Back to the Art Season: Part I: 12 Gallery Shows We Are Excited About
As summer draws to a close and the fall art season begins, we are eager to see all the new New York City gallery exhibitions. We have curated a list of shows we are most excited about and are thrilled to share with you.
Nicholas Party: Swamp
Nicholas Party ‘Portrait with an Eagle’
Coming from his successful emersive solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles in 2020, Nicholas Party will have his first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York City, opening this September. Party is a figurative painter who has garnered critical acclaim for familiar yet evocative landscapes, portraits, and still lifes.
Nicolas Party will transform the entire first floor of the gallery’s 22nd Street building into a vibrant world of visual enchantment. Featuring new oil-on-copper compositions, painted cabinets, signature pastel works and two site-specific murals that expand upon the artist’s most recent series––Swamp and Red Forest––the exhibition will immerse viewers in Party’s idiosyncratic practice, which simultaneously celebrates and challenges conventions of representational painting.
September 7th - October 21st
Hauser & With: 542 W 22nd Street
Jesse Mockrin: The Venus Effect
Herself unseen, 2023, Oil on canvas
This will be Jesse Mockrin’s first show with James Cohan gallery. Mockrin’s work is inspired by Old Master paintings, challenging the boundaries of realism and symbolism. She frequently explores themes of gender and androgyny, reinterpreting stories from a feminist lens.
In The Venus Effect, Mockrin explores historical representations of women with mirrors, ranging from scenes of the toilette to biblical and mythological narratives of reflection. The Venus effect, named for the art historical tradition of images that depict Venus gazing into a mirror, is a perceptual phenomenon wherein the viewer is fooled into believing that Venus is looking at her own reflection. In reality, her line of sight in the mirror connects with the viewer of the painting or the painter who created it. Mockrin sees this as an apt metaphor for these historical paintings themselves, which profess to portray women’s self-obsession, but instead depict a female subject gazing adoringly at the male painter who fashioned her. For centuries, images of women painted by men have depicted women’s beauty and nudity in the service of revealing an innate feminine vanity, greed, or wantonness. Mockrin reveals whose narcissism and gratification is truly on display. Through the artist’s contemporary feminist lens, the mirror becomes the tool through which her sitters recognize themselves as both the object of desire and a powerful subject whose agency is antithetical to their original narratives.
September 8th - October 21st
James Cohan: 48 Walker Street
Sanford Biggers: Meet Me on the Equinox
The Soothsayer, 2019-23, White marble on custom cedar plinth
Sanford Biggers’s third solo exhibition with Marianne Boesky gallery Meet Me on the Equinox, explores the realms of harmony and discord through material, form and concept. Biggers’s work is a dynamic interplay of storytelling, viewpoints and historical exploration. He often comments on contemporary, social, political and economic events while exploring the context behind them. His multifaceted approach positions him as a collaborator with history, delving into often-overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history.
A foray into the origin of myth and the malleability of historical narrative, the exhibition blurs the boundaries between seemingly disparate elements of Biggers’s practice as the convergence of pattern, material, and allegory sets the stage for the creation of novel, discordant, and subjective mythologies. Throughout his practice, Biggers examines the inherent tensions of history and culture, of language and symbol, of myth and narrative. Operating across diverse mediums—including painting, sculpture, collage, mixed media, music, video, and performance—Biggers emerges as an artistic intermediary. Continuously interrupting established narratives, intervening into historical forms, and remixing recognizable cultural signifiers, Biggers complicates, questions, and ultimately fosters new understandings of collective histories.
September 7th - October 14th
Marianne Boesky: 507 West 24th Street
Mickalene Thomas: je t’adore
November 1977, 2023. Rhinestones on dye sublimation prints
Mickalene Thomas is widely known for her bold mixed media works, often embellished with rhinestones, that feature and celebrate black female beauty, strength and determination. For her first solo exhibition at Yancey Richardson, Mickalene Thomas will be presenting 13 large-scaled mixed media photo collages, drawing inspiration from her research examining the imagery found in Jet magazine's calendars and the pages of the 1950s French publication Nus Exotique featuring imagery of Black female erotica.
Debuting these new works, Thomas investigates the notion of desire, memory, sexuality, and transformation through images of everyday, familiar Black women positioned and posed as alluring beauties. Thomas was inspired by the exhibition Black Womanhood (2009) and the book The Black Female Body by Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, a photographic history of the fascination of western cultures with the Black body. These two references have informed the artist’s long exploration of the Jet beauties of the month and inspired her personal engagement with an array of familiar, yet anonymous women, simultaneously reflecting the complexities imposed on the artist’s own body.
September 9th - November 11th
Yancey Richardson: 525 West 22nd Street
Jacob Hashimoto: The Disappointment Engine
The curiously forested spaces of young hearts, 2022, Acrylic, bamboo, paper, wood, and Dacron.
Jacob Hashimoto creates a world where dreams and meditation are linked to tradition and modernity. Hashimoto’s first show with Miles McEnery Gallery The Disappointment Engine is influenced by the digital age, video games, bright colored virtual realities, cosmology and art-historical traditions.
Loosely referencing East Asian craft traditions, the work also draws from the visual language of weeds and invasive species; radio telescopes; as well as the architecture of churches and mosques built during plagues, all to ask: how might visual sampling exist at the root of identity formation? Through his artworks, Hashimoto explores what it means to build an understanding of oneself from scratch, both as a denizen of the visually cacophonous digital age, but also as a Japanese American artist grappling with family histories of internment that resulted in shattered cultural inheritance.
September 7th - October 21st
Miles McEnery Gallery: 511 Wet 22nd Street’
April Gornik: The Other Side
Study for Storm Suspended by Light, 2022, Oil on canvas
April Gornik’s always memorable and riveting large scale paintings are the very definition of the word sublime. Her upcoming show, The Other Side will display Gornik’s fascination with the sky, the earth, and the horizon. The way these elements converge serve as the foundation to her paintings. She blends reality, memory, dreams and photography creating beautiful oil painting on linen. Gornik immerses you into these breathtaking landscapes.
Gornik has gone on to become one of the foremost figures of contemporary American landscape painting, having exhibited at the 1989 Whitney Biennial and both the 41st and 56th editions of the Venice Biennale. In 2021, she cofounded The Church, an innovative artist residency and exhibition space in Sag Harbor, NY.
September 7th - October 21st
Miles McEnery Gallery: 511 Wet 22nd Street
Bethany Czarnecki: A Memory, Eternal
Electric Geyser, 2023
Bethany Czarnecki’s A Memory, Eternal unveils a new group of abstract paintings where color-dense, enigmatically transcendent forms will veer from the sensual feminine to the vibrant landscape. Czarnecki’s works feature jewel-toned shades and constantly fluid, undulating shapes to craft immersive sensory encounters. Her sensual works skillfully play with light and shadow creating an emotive viewing experience.
Created over the course of 2023, the nine paintings included in the exhibition are at once a collection of individual entities that vary in form, color, and sensorial tone; creating a harmonious ensemble that is viscerally linked. Like the title of the exhibition, the paintings are complex, personal, and abstract. They metaphorically embody the idea that while the physical expires, a memory lives on, and the works endeavor to act as tangible tokens that call upon these moments.
September 8th - October 21st
Massey Klein Gallery: 124 Forsyth Street
Daniel Arsham: 20 YEARS
Friedrich Kunath, On The Beach, 2023, Oil on canvas, 48 x 38 1/2 in
Daniel Arshram is widely known for working with art, architecture and performance. His art reaches broadly into popular culture. In the new 20th anniversary exhibition, Arsham will transform Perrotin gallery’s space to present works in sculpture and paintings that explore and contemplate his fascination with intricacies of material and space
20 Years / 20 Ans will juxtapoze works on paper and paintings alongside life-size architectural inventions, sculptures carved from geological materials, to handheld objects and beyond. Key highlights will include a new collaboration with Star Wars, featuring the film’s iconic characters in Arsham’s signature “eroded” fictional archeological techniques; paintings in a new impasto paint specially developed by Arsham to invoke the texture of Renaissance masterpieces; a salon-style hanging of never-before-seen sketches on hotel stationery; wall surface manipulations bearing motifs of Falling Clocks and Veiled Poems and updated interpretations of Arsham’s classical antiquity sculptures.
September 6th - October 14th
Perrotin: 130 Orchard Street
Joe Fig: Contemplating Compositions
Gathering/Guggenheim (The Great Katzby), 2022-23
Joe Fig’s paintings may be very small in scale but they are just mesmerizing, serving for us as psychological windows into the world of art, museum exhibitions and the viewing experience itself. The paintings in Contemplating Compositions are a continuation of Fig’s 2020 exhibition of individuals observing art. His paintings range from high-profile exhibitions at renown museums to individuals looking at a single work of art. The series of works documents Fig’s travels across the country.
When we contemplate an artwork, we often distill a piece down to its elements, analyze what we see, and form opinions. We uncover what is being communicated. Similarly, when making work, artists frequently pause to take a step back, look, and reflect. Contemplation is as intrinsic to the creative process as the actual physical work of making an object. As Fig says, "It's in this moment of seeming inactivity when the artist is working the hardest."
September 8th - October 21st
Cristin Tierney Gallery: 219 Bowery
Kathleen Ryan: My Shell
Bad Lemon (Cameo), 2023, semi-precious stones, acrylic, glass, steel pins on coated polystyrene
Kathleen Ryan’s sculptures are both alluring and disturbing, gorgeous and incomprehensible, all of which makes them an absolute joy to experience. They are all made from found objects where the process of sourcing and collecting is essential to her work. Her over-size rotting fruit explores subliminal tension between revulsion and delight.
Insistent on their physicality, Ryan’s sculptures recast found and handmade objects as spectacular, larger-than-life hieroglyphs of Americana. Her mediums, which range from bowling balls to a deconstructed Airstream camper, are both familiar and iconographic, and seemingly lost in time. These materials are often at odds with the subjects they represent: delicate, sensual grapes are rendered with heavy, utilitarian concrete; mold colonies are composed of semi-precious gemstones. As in Dutch vanitas paintings, the relics of the everyday—seed pods, jewelry, domestic fixtures, moldy fruit—become tongue-in-cheek allegories for sexuality, decadence, and the cycle of life.
September 9th - October 28th
Karma: 22 East 2nd Street
Zoë Buckman: TENDED
Tended, 2023
Buckman effortlessly merges multiple mediums—embroidery, textiles, appliqué, sculpted forms, painting, and drawing—into an urgent body of composite work that strikes far beyond the sum of its parts. She addresses themes that are hard pressing and vital: intimacy, gendered violence, female outrage, reproductive rights, trauma, motherhood, and romance. Her works are a dense textured weave—portraits and scenes of personal history, collective trauma and experience—that spool an ongoing narrative through their pictorial and textual juxtapositions.
Buckman effortlessly merges multiple mediums—embroidery, textiles, appliqué, sculpted forms, painting, and drawing—into an urgent body of composite work that strikes far beyond the sum of its parts. She addresses themes that are hard pressing and vital: intimacy, gendered violence, female outrage, reproductive rights, trauma, motherhood, and romance. Her works are a dense textured weave—portraits and scenes of personal history, collective trauma and experience—that spool an ongoing narrative through their pictorial and textual juxtapositions.
September 5th - October 14th
Lyles & King: 19 Henry Street
Angela Heisch: As above, so below
Reflection Pools, 2023
Fascinated by natural patterns and fundamental forces, Angela Heisch’s latest works are powerful abstract creations. Her paintings embody a sense of celestial vastness and uniformity. Heisch is able to create these pieces by using baroque-inspired color palette, combined with fluid motions and a sense of calm.
Heisch aims to highlight the connectivity and mirrored relationship between nature and the manmade. Such dichotomies are at the root of Heisch’s practice, as referenced by the exhibition title As above, so below: hard and soft, fast and slow, light and dark. The paintings in the exhibition each have a counterpart, or a “response painting,” a process that has allowed the artist to examine each work through a divergent lens: meditating on alternative environments, materials, and time. This creates a brief and discreet narrative and relationship between the paintings which otherwise prompt the viewer to create meaning through their own projections.
September 8th - October 14th
GRIMM: 54 White Street
Newsletter written by Sophia Schlesinger
E-mail ArtMuse’s founder Natasha Schlesinger, ns@artmuseny.com to learn more about art tours, art guidance and art curation.
If you have questions about our newsletter or would like to share events with us, please email Sophia Schlesinger: Sophia@artmuseny.com