8 Exhibitions Worth Visiting During NYFW

Neubauer Artists LLC

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Bringing its grand avenues to life through September 15, we highlight the exhibitions worth visiting between shows.

Which exhibitions should you not miss in New York this fall? If there is one place in the world made for art, it may well be New York. In the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps, so much is happening that it can sometimes be impossible to keep up with everything opening in a single evening. And if you already find yourself amid the exhilarating chaos of New York Fashion Week from September 10 to 15, 2026, before the fashion marathon moves on to London, Milan and Paris, it will not be difficult to add a little art to your itinerary, perhaps the best way to get to know the city better. Alongside the spring/summer 2027 shows, New York’s museums and galleries are presenting an equally rich program, from major retrospectives and long-awaited exhibitions to the first solo shows by a new generation of artists, across Manhattan and beyond. These are the art events you should not miss.

Jenna Gribbon: Entwined, Rose Art Museum

We begin with Jenna Gribbon’s deeply sensual paintings. Bringing together more than forty works created from 2001 to the present, Entwined traces her distinctive approach to figurative painting, from her earliest experiments to ambitious canvases conceived especially for this retrospective.

Originally from Tennessee, Jenna Gribbon became known for her intimate paintings, particularly portraits of her partner, indie rock singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott, known by her stage name Torres. Often nude, she appears in scenes from everyday life, from napping on the sofa to contemplating her own reflection in the bathroom mirror. Bright pink nipples, ash-blonde hair left loose, legs crossed or outstretched, Jenna Gribbon observes the body of the woman she loves with precision and tenderness. Intimacy here is never a means of provocation, but a space of closeness. There is equal pleasure in the sitters surrendering themselves to the gaze and in Gribbon lovingly observing those who share her life.

Jenna Gribbon, Working mother, 2019.Oil on linen. 10 x 8 inches (25.4×20.32 cm).© Jenna Gribbon /Fredericks & Freiser, New York.

Yves Saint Laurent and Photography, International Center of Photography

When it comes to fashion, we head to the International Center of Photography on the Lower East Side, where a glimpse into Yves Saint Laurent’s rich visual archive awaits. The exhibition offers an opportunity to explore the relationship the designer developed with photography over the years, while also revealing how the medium became one of the key creative forces shaping his work and legacy. Organized in collaboration with the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris and the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, the exhibition brings together almost 300 iconic photographs by some of the medium’s greatest names, including Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Guy Bourdin, Robert Doisneau, Horst P. Horst, William Klein, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Andy Warhol. An exhibition you should certainly not miss.

Dominique Issermann, Evening dress from the Fall/Winter 1984 haute couture collection. Published in Vogue, November 1984 © Dominique Issermann / Yves Saint Laurent

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum

We head to the Brooklyn Museum, where Iris van Herpen’s fashion becomes a truly sensory experience. Following its presentation at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2024, the Sculpting the Senses retrospective arrives in New York, celebrating the designer’s singular approach through several thematic sections, from water and the origins of life to the skeleton, a recurring motif in her work, and the enigmatic world of dreams. Throughout the exhibition, haute couture creations enter into dialogue with objects and specimens from natural history collections, blurring the boundaries between different disciplines. This fascinating encounter transforms the museum into an imaginary landscape that is equally spectacular and wondrous.

Iris van Herpen. Loie Dress from the Sympoiesis collection, 2025. Silk satin and resin. Model : Akuol Deng Atem. Photo : Rob Rusling.

Costume Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art

After Iris van Herpen’s futuristic spectacle, we return to the Met for Costume Art, an exhibition exploring the relationship between clothing and the ways in which we represent the body. Pairing pieces from the Costume Institute’s collection with works from across the museum’s departments, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between sartorial silhouettes, paintings and art objects, from prehistory to the present day. The display reveals the many ways clothing can shape, reveal or transform the body that wears it. It is therefore impossible to experience the exhibition as an entirely passive observer. Here, looking becomes an act of active participation: visitors catch their own reflections in the mirror-like surfaces used to create the featureless heads of mannequins designed by sculptor Samar Hejazi. This presentation conveys curator Andrew Bolton’s vision, inviting everyone to reflect on their personal experience and establish a sense of connection, empathy and compassion when encountering works of art.

Anna-Marie Kellen

Deana Lawson, Gagosian

Gagosian is hosting the first solo exhibition by Deana Lawson, whose works are also held in MoMA’s photography collection. From September 10 to October 24, the artist explores the relationships between identity, surveillance and technology. Among the photographs on display is Edge Control, a work based on appropriated surveillance-camera footage from beauty supply stores. The title refers simultaneously to wax used to style textured hair and to appearance-based policing, particularly practices targeting racialized people. The exhibition also includes Lawson’s more recent portraits, inspired in equal measure by family albums and 17th-century Dutch painting.

Deana Lawson, Edge Control_edvc, 2023- © Deana Lawson

Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now, Guggenheim Museum

We continue at the Guggenheim, where pop art icons meet their contemporary successors. An eclectic selection of works by 29 artists, from Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol to Alex Da Corte and Farah Al Qasimi, presents and celebrates more than six decades of popular culture. Historical works are displayed alongside the museum’s more recent acquisitions, connecting different generations of artists through a shared area of interest: the images, objects and codes of popular culture.

The exhibition also considers the role of British curator and critic Lawrence Alloway, who helped introduce pop art to American audiences during the 1960s. At the time, artists appropriated the visual language of advertising and mass media to push the boundaries of art. Six decades later, their successors continue this exploration in the age of the internet. From Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room installation, the exhibition demonstrates how pop art transforms the familiar into the strange and the everyday into the spectacular.

Claes Oldenburg, Soft Pay Telephone, 1963. Vinyl filled with kapok, mounted to painted wood panel, 46 1/2 × 19 × 9 in. (118.1× 48.3 × 22.9cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Ruth and Philip Zierler in memory of their dear departed son, William S. Zierler 80.2747. © Estate o f Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Photo : Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Nikki Maloof: Menagerie at Perrotin

At Perrotin, we enter a somewhat wilder world in which Nikki Maloof blurs the boundaries between the human and the animal. Menagerie presents an entirely new series of paintings filled with imaginary interiors and fantastical landscapes. It reveals how Maloof has gradually expanded her painterly universe, once focused on intimate scenes, towards more expansive pastoral settings. The artist now also ventures into public spaces such as the zoo, which becomes a particularly fertile setting for exploring the oppositions of our time: freedom and captivity, joy and melancholy, the wild and the domesticated. In Nikki Maloof’s work, the animal world thus becomes an unsettling mirror of our behavior and emotions.

Nikki Maloof, Abandoned Picnic, 2026. Oil on linen. 49 x 66 x 2 inches. Photo : Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

Thomas Ruff: jpeg ny, David Zwirner

Finally, on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, German photographer and visual artist Thomas Ruff uses his exhibition jpegs ny to reconsider the images that have become inseparable from the collective memory of the event. Found online and then altered through compression, pixelation and color manipulation, these documentary photographs become unsettling, almost abstract compositions on the walls of David Zwirner.

Thomas Ruff was in New York on September 11, 2001, and photographed the catastrophe, but upon returning to Germany, he discovered that his camera had failed to capture a single image. Three years later, he began searching for photographs of the event online and subsequently transforming them. The result is a fascinating meditation on memory, the ways images circulate and our relationship with the tragedy we observe through them.