Where to see art gallery shows in the D.C. region

Circles and squares, sometimes made of pure color but usually stuffed with ornamentation, are fundamental to Susan J. Goldman's exquisite prints. In two current shows, the Maryland artist explores formats that are literally circular, with inked images that end at curved, raggedly fibrous edges. In the exhibit "Layered Beauty" at Washington Printmakers Gallery, such rounds hang alongside characteristic screen prints in which four squares quadrisect circles. At Long View Gallery's "Artful Prints," they share the walls with the work of three other artists.

Semicircles feature prominently in Eve Stockton's large woodcuts in the Long View show. The partial rounds represent the sun and its rays, as seen over waves in stylized seascapes of simple compositions and luxuriant detail. The Northern Virginia artist's color schemes aren't literal but generally place cooler tones at the bottom and warmer ones on top. The exception is one print that's all in shades of blue, reducing the image's palette while intensifying its impact.

The arcs are less regular in the multilayered and multicolored pictures by Laura Berman, who teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. Möbius strips and plantlike tendrils twist and sometimes overlap in her lithographs and monoprints, whose complex interplay provides engaging dynamism.

Matt Neuman's towering woodblocks arrange tapered, tightly spaced bars of color in ways that appear structural. The New Yorker's prints are purely abstract yet intriguingly suggest interior spaces, whether caverns or cathedrals.

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Goldman's circular prints at Long View and Washington Printmakers are similar, although she titles the former "tondos" and the latter "oculeses." Inside the tondos are many small circles or rectangles, while two of the oculeses contain floral patterns. One of the tondos positions a yolk-like yellow shape over a blue base, giving it a visual affinity to Stockton's prints.

The majority of the prints in Goldman's solo show are from her lushly hued "Squaring the Flower" series, in which a stylized bloom is split across four panels, sometimes replaced by a quarter-circle or vanishing altogether. The format is predictable, yet the variety of treatments seems infinite. The flower can be squared endlessly, and each variation conveys afresh the joy of invention.

Artful Prints Through July 2√ at Long View Gallery, 1234 Ninth St. NW.

Susan J. Goldman: Layered Beauty Through June 25 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW.

Evolution proceeds by mutation, so perhaps the future will look something like "Sticky Entanglements," Beth Yashnyk and Fanni Somogyi's Transformer installation and show. The two Baltimore artists "explore glitch as a point of metamorphosis," according to a gallery statement. But the resulting sculpture, painting and animated videos are more whimsical than scientific. The styles owe as much to Walt Disney as to Salvador Dali.

The human body, dissected and caricatured, is the basis of Yashnyk's work. Hands, feet, eyes, mouths and intestine-like tubes reappear in her paintings, whether rendered directly on the wall or in part-sculptural pictures made of paint, wood and Mylar. The results are grotesque, but amiably so, and also oddly optimistic. Yashnyk's fundamental interest is gender, and her biomorphic mash-ups challenge categories that are more societal than physical in origin.

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Somogyi's sculptures draw on things that are organic, but not human. The artist grafts hard and soft, animal and vegetable. Most often, she constructs a small metal container with protruding legs or tentacles and fills it with flocking, polyurethane or other malleable material. Several of these hybrid creatures contain soil and a live cactus, as if hyper-intelligent plants had built themselves transport systems. Where they might travel is unclear, but it's surely to someplace as funky and freewheeling as this show.

Beth Yashnyk and Fanni Somogyi: Sticky Entanglements Through June 17 at Transformer, 1404 P St. NW.

There aren't many works that could be termed realist in "Level Up," which introduces 11 recent or imminent graduates of art schools in Washington, Baltimore and Chicago. But most of the participants in this Brentwood Arts Exchange survey ground their pieces in the real world, even if it's just by combining coffee dye with India ink, as Claudia Cappelle did to make a vast, stormy abstraction that's one of the show's highlights.

One quality that links many of the works in this array, curated by local artist Mary Early, is an ability to conjure a sense of space. Elaine Qiu's painting is abstract yet hints at an urban landscape, while Marie Gauthiez's canvas depicts a garden that contains both naturalistic and surreal features. Amelie Wang and Boram "Bo" Kim portray tangible places or things, but at some sort of remove: Wang's painting of an everyday bathroom is rendered eerie by its see-through inhabitant; Kim fastidiously draws birds and their eggs, but her subjects are scientific specimens, not living things.

Forget ‘Immersive Van Gogh.’ These exhibitions are the real thing.

The 3D entries are tiny universes, whether visual or personal. Kelsey Bogdan and Tara Youngborg assemble soft hanging pieces enlivened by such additions as sequins, lighting, electronic music and motorized motion. Jill McCarthy Stauffer's "Memoir (detail)" packs plants, recipes, a teapot and other autobiographical talismans into a structure that includes light-up acrylic text panels. Less technological but just as immersive are Sookkyung Park's two elaborate spirals of color-gradated, spray-painted origami. These miniature galaxies appear as sturdy as they as fanciful.

Level Up: A Juried Exhibition for Graduate Students Through June 17 at Brentwood Arts Exchange, 3901 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood.

Made before Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine — and mostly before its 2014 annexation of Crimea — the paintings in "Ukraine: A Celebration of Beauty and Resilience" depict the now-beleaguered country as placid, agrarian and nearly sublime. In today's context, these works have an added poignancy, as well as a new purpose. Proceeds from the Ven Embassy Row Hotel show will benefit the Central Kyiv Children's Hospital.

The pictures are overwhelmingly landscapes and include such idyllic scenes as Hryhoiy Zoryk's "Dniester Frontier," with the gently lapping river in the distance, and Pavlo Volyk's magical-realist "Evening Memories," whose cluster of small houses on and around a hill is suffused with pink light. More distinctively Slavic are two mythic scenes by Feodosiy Humenyuk in a flattened style that recalls tapestries and stained-glass windows. Born in 1941, Humenyuk studied art in the city then called Leningrad. Seen under other circumstances, his pictures might suggest a strong affinity between Ukraine and the neighbor now warring against it.

Ukraine: A Celebration of Beauty and Resilience Through June 18√ at the Ven Embassy Row Hotel, 2015 Massachusetts Ave. NW.