1.) Robert Longo, at Pace, Sept. 11–Oct. 25.

Throughout his career, Robert Longo always seems to capture the Zeitgeist of America’s dilemma du jour, even if the imagery is not specifically or explicitly political and confrontational. His dark, brooding photo-based images meticulously rendered in charcoal, typically scaled up, become imposing visual statements that often reflect the times in subtle ways. Among the most striking recent works in the survey Robert Longo: The Weight of Hope, for instance, a composition of countless honeybees Untitled (Honey Bee Hive), 2025, delivers a potent environmental plea by the rather formal means of a lively allover composition, like an homage to American Abstract Expressionism (i.e. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings). The work features an intricate rhythmic patterning of crammed together, wiggly bodies of the now-endangered insects. Similarly, the even more stunning Untitled (Snake Pit, 2025), shows a mass of snakes, slithering among each other in mesmerizing tangles of deft lines, light and shadow. After prolonged contemplation, one might recognize the work as a metaphor for contemporary American politics. The writhing serpents suggest the venomous partisanship of the “red versus blue” mindset of government officials that currently thwarts any meaningful political discourse.

Filling several floors of Pace’s Chelsea building, the exhibition encompasses some sixty-five works, including three sculptures as well as three films shown on a continuous loop projected on a huge screen on the seventh floor. The sprawling installation is a version of Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History, which appeared at the Milwaukee Art Museum last year (Oct. 25, 2024–Feb. 23, 2025), a survey organized by the museum’s senior curator Margaret Andera, who also curated the Pace exhibition. Here, the emphasis is placed exclusively on the  political imagery of the past decade, a theme that Longo addressed in a recent interview: “As artists, we’re reporters. Our job is to report what it’s like to be alive now. We’re one of the few professions left in the world that has the opportunity to try to tell the truth. I feel a moral imperative to preserve the images of our shared dystopic present with the hope that something will one day change.” Throughout the show, a sort of quixotic melancholy takes hold, triggered by the ambiguity of certain images, such as Untitled (Ascending Flag), 2023, which displays the American flag unfurling in the lower part of the composition yet weighed down by an inordinate darkness.       

 

2.) Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman Gallery, Sept.12-Oct. 25.  

The intimate yet enigmatic relationship between visual art and music has long preoccupied the avant-garde, from Wassily Kandinsky to Jennie C. Jones. There are close correspondences between the visual and the aural in terms of mood, expression, and spatial relationships, as music can fill a room with sound in an almost sculptural way. In this exhibition, Partituras (Scores or Sheet Music), Gabriel Orozco’s foray into this field of exploration is at once wistful and exhilarating.  Upon entering the gallery, viewers hear recorded sounds of the artist playing his original compositions on an acoustic piano. Although Orozco doesn’t read music, and the compositions—averaging just a few minutes long—are intuitive and improvisational, his piano playing nevertheless comes across as accomplished and assured. Basically, his keyboard technique is gently atmospheric, at times recalling Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies or Claude Debussy’s Études. Like the latter, Orozco’s piano riffs are in fact studies—studies for the meticulously composed paintings and related drawings on view.

At an early phase of an elaborate process, Orozco commissioned musician friends to transcribe his piano compositions; the resulting scores on sheet music serve as templates for the eleven large paintings on view, so that each of the works has its own distinctive “sound.” Orozco then transposes the musical notation of the score into his own idiosyncratic geometric lexicon that first appeared in his “Samurai Tree”series from the mid-1990s. These mostly circular forms in blue, red, and white tempera with gold leaf, appear in the new works as punctuation marks or grace notes along the long horizonal lines and bands that have retained the general look of a five-line musical staff.  Formally, works such as 5 de Agosto 2011, 14:18 hrs, Saint Fargeau (2025), whose title refers to the place and time the original piano piece was performed, have an austere Minimalist elegance like refined paintings by Agnes Martin or Max Cole. Despite Orozco’s visual transformation of the original score, musicians can still “read” the painting as they would sheet music. In this remarkably transformative exhibition, Orozco proposes a new way to see music and hear painting.                     

3.) Gregory Gillespie at Forum Gallery, Sept. 12-Nov. 8.

This museum-quality exhibition, Gregory Gillespie: 1936–2000, is a rare opportunity to experience in person some of the best works by an artist whose towering talent and tragic life story have become the stuff of legend, if only to a rarefied circle of artists, writers, collectors and admirers. Gillespie possessed a technical proficiency arguably unmatched by any of his peers. A work such as the monumental Studio: Still Life (1978) serves as a compendium of the painterly skills he had at his command.  Against a luminous golden-yellow background, a table covered with a red-and-white checkerboard cloth holds an array of organic forms, such as two gourds and a tree stump set beside a mannequin’s armless bust that has unusually expressive—uncanny—lifelike facial features. At the top of the composition, what appears to be an antique Japanese mask, resting on a narrow shelf, presides over the scene flanked by two meticulously rendered portraits, while another mask, emanating six pointy leaflike shapes, hangs on the wall. The composition suggests an allegory of personal significance, especially since one of the faces on the wall is a self-portrait.

Several other self-portraits appear in the show, and the theme of self-examination is a current that runs through the exhibition, and indeed, throughout this artist’s unique oeuvre. It is tempting to view some Gillespie paintings as Surrealist, but his work seems to be an exploration of empirical reality and his relationship to it, rather than of the unconscious. Works like Self-Portrait, Foro Romano (1969), however, definitely have a hallucinatory, dreamlike quality. This compact composition of oil, tempera, and collaged elements, features sinuous abstract organic shapes, and includes a postcard of the Roman Forum, which held a great fascination for the artist. References to antiquity and to non-western cultures, especially Buddhist and Hindu religious iconography, abound in the works, and are treated with a great deal of sensitivity, intensity and reverence.  After spending time with this exhibition, one wonders if this artist, who took his own life at the height of his creative powers, was just too sensitive, too caring about the world and the plight of humanity to find solace in the transcendental state that his art proffers.            

4.) Márton Nemes at Marc Straus Gallery, Sept. 2- Oct. 26.  

Márton Nemes made a sizable splash at last year’s Venice Biennale when he represented Hungary with a stunning exhibition titled Techno Zen. This pulsating audio and visual experience featured large-scale, Day-Glo-hued paintings, painted-metal constructions, and 3-D works that examined a physical space and provided a conceptual mindset that transcended the mere mesmerizing, lava-lamp seduction of each work. Nemes investigates complex relationships among visual art, audio effects, time, technology, and perception by means of a distinctive abstract visual language that he continues to refine in the current exhibition Law of Attraction at Marc Straus, his first New York solo show. 

Born in Hungary in 1986, Nemes has been influenced by rave culture and graffiti in tandem with Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Works such Stereo Painting 11a (2025), a rectangular wall relief with rounded corners, contains actual speakers that emit a pulsating beat. What appear to be splashes of colorful pigment in hot pink and acid green dripping over the speakers are actually meticulously rendered passages of color made with laser cut and powder-coated stainless-steel sheeting. Here, as in many works on view, the semblance of spontaneity results from a painstakingly rigorous process. A number of large-scale works, including Synchronicity Paintings 17 (2025), feature constantly shifting patterns of LED lights that frame what appear to be compositions of gestural splatters of bright color. These are all carefully calibrated constructions intended to arrest the viewer with a form of kaleidoscopic hypnosis. In the most recent works, small slabs of high-fired white porcelain punctuate the brilliantly hued surfaces. By adding low-tech ceramics to these high-tech constructions, Nemes adds yet another dimension to his rarefied vision.              

5.) Cora Cohen at Greene Naftali, Sept. 12-Nov. 1.

The late Cora Cohen (1943–2023) lived, breathed, and loved the language of gestural abstraction. Her deep reverence for and knowledge of the history of abstract painting— ranging from Kandinsky to Pollock, and from Joan Mitchell to peers like Dona Nelson and Craig Fisher— were reflected in everything she said and did. In other words, she was a painter’s painter. She felt a special kinship with German postwar artists such as Wols, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, and her work was well appreciated in Germany, where she frequently exhibited and enjoyed prolonged stays. Beginning in the mid-1990s, with my Art in America colleague and painter Cathy Lebowitz, I often spent some unforgettable hours in Cohen’s New York studios in lively conversation, surrounded by, and intensely absorbed with her latest works. Although we were relative newcomers on the scene, Cohen always generously offered insights into her process and seemed to value our responses and opinions.  

In general, Cohen’s consistently ethereal compositions result from dense layering and nuanced textures that shift dramatically in tone and temperament. This dreamy exhibition, Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012–22, focuses only on works from her last years, after the rather thick layers of oil paint she once favored had yielded to delicate washes and subtle veils of color that seem almost about to evaporate. Her work might suggest a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, although with an inimitable touch and earthy palette. Veronica’s Veil (2022), for instance, features a meandering band of pale purple that nonchalantly frames airy washes of greens and browns at the center of the composition. Elsewhere, Terrain Vague (2022), with its luminous field of layered earth tones, exemplifies the close connection to nature that was central to Cohen’s painterly vision.       

6.) Sana Musasama at Eric Firestone Gallery, Sept. 5-Oct. 25.

A sculptural exploration of architectural motifs in the seminal medium of ceramics speaks to the origins of architecture itself when one considers that the first human-made structures were made of dried mud slabs and later, fired clay bricks. The New York-based artist and activist Sana Musasama, who has spent significant periods of time in West Africa, South America and Cambodia, uses earthenware and stoneware for her elegant totem-like sculptures. They often resemble highly stylized church steeples, castle towers, or temples, but with a modern constructivist approach. She embellishes each of these imaginative works with a variety of colorful ceramic glazes but often finishes with salt or soda firing to retain an earthy, rough-hewn feel. Sana Musasama: Raised Earth is an elegant exhibition of some two dozen works from the artist’s ongoing “House” series, begun in the late 1970s.

The inspiration for these towering, highly textural slab-formed Houses stems from her first trip to Sierra Leone in the ’70s, when she lived among the Mende people. A representative work from the 1980s, Yellow Space (House Series #4), 1983, is a 64-inch-tall, four-sided tower that gracefully narrows toward the top. There, rectangular openings appear as widows, and an arrangement of small yellow rectangles hints at the golden roof of a sacred temple. In isolation during the pandemic, Musasama revisited the “House” series, and her sculptures of the past four years are even more adventurous in terms of form and color. Especially striking is a series of smallish wall reliefs that at a distance recall imaginative birdhouses. House Series #46, 2025, for example, looks like a cutaway architectural model for a little blue-gray house, although with its catawampus roof and tiny cut-out hands, hooks and curvilinear abstract shapes stuffed into every corner of the interior, the structure must have been inspired by some fantastical fairytale.     

7.) Joseph Marioni at Yares Art, Sept. 15, 2025-Jan. 31, 2026.

The ultra-luminosity of Joseph Marioni’s paintings can only be fully experienced in person. Reproductions are indifferent to the subtle layering and refined shifts in tone that take place on and within these ostensibly monochrome compositions. Homage to Joseph Marioni, an unforgettable exhibition of a dozen major acrylic-on-linen paintings and a selection of works on paper, is the first posthumous solo exhibition for the artist. The Ohio-born, New York-based Marioni (1943–2024) spent more than fifty years developing and refining a special technique whereby minute but exciting incidents of gesture—a splash of paint here, a pool of contrasting tone there—appear primarily along the edges of the compositions and may be perceptible only after extended viewing. His work inspires viewers to slow down and immerse themselves in the colorful aura that the high-gloss surfaces consistently emit.

In the large (96 by 78 inches) and brilliant Yellow Painting (2000), the dazzling chartreuse field is disrupted along the lower edge by touches of bright red that appear to seep through the surface. More overtly dramatic, Orange (2022) features a surface made of countless veils of golden yellow pigment; passages of the titular color emerge along the sides and all four corners of this mesmerizing composition. It is often difficult to describe or even name the color that Marioni achieves in certain of his works. One of the most outstanding pieces is titled Green Painting (1999) but I have never seen a color quite like this “green.” There are hints of teal (I think), and perhaps navy blue, but with each viewing the color seems to change. Similarly, Violet (2018), with its jewel-like intensity, radiates an otherworldly hue.               

8.) Renate Druks at Max Levai Gallery, Sept. 10-Nov 1.

It is always exciting to discover an underappreciated or overlooked talent, as is the case with Renate Druks (1921–2007), an Austrian-American artist and performer. One of her most notable appearances was as Lilith in Kenneth Anger’s 1954 cult classic film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Her accomplishments as a visual artist, however, are only lately coming to light with the help of this wonderful exhibition, Renate Druks: State of Mind: Paintings 1959–1980, the first New York solo exhibition of her work. Born in Vienna, Druks married an American medical student and emigrated to the United States just before the war. She studied for a time at the Art Students League in New York, and, in the late 1940s, retreated to an artist colony in San Miguel Allende, Mexico, where she apparently first met the Los Angeles artist and mystic Marjorie Cameron and became part of her circle of occultists.

Druks showed her work regularly in the late 1950s through the ’70s, and became especially well regarded for her portraits. Among the ten major works on view, Jon’s Head (1966) is a fine example of her portraiture, with the figure’s centralized face and melancholy expression commanding the large panel. Today, her Surrealist-tinged compositions are the most striking in their proto-feminist exploration of the unconscious. Her vision corresponds closely to that of artists like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo in compositions such as Nude and Tiger (1979). Here, a female nude wrapped in a translucent veil, reclines beside a Bengal tiger without the slightest hint of vulnerability. The two “portraits” of individual cats on view are also remarkable. They have a sweet, folksy feel at first, but with the intensity of each animal’s gaze and the humanlike expressions, Druks renders them as uncanny, mystical creatures.

9.) Wanda Koop at Arsenal, Sept. 5-Nov. 1.

Over the past four decades or so, Canadian artist Wanda Koop has developed a distinctive visual vocabulary in her paintings that encompasses an ethereal, quasi-Surrealist illusionistic landscape space—often recalling those of Yves Tanguy or Kay Sage. Koop also delves into a purely conceptual realm in her art, such as her recent text-driven imagery. Both avenues of exploration merge in this engaging exhibition of recent work, Wanda Koop: Magnetic Field.  The twenty-one works on view were produced in Koop’s studio at Riding Mountain, Manitoba, near her Winnipeg home. Many of the paintings directly address the recent Manitoba fires that forced 20,000 area residents to leave their homes. One of the most stunning works in the exhibition, the mural-size Evacuate (2025), at nearly 10 by 14 feet, shows a blaring red sun pulsating against a pink-gray sky. At first glance it appears as an homage to Color Field painting or a new take on Gottlieb’s “Bursts.” But to know that Koop’s inspiration for this image was the sun struggling to pierce through thick smoke during the environmental disaster of the Canadian fires, reenforces the painting’s tragic beauty and urgent message.         

The exhibition also features Koop’s recent series of “AI Ghost Trees.” While examining the devastated forests, and the details of burnt trees in the aftermath of the fires, the artist came upon a trio of barren trees whose trunks and branches suggested the letters “A I.” In Ghost Tree A I (Grey Sky), 2025, the three tree trunks stand tall against a smoky, slate-grey sky. Two of the trees appear to lean against each other with a middle branch of one nearly touching the other trunk, thus forming the letter “A.” The standalone tree designates the “I.” It is a tongue-in-cheek gambit for sure, and humor plays a role throughout Koop’s oeuvre. However, the idea that nature could offer warnings about the ever-increasing command of technology over human lives and resources, and its potentially disastrous consequences, is a valid one. And the notion that nature could convey those warnings by means of a written language that can actually be “read” by humans is certainly a brilliant provocation.   

10.) Larry Bell at Madison Square Park, Sept. 30, 2025-Mar. 15, 2026.

Larry Bell: Improvisations in the Park is the surprise outdoor exhibition of the fall. The Los Angeles-based Minimalist maestro, now 85, has brought to Madison Square Park six major outdoor installations created over the past eight years. At first these compositions of spare geometric forms made of tinted laminated glass would seem out of place in a nature setting. Works like Cantaloupe but Honeydew (2025), however, with its configuration of pale green rectangles and orange triangles seems to correspond to the surrounding vegetation in a harmonic way. And the cube-like Frankly Purple (2022), with its jewel-like amethyst-tinted upright glass rectangles, neatly corresponds to the surrounding architecture of lower midtown Manhattan. Pacific-Red II (2017), features a long horizontal sequence of 6-foot-tall ruby-red glass panels that unfold accordionlike across the lawn. Initially, the installation seems austere and mechanical, but with its warm reflections of all passersby, it is perhaps the most inviting, people-friendly work on view.