10 Art Shows to See in New York, September 2024

by Admin
10 Art Shows to See in New York, September 2024

It’s officially the fall art season and the New York art world was abuzz last weekend with fairs and openings. With so much to choose from it’s hard to single anything out, but below are 10 of our favorite shows right now, featuring artists ranging from museum heavyweights (Leon Golub) to Asian-American pioneers (Charles Yuen of the Godzilla art collective), and from technology virtuosos (Rafael Lozano-Hemmer) to brilliant mosaicists (Manny Vega). This will be our only guide to New York City exhibitions in September, but next month we’ll be back to our biweekly schedule. And a few great summer shows remain open through this weekend, so before you rush to see the new ones, check out Richard Serra’s film and video works at Dia Chelsea, Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul at the Drawing Center in Soho, and the Art Students League of New York’s 2024 Juried Selection Exhibition at the Lower East Side’s Gallery Onetwentyeight. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor


Tristan Unrau: Re-enactment

Sebastian Gladstone Gallery, 291 Grand Street, Fourth Floor, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 2

Tristan Unrau is the type of noncommittal art weirdo I adore. Each of the 12 paintings in this one-room exhibition are created in a different art historical style that he easily assimilates. The works resemble those of Pierre Bonnard, Gerhard Richter (the photorealist period), Max Klinger, and other bold-faced and not-so-bold-faced artist names in this puzzle of influences that refuses to congeal into any one thing. There’s something very internet-y about his obfuscation of a personal style while celebrating the absurdity that comes from paintings like “Academy” (2024), which depicts an art school for ants, “Death Peeing, after Klinger” (2024), portraying a urinating skeleton, or “Invitation” (2024), which looks like two jack-off buddies rendered with the same care that might be allotted to a Baroque Doubting Thomas scene. Even “Interior with Dog” (2024), which is one of the prettiest paintings, has a quality that vibrates off the wall and appears to come to grips with the unease of being alive in this time of monsters. —Hrag Vartanian


Charles Yuen: Frequency Surfing

JJ Murphy Gallery, 53 Stanton Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 5

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Detail of Charles Yuen’s “Shoulder Assist” (2023) (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

This newish gallery is the site of a solo exhibition by one of the original members of the influential Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network, Charles Yuen. His brash, textured canvas works have a dreamlike quality that distills seemingly simple compositions into layered scenes that occupy your imagination. “Shoulder Assist” (2023) and “This Again” (2023) are good examples of his language cutting to the core of what almost feels like various artistic anxieties. In the former, a figure sits atop another’s shoulders as they stare at a forest of ladders and dots that form the roots of a gesturally outlined forest, and in the other, a figure catches fire while their companion appears helpless to do much of anything with its ladder arms. Paint often seems to be in flux on his surfaces and the artist refuses purity in favor of a sometimes muddy line that produces a sense of speed, as if the artist was jotting something down before the idea slipped away. —HV


Monica Bonvicini: Put All Heaven in a Rage

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through October 12

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Installation view of Monica Bonvicini: Put All Heaven in a Rage at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (photo Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery has long excelled at presenting conceptual art that is visually and intellectually engaging. This show is both of those of those, with a dry, bitter sense of humor to boot. A first-floor installation might appear almost clinical at first — all metal chains, fluorescent lights, and slick surfaces — but it hides undercurrents of transgressive desire: the chains terminate in handcuffs, leather belts are woven together, a cluster of objects turns out to be chainsaws coated in black rubber, and glass tongues emerge from holes in pink-tinted mirrors that reflect the entire installation, adding an element of voyeurism. While the artist’s feminist themes aren’t front and center in the show, her sly imprisonment of a giant Marlboro Man cowboy, in a black and white image on one wall, into her bondage fantasy (complete with yellow-painted wood bars enclosing one entrance) refuses the male-centric power relations that dominate BDSM worlds. Although the text-based works on the second floor, bearing phrases like “own your own desire” and the show’s title, aren’t quite as compelling, they give voice to the libidinous energies simmering beneath the show’s surface. —NH


Leon Golub: Et In Arcadia Ego

Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through October 19

Few words can fully convey the brutality Leon Golub’s paintings. On a sociopolitical level, the artist’s visceral images of mercenary soldiers and authority figures reify the power relations that bolster dictatorial regimes. But, like Otto Dix, Kim Jones, and other artists who experienced war and abuses firsthand (Golub served in World War II as an army cartographer), his art aims at the gut more than the mind. Rendered on linen tarps, sometimes using instruments like meat cleavers, works like “Mercenaries IV” (1980) and “White Squad V” (1984) perform intimidation and aggression as they record it. The blood red background in the former is a power move in itself, an assault on vision that at once commands and aggrieves attention. It serves as the stage for the five brute figures dressed in the khaki and green of camouflage, two holding machine guns. Yet a swath of saturated red in the composition’s center asserts the color as an equal actor in the scene, one reflected in the red, burned bodies of “Napalm III” (1969).

The two-part show also includes a selection of works by other artists who have tackled violence and corruption in their own trenchant ways (e.g., Teresa Margolles, David Hammons). Visit the group show, curated by artist Rashid Johnson, while you’re there but go to see Golub’s works, their vast expanses consuming the air, memorials to atrocity frozen in time. —NH


Naudline Pierre: The Mythic Age

James Cohan Gallery, 48 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through October 19

There’s no doubt that Naudline Pierre’s expansive paintings of fantastical femme figures are gorgeous, but what elevates them beyond their surface allure is the melancholy that suffuses them. As sprite-like forms coalesce and recede amid swirls of warm jewel hues, and blend into one another, they appear suspended between individuation and loss of self. In “A Hopeful Many” (2024), faces peer out from gray, cloud-like forms, just barely discernible, while the horizontal figure in “Longing For” (2024), rendered in a fiery orange-red, seems almost one with the Turner-esque storm of flames and clouds that surrounds her. Pierre’s elegant, expressive gestures activate the fluidity of the figures and evoke a realm that is forever in flux. These poignant paintings linger in the imagination long after seeing them. —NH


Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos): milk and honey

Cristin Tierney Gallery, 219 Bowery, Floor 2, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 19

This is Sara Siestreem’s (Hanis Coos) first New York City exhibition, and it demonstrates her ease with various artistic registers that include, but are not limited to, petroglyph-style mark making, beading, weaving, abstract painting, and various printmaking techniques. Her process-based art makes you conscious of time, whether as a cumulative effect — as in her weaving, where you can see how things are made and sometimes cast or 3D printed — or in her paintings, where we see layers of line, image, and shape come together to reinvent notions of ceremony, ritual, and ancestral inheritance.

In “skyline” (2024), seven glazed slip cast ceramic baskets are placed in front of the windows, making us aware of the pattern of urban structures across the street from the gallery, which denote another type of rhythm in stacked forms. The three large paintings here are more austere than previous panel works, using graphite, acrylic, Xerox transfer, and other techniques that reclaim cultural forms that went into “hibernation,” a term she’s used before, during the 1850s, when her own tribe was dispossessed and persecuted by the US government almost to the point of complete genocide. Each of these art pieces, particularly the baskets and dance caps, renew the promise that art has an alchemical power that can be born from humble yet proud origins, and with the right care it can be woven into gold. —HV


Michael Bühler-Rose: I Want Your Skull

New Discretions at Situations, 127 Henry Street, Two Bridges, Manhattan
Through October 20

During the pandemic, some of us started baking sourdough or cleaning out our closets (I fall into the latter, while my spouse tried the first), but artist Michael Bühler-Rose took up marquetry, and these four works at New Discretions at Situations (why are gallery names getting worse?) are wondrous examples of what he calls the “collapse [of] my inner life … growing up in both the Hare Krishna movement and the punk/hardcore music scenes.” 
Inspired by the 15th-century Gubbio Studiolo on display at the Met Museum, his large “Bühler-Rose Studiolo Summer ’24 (FDR & Grand St.) 1–4” (2024) uses 40 different types of wood, including ebony, purple heart, jackfruit (light and dark), champa (four kinds), maddi, silver oak, and rosewood. It offers us a scene from his Manhattan studio, with its stacks of art books, boxes of vinyl, and items that suggest his life and interests, but in a manner that turns the everyday into a decorative feast. The gallery has done a particularly good job at placing the art on a wall that allows the outdoor light to enter the space in a manner that corresponds to the light source in the work itself. Only three panels are on display, as the fourth is yet to arrive from Mysore, South India, where the artist works with artisans who normally make religious objects for Hindu temples. The overall effect of the wood inlay artworks is very contemporary while consciously feeling rooted in a multicultural and multitemporal art history, which gives them an added sense of authority. —HV


Darrel Ellis and Miguel Ferrando

Candice Madey Gallery, 1 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 25

Exhibitions that pair artist friends don’t always offer much beyond the novelty of the friendship, but in this standout show, already impressive works by Ellis and Ferrando — who met while attending the High School of Fashion Industries in New York — become even richer in each others’ company. The artists’ aesthetics and subjects are distinct — Ellis worked mostly in black and white and reflected the world around him while Ferrando’s brightly colored pieces often evoke history painting — and, to its credit, the gallery doesn’t strain to make connections aside from some portraits the two made of one another. Instead, the works complement each other, the delicate, fluid lines and soft washes of gray in Ellis’s pieces giving way to the quivering outlines and translucent color in Ferrando’s. In this way, the art is an analogue to the friendship itself, as two visions that are different but aligned. Both artists died of AIDS-related complications within a few years of each other in the 1990s, adding a mournful dimension to the show, but it shouldn’t overshadow the delight that these artists seemed to take in creating and togetherness. —NH


Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Caressing the Circle

Bitforms Gallery, 131 Allen Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through October 26

This is a must-see show that feels like a small glimpse into the future. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is always on the cutting edge of art and tech, but here his “Transparency Display” (2024), in particular, which he developed with his own “pixel glass” technology, plays with the viewer’s experience in the gallery as it reveals and conceals in real time, offering us temporary relief from the opacity of a triptych of glass walls. Another piece, “Shadow Tuner” (2024), was first developed as a public artwork in Abu Dhabi, but this smaller version still links to thousands of geo-located radio stations that respond to the viewers’ spatial relationship to the globe. The classic, much earlier work “Standards and Double Standards, Subsculpture 3” (2004) is a single fastened belt hanging in a roped-off gallery that gives the impression of following your movements. The belt, which hangs at roughly waist height, evokes a patriarchal figure through this symbolic object of authority and foreshadows the artist’s long-running interest in technology and power, and how viewers may have agency in determining their relationship to both. 

My guess is we’ll be seeing a version of “Transparency Display” in buildings everywhere in a few years, so I hope he’s got his patent. —HV


Byzantine Bembé: New York by Manny Vega

Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan
Through December 8

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Manny Vega, “Tito Puente” (2009), colored glass on plaster (photo Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)

Before you continue reading this, put your headphones on and get this playlist going, curated by Manny Vega himself to soundtrack his melodious, vibrant exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem” and the voices of Celia Cruz and Tito Puente will also reverberate as you admire Vega’s carefully crafted mosaics, prints, and works on paper in this intimate, satisfying show. Starting in the 1980s, the Nuyorican artist (a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent) was deeply inspired by the Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices of Candomblé; this influence is an anchor of his visual lexicon, along with religious art, female figures, the neighborhood of El Barrio, and, of course, music. One special gem on view is a watercolor of the Yoruba spirit Changó, on loan from Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is said to display the piece in her chambers. —Valentina Di Liscia

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Natalie Haddad is Reviews Editor at Hyperallergic and an art writer and historian. Natalie holds a PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the University of California San Diego and focuses on World…
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Valentina Di Liscia is the News Editor at Hyperallergic. Originally from Argentina, she studied at the University of Chicago and is currently working on her MA at Hunter College, where she received the…
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