The Nerman Museum shop, a casualty of budget cuts in 2014, is reborn this spring as an exhibition space, thanks to a $700,000 gift from..

Still lifes and flower paintings don’t usually summon adjectives like “rebellious,” “subversive” and “transgressive.” But spend a little time in “Ephemeral Beauty: Robert Zakanitch” at the Nerman Museum, and you may see the connection. It’s a bower of a show, filled with mural-scaled evocations of lush organic growth, riotous color, exuberant brushwork and flowers, flowers, flowers.

Dark Days, Bright Nights,” an exhibit of contemporary Finnish painting at the Kemper Museum, gathers familiar vocabularies and styles, including figurative expressionism, narrative realism, stripe paintings  and graffiti art. But the spirit of this show, curated by the museum’s executive director, Barbara O’Brien, is something intriguing and different.