5 noteworthy art gallery exhibitions to check out during Expo Chicago

By far the biggest recurring event on Chicago’s contemporary art schedule is Expo Chicago, an annual, high-end art fair at Navy Pier that draws thousands of art collectors and aficionados from across the region and beyond.

This year’s edition, which will take place April 9-12 and feature more than 130 galleries from around the world, will be accompanied by an array of complementary events at museums, galleries and other art spaces across the city.

Many of the city’s dozens of commercial galleries take care to schedule exhibitions during this week that they hope will show off their spaces and lure museum groups and other art lovers who are in town for Expo.

That is certainly the case with Gray on the Near West Side, one of the city’s oldest and most respected galleries. “Of course, we want to have a strong exhibition on view and do what we can to put our best foot forward,” said Valerie Carberry, Gray’s president and chief executive officer.

In November, Gray began representing the estate of Roger Brown, one of the best known of the Chicago Imagists who died in 1997, and it will present its first exhibition devoted to the artist during Expo.

“There’s something really relevant about his work,” Carberry said, “that’s reverberating not just with collectors today who are new to Roger Brown but, also, you can see things expressed in contemporary art — his sense of patterning and the clarity of his compositions.”

The show, titled “Weathervane,” opened March 19 and runs through June 13. It features 11 of Brown’s paintings from the 1980s and ’90s that depict a tense relationship between the built environment and natural world, with many including looming storms and other dramatic weather phenomena.

Along with the strong patterns and color contrasts in these semi-abstracted compositions, which can be read from afar, are often diminutive figures and vehicles that require viewers to lean in.

“So, they really reward that close inspection,” Carberry said.

Here’s a look at four other noteworthy, diverse shows taking place around Chicago during Expo:

Marshall Brown, ‘Palaces and Prisons,’ Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago Ave., through May 30

Marshall Brown, an architecture professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, uses the medium of collage to create often large-scale works that conjure what Scott Speh calls “unconventional and almost impossible structures and worlds.”

The owner of Western Exhibitions in West Town discovered the architect and futurist during the decade or so he taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and became excited to show his creations.

“I’ve always been interested in artists who create their own worlds or who look at the world and try to envision it as a different place,” Speh said.

Brown, who was showcased in 2022-23 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, has had four previous exhibitions at the gallery. The first in 2013, “Center of the World, Chicago” included three newsreel-like films with different speculative futures for the Windy City.

This two-part show offers continuations of two series, “Prisons of Industry” and “Prisons of Invention.” The latter is inspired by “Carceri d’invenzione,” a celebrated series of 18th-century etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi depicting intricate architectural fantasies based on Roman buildings.

Jessica Diamond, Hélène Fauquet and Jason Hirata, ‘Ethical Managers Make Their Own Rules,’ Bodenrader, 1620 W. Carroll Ave., through May 2

For the 2 1⁄2-year-old Near West Side gallery’s exhibition during Expo, owner Ethan Kennemer has brought together the work of three related yet still contrasting conceptual artists from different generations.

He first settled on the language-based work of Diamond, the best known of the three. She emerged in the 1980s in New York’s downtown art scene and was featured in a long-running solo exhibition that ended in 2025 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Joining her will be Fauquet, a French artist who had her first solo show in the United States in 2024, and Jason Hirata, who explores the nature of authorship in his work.

“I think the show gets at a core concern that I’m always thinking about as gallery owner, which is how exhibitions function within themselves and how artists approach exhibition-making, which I think is always interesting and something that is sometimes taken for granted or overlooked,” Kennemer said.

Youssef Nabil, ‘No One Knows but the Sky,’ Mariane Ibrahim, 437 N. Paulina St., April 8 through May 23

Vintage cinematic images of Cairo blur with childhood memories in Nabil’s hand-colored silver prints — dreamy, nostalgic imaginings of his native city.

“His work engages with longing, memory and return, and it’s very cinematic but also emotive,” said Emma McKee, director of Ibrahim in West Town.

This show, the busy artist’s inaugural outing at Ibrahim, follows a small solo exhibition that closed in January at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and precedes another that opens in May at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

“The first exhibition with an artist is always the most important, because it kind of sets the tone for the relationship,” McKee said.

She called the gallery’s exhibition during Expo the most important one of the year. Gallery leaders were eager to showcase Nabil during that time, in part because he returns the gallery to its photographic roots and offers works that deal with both personal and collective histories.

On view will be more than 15 photographs and three videos, including a 2015 one, “I Saved My Belly Dancer,” which features famed movie actress Salma Hayek, whose father is of Lebanese descent.

B. Ingrid Olson, ‘All Lock No Key,’ Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2156 W. Fulton St., through April 25

Corbett vs. Dempsey co-owner John Corbett calls Olson a “hometown hero” because the Chicago native and former intern at the gallery has achieved considerable success, including her inclusion in the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 2024.

She will be featured at the Near West Side gallery during Expo in what Corbett said would be Olson’s first solo show in Chicago since early in her career. It includes 40 works from the tiny to the monumental, including photo-based and found-object wall works.

At the center of the site-specific exhibition is an installation that re-creates a room in the gallery called The Vault, where it typically presents video and film works, with Olson offering a kind of turned-out version of the distinctive space she has long admired.

“The work deals with the body, the kind of ambiguity of perception and how one’s own body responds to seeing a body represented. So, she is really interested in the notion of proprioception, which is how a body through the senses is aware of its own position in space,” Corbett said.