Our What’s On column distills and compiles Critics’ Table coverage—from our In Brief roundups, Big Picture essays and diaries, and Close Look reviews and profiles—and organizes our recommendations by neighborhood. Tip: to map our picks and plan your route, enter the Critic’s Table hashtag #TCT in the search bar of the See Saw app. Easy!
CHINATOWN / LITTLE ITALY
Zoe Leonard through October 25
Maxwell Graham | 55 Hester Street
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s New York Art Week Diary here.
Ohad Meromi through October 26
56 Henry | 56 & 105 Henry Street
Ohad Meromi’s work, which fills both of 56 Henry’s locations, uses smoking—or not smoking—as a kind of narrative conceit; the assorted sculptures and paintings were produced in the aftermath of his quitting. And so, cigarettes, as geometric forms or apparitions, realistically rendered or abstract, sneak into wall-based compositions and maybe echo in the attenuated limbs of his large-scale, somewhat comic, reclining figures—languidly pensive, a little checked-out. Some works channel Archipenko, which I love… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s New York Art Week Diary here.
Ambera Wellmann through October 25
Company | 145 Elizabeth Street
Ambera Wellmann is known for her collage-like and hallucinatory paintings, feats of spatial impossibility rife with internal inconsistencies of perspective and scale, populated by unmoored elements drawn from a lexicon of striking, semi-mythic imagery: Glistening fruit, watchful animals, and women fucking are frequent subjects. The pièce de résistance at Company Gallery (“a great place to be totally unhinged, go crazy, be disgusting, whatever,” the artist has said) is a charcoal mural drawn directly on the wall—something she’s never done before… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s profile of the artist here.
SOHO
Sam McKinniss through November 1
Deitch | 18 Wooster Street
At Sam McKinniss’s preview, I learn that a small painting (a nighttime Manhattan cityscape) is based on an establishing shot used by David Lynch. It seems like less of a foil to the figurative works in “Law & Order” than a connector, like a conjunctive adverb—if you’d like to think of the show as a halting run-on sentence in which Luigi Mangione is the subject of a clause. McKinniss’s portrait of the alleged assassin on the gallery’s main floor is like the hook of the stupidest (the most efficiently, ruthlessly composed and infectious) pop song. But it’s not the essayistic quality of the paintings together that matters so much, it’s the ineffable sense of dread that the arrangement sustains, the way it keeps the fear ricocheting around, from image to image, no place in the paint to rest or hide… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s New York Art Week Diary here.
Ambera Wellmann through October 25
Hauser & Wirth | 134 Wooster
The 18-foot composition Death Masks Eternity, 2025, after Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, 1849–50 is the centerpiece of Ambera Wellman’s show “Darkling” at Hauser & Wirth. Her supernatural, wintry take evokes not just the gray-sky gravitas and ritual of the famous panoramic group scene, but also the French artist’s abandonment of idealized Romantic subjects for a steely Realism—the kind of artistic rupture that perhaps befits our too-real times. While not the only moment when climate grief surfaces in the paintings assembled here, it’s the one that spurs Wellmann to articulate her interest in it. She’s concerned, in her art, with the way the accelerating crisis changes our “experience of time and understanding of death,” she says… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s profile of the artist here.
CHELSEA
Nayland Blake through October 25
Matthew Marks Gallery | 522 & 526 West 22nd Street
Is it a lieu commun that a Nayland Blake show tends to look like a group show? Their exhibitions rarely read as unified by style or form; instead, they operate like polyphonic theatrical stages wherein disparate objects, moods, and references rub against one another. For Blake, that multiplicity is not an accident but a principle: queerness itself enacted as an aesthetic method… —David Rimanelli
Read more from David Rimanelli’s Close Look on Nayland Blake here.
Paul Feeley through October 25
Garth Greenan Gallery | 545 West 20th Street
The color field painter Paul Feeley, who was Helen Frankenthaler’s teacher at Bennington in the late ’40s, turned to sculpture in the last years of his short life, in the ’60s. At Garth Greenan Gallery, intersecting pairs of colorful quatrefoil forms, free-standing butterfly-like X’s, anchor and organize the space. There are paintings, drawings, and preparatory works on view, too. My friend the artist Alex Jovanovich and I, both very into miniatures, mime breaking a vitrine to steal the artist’s simple but exquisite maquettes… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s New York Art Week Diary here.
Cady Noland through October 18
Gagosian Gallery | 555 West 24th Street
The buzz around the show broke through before I had a chance to see it. One critic-friend said bluntly: “It’s bad.” Someone running socials at Maxwell Graham gallery posted “What a Waste of a Legacy.” But, after spending sustained time with Cady Noland’s show at Gagosian, I don’t think either of these takes get it right. Is it good? Wrong question. It’s a fascinating mess—and among the most interesting gallery exhibitions in New York right now. If it’s partly funny (it is), Noland is in on the joke… —John Vincler
Read more from John Vincler’s Close Look here.
MIDTOWN
Lisa Yuskavage through January 4, 2026
Morgan Library | 225 Madison Avenue
It’s a perfect—maybe perfectly perverse—context for the figurative painter, famous and infamous for her virtuosic rendering of a queasily beautiful, self-consciously vulgar, and often funny world of desire and desolation. With absinthe or Kool-Aid skies, cadmium sunlight, pastel poly-satin, neon in deep shadow, and girls, girls, girls, Yuskavage tells the story of the nude in Western art like a dream excavation of haunted smut and the interior lives of model-muses—what better foil to her art than the holdings of Pierpont Morgan? (And what better way to cement her place in this centuries-long conversation?)… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s interview with the artist here.
UPPER EAST SIDE
Alix Cléo Roubaud through October 25
Galerie Buchholz | 17 E 82nd St
Don’t miss the self-baring stare of writer-photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud and the moody images she produced in the bathroom darkroom of her Paris apartment. The superlative show “Correction of perspective in my bedroom” at Galerie Buchholz, just half a block from the Met, is the artist’s first solo presentation outside of France, featuring a group of intimately scaled black-and-white works that span 1979 to 1983 (the Canadian artist, who was born in Mexico, died that year at the age of 31). To make them, she layered apparitional interiors and figures—often her own—in shadowy multiple-exposure scenes, or she isolated image fragments in etheric white space. Guided by something like superstition as well as theoretical rigor, Roubaud destroyed her negatives after she’d wrung her vision from them… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s Upper East Side Gallery Guide here.
Nancy Holt through October 25
Sprüth Magers | 22 East 80th Street
Two short blocks away, another historical exhibition, “Echoes & Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels” at Sprüth Magers, is an elegant exposition of Holt’s legendary contribution to the Land art canon with her 1975 Sun Tunnels. Preparatory works (diagrammatic drawings, studies, and a tabletop model of the four tipped cylinders) show the painstaking planning that went into the creation of her concrete Stonehenge, while color photo grids (artworks in their own right, as well as documentation of a sort) show the tubes in their finished state. In one magnetic, large-scale print, they are forbidding vortex-like apertures that frame the sun while light enters through small holes to chart celestial constellations on their dark interior surfaces… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s Upper East Side Gallery Guide here.
![Tiona Nekkia McClodden, NEVER LET ME GO | XXXII. the giver of scars [32], 2025](https://culturedmag.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/uploads/2025/09/23125542/Tiona-Nekkia-McClodden-NEVER-LET-ME-GO-_-XXXII.-the-giver-of-scars-32-2025-225x300.jpeg)
White Cube | 1002 Madison Avenue
Two blocks south, on Madison Avenue, at White Cube, the conceptual artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden (whose past work has spanned every medium) revisits painting’s final boss, the black monochrome (Malevich’s zero-point, Reinhardt’s last word), plumbing its depths anew in search of a corporeal mode of abstraction. Or perhaps the austere wall-based works in “PURE GAZE” merely sideswipe that history on their way somewhere else. Made from black jute rope, leather, and shoe polish, the precise assemblages are clearly (also) nested in an alternate set of references. The visual language, technique, and material of kinbaku-bi, a Japanese style of rope bondage, form the geometric structures of the stark compositions… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s Upper East Side Gallery Guide here.
P. Staff through October 25
David Zwirner | 34 East 69th Street
The latex-draped (and bound) sculptures in P. Staff’s exhibition “Possessive” at David Zwirner are scattered throughout the rooms of the townhouse gallery, their fetish-y fabric becoming an untidy wrapping material for improvised scaffoldings that roughly mimic the surrounding architectural elements (built-in bookcases, a fireplace). Staff’s industrial materials, rather than straightforwardly analogizing skin and bones, thus also become the stuff of fixtures and containers—of inanimate as well as living things. Meanwhile, the luridly lit building itself (an acid glow is visible from the street) becomes a body, or a mammoth exoskeleton for a spectral one: In a trio of contiguous projections, synced video of a single performer (a hot guy) spans three floors. The giant does little more than breathe as a green laser beam prods or penetrates his torso (his guts) in the dark, but that’s enough. Staff’s total takeover of the exhibition space—every crevice flooded with blue or yellow light, every detail of the site addressed in some twisted way—makes for an impressive New York solo debut… —J.F.
Read more from Johanna Fateman’s Upper East Side Gallery Guide here.
BROOKLYN
The perfect counterpoint to Cady Noland at Gagosian, is the potently diminutive show, “IKEA,” in the second-floor apartment gallery Ciccio in Brooklyn Heights. It takes up many of the same themes (commercialism and industrial design, political violence and counter-cultural movements) while looking across to Europe from America. The exhibition restages an installation by Thomas Eggerer and Jochen Klein (1967-1997), curated by Julie Ault, made for the windows of Printed Matter in 1996… —J.V.
Read more from John Vincler’s Close Look here.
QUEENS
“to ignite our skin” through December 22
SculpureCenter | 44-19 Purves Street, Queens
A group exhibition about the body shedding and renewing itself, “to ignite our skin” at SculptureCenter is a sensuous and solemn show, where soft, bruised textiles are offset with metal braces and armatures—abject matter disciplined by hard frames. Sarah Friend’s work is displayed on several iPhones as screen recordings that alternate collectors’ prompts with the images they yielded. The matte, pastel-toned phone cases and cords have the protective and rubbery look of medical equipment, their flexibility and palette drawing attention to them as prosthetic veins and nerves, extending bodily sensitivities and tastes. Translucent 3D-printed claws clutch the devices to hold them in place… —Brian Droitcour
Read more from Brian Droitcour’s digital art roundup here.
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