The summer is over and the fall art season has officially kicked off in New York City. The cultural calendar is chock-full of art fairs, museum shows, and of course gallery exhibitions. There’s something for everyone, from art historical rediscoveries to emerging talents, plus performances and works on offer in every conceivable medium. Read on for our picks of shows to see this week.
“Mercedes Matter” at Berry Campbell
September 5–October 4, 2025
Mercedes Matter, Untitled, (ca. 1848). Image Courtesy of Berry Campbell.
The latest forgotten woman of Abstract Expressionism ripe for renewed attention is the late Mercedes Matter, who is getting her first solo show at Berry Campbell. (The gallery has previously helped revive the reputations of female Postwar artists such as Lynne Drexler.) One of the first abstract painters in the U.S., Matter was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 and became a key figure of the Ab-Ex movement. And in addition to her studio practice, Matter, who studied under Hans Hofmann, was an important arts educator, founding the New York Studio School in 1964. The exhibition offers an overview of her unjustly overlooked career, from early figure drawings to mature, large-scale canvases that meld abstraction and figuration with bold and colorful brushstrokes, as well as some of Matter’s late charcoal drawings.
“Julio Torres: Color Stories” at Performance Space New York
September 3–September 22, 2025
Julio Torres at Performance Space New York. Image Courtesy of Color Theories.
At the core of Julio Torres’s work is art—whether in , his surreal comedy set on the fringes of the New York art world with Tilda Swinton, or in the world-building of , his Peabody-winning HBO series. Both projects share the visual audacity and outré fashion that have become Torres’s signature, shaped by his years orbiting galleries and institutions as an amused, skeptical outsider.
That sensibility carries into Color Theories, his off-Broadway debut at Performance Space New York, a venue with deep experimental roots that feels perfectly suited to a comic whose stand-up has always bordered on performance art. Here, Torres blends design, dream logic, and wry humor into a theatrical exploration of how colors map onto feeling and memory. Expect something between comedy, theater, and art piece, with Torres as both spirit guide and trickster.
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“Gabrielle Garland: I’ll Get You, My Pretty, and Your Little Dog Too” at Miles McEnery
September 4–October 25, 2025
Gabrielle Garland, I’m glad he’s single because I’m going to climb that like a tree. —Megan, Bridesmaids (2011) (2025). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery.
It is the first New York solo show for Gabrielle Garland, whose neon palette and use of skewed scale and perspective lend a surreal note to her paintings of suburban homes. Each house takes on a personality of its own in her square compositions, homes captured under the blazing sun at the heat of midday, at golden hour, or in the dark of night, illuminated by street lamp or porch light. Garland paints her subjects with an undeniable reverence, but not in the pursuit of photorealism, instead embracing the unreliability of our memories. Letting certain architectural elements loom larger than life creates distortions that are at once endearing and unsettling, lending character to what whether others might see as cookie cutter housing developments.
“Omar Ba: Promises and Glory” at Templon
September 3–October 25, 2025
Omar Ba, Promises and Glory, (2025). Image Courtesy of Templon.
Omar Ba conjures fantastical worlds. Sometimes they’re quite alarming. Trained in Senegal before continuing his studies in Geneva, Switzerland, Ba has long woven together African and European traditions, critiquing both with equal brio. In layered works of paint, pencil, pen, and Indian ink, faceless dictators loom over tanks and soldiers and Christianity melds with animism. America has now entered the mix. Following a 2020 residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Ba now splits his time between New York and Dakar. At Templon Galerie he presents 30 new portraits that, though rooted in the city, wander across the Atlantic and back again.
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“Kat Ryals: Showroom Dynasty” at 5-50 Gallery
September 6–October 12, 2025
Kat Ryals, Pattern Recognition. Image Courtesy of Michelle Silver.
There is more than meets the eye to the 10 ornate-looking rugs from Kat Ryals’s “Rug” series for the Brooklyn artist’s first solo show with 5-50. Each work is actually a large multimedia collage, the ornate pattern of a 17th-century Savonnerie French rug created using a variety of both natural and artificial objects, including poker chips and other gambling paraphernalia. Ryals then takes high-resolution photographs of these labor-intensive tableaux, printing them at life-scale on velvet rugs using a commercial dye sublimation print process. The result is the illusion of luxury, an image of various detritus masquerading as a hand-woven textile, much as a Las Vegas casino apes the opulence of the baroque, while promising visitors a shot at capturing such wealth for themselves.
“June Edmonds: The Sky Remains the Same” at Galerie Lelong
September 4–October 25, 2025
June Edmonds, Still Point, (2025). Courtesy of Galerie Lelong.
This marks L.A.-based artist June Edmonds’s first major solo show in New York, featuring new paintings inspired by “,” a river leaf motif. The , featured as a or symmetrically shaped form, is prominently showcased in metallic plaques from the Kingdom of Benin, where it was associated with the power and protection of kings and deities.
Edmonds has long centered her practice in researching major events in Black American art and history, For this body of work, “The Sky Remains the Same,” she recontextualizes the historic, sacred geometric form. Bonus: On Saturday September 6, at 3 p.m., the gallery will present a conversation between Edmonds and independent curator jill moniz. The talk is free to attend, and the gallery requests visitors register here in advance.
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“Bilgé: 1975” at Sapar Contemporary
September 5–October 13, 2025
Bilgé, Threshold state (1975). Image Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary.
The late Turkish American Bilge Civelekoğlu Friedlaender, known as Bilgé, is currently the subject of her first U.S. museum solo show, with an impressive outing at New York’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Art. Her second exhibition at Sapar Contemporary hones in on the works of a single, watershed year, with watercolors, collages, and sculptural works made using torn paper—a technique that helped Bilgé redefine her practice after she had destroyed nearly every canvas she had ever made just three years prior. The show makes the case that moving beyond the confines of the canvas allowed Bilgé to find herself, and a new style imbued the austerity of minimalism with an undeniable romanticism.
“9 Women, 20th Century” at Nagas
September 3–October 25, 2025
Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Untitled (1966). Courtesy of Nagas.
Nagas is paying tribute to the great dealer Peggy Guggenheim’s landmark 1943 show “Exhibition of 31 Women,” which was the first all-woman art show, with a wide-ranging exhibition that includes both artists who have recently enjoyed renewed attention, like Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, and others who remain obscure. There’s Louise Janin, a California artist who moved to Paris and developed her own art forms she dubbed cosmogrammes, swirling pigments in liquid to create abstract compositions. Also largely unknown because she spent much of her career in Europe is Amaranth Ehrenhalt, a second generation Abstract Expressionist painter who embraced vibrant colors. Other intriguing figures in the exhibition include British Surrealist Grace Pailthorpe and Filipino textile artist Pacita Abad, who recently enjoyed a stunning traveling retrospective.
“Spencer Finch: One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige)” at James Cohan
September 5–October 4, 2025
Spencer Finch, One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige), (2025) (detail). Image Courtesy of James Cohan.
As a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Spencer Finch took to meticulously copying Claude Monet paintings, an experience he described as “his first brush with Stockholm syndrome.” One wonders what Finch has to say about Hiroshige, the 19th century Japanese woodblock master whose “100 Famous Views of Edo” he has spent the past year channeling. Here, New York plays the muse. Fitch laid a period map of Edo, modern-day Tokyo, over a contemporary one of New York and then photographed the corresponding locations. He focused on Hiroshige’s spring paintings, adopting their shapes, cut-outs, and formats across 42 watercolors. The city emerges in slices and half-familiar fragments, an assembly James Cohan calls Finch’s “love letter” to his long-time home.
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“Echoes and Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels” at Spruth Magers
September 5–October 25, 2025
Nancy Holt, (1973–76), Great Basin Desert, Utah. © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: ZCZ Films/James Fox, courtesy Holt/Smithson Foundation.
If you’ve yet to take the time to make a pilgrimage to (1973–1976), Nancy Holt’s famed earthwork in the remote Utah desert, the next best thing just might be the late artist’s first show at Sprüth Magers New York. The show includes drawings, collages, and photographs related to the work, many of which have not been previously exhibited. An installation of four large concrete cylinders lying on their sides in an x-formation, is positioned in alignment with the movements of the sun, so that it frames the sunrise and sunset on the Winter and Summer Solstices .A pair of earlier sculptures from her “Studio Locators” series are also included in the exhibition, short steel pipes mounted at eye level, as if they are telescopes without lenses, framing views of the same objects they originally pointed at in Holt’s studio, as referenced in the titles,
“John McAllister: Sun Sundry Beguiles Wild” at James Fuentes
September 5–October 5, 2025
John McAllister, ablaze rapt chorus beaming, (2025). Courtesy of James Fuentes.
This marks masterful landscape painter John McAllister’s seventh solo show at James Fuentes, featuring seven new large-scale works that further the artist’s exploration of painting as an immersive field. Inspired by his bike rides through the woods where he resides in Massachusetts, McAllister is a a keen observer of New England’s contrasting seasonal extremes. At the center of the show is (2025), a sprawling nine-by-fourteen-foot panorama infused with yellow light. Though McAllister is deeply inspired by Impressionism and Fauvism, he aims “less at representation than at evocation,” according to the gallery.
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“Kahlil Robert Irving” at Canada
September 5–October 18, 2025
Kahlil Robert Irving, Gold GrainedBOX&Gravel[Handle{Terracotta = Architectural Ornament}]news, 2023–2025. Image Courtesy of Canada.
Time moves strangely in the work of Kahlil Robert Irving. Taking inspiration from a digital archive that he started in 2012, the images and objects reproduced in his work are recognizably contemporary but simultaneously like products of some ancient archeological dig. Irving noted, “my ceramic sculptures engage in a kind of slow photography, using the kiln as an exposure unit transforming wet malleable clay into ceramic… it is a kind of deep time.” Fresh off his major travelling solo show “Archaeology of the Present”—shown at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, respectively—Irving is set to debut a new body of work at Canada in “EF3+E40.” Here, a range of paintings and sculptures tap into parallel realities, one physical the other digital, suggesting new pathways between the two.
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Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
