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“Peace Core” by Christopher Kulendran Thomas
Where: Gagosian, Park & 75
When: September 4 – October 18
Why It’s Worth a Look: Before most of us had heard the term “large language model,” Christopher Kulendran Thomas was using artificial intelligence tools to question notions of Western individualism. Central to his latest installation is a titular video work, which continually auto-edits the American television footage broadcast in the moments just before the 9/11 attacks occurred. This is shown alongside 11 paintings of an underreported massacre that occurred in the artist’s native Sri Lanka during a period of intense ethnic violence following the War on Terror.
Know Before You Go: Kulendran Thomas’s paintings are created with his studio team using a neutral network that has been fed the work of Sri Lanka’s most famous and respected artists. Here, the uncanny nature of A.I. renderings is a feature, not a bug.
“God is Good” by Catharine Czudej
Where: Meredith Rosen Gallery
When: September 2 – September 27
Why It’s Worth a Look: Few artists want to hear the word “merchandise” tossed around, but Catharine Czudej invites it. Her latest series of paintings, which take on consumerism and the grid through corrupted QR codes and religious imagery, are accompanied by a line of products made specifically for the exhibition. Don’t have $50 for a T-shirt? No worries. You can trade for the one off your back.
Know Before You Go: On opening night, Czudej will also debut her new film, Don’t Stop Moving, a riff on first person video games. As the film’s protagonist goes on a tear through the American suburban landscape, the film looks for the links between violence, disidentification, and the gamification of reality.
“cold tears released” by Florian Krewer
Where: Michael Werner
When: September 5 – November 1
Why It’s Worth a Look: There’s something ominous looming on the horizon of the latest paintings from German-born, Bronx-based artist Florian Krewer. The curve of a ram’s horn, the flap of a dove’s wing, and the bared fang of a wolf are a kind of augury for a world that demands change—and will keep changing regardless.
Know Before You Go: The 2021 CULTURED Young Artist tackles the animalistic side of human nature. His thickly layered oil paints read as a bestiary of human emotion: desire, dread, and everything in between.
“At Rest” by Ohad Meromi
Where: 56 Henry, 56 and 105 Henry St
When: September 3 – October 26
Why It’s Worth a Look: Anyone who’s worked a menial service job knows the power of a smoke break: Sometimes it’s the only rest you get. While attempting to kick smoking earlier this year, sculptor and painter Ohad Meromi began creating works nestled in moments of inactivity, observation, reflection, and potential.
Know Before You Go: Perhaps best known for a controversial, hot pink public sculpture plopped in the center of Long Island City’s Jackson Avenue, Meromi’s works of repose are deceptively activating and often cause a stir.
“Nayland Blake”
Where: Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 and 528 W 22nd St
When: September 11 – October 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: This three-parter is the largest exhibition of Nayland Blake’s work in New York in decades. Exploring sexuality, queer community, and gender, Blake is playful in their motifs, fusing BDSM imagery and medical equipment with cherubic silkscreens and bunny costumes.
Know Before You Go: The first part of the show is a retrospective tackling the ongoing AIDS crisis and culture wars titled “Sex in the 90s,” while another section features new sculptural works building off Nayland’s “Restraint” series of the ’80s. Finally, Blake will curate a group show featuring the work of Wangechi Mutu, Joseph Cornell, Betye Saar, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
“Agosto Machado”
Where: Gordon Robichaux
When: September 7 – October 26
Why It’s Worth a Look: Though Agosto Machado is well-known for playing muse to photographer friends—including Peter Hujar, Jack Pierson, and Collier Schorr—in his own work, the artist is cast as a quiet observer of city life. The shrines, altars, and other constructions he assembles are as much archives of New York’s decades past as they are works of art.
Know Before You Go: This is Machado’s second showing with Gordon Robichaux, and eagle-eyed viewers will spot a piece from his first turn in the collection of MoMA, currently on view as part of the “In the Shadow of the American Dream” exhibition.
“Second Nature” by Paul Gardère
Where: Magenta Plains
When: September 12 – October 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: Few gardens loom larger in the popular imagination than Monet’s in Giverny, teeming with weeping willows, wisteria, and water lilies that became the subject of many of the painter’s best known works. In 1993, the late Haitian-born American artist Paul Gardère completed a residency at those gardens, which went on to inspire over five years of rarely exhibited mixed media works.
Know Before You Go: To Gardère, the garden is a symbol of the impulse to control nature, and thus serves as a metonym for the colonial impulse, particularly France’s presence in the Caribbean. “Second Nature” is a fusion of political and personal histories embodied by glittering Haitian Voudou flags, bidonvilles (Haitian shantytowns) nestled amongst lush European-style gardens, Greek crosses, and pinup girls peeking provocatively through open windows.
“Improvise with what we have” by Sonia Boyce
Where: Hauser & Wirth
When: September 4 – October 18
Why It’s Worth a Look: A kaleidoscopic silent disco and Guyanese-British actor Carmen Munroe: at first blush they don’t have much in common, but both are subjects of the new films that Sonia Boyce will present this fall in New York.
Know Before You Go: The Golden Lion winner has made a long career of social practice, art, and participatory performance. The occasion marks her first show at Hauser & Wirth after joining the mega-gallery two years ago.
“What the Thunder Said” by Jacob Littlejohn
Where: Karma
When: September 10 – October 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: In New York, it’s easy to feel disconnected from the cycles of natural life that once manifested to our ancestors as sprites, hinkypunks, and faeries. Jacob Littlejohn probes Scottish and Celtic folklore to re-enchant his audience with the wild in large-scale paintings.
Know Before You Go: Littlejohn’s work oozes materiality: Gobs of paint have been stripped away with knives, substrate stained with organic materials, and wet drawings imprinted on new paper-like afterimages.
“Possessive” by P. Staff
Where: David Zwirner
When: September 18 – October 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: The bodies of P. Staff’s first solo exhibition in New York are shadowy, silhouetted against dim monochromatic backdrops and penetrated by a single probing laser beam. At the core of the show is a video piece, projected against all three stories of the gallery, merging the body with architecture. Is the figure under surveillance or siege?
Know Before You Go: The rest of the installation, completed with a series of sculptures, has a similarly jaundiced quality. Sickly grey latex and anatomical aberrations point to the ungovernable nature of the physical form, even as it is subjected to ordered control.
“Joel Shapiro”
Where: Paula Cooper Gallery
When: September 4 – October 11
Why It’s Worth a Look: After a decades-long relationship, Paula Cooper Gallery will open its gallery to the work of towering Postminimalist sculptor Joel Shapiro, who died earlier this summer. It’s a testament to the power of a relationship between a great artist and his institutional champions.
Know Before You Go: Shapiro’s landmark sculptures from the ’70s—the focus of this exhibition—are compact, linear, and austere renderings in bronze, cast iron, and wood.
“Abstract Bodies” by Hannah Wilke
Where: Petzel
When: September 4 – October 18
Why It’s Worth a Look: Throughout her storied career, the late Hannah Wilke looked to create a feminist aesthetic language rooted in her own body. Alongside Georgia O’Keeffe, Wilke’s libidinal, folded ceramics asserted the integrity of the female body while also addressing its vulnerabilities, pains, and fraught relationship with objectification.
Know Before You Go: This exhibition pairs a selection of Wilke’s painted ceramics with a host of large-scale, watercolor abstractions and self-portraits made in the late ’80s, during which the artist worked through the news of a cancer diagnosis.
“Meio Aqui” by Lucas Odahara
Where: David Peter Francis
When: September 3 – October 11
Why It’s Worth a Look: Berlin and São Paolo-based artist Lucas Odahara turns to choreography to explain the rhythms of human migration. Here, Odahara splits the gallery space in half, rendering it a microcosm through which to explore questions of belonging, vulnerability, and distancing.
Know Before You Go: Odahara’s practice spans ceramics, painting, collage, and writing. Especially prominent in this show is the motif of ceramic tiles, at once the language of imperial Portuguese conquest and fragmented in nature.
“Display” by Zoe Leonard
Where: Maxwell Graham
When: September 3 – October 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: A former member of Act Up, Zoe Leonard’s work often challenges the dominant narratives and systems that enable casual acts of violence in everyday life. Her latest series, “Display,” is made up of photographs taken between 1990 and 1994, which Leonard only recently assigned “artwork” status to.
Know Before You Go: “Display” follows Leonard’s seminal series “Al río / To the River,” 2016-22, which consisted of hundreds of photos taken along the U.S. and Mexico border, featuring surveillance videos and chainlink fences that contrast an expansive geography of mountains and arroyos.
“EF3+E40” by Kahlil Robert Irving
Where: Canada
When: September 5 – October 18
Why It’s Worth a Look: Kahlil Robert Irving seeks to collapse the boundaries between nature, constructed environments, and digital landscapes. Through a painstaking process of layering ceramic, enamel, plastic, paint, glaze, and dozens of firings, Irving’s everyday objects become archives of their own making, with digital collages decorating their surfaces.
Know Before You Go: A CULTURED Young Artist award winner, Irving’s part space junk, part fossil, part diorama constructions capture the multifarious levels on which modern life operates.
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