural tableaus, and oddly human shapes made from moss and snow—a not-to-be-missed opportunity to take in the work of this up-and-coming painter.

4. Cecilia Vicuña, Arch Future (5 June–2 August 2025) at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña makes her debut at Brussels’ Xavier Hufkens with a show spanning the more than 60 years she has been working. This show features two monumental quipus (corded recording devices used by Andean peoples) and a room-size precario installation—a ‘geometric city’ made from bones, feathers, stones, shells, and driftwood.

Not to be missed are Vicuña’s ‘lost paintings’, recreations of artworks lost or destroyed after the Chilean military coup. Vicuña herself went into exile following the rise of Augusto Pinochet and has grappled with this period in Chilean history in her work through the decades.

5. Clifford Owens, I’m New Here (26 June–8 August 2025) at David Kordansky Gallery, New York

American performance artist Clifford Owens already kicked off this survey of his decades-long career with a new live performance last month, but there’s still plenty to take in at David Kordansky Gallery in New York until 8 August.

Through performance, photographs, drawings, and objects, I’m New Here allows visitors to get their heads fully around the three-decade career of Owens and his practice, which holds the work of Black artists and intergenerational dialogue as foundational pillars.

6. The Garden of Earthly Delights (27 June–8 August 2025) at GRIMM, New York

The Manhattan branch of GRIMM brings back Bosch with a group exhibition that plays with the multitude of heady ideas presented in his Garden of Earthly Delights. Creators like Volker Hüller and Francesca Mollett contribute work responding to the legendary triptych and its surreal depiction of heaven, hell, and the spaces in between.

It’s an opportunity to reconnect with a classic work in a new context. As Hüller bluntly puts it: ‘Honestly, a bunch of flowers stuck in the ass of a figure has quite a potential to comment on the present—it’s surreal, absurd, and strangely fitting.’

7. Back to the Earth (7 June–9 August 2025) at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

On the West Coast, in a city still reeling from recent wildfires, a gallery has put together a group exhibition of artists interrogating humanity’s relationship with the natural environment.

Roberts Projects in Los Angeles presents Back to the Earth until 9 August. Works to watch out for include the delirious charcoal figures of Luke Agada, and Suchitra Mattai’s arrangements of vintage found objects and fake plants that suggest post-apocalyptic ritual.

8. On Blindness (12 June–9 August 2025) at Galeria Nara Roesler, New York

New York’s Nara Roesler brings together an astonishing range of works all grappling with the concept of blindness, inspired by the final sightless decades of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who said God had granted him both books and night in one touch.

Now curator Mateus Nunes has assembled a suite of works that similarly deal with artistic experiences beyond the edge of vision—be it Robert Mapplethorpe’s striking, eyes-clenched portrait of painter Alice Neel just days before her death in 1984, or the permanent night of Milton Resnick’s Last Elephant (1979).

9. Noor Mahnun, Anum (17 May–31 August 2025) at Yeo Workshop, Singapore

Malaysian artist Noor Mahnun—also known as Anum—first received recognition for marrying traditional oil painting techniques with a perspective that handles the banal and the unusual in the same stroke of the brush.

Now, with 40 years of work behind her, Mahnun’s first-ever show in Singapore is hosted by Yeo Workshop, offering punters a rare opportunity to get their eyes on her paintings in person.

10. Worlds Within: Art as Refuge (6 June–31 August 2025) at Villepin, Hong Kong

Art as a vision of refuge is on offer at Hong Kong’s Villepin, where a group of four artists with roots across Asia are brought together under the thematic banner of the reintegration of a ruptured world.

Kang Myonghi, Zao Wou-Ki, Fernando Zóbel, and Lê Phổ all have work in Worlds Within: Art as Refuge, but it’s a particularly significant moment for the latter two. It’s the first time Zóbel’s works are on view in Hong Kong, while the show acts as a survey of Lê Phổ’s life, with work from each major era of his career.

11. Aubrey Levinthal, Mirror Matter (28 June–13 September 2025) at Ingleby, Edinburgh 

Up in Edinburgh, Scottish gallery Ingleby brings the works of American painter Aubrey Levinthal across the pond for their very first exhibition in the United Kingdom.

You’ve got until mid-September to stop by the gallery to see a wide range of work by the Philadelphia-based painter, who uses oils to render uncanny visions of her city and everyday life that play with the human form in surprising and arresting ways. —[O]

Main image: Noor Mahnun (Anum), Baju Kurung (2025) (detail). Oil on linen. 120 x 150 cm (unframed); 123 x 153 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Yeo Workshop, Singapore. Photo: Puah Chin Kok.