The New York Gallery Shows Not to Miss During Armory Week

After the art world’s all-too-brief summer break, New York is back in business with a packed slate of major exhibitions kicking off the fall season. This year, The Armory Show has been pushed to the end of the month, from September 24-27, avoiding the usual overlap with Frieze Seoul—an unsurprising bit of coordination now that the two fairs sit within the same portfolio.

The change will spare many international dealers the frantic stretch between the two regions and scenes, though several galleries are opening shows at the beginning of the month, creating early momentum around what has long been one of the calendar’s most important slots, typically reserved for the strongest artists. As usual, there will be plenty worth seeing in Chelsea, Tribeca, the Lower East Side and what remains of the Upper East Side gallery scene. To help you navigate the sprawl, Observer has compiled our usual list of the best Armory adjacent exhibitions in New York.

Bea Scaccia, “Groomed”

• Gagosian
• Through Dec 23, 2026

With star curator Francesco Bonami brought in to organize a seven-exhibition sequence at Gagosian’s Park & 75 location—launched in May with Eliza Douglas’s first New York solo—Italian artist Bea Scaccia is now making her debut at the gallery. Known for her highly detailed, surrealist-inflected figurative style, Scaccia turns the codes of feminine beauty into something theatrical, unstable and slightly grotesque. Hair, that quintessential marker of femininity, has long been central to her work, along with wigs, pearls, ribbons and fur, which coalesce into faceless, articulated and overtly artificial figures—as if ornament alone were enough to cover, replace or stand in for the psychological and bodily presence of the feminine subject itself. Baroque and Rococo excess and Flemish vanitas imagery fluidly combine with fairy tales and contemporary pop culture, while hair and wigs become almost invasive—closer to organisms, infestations or masks—pushing beauty toward monstrosity. The title of the show, “Groomed,” suggests a commentary on how a certain idea of femininity is cultivated from childhood within a society that has never stopped asking women to please, to be pretty, resulting in a mania for self-improvement and a pervasive performative anxiety.

“Dahn Vo”

• White Cube
• Through October 16, 2026

At White Cube, the Vietnamese-born Danish conceptual artist unveils an installation of found objects and artifacts, historical artworks and new sculptures within a spatial intervention constructed from pinewood scaffolding. In some works, mushrooms bloom through cracks in stone, bronze or wood, staging an ongoing tension between the human and natural worlds while highlighting the interdependence of the cycles of generation and regeneration that bind them together. Fifteenth-century ceramics recovered from a shipwreck in Vietnam are shown alongside wall-based works featuring calligraphy by his father, Phung Vo, a figure with whom he has collaborated for many years. Bringing attention to the different tempos of archaeological and geological time, Vo examines how private and collective histories can shift meaning within new and evolving contexts, while considering the conditions that shape how we move, endure and create meaning.  Additionally, several pieces from his iconic Statue of Liberty and American flag series remain on view at the Vilcek Foundation uptown through June 2027, including three sculptures from his We the People series (2011-2016) with Live Free or Die (2026), a work commissioned specifically for the Vilcek Foundation’s gallery.

“260 Madison”

• 260 Madison Avenue
• September 24 through November 22, 2026

“260 Madison” brings together more than 50 artists across two vacant floors of a Midtown building at 260 Madison Avenue: a former Duane Reade at street level and a stripped-out office floor above. The unusual location became available while the building awaits its next phase of construction, presenting challenges but also opportunities to engage with its architecture and the remnants of its former uses, which serve as both a setting and a point of departure. Working across sculpture, new media and video, the artists intervene in a site defined by the spatial condition Rem Koolhaas diagnosed as “Junkspace.” Showing alongside these emerging names are established artists including Matt Mullican, Josh Kline, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jon Kessler and Rachel Rossin.

Lynda Benglis, “KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING” 

• Pace Gallery
• Through October 24, 2026

IIt has been a while since a gallery staged such an extensive presentation of Lynda Benglis’s pioneering practice, which has long explored the expressive potential of materials charged with instability in their physical and chemical properties, opening onto relentless possibilities for alchemical transformation. Emerging amid the rise of Postminimalism, Benglis distinguished herself from her contemporaries through an exuberant embrace of vivid color, sensuous surfaces and organic form. Across her career, she has continually pushed the boundaries between painting and sculpture, pursuing a radical investigation of materiality and sensorial perception. The exhibition brings together glazed ceramics, bronzes, pleated works and works on paper made between 1972 and 2024, alongside rarely exhibited glass sculptures from 1985. The earliest work on view is Sparkle Knot IV (1972), a knotted tube of wire mesh covered in plaster, paint and glitter, which signals the processes Benglis would go on to transform across subsequent bodies of work. That trajectory unfolds through the vibrant gold-leafed and metalized pleats and glassworks of the 1980s, the painterly extruded and folded ceramics of the 2010s and, finally, her more recent Elephant Necklace and paper works, where knotting gives way to more open, expansive forms.

The Haas Brothers, “MATHEMAGICAL”

• Marianne Boesky
• Through October 17, 2026

Whimsical and playfully irreverent, the Haas Brothers’ creatures are among the few ingeniously crafted characters to have captured such attention—and found so much room to expand their storytelling—without ever being tied to a franchise. Their works move fluidly between art and design, frequently departing from functionality altogether to become purely sculptural, playful and sometimes irreverent creations. With “Mathemagical,” the brothers push this universe into a more systematic and technically sophisticated territory. A new series of Accretion paintings begins with nostalgic landscape scenes that are gradually abstracted through layers of thickened acrylic applied according to a reaction-diffusion equation—the same kind of mathematical process used to describe cellular growth and the formation of stripes and spots in animal fur. At the center of the exhibition is Peach Tree, the pair’s largest work and perhaps the clearest synthesis of their evolving practice. A carved stone base nods to their ongoing engagement with stone—and an emotional link to their stonemason father—while the bronze trunk uses the same Accretion process developed for the Beasts. Its Venetian glass-bead foliage was hand-beaded by the Haas Sisters of Lost Hills, a group of women from a Central California agricultural community with whom the artists have collaborated for nearly a decade, creating an ongoing social-practice dimension within their production. Intricately blown-glass peaches, illuminated from within, complete the work.

Lee Bul, “The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun”

• Hauser & Wirth
• Through October 24, 2026

Post-human and inhuman, Lee Bul’s humanoids cross the boundaries of a futuristic vision that hovers between dystopia and utopia. Bul was one of the earliest artists to engage with these themes; just a few years later, they have become anxieties that accompany our daily lives globally. Staging the tension between nature and technology while exposing the fractured connection between the two and the most genuine human element that still resides in the brain and in creativity, Bul has built an entire symbolic universe that in many ways foresaw, and now simply stages, the tensions of our age. Marking the artist’s first solo with the gallery since her representation was announced, this extensive exhibition, organized by guest curator Dr. Jiyoon Lee, extends Lee Bul’s decades-long examination of humanity’s drive to transcend nature through technology and systems of control. Her new large-scale sculptures further develop ideas first explored in her acclaimed 2024 commission Long Tail Halo for the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fusing bodily, mechanical and architectural forms. Futuristic yet fragmentary, these hybrid structures exist somewhere between organism, monument and architecture, continuing Bul’s interrogation of the systems through which societies project power and humanity’s longstanding drive to transcend nature through technology. Together with Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon and recent bodies of work, the exhibition brings these questions into sharp focus, revealing the unstable space between utopian aspiration and inevitable collapse, resulting from an increasingly entangled, uncontrolled relationship among technology, history, nature and the human body.

Akira Ikezoe,
“The Stories of Kunkuru”

• Proyectos Ultravioleta
• Through September 24, 2026

New York-based Japanese artist Akira Ikazoe has had a couple of stellar years, first appearing in the 2025 Sharjah Biennial and now with works in both the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York.” Perhaps it is his ability to use such a seemingly naïve and playful visual lexicon to address some of the biggest paradoxes of our time—particularly the controversial and distorted cycles of extraction, production and consumption that regulate the relationship between the economic and social systems of the human-made world and the timeless cycles of nature. This September, his gallery, Proyectos Ultravioleta, is hosting a pop-up exhibition on the third floor at 535 W 22nd Street, giving him a long-awaited solo presentation in the city. Through systems and ecosystems populated by fantastical animals, Ikazoe instinctively charts both progression and devolution within the flows of resources and exchanges that regulate our existence and shape our relationship with the planet. Even when aliens take over or frogs manage the remains of human bodies, his work is never intended to be dystopian. Rather, it offers a witty, lucid contemplation of the state of humanity and its possible fate while embracing the inevitability of the cyclical nature of all physical, earthbound existence. Everything is transformed into something else, only to be reborn in new forms.

Maia Cruz Palileo, “The World Tangled in You”

• David Kordansky Gallery
• Through October 24, 2026

Marking their New York solo debut with the gallery, following a 2025 Los Angeles exhibition, “The World Tangled in You” finds Cruz Palileo fully engaging with the complex legacies and material possibilities of painting, as well as an increasingly expansive understanding of how family and personal narratives, geopolitical histories and formal expression intersect. With lush brushstrokes and tropical colors, Cruz Palileo’s work draws directly from both familial and historical archives, reconstructing and reviving an archival, geological and spiritual topography of the Philippines—their family’s homeland—while also tracing the migratory routes that brought them to the United States. This fascinating entanglement of ancestry, flora and fauna transports the subjects of Cruz Palileo’s paintings into a more imaginative and symbolic realm, one dense with animistic spirituality and animated by the same primordial energies sparked by a profound connection to the land. Drawing the exhibition’s title from a poem by Shirley Ancheta, these new works are both an homage to painting’s power to reactivate erased stories and histories and a means of confronting the stark realities of the past.

Alfredo Jaar, “A Logo for America”

• Galerie Lelong
• Through October 25, 2026

Addressing American identity at this fragile juncture in its history, Galerie Lelong is staging a new exhibition by celebrated artist Alfredo Jaar, centered on an iconic and foundational work he first produced in 1987, A Logo for America, which remains strikingly relevant to the moment we are living through. Created five years after Jaar moved to New York from his native Chile, the work was commissioned by the Public Art Fund as an animation for a Times Square billboard. It critiques the common use of “America” as shorthand for the United States, exposing the imperialist mentality embedded in a language that erases the independence, identities and distinct voices of the rest of the continent. The show follows another major year for the now firmly institutionalized artist, who is presenting a major installation, The End of the World, in the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition. He also gave a monumental presentation of the historic work The Power of Words at Art Basel Unlimited, alongside multiple solo institutional exhibitions worldwide. Over the past year, Jaar was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the MacDowell Medal and the Prix Pictet, adding to a long list of honors that includes the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography and the Hiroshima Art Prize.

Aurie Harvey, “Ready to Die”

• Heft Gallery
• Through October 8, 2026

“Ready To Die” is a solo exhibition by digital art pioneer Auriea Harvey, following a successful solo booth at Untitled Miami 2025 and a major solo exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image. Like other artists shown by the gallery, Harvey’s output remains deeply physical, moving across traditional materials and techniques and translating her reflections on networks and technology into largely sculptural form. Coming from the world of gaming, she created some of the earliest and most significant art games as spaces for intimate digital experience, bringing together mythology, autobiography, desire and a ludic sense of play and curiosity. For this show, Harvey is transforming the gallery into a burial chamber of sorts, with a private ceremony centered on a limited series of 30 Amulets—unique, hand-finished sculptures in marble, ceramic and pewter. Each sculpture will be paired with a digital counterpart: a spatial Gaussian-splat portrait recorded on Ethereum. The exhibition as a whole explores new models of artistic production and presentation, translating Harvey’s expansive storytelling into a more intimate and accessible format. An exclusive ceremony for collectors of Amulets will see the artist name each work as it is entrusted to its living “Bearer,” while its digital counterpart extends the work into an online space.

Gökhun Baltaci,
“A Moonless Plateau”

• kaufmann repetto
• Through October 31, 2026.

Marking the New York debut of the young Turkish artist, Gökhun Baltacı presents a series of melancholic, dusty still lifes suspended between memory and the subconscious, where nostalgia for time passing and things left behind meets an attempt to draw existential meaning from them. In these new works, Baltacı returns to the enclosed rooms and isolated objects that have long occupied his practice, stripping them of almost everything that might explain them. The show unfolds as a succession of interiors without a visible source of light and as mindscapes—allegories for the challenges of existence in contemporary society. Despite their gloomy atmosphere, the works tap into the imaginative capacity of childhood, maintaining that unfiltered curiosity in encounters with the world. Baltacı releases objects from their ordinary functions and reimagines more playful, yet revealing relationships with them, casting them as characters in an inner and outer journey that gradually shapes our worldview.

Cannupa Haska Luger’s “American Traditional”

• Garth Greenan Gallery
• Through October 24, 2026 

Garth Greenan is launching its new space in Soho with an expansive solo exhibition by one of the gallery’s leading artists, Cannupa Hanska Luger. The Native American artist, of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian and Norwegian descent, has long explored the notion of “ancestral technology,” revitalizing Indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling and craft traditions as generational tools that encode ecological, social and spiritual intelligence through his contemporary mythmaking and artistic practice. For this show, he is debuting a group of new sculptures fabricated from salvaged materials and hand-built ceramics, all unified by the same matte-black palette. Created from an ironstone clay body with applications of sumi ink and direct flame, the all-encompassing monochrome lends the work a more mournful, almost elegiac quality, in stark contrast to the bright colors that typically define his practice. With an almost totemic, commemorative presence, the works evoke specific episodes in the troubled history of Western expansion, simultaneously deconstructing and eulogizing the dream of dominion and transforming its material remnants into forms that are at once elegant and destabilizing. Hanska Luger has also incorporated found objects—including Buffalo nickels, Pulaski axes, railroad spikes and concertina wire—alongside ceramic replicas of a skinned pronghorn deer, a stack of bison skulls and a severed Sharps Model 1874 sporting rifle.

“Savdie/Soutine”

• Norr Cohan (James Cohan)
• Through October 24, 2026

Following her debut with White Cube just last year, Ilana Savdie returns with a new exhibition in New York at Norr Cohan—the newly renamed James Cohan, after partner David Norr assumed full ownership—where the gallery has staged an especially resonant dialogue between the fluidity of her seemingly abstract compositions of bodies in transformation and the visceral, fleshy gesturalism of peintre maudit Chaïm Soutine. With his thickly physical, agitated brushwork and distorted forms, Soutine pursued psychological intensity over descriptive accuracy. Savdie’s newest paintings similarly stage a magmatic fusion of forms that defy containment, dissolving the coherence of the individual body in favor of corporeal and metaphysical excess—an overflow that channels a generative force while disrupting any fixed or unambiguous definition of identity. Her works speak to the instability of identity today, continually staged, performed and reshaped across physical and digital dimensions.

“WEBSITES, WEBSITES, WEBSITES!”

• New Int. Picture Company
• September 21-27, 2026

Organized by ARTXCODE in partnership with Rhizome—the pioneering institution for born-digital art and culture, which celebrates its 30th anniversary on this occasion—”WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES! (WWW!)” is a group exhibition featuring artists who have explored the possibilities of using the website as an artistic medium. Curated by Vienna Kim and Benoit Palop of LAN Party, the show traces the historical trajectory of this medium, spanning from the playful interventions of 1990s net.art pioneers to the poetic web experiments of artists navigating today’s algorithmically saturated internet. All works in the exhibition will be available for acquisition through a sale hosted by Fellowship, with 25 percent of the proceeds benefiting Rhizome’s work as a memory institution for digital art.

Sara Zapata, “In escape from the vices of idleness”

• Sargent’s Daughters
• Through October 24, 2026

Vibrantly colored, playfully tactile yet deeply anchored in ancestral textile traditions, Sarah Zapata’s handwoven installations create entire worlds. Turning fiber into language and weaving into storytelling, she immerses viewers in the long history of wool weaving and the cultural and anthropological meanings embedded within it. Raised in an evangelical Christian household by a first-generation Peruvian immigrant father and a Texan mother, Zapata has long drawn on the inherent hybridity of weaving and the histories of cross-cultural exchange that textiles reveal. That framework has helped her navigate her own identity as a queer woman, challenging the association of weaving with traditional “women’s work” while paying homage to Peru’s textile heritage and to her own family history: her grandfather in Piura owned a fabric shop, while her grandmother taught her how to sew. For her debut show with Sargent’s Daughters in Tribeca, she has been using American-style looms, yet the intertwined geometries of her hand-weaving recall the abstracted forms of Pre-Columbian textile artworks. “Textiles are just such a human expression, and have been since we’ve needed to clothe ourselves,” Zapata explains. “Every part of the world has made textiles in similar ways, but has differences that speak to its own experience. It is a beautiful way to think about how we are different but fundamentally similar.” 

Melissa Joseph,
“Casserole Culture”

• Charles Moffett
• Through October 17, 2026

Developing a uniquely original technique and a deeply personal visual language, Melissa Joseph has gone far in exploring the potential of objects, remnants and materials as vehicles for memory, time and storytelling. Working with found objects and needle felting on industrial felt as a way of painting, Joseph’s labor-intensive practice alludes to the histories of women’s labor and craft while also drawing on her experience as a first-generation Indian American and the cultural hybridity of diasporic life. Born in Saint Mary’s, Pennsylvania, to a mother from Pittsburgh with Irish roots and a father from Kerala, India, her work has long explored familial legacy, labor, migration and human connection, gently revealing the tensions of cultural displacement, inherited trauma and identity in flux alongside the quiet grace of care and the solace of memory. With this new exhibition, Joseph returns to her family’s photo archive to create works that further investigate place and belonging, particularly when the prevailing demographics or politics of a place threaten to reject the very bodies living there. Throughout, memory operates not simply as a record of what has been lost or displaced, but as a way of sustaining connection across generations and geographies.

“Christine Safa”

• Bortolami
• Through October 24, 2026

French-Lebanese Christine Safa is taking over the elegant, light-filled space of Bortolami in Tribeca in her New York debut. Safa’s paintings feel at once deeply physical and psychological: landscapes to be traversed on a sensorial level, but also reveries imagined or remembered within a more interior space. Hovering between the earthy and the ethereal, they embody what the gallery describes as “painting in motion,” blending fragments of memory with more intuitive gestures. The palette itself reveals this continuous melding of land and body, carrying different emotions of attachment and displacement as Safa records her movement across the Mediterranean—between her home and studio outside Paris and her family’s native Beirut. Across these shifting geographies, she interrogates ideas of place, home and identity, allowing them to surface through color, memory and form.

Emma Beatrez,
“Candy Apple”

• Hair + Nails New York
• Through October 11, 2026

After a series of successful fair presentations and a solo show last year, Emma Beatrez returns with a new exhibition at Hair + Nails’s New York space on the Lower East Side. Based in Minneapolis, Beatrez has drawn the attention of the international art world by developing and refining a distinctive painterly language that plays with—and reinvents—the nightmares and dreams of young people in contemporary America. Animated by a strong interest in ritual, belief systems and the strange symbolism embedded in ordinary American life, Beatrez’s works have a surreal, almost witchy quality, like ominous dreams or elusive hallucinations. They also anchor viewers through recognizable imagery—figures, cheerleaders, chandeliers, fire, faces and fragments of pop culture—which provides an immediate point of entry before being distorted and recontextualized until the familiar becomes uncanny. The result is a group of powerful paintings that hover between fiction and action, the symbolic and the real, intimacy and spectacle.

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