Eliana Willis

Though the approach of Daylight Savings might mean dark days, galleries are lighting up New York with a torrent of new shows this month. Parsing through the hundreds of exhibitions that have recently—or are soon to be—opened, we’ve rounded up 10 artists taking the spotlight this month in solo shows across the city.
From an artist who uses their practice as a research vehicle to explore the profound implications of biomedical technology to a painter who uses fabric as their primary material, these 10 artists are expanding what their mediums are capable of and the scope of artistic inquiry.

Kirsten Deirup, “Ex Voto In Silico”Hesse Flatow, through December 2
Kirsten Deirup. Photo: Pietro Gatto. Courtesy of the artist and Hesse Flatow, New York.
For her second solo show with Hesse Flatow, Hudson Valley-based artist Kirsten Deirup presents a series of paintings and works on paper in “Ex Voto In Silico.” The title of the show is a play on Latin, with the term “voto” meaning votive or offering, and the term “in silico” an invented Latin term referring to when an object has been put through a computer program. Echoing 20th-century discussions around the essence of art in the face of mechanical reproduction, Deirup’s work confronts the boundary between creation by human hand and artificial intelligence.
Incongruities abound in each composition; plants blossom into dazzling gems, a tree is hung with tennis balls instead of fruit, and plastic spray bottles, a slice of bread, or a computer keyboard appear in otherwise classical-inspired settings. Backgrounds are obfuscated and pervasive shadows lend the otherwise aesthetically pristine vignettes a deep, unshakable sense of the uncanny. Here, the idea of artificial intelligence as it is understood in the realm of art is turned on its head, and Deirup captures the zeitgeist of today as we face the unknown.
Kirsten Deirup, Ex Voto In Silico (2023). Photo: Jenny Gorman. Courtesy of the artist and Hesse Flatow, New York.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, “Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera“Fridman Gallery, through December 13
Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Ana Brígida for The New York Times. Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery, New York.
The first genetically engineered pig heart transplant occurred in January of 2022 following decades of research and experimentation. The relationship between pigs and humans, spanning some 10 millennia from their first domestication, lays at the core of artist Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s newest exhibition, “Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera,” her third solo with Fridman Gallery. Featuring sculptural works, animations, and a film narrated by the artist and set to an original score by composer Bethany Barrett, questions around our very existence—down to our DNA—are explored within the scope of humanity’s long-standing relationship with pigs.
Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg received her Ph.D. in electronic arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, is an affiliate of Data and Society and a founding board member of the European Research Council-funded project Digital DNA that explores the relationships between new technologies, DNA, and empirical evidence. Combining expertise with creative expression, Dewey-Hagborg offers a cogent look at the wide-ranging implications of interspecies relationships and new technologies.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, film still from Future Pigs, Plural (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery, New York.
Shilpa GuptaTanya Bonakdar Gallery, through December 16
Shilpa Gupta. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
For her debut self-titled solo exhibition with Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta continues her interrogations of language, cultural identity, and ideas around otherness and power—and its myriad effects and consequences. Paring down both ideas and means to their most essential, Gupta poetically captures the collective essence of experience, transcending time and place.
A new sound installation, Listening Air (2023), is a central work in the exhibition. Shown in a darkened gallery space, suspended microphones counterbalanced by dimmed light fixtures move through the air. Rather than take sound, however, the microphones have been turned into speakers which emit spoken words. Leveraging the power of language as a form of resilience and resistance, the work is both haunting and beautiful, a testament to the pervasive desire to speak and be heard.
Concurrent to the present exhibition, Gupta is the subject of a solo exhibition curated by Ruth Estévez at the Amant Art Center, Brooklyn, on view through April 28, 2024.
Shilpa Gupta, Listening Air (2022–23). Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
Jessie Makinson, “Bad sleeper”Lyles and King, through December 16
Jessie Makinson. Courtesy of Lyles and King, New York.
Marking a decisive moment in and evolution of the artist’s practice, Jessie Makinson created “Bad sleeper” at Lyles and King, an experimental, site-specific exhibition that melds her painting practice with the architecture of the gallery space, bringing it into the third dimension. Mining art history, literature, and cinema, Makinson presents viewers with a window into an otherworldly, fantastical realm filled with visual references and allusions to influential works by the likes of Italian writer Italo Calvino, Georgian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, and Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk. Narrative without being didactic, the scenes and vignettes portrayed elude easy reconciliation; almost human figures and alien-like landscapes beg questions but don’t offer easy answers, providing fertile ground for imaginative interpretations and conclusions.
The immersive project is made up of a hand-painted mural, patterned wallpaper, and plush purple carpet—together the antithesis of a sterile white cube—as well as paintings on canvas and a detailed wooden screen. Inverting common notions of how and where painting is displayed, “Bad sleeper” instead “makes a world for the paintings to live in.”
Jessie Makinson, Tiny Pyre (2023). Courtesy of Lyles and King, New York.
Eric N. MackPaula Cooper Gallery, through December 16
Eric N. Mack, 2021. © Eric N. Mack. Photo: Daniel King. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Working at the intersection of art, fashion, and architecture, Eric N. Mack creates intricate compositions comprised of fabric and found objects that defy easy categorization. A self-described painter working in the medium of fabric, each assembled work operates as an archive, recording not only the arrangements and juxtapositions of materials chosen by Mack, but the collection of fabrics themselves—whether it be fine silk, deadstock prints, or heavyweight suiting wools. How the materials interact with each other, as well as with the overall composition, and beyond the space the work occupies, invites considerations of the whole as well as the parts simultaneously. A hanging construction is the centerpiece of Mack’s eponymous exhibition, evoking Modern kinetic art and underscoring his ability to dialogue with surrounding architecture through carefully considered assemblages.
“Eric N. Mack” follows the announcement of his representation by Paul Cooper Gallery last year. In recent years, Mack has completed several high-profile residencies, including at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, and the American Academy in Rome.
Installation view of “Eric N. Mack” (2023). Photo: Steven Probert. © 2023 Eric N. Mack. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Andy Dixon, “Joy”The Hole, through December 17
Andy Dixon. Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, New York / Los Angeles.
Artist and musician Andy Dixon started his career in Vancouver’s punk scene before pivoting to visual art, though his past endeavors continue to influence his practice. Using a process of appropriating old masterwork motifs and compositions—which Dixon compares to music sampling—these elements are then given the “Andy Dixon treatment,” transforming them by simplifying the forms and using a vibrant pastel palette that, together, evokes everything from Disney’s Fantasia (1940) to the oeuvre of Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
In his solo “Joy,” playfulness and joie de vivre abound. “The world could use a bit of happiness and celebration right now,” said Dixon. In Yolo 🙂 (2023) multicolor cherubs drawn from different paintings circle each other in the air, and in Yolo 🙁 (2023) a collection of skulls from various memento mori gaze haphazardly against what appears to be a Dutch landscape. Rounding out the exhibition is a collection of the artist’s outrageously oversized shirts, branded Hermes, Moschino, and Versace, offering a witty look into the sometimes dubious sometimes absurd relationship between retail, fine art, and luxury goods.
Andy Dixon, Pressed Pill (2023). Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, New York / Los Angeles.
Asif Mian, “The Village Bites Itself”Management, November 8–December 17
Asif Mian. Photo: William Jess Laird. Courtesy of Management, New York.
The recipient of the 2019–2020 Queens Museum-Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Award, Asif Mian was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Museum in 2021, which focused on the artist’s multi-part project RAF. Mian’s exhibition with Management, “The Village Bites Itself,” marks his first solo exhibition with a commercial gallery in the city, and sees Mian continue his exploration of how violence and the perception of violence affect both personal and collective memory, psychology, and behavior.
Mian’s multidisciplinary practice blends autobiographical and universal experience with the aim of responding to and reflecting on the theme of violence; deconstructing and reassembling elements of raw or readymade materials, such as aluminum sheeting or Afghan tribal rugs, the breaking down and rearranging of medium evokes a liminal psychological space, one detached from the quotidian where the “ghosts” of violent acts and the mental processing of violence reside.
Asif Mian, The village bites itself, leaving a 6-foot scar from head to toe (2023). Courtesy of Management, New York.
Raqib Shaw, “Space Between Dreams”Pace, November 10–December 22
Raqib Shaw. Courtesy of Raqib Shaw Studio.
In his first presentation with Pace in New York since 2019, Raqib Shaw’s “Space Between Dreams” will see 16 works brought together. Shaw has garnered widespread recognition for his meticulous and intricate compositions that convey a diverse range of influences—from Japanese lacquerware and Persian carpets to early modern painting. Frequently conceived of as a series inspired by literature, art history, and mysticism, the works within the show synthesize real and imagined places and spaces, inspired by Shaw’s memories of Kashmir, where he is originally from, cityscapes and vignettes from his garden in London, where he is currently based, as well as vignettes reminiscent of New York, Paris, and Venice. Uniquely beguiling, each of Shaw’s works invites the mind’s eye to wander and explore.
Simultaneous to his showing with Pace, Shaw’s first traveling museum retrospective is on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, “Ballads of East and West,” through December 21 before traveling to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, in February 2024.
Raqib Shaw, Space Between Dreams – The Mourning Mendicant (2022–23). © Raqib Shaw / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Arghavan Khosravi, “True to Self”Rachel Uffner, November 11, 2023–January 6, 2024
Arghavan Khosravi. Photo: Hossein Fatemi. Courtesy Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York.
Nine recent wall-mounted and freestanding sculptural paintings are included in Arghavan Khosravi’s second solo exhibition with Rachel Uffner, following on the heels of her solo exhibition at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham. “True to Self” illustrates Khosravi’s ongoing exploration of ideas and histories around identity, agency, and womanhood, and further provides insight into the evolution of her practice in light of Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom), a global movement in solidarity with Iranian women and girls who peacefully demonstrate for their fundamental human rights.
Born in Iran in the years following the Islamic Revolution, Khosravi’s work shows the influence of the three decades she lived there, largely living dichotomously: following strict Islamic law in public while fostering freedom of thought and action in private. Themes of resilience, perseverance, and strength in the face of oppression are found throughout Khosravi’s oeuvre, as well as references to traditional architectural forms, Persian miniature paintings, and canonic artworks and stories ranging from tales of the Iranian hero Prince Siyavush to Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina. Commingling elements of sculpture with painting, Khosravi expresses the dynamism and complexity of lived experiences both conceptually and materially.
Arghavan Khosravi, The Battleground (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York.
Pipilotti Rist “Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon”At Hauser and Wirth, November 9, 2023–January 13, 2024At Luhring Augustine, November 18, 2023–February 3, 2024
Pipilotti Rist (2022). Photo: Joël Hunn. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist is widely recognized for experimental video art and site-specific installations, as well as for maintaining a distinct surrealist bent in her work. This month, Rist is the subject of a major two-part exhibition staged between Hauser and Wirth’s West 22nd Street building and Luhring Augustine on West 24th Street. The complementary shows invite viewers on a multisensory journey through Rist’s imaginative and immersive world that spans both locations’ interior and exterior spaces, beginning with each of the gallery’s greeting visitors with an “artistic gesture” on their facades, Textile Simultaneity at Luhring Augustine and Innocent Collection at Hauser and Wirth.
Employing a wide range of media, including painting, video sculpture, projections, and more, each presentation will include works debuting for the first time, including new iterations of previous work such as occasion-specific videos that will be shown in the windows of Neighbors Without Fences (2020), a full-scale clapboard house facade. Playful and enchanting, across each presentation visitors will be enveloped in Rist’s singular artistic vision.
Pipilotti Rist, twin concept pictures (2023). © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser and Wirth and Luhring Augustine / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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Plenty of people can tell you what a Mark Rothko painting looks like. Posters of the Abstract Expressionist’s seductive fields of color are a fixture on dorm room walls. Fewer people can tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a Rothko painting in person. And until now, I’m not sure anyone could tell you what it felt like to be in the presence of 115 Rothkos all at once—but this transcendent experience is open to a whole lot more people after the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened its stunning encyclopedic winter blockbuster in Paris, “Mark Rothko.”
Most museums would dream of staging a show like this. But these days the massive expenses of shipping, insuring, and loan agreements mean it could only be pulled off by a deep-pocketed private institution. Backed by the billionaire art collector and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, the exhibition includes major groups of works lent from the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Tate in London, as well as private lenders including the artist’s children Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, the Taiwanese collector Pierre Chen, U.S. collectors Adriana and Robert Mnuchin, Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, and the Nahmad family.
It’s a huge moment for Paris, as the foundation’s curator Suzanne Pagé, who has co-organized this exhibition with Rothko’s son Christopher, can attest.
“Nobody in four generations has had the possibility to see Rothko in Paris,” Pagé told me. While there are two Rothkos in the Pompidou’s collection, the last time the artist had a retrospective in France was 1999—a show Pagé herself curated at the the Musée d’Art Moderne. “A lot of young people have posters, but it is a great betrayal to enter into the emotional painting of Rothko that way. What is essential in the painting of Rothko are the vibrations, which are totally reduced in a poster,” Pagé explained. “You have to stop, look, and be captive with your body, with your soul, with everything in you, and you are hypnotized.”
“Mark Rothko” at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris on October 17, 2023 in Paris, France. (Photo by Luc Castel/GettyImages)
The exhibition offers plenty of discoveries, from Rothko’s early figurative work to a re-evaluation of his later, darker paintings. It does a fair amount of work to undo how the macabre facts of Rothko’s biography—including his death by suicide aged 66—have colored the interpretation of these late works. A popular myth, which the curators deem reductive, has it that Rothko’s late-career turn from his classic, brightly-colored paintings towards a darker palette of rusty reds, purples, and blackish hues reflected his declining mental state.
“A retrospective by definition needs to tell the whole career. And of course it needs to tell the whole life,” Christopher Rothko told me as we stood in front of some of these murky late works. “I think for me the most important thing is for people to experience the career, see the trajectory of the painting, and not start with the idea of suicide and then view the career backwards—because that’s a distortion. Nobody lives their lives backwards.”
The show takes a basically chronological approach, beginning in a dimly lit subterranean gallery with Rothko’s early works. Painted in New York in the 1930s, where Rothko settled as an adult after emigrating to the U.S. from Russia as a child, these lonely and claustrophobic figurative paintings convey the spirit of the Depression era. His muted “subway paintings” concentrate on oppressive architectural features, corridors, staircases, and rails. A pair of unsettling, brassy nudes with faraway eyes might surprise those unfamiliar with this early period, as might the artist’s lone self-portrait, a dense painting from 1936, where Rothko cuts an inscrutable figure, his gaze obscured behind dark glasses.
Left to right : Mark Rothko, Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1942), Tiresias (1944), Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944). Installation view, gallery 1, level -1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
From the beginning of the 1940s, there’s a marked shift in style as Rothko grapples with expressing the barbarism of World War II through his brush, as well as his own childhood memories of religious persecution as a Russian Jew. A set of aesthetically troubling paintings veer from realism and draw instead on both mythology and Surrealist techniques for accessing the unconscious mind.
This “neo-Surrealist” period where Rothko repeatedly splits, twists, dissects, and reconstructs the human figure comes to a peak in 1946, when we finally get to Rothko’s abstract turn. The next room hits visitors like a blast of wind, intensified by a Mozart opera reverberating through the galleries. In these scrubbed-out, pared-back canvases, we first begin to see the fields of color, amoeba-like, spring forth inside the painter’s mind as he realizes the impossibility of expressing what he sought to through the human figure. These “multi-form” paintings attempt to capture something of inner human realities, grasping into the abyss and tapping into that realm of experience beyond the measurable, the kind of experience that the Romantic poets called “the sublime.”
A quote on the wall situates you with what was going on in Rothko’s mind: “A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an Experience,” he wrote.
Left to right : Mark Rothko, No. 8 (1949), Untitled (Blue, Yellow, Green on Red) (1954), No. 7 (1951), No. 11 / No. 20 (1949), No. 21 (Untitled) (1949). Installation view, gallery 2, level -1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
After that point, the galleries shift gears into the “classic” Rothkos, his best-known rectangular Abstract Expressionist fields of color from the late 1940 and onwards. The largest portion of the exhibition, it includes 70 works, awash with chromatic harmonies of saturated yellows and reds, but also pinks, purples, and blues. Their bright colors have often led observers to misconstrue these ethereal and beautiful works as serene or cheerful. Coming upon them here, having passed through the context of his earlier work, makes palpable how they are just as perforated with existential angst.
Left to right: Mark Rothko, Ochre and Red on Red (1954), Orange and Red on Red (1957) Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 7, level 1, the “Rothko Room” from the Phillips Collection, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.

Through that lens, Rothko’s shift toward his darker hued palette from around 1957 does not feel so much like a break as a natural evolution. Among the examples in the exhibition is Tate Modern’s entire Rothko Room—nine deep red paintings donated by the artist in 1959, originally destined for a restaurant at the Seagram building in New York. Working on a public installation prompted Rothko to change his interaction with the viewer. “He’s no longer trying to grab your attention as you walk by in a museum,” Christopher Rothko said. “He knows that you will be with him for an hour or two, or more, so instead of trying to overwhelm you in a moment with color and emotion, he reduces the tone. He reduces the speed of interaction and lets the painting seep into you.”
After the end of the Seagram commission, Rothko retained this strategy, going even darker for the “black form” paintings, a number of which grace the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. A number of these sonorous works, which at a glance appear monochromatic but hum with just as many colors as the bright paintings, stole the show for me. Rothko was particular about the way he wanted these works to be experienced: not hung like a monument or trophy on the wall, but mounted low, so that you can look at them directly. In the low-lit setting of the gallery, as your eyes adjust to the lighting conditions, the miraculous paintings almost seemed to hover off the walls.
Left to right: Mark Rothko Untitled (1964). No. 8 (1964) Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 6, level 1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher knew Rothko while he was alive—the gallery has represented the estate since 1977—and has always been fond of these later, under-appreciated works, devoting a gallery show to them in 2017.
Speaking over the phone, Glimcher recalled Rothko telling him a story about a “magnificent” dark painting, now in the dealer’s possession. It had been rejected by a collector who had been invited to the studio, but said she would prefer a “happy” painting in the palette for which the painter was most famous. Rothko recounted his reply: “Red, yellow, orange—aren’t those the colors of an inferno?”
Glimcher credited an introduction by Louise Nevelson—who bonded with Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottleib over their shared refugee experience—for entree into a friendship with the notoriously reclusive painter. His 69th Street studio also just happened to be directly across from Glimcher’s apartment.
“Mark let me come to his studio quite often,” Glimcher recalled. “Sometimes, in the winter, it got dark and I’d be coming home from work because I lived across the street, and there would be a light on. I would knock on the door and he would let me come in and sit and talk and show me the paintings that he had been working on.”
Because of those encounters, the dealer has rare insight into the artist’s feelings about some of the later works, including smaller canvasses and works on paper which he made after a heart attack in 1968 meant he needed to work on a less physically strenuous scale. “He liked the feeling of the brush on the paper, how it slid more easily against the paper than against the canvas,” Glimcher said.
Left to right: Mark Rothko, Untitled (1969-1970), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969). Sculptures : Alberto Giacometti, L’Homme qui marche I (1960), Grande Femme III (1960). Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 10, level 2, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
As skeptical as I probably should be about a dealer trying to make a market for less in demand works, I am still persuaded by these sepulchral beauties. The exhibition’s final gallery offers up a number of Rothko’s late black and gray paintings alongside sculptures by Giacometti, as Rothko had originally intended for them to be shown in a never realized commission for UNESCO. The curators position these works, so simple but filled with incredibly rich and beautiful brushwork, as a springboard towards Minimalism. You can certainly see how an artist like Brice Marden might have looked at such works and taken inspiration.
Viewed this way, Rothko’s darker works are rightfully seen as a progression: the artist uses reduced means, and a different chromatic scale, but is still after the same fundamental truths as the earlier works. Through this lens, they could be read as allegorical, with their deepening colors representing Rothko ongoing quest to convey pure human emotion, rather than simply expressing his own feelings. Yet lurking behind the great seduction of the colors in the “classic” Rothko paintings is the same drama: That of the human condition.
“Rothko was always interested in Greek tragedy, and he felt that was what he was attaining and searching for in his paintings: The edge of perception, and taking us forward to someplace else,” Glimcher told me.
With everything going on in the world right now, viewers might find catharsis in these paintings. I certainly did.
“Mark Rothko” is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris through April 2, 2024.
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