As the crisp air of early fall sweeps through the city, New York’s art galleries have burst into full creative bloom, ushering in a new season with a wave of compelling solo exhibitions and innovative group shows across Manhattan and Brooklyn. This September, the energy is palpable, with galleries embracing bold narratives, challenging formal conventions, and welcoming audiences into spaces that blend the emotional, the political, and the deeply personal.
Among the most talked-about openings is Ambera Wellmann’s debut at Hauser & Wirth. Titled Darkling, the exhibition features a haunting series of oil paintings that dive into themes of corporeality, decay, and transformation. Drawing from her upbringing in rural Nova Scotia and shaped by contemporary anxieties around climate and mortality, Wellmann creates layered, often chaotic canvases where human and animal forms collapse into each other, pushing the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. Her works feel almost mythological—at once ancient and urgent—blurring the line between flesh and landscape, vulnerability and threat. The show’s emotional resonance and painterly intensity position Wellmann as one of the season’s breakout voices.
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Not far away in Chelsea, Sasha Gordon’s Haze opened at David Zwirner Gallery, marking her first solo show since joining the powerhouse gallery earlier this year. Known for her luminous and psychologically charged portraiture, Gordon presents a series of new works that explore identity, interiority, and the fragmented self. Her paintings are rendered with hyperreal precision and drenched in surreal hues—pink skies, green shadows, and haunting double selves—that heighten the tension between perception and reality. The exhibition represents a maturation of Gordon’s practice, offering intimate insight into the complexities of queer identity, memory, and self-construction. For critics and collectors alike, Haze confirms Gordon’s growing influence in the contemporary figurative art scene.
Beyond these headline solo exhibitions, the city is pulsing with group shows that embrace material experimentation and social commentary. Fiber art is making a notable resurgence, most visibly in FIBRATION III: Anxiety and Hope at L’Space Gallery, a group exhibition featuring sixteen artists working in textiles, embroidery, and mixed media. The show grapples with emotional and ecological vulnerability, using tactile materials to express fragility and resilience. From handwoven sculptures to embroidered protest banners, the exhibition underscores how so-called “craft” practices are reclaiming space within contemporary fine art, offering viewers a sensory and conceptual experience.
Meanwhile, across town, smaller and artist-run galleries are contributing to the season’s richness with experimental installations and thematic showcases. In Bushwick, collaborative spaces are staging shows that explore diasporic memory and speculative futures, while the Lower East Side is seeing a rise in multimedia installations that combine video, performance, and archival material. The shared emphasis, regardless of location, seems to be on creating work that speaks to the moment—be it through the lens of climate anxiety, gender fluidity, cultural heritage, or personal transformation.
This season’s exhibitions also highlight a shift in how galleries engage with the public. Gone are the days of insular, opaque presentations aimed at elite audiences. Today’s curators are increasingly programming with accessibility, education, and dialogue in mind. Artists are being given space to take risks—both aesthetically and thematically—and audiences are responding with a hunger for work that feels relevant, emotionally charged, and rooted in the complexities of real life. The art world, in this moment, is not retreating from difficulty but leaning into it with courage and conviction.
New York’s September shows reflect a broader conversation unfolding across the global art scene—one that questions not just what art looks like, but what it does. What histories does it challenge or preserve? What emotions does it allow us to feel, process, or release? And perhaps most importantly, how can it serve as a tool for connection in a time when isolation, disillusionment, and dislocation remain so widespread?
As the city’s galleries continue to open their doors throughout the month, visitors can expect to encounter work that doesn’t shy away from discomfort, but embraces it with beauty, honesty, and complexity. Whether through the visceral brushwork of Ambera Wellmann, the introspective portraits of Sasha Gordon, or the stitched and sculpted declarations of fiber artists across the city, New York’s fall art season invites viewers not just to look, but to feel deeply—and perhaps to leave changed.
