Here Are 11 Must-See Gallery Shows This Armory Art Week

The temperature outside is cooling, but in the galleries of New York City, it’s heating up with a crop of exciting and timely gallery shows. All across Manhattan, as visitors flock to the slew of art fairs that open this Armory week, commercial galleries are presenting solo and group shows that both harken back to history-making artists of the past, and present up-and-coming artists charting a new course. From super-sized sculptures to a resurgence of fiber art, plus mind-bending paintings and videos, here’s our pick of what to see around town.

“Gina Beavers: Divine Consumer” at Marianne Boesky 
September 5–October 5, 2024

Artist Gina Beavers is best known for her semi-sculptural relief paintings drawn from consumer culture, be they paintings of comically exaggerated lipstick-smeared mouths or borderline salacious depictions of fast food. In her new show “Divine Consumer” at Marianne Boesky Gallery, the New Jersey artist draws inspiration from the glut of blankets, towels, and pillows proffered up for sale on the internet and their promises of luxurious self-care and a good night’s sleep. These dimensional paintings that the artist dubs “comfortcore,” mimic knits of passage of yarns and folded towels with an almost perverse verisimilitude—you’ll want to reach out and touch them.  Observing these works is pleasurable, a kind of visual ASMR, but cozy as these paintings appear, they’re also a bit disquieting. These cozy blankets feel a bit sentient, aware of their hypnotic qualities, and ready to lull you to sleep.

“Jenny Holzer: Words” at Sprüth Magers
September 5–November 2, 2024 

As her take over of the Guggenheim—“Light Line” through September 29—draws to a close, Jenny Holzer kicks off her first show at Sprüth Magers’s New York gallery, which opened two years ago. The exhibition offers a broad view of the artist’s practice from the 1980s to the present, with a salon-style hang of a selection of her preparatory drawings as well as new paintings and some of Holzer’s stone benches. She’s also presenting a new LED installation, featuring AI-generated text.

“Radical Artists of the 1960s/1970s: Between Geometry and Gesture,” at David Nolan  
September 5–October 26, 2024

Political upheaval, economic headwinds, and all-around conflict are all phenomena that mark not only our fraught current moment but also that of the 1960s and ‘70s, when the artists in this show—stanley brouwn, Barry Le Va, Bruce Nauman, Dorothea Rockburne, and Richard Serra—hit their stride. Whether it was Serra throwing lead, Le Va smashing panes of glass, Nauman pacing his studio on film, or Rockburne creating delicate drawings that combined ideas from dance and the processes of nature, these practitioners pushed art beyond its boundaries, often asking the viewer to reconstruct the path the artist traveled to create the final work. In this timely group presentation, the works take on new meaning as they are viewed through the (fractured) lens of contemporary society.

“Stephen Thorpe: Dream House” at Dimin 
September 6–October 19, 2024 

At first glance, you almost feel you can step inside Stephen Thorpe’s oil paintings of full-scale, elegantly appointed interiors that meld into dreamy landscapes. His latest suite of eight works is inspired by the “dream house,” psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s concept of the human mind as a home divided into different floors. Each painting shows the corner of a room, combining surrealist and naturalistic elements, as well as areas of thick impasto contrasting with more realistic passages.

“Josh Kline: Social Media” at Lisson Gallery
September 5–October 19, 2024 

Marking his first solo show with Lisson Gallery since his representation by the gallery was announced earlier this year, Josh Kline will show a series of never-before-seen self-portraits in “Social Media.” Revisiting themes from earlier bodies of work, Kline explores ideas around employment and the ever-evolving (and often shaky) contemporary workforce. Tapping 3D technology and the selfie, one of the world’s most recognizable image formats, Kline turns the idea of a self-portrait on its head to confront the contemporary obsession with individuality and self. The exhibition is concurrent with the artist’s solo exhibition “Climate Change” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

 “Jason Rhoades: Drive II” at Hauser and Wirth 
September 5–October 19, 2024 

The automobile is an essential part of the American lifestyle, and no one knew this better than artist Jason Rhoades, who made a series of works consisting simply of readymade cars. Reach for your license and registration and head to Hauser and Wirth, which will display a Pontiac Fiero, a Caprice and an Impala made by Chevrolet, a Ferrari 328 GTS, and a Ligier microcar, all alongside a video of the artist driving around the city and waxing on about his car projects, recorded during an interview with (who else?) Hans Ulrich Obrist.

The Los Angeles–based artist was partly inspired by the City of Angels’ notorious traffic. “I spend hours going to my studio,” he once said of a Chevrolet car he owned, “so I established this extension of my studio, or rather this second space, in my Caprice.” The sculptures have largely languished in storage for decades, excepting a 1992 Caprice that was on display at the 2022 Whitney Biennial as an outdoor sculpture, so you won’t want to miss this one.

“Fibration: poking back” at L’Space Gallery
September 3–October 26, 2024 

Featuring the work of 16 artists, “Fibration: poking back” takes a novel and refreshing look at fiber and textile art today. Following the gallery’s first contemporary textile exhibition last year, also titled “Fibration,” the show builds on the growing traction and interest the medium has garnered in recent years. Curated by Lisa Rockford, the show’s current iteration makes the human body its starting point and expands to engage with the history and trajectory of fiber arts, including the practices of emerging artists. Engaging with the symbolic and emotive potential of textile and fiber art, feminist traditions, and the foundational work of artists from Louise Bourgeois to Judith Scott, “poking back” highlights an exciting new chapter for the medium.

“Pieter Schoolwerth: Supporting Actor” at Petzel
September 5–October 26, 2024 

Comprising painting, sculpture, film, and a reality-bending architectural installation, “Supporting Actor” showcases Pieter Schoolwerth’s ongoing interrogation of the figure, paralleled by experimentation with technology. A scale replica of a bathroom turned on its side, replete with a mirror that covers a tunnel entrance that leads to a miniature model of the gallery space, sets the tone for the show, which plays with the evolving boundaries of artistic medium and the blurring of what constitutes reality. “Supporting Actor” also features a CG-animated film made in collaboration with Phil Vanderhyden with a soundtrack by Aaron Dilloway; at 7:45 p.m. on the show’s opening night, Dilloway will present a live performance within the context of the installation.

“Brie Ruais: Bone Dice” at Albertz Benda
September 5–October 12, 2024 

Each of Brie Ruais’s clay sculptures weighs exactly 130 pounds–the same as the artist’s own body. Though that has been the basis of her practice for years, she’s become especially attuned to the connection between our bodies and the earth since relocating from Brooklyn to New Mexico. The state’s intense spring winds have become particularly inspirational, with Ruais donning a special multi-sleeved garment that catches the breeze like a weather vane. This guides her moments, for a new process she’s dubbed “Wind Work,” resulting in the windswept-looking sculptures Traveling with the Wind, East and Traveling with the Wind, West. The show also features a new video work, created in collaboration with poet Caitlin Lorraine Johnson.

“Teresa Baker: Mapping the Territory” at Broadway Gallery
September 6–October 19, 2024 

Teresa Baker, who hails from North Dakota, has had a solo booth with Los Angeles’s David de Boer Gallery at NADA in Miami and a solo show at Arizona’s Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2022 and was featured in the 2023 “Made in LA” biennial. But her first New York show could be considered something of a homecoming for the Mandan/Hidatsa artist, who graduated in 2008 from Fordham University (where, full disclosure, she studied with Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone). Inspired by the contrast between Native traditions and contemporary Modernism in painting, Baker works with artificial and natural materials, adding deerskin, yarn, and willow branches to paintings made on artificial turf. She cuts each piece into asymmetrical shapes that recall borders on a map, a further allusion to the land.

“Tiffany Shlain: You Are Here” at Nancy Hoffman Gallery  
September 5–October 19, 2024 

Last fall, Tiffany Shlain brought a feminist timeline to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in the form of her piece DENDROFEMONOLOGY: A Feminist History Tree Ring. She annotated the cross-section of a 250-year-old deodar cedar with 30 wood-burned milestones highlighting women’s contributions to world history. Her first show with Nancy Hoffman includes a selection of tree-ring sculptures, as well as other works exploring feminism, philosophy, technology, neuroscience, and nature.