This Fall’s Must-See Gallery Shows in New York
From Ambera Wellmann’s visceral debut at Hauser & Wirth to Sasha Gordon’s first Zwirner solo, September delivers a high-energy lineup of exhibitions across the city.
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As it does every year, The Armory Show signals the start of a bustling art season in New York City as the art world returns from summer retreats in the Hamptons, Upstate or further south in France and the Mediterranean. Since the launch of Frieze Seoul—this year overlapping with the iconic New York City fair—many mega galleries have pushed their openings to the second or even third week of September. Still, the city’s galleries are as usual set to host a new wave of blockbuster exhibitions and shows of emerging talent, each vying for a prime slot in the art calendar and acting as a proving ground for the year ahead. With that in mind, Observer has assembled a lineup of this month’s must-see New York exhibitions to keep firmly in view.
Don't miss
- Ambera Wellmann's "Darkling"
- Caleb Hahne Quintana's "A Boy That Don't Bleed"
- Sasha Gordon's "Haze"
- Dew Kim & Filippo Cegani "Ecstasy Protocol"
- Elizabeth Glaessner's "Running Water"
- Yuan Fang's "Spaying"
- "Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties"
- Bernardo Pacquing's "Casual Loops"
- Celeste Rapone's "Some Weather"
- Omara Mara Oláh's "Guess what, I'm still here"
Ambera Wellmann's "Darkling"
- Hauser & Wirth, New York (Wooster Street)
- September 5 - October 25, 2025
Ambera Wellmann’s paintings can be described as intense, simultaneous visions of body and psyche—the tragedy of flesh torn apart set against the infinite agility of the mind. For her debut at Hauser & Wirth New York, Wellmann stages the horror and doom of our time, where apocalyptic news, nuclear threats, climate cataclysms and death thrash all around us. Her paintings are pure drama; contorted bodies bleed and purge into one another in an orgy of splintered flesh and demonic presences that embody the unsettling violence and chaos of our age. It is a nightmare unfurling before the viewer’s eyes, an ominous hallucination already containing so much of what is happening in the world. Yet the artist still offers the sensual pleasure of her lush, textured use of paint and color, allowing the rawness and brutal intensity of these scenes to coexist with the virtuosity of a painting so masterfully crafted. This overpowering intensity seduces us into a haunting spectacle of the senses, a tactile horror that confronts us with both our finitude and the potential immensity within and beyond us.
Caleb Hahne Quintana's "A Boy That Don't Bleed"
- Anat Ebgi, New York
- September 5 - October 17, 2025
Although Caleb Hahne Quintana is among the artists who rose to prominence during the pandemic, he has never rushed or compromised his command of painting, instead relentlessly questioning his art and pursuing continual evolution. Going more than a year without a solo show gave him the space to reflect and grow in both style and subject, as seen in the new body of work he presents this September at Anat Ebgi. "A Boy That Don’t Bleed" examines the myth of masculine invulnerability through deeply poetic and emotionally charged paintings. Drawing on mythological symbolism, Quintana challenges societal expectations that suppress emotional and physical vulnerability in men. His works invite viewers to consider the complexity of masculinity, self-discovery and the search for meaning. To describe Quintana's paintings as merely figurative feels reductive: he distills scenes of profound emotional and psychological weight, staging archetypal situations and literary tropes that have threaded through civilization’s history. By entering the mythological realm, he allows these scenes to transcend personal or autobiographical reflection, extending into the larger, universal questions that have always accompanied human existence.
Sasha Gordon's "Haze"
- David Zwirner, New York
- September 10 - October 18, 2025
September will be the month of major debuts for once-emerging and now rapidly established young artists, many of whom have been poached by mega galleries from smaller ones. Sasha Gordon is another pandemic-fueled rising star who captured collectors’ attention with her bold, often cartoonishly distorted figuration, and her work Gone Fishing (2019) fetched a record $214,200 at Christie's New York last November, building on the momentum of her solo show the year before at ICA Miami during Art Basel. Through her lens as an Asian diasporic artist, Gordon engages with themes of identity, memory and cultural heritage from a perspective that is at once critically intellectual, intimately emotional and deeply personal, balancing beauty and grotesque to intertwine pleasing elements with discomfort and unease, and allowing the viewer to feel both the physicality and emotional weight of her subjects. Whether addressing personal struggle, societal issues or the complexities of self-image, her art becomes both narrative and symbolic, compelling audiences to reckon intellectually and empathetically with the material and intangible dimensions of identity and existence, and this exhibition marks her first solo show with David Zwirner since the announcement of her co-representation with Matthew Brown last year.
Dew Kim & Filippo Cegani "Ecstasy Protocol"
- Swivel Gallery, New York
- September 10 - October 4, 2025
For centuries, Catholicism has dominated Western art, serving both as a narrative tool and as a system of values, with subtle erotic allusions often repressed or sublimated in religious stories to diminish the significance of earthly flesh in favor of higher spiritual realms. Coming from two distinct parts of the world—South Korea and Italy—both long shaped and often controlled by Catholicism, Filippo Cegani and Dew Kim offer a timely reflection on the fractured afterlife of Christian iconography in the post-digital age. In a cultural landscape where sacred imagery is now more likely to appear as an emoji, meme or K-pop stage design than in a church or chapel, Kim and Cegani trace the migration of the divine into the digital unconscious and its expressions, raising the question of what happens when symbols of martyrdom, grace, sacrifice and ecstasy are stripped of spiritual grounding and repurposed within the spectacle economy of late capitalism and social media virality. Cegani’s paintings render classical religious figures in high-gloss, hyperreal surfaces built through layered brushwork and airbrushing, while Kim’s multimedia practice explores the collision of Catholic symbolism with the idols of K-pop and K-movie celebrity. This fusion generates a new spectacularization of the idol and an aesthetic of transgression that creates space for queer experiences even within hyper-traditional societies. Together, Kim and Cegani present a haunting vision of how contemporary visual culture metabolizes religious legacy: ecstasy, pain and sacrifice are not suppressed but everywhere, repackaged as content, drifting across screens, drained of context yet still potent as universal symbols.
Elizabeth Glaessner's "Running Water"
- PPOW, New York
- September 5 - October 8, 2025
Glaessner's paintings emerge from a liquid, dreamlike space where the subconscious rises and dissolves in the in-between, blurring abstraction and figuration. Working in oil, acrylic and pure pigments dispersed with water and binders, her technique shifts between formal articulation and non-representational gesture, opening surreal and heightened possibilities of vision. Ghostly, diaphanous figures drift across these canvases, embodying continual metamorphosis and collapsing the boundaries between body, psyche and the external world. The new works at PPOW draw on her dream analysis and personal history, refracted through universal archetypes and literary tropes, to consider the body as a porous vessel in constant dialogue with its surroundings. Through fluid, intuitive processes, Glaessner reveals the delicate interplay between inner and outer worlds, inviting viewers into a space where boundaries dissolve and new forms of connection take shape. Her work becomes a meditation on the body’s vulnerability and fluidity, its ability to transcend physical limits and its potential to reconnect through watery dimensions that gesture toward a mythical, interconnected reality.
Yuan Fang's "Spaying"
- SKARSTEDT, New York
- September 4 – October 25, 2025
“I need my paintings to be confrontational,” Fang states in a press release, and her new body of work is indeed a testament to endurance. Deeply psychological and emotionally charged, these works confront the viewer with the weight of her personal experience and challenging period while asserting a visual force built on fierce resilience. Known for her psychological and visceral approach, Fang’s practice captures the interplay between body, psyche and the external world. In the ribbon-like entanglements and contortions, she explores the perpetual cycle of generation, transformation, decay and rebirth through untamed brushwork that folds into swirling abstract forms. The shift from acrylic to oil introduces a new level of visceral depth and heightened emotional intensity, and the works now on view reflect a profound confrontation with bodily vulnerability following Fang’s cancer diagnosis, channeling resistance and resilience through energetic, tactile gestures. Alive with vibrant color and fluid movement, the paintings embody female strength, emotional depth and the constant tension between beauty and brutality, evoking both personal and collective healing and reconnecting with nature’s regenerative potential and the transformative power of human experience.
"Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties"
- Levy Gorvy Dayan, New York
- September 18 – December 23, 2025
For those nostalgic for New York’s legendary 1980s art scene, Levy Gorvy Dayan offers a timely throwback this September with a show organized in close collaboration with Mary Boone, the “queen of the [1980s] New York art scene,” as New York Magazine christened her in a 1982 cover story. Staged with museum-caliber hanging, the exhibition provides a sweeping snapshot of the creative fire that powered the city’s art world, complete with ephemera and music video projections. The main draw, however, is the roster of blue-chip heavy-hitters, from Andy Warhol’s Reel Basquiat (1984), in which a black silkscreened portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat smolders against a red-hot background, to a large-scale Richard Prince diptych from his iconic Cowboy series and Jeff Koons’s New Shelton Wet/Drys 10 Gallon and New Shelton Wet/Drys 5 Gallon Doubledecker (1981-86), the vacuum cleaners that first made waves in the New Museum’s windows when it was still located at 65 5th Avenue. The show also features works by other notables of the era, including Ross Bleckner, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, serving as both a vivid throwback to the energies of those years and a tribute to the figures who truly shaped the city’s art scene.
Bernardo Pacquing's "Casual Loops"
- Silverlens, New York
- September 4 – November 1, 2025
In September, Silverlens will spotlight one of the most compelling and widely recognized Filipino artists with his debut New York exhibition. Through a resourceful approach to materials, Pacquing constructs entire physical and imaginative landscapes of meaning, beginning with the detritus of civilization—collected from the streets and transformed into open narratives on canvas and intricate installations. In this show, he continues to probe the transformative qualities of everyday matter, focusing on the complex nature of concrete when reimagined on canvas. Typically employed in the construction of monolithic and supposedly permanent structures, here concrete is not cast or erected as tiles or blocks but shaped, molded and fluidly manipulated into new poetic constellations that intersect both the history of materials and their memory as vessels carrying the stories they have borne through their life cycles. At the same time, Pacquing challenges conventional expectations of painting by disrupting the "sacred" space of the canvas and revealing the expressive potential of the medium itself. In doing so, he pushes the boundaries of what we are willing to do and be seen doing while questioning the very notion of art.
Celeste Rapone's "Some Weather"
- Marianne Boesky, New York
- September 4 - October 18, 2025
Celeste Rapone is another artist who gained significant attention during the pandemic, with many collectors landing on a waiting list to acquire one of her compelling canvases. Conceived as parallel selves or alter egos, her characters stage allegorical commentaries on the millennial condition, grappling with societal pressures, psychic unease and the overwhelming influence of media while also navigating timeless existential questions around the absurdity and beauty of human existence. Challenging the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, Rapone layers pigment and texture to create images that are tactile even as they borrow from the digital aesthetics of screens. Against unnervingly flattened backdrops, she stages exaggerated and surreal depictions of the human form, engaging with simultaneous layers of reality and sensation to suggest that millennial life is already a multiscreen, multidimensional experience shaped by overlapping narratives and communications unfolding at once. With humor that sharpens rather than softens darker introspective themes, her characters appear trapped and compressed within this overwhelming entanglement, fighting to assert their physical and sensual presence—as bodies in space, as flesh and as sites of multiple inner and outward events. By probing the intersections of identity, social dynamics and human experience, Rapone’s visual storytelling lays bare the complexities of shifting notions of gender, sexuality and personal history.
Omara Mara Oláh's "Guess what, I'm still here"
- Margot Samel, New York
- September 5 - October 4, 2025
Margot Samel is dedicating her September exhibition slot to a singular and institutionally recognized perspective with "Guess What, I’m Still Here," a solo show featuring works from the estate of Hungarian Roma artist Mara Oláh (1945-2020), also known as Omara. Oláh’s self-taught practice—spanning drawing, painting, collage and photography—has garnered increasing institutional attention in recent years, accelerated by her inclusion in the first Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Marking the first exhibition of her work in the United States, the show presents bold paintings of people around her alongside her emotional "Written Photographs," each offering candid and intimate glimpses into Roma life and powerful storytelling about her experience as a Roma woman in Hungary. Notably, Oláh began her artistic journey at the age of forty-three with no formal training, discovering in art a therapeutic means to confront her own traumas while pursuing a relentless commitment to empathy and human understanding. Her work shares the reality of the Roma community with a broader audience, challenging stereotypes and rehumanizing their perception. Having grown up in a community scarred by both Nazi and postwar persecution, Oláh’s determination to thrive amid discrimination shaped both her identity and her art. While poverty, segregation, lack of medical access and extreme prejudice are daily realities reflected in her work, her oeuvre ultimately stands as a deeply personal and defiantly political celebration of Roma strength and dignity, transforming lived experience into art that insists on visibility, humanity and survival.
