The 12 best gallery shows in New York City in October 2026

The show of the season: six decades of Marden’s paintings, from the monochrome oil-and-wax panels of the 1960s to the looping calligraphic canvases of his last years, with major loans from museums and rarely seen works from the estate and private collections. It is organized around the plane and the material presence of paint, which is to say around what Marden cared about most, and it is the first chance since his death in 2023 to see the whole arc in one place.

It runs longer than almost anything else this month, through December 12, at 522 West 21st Street. Gagosian’s two 24th Street spaces have Deana Lawson and Jordan Wolfson at the same time, so give the block an afternoon.

Karma’s first show of Yvonne Jacquette (1934–2023) gathers paintings and works on paper from 1971 to 2016 that look down on cities, clouds and fields from planes, helicopters and high towers. It follows how the bird’s-eye view became both her subject and her method: early watercolors framed by the oval of a passenger window, then pastels and large oils in which the frame drops away and mills, highways and Manhattan blocks tilt up toward the viewer in patches of dotted, almost Pointillist color.

Jacquette chartered small planes over Maine, rode helicopters above New York at night and sketched from the upper floors of the World Trade Center, later reworking the studies from memory. A painter long admired by other painters, she is getting the attention she was owed; the show is on West 26th Street through October 31.

Lawson’s first solo show with Gagosian brings mirror-framed photographs and holograms from her Edge Control series, which reworks the surveillance imagery of beauty supply stores. Her large, staged photographs of Black life have been among the most discussed of the last decade, and here the reflective frames pull the viewer into the frame too.

At 541 West 24th Street through October 24, with Jordan Wolfson’s new sculptures next door at 555, in his first show with the gallery in New York.

Sculpture from 1972 to 2024 in glazed ceramic, bronze and pleated paper, with particular attention to rarely shown glass pieces from 1985. Benglis has been turning the gestures of Abstract Expressionism into three dimensions for more than fifty years, and the knots and folds here, some tiny and some monumental, are as alive as anything she has made.

At 540 West 25th Street through October 24, in a building that also has Torkwase Dyson’s deep-sea paintings and, across the street, Arlene Shechet’s monumental metal sculptures and ceramics. The galleries close early, at 4 pm, on Tuesday, October 6.

Auerbach has long worked at the border of art and the sciences, and this show takes natural turbulence as its subject: pointillist paintings of microscopic foam, thermal photographs of water currents, sculptures and glass chimes that turn air movement into sound. It is rigorous and beautiful in equal measure, which has become Auerbach’s signature.

At 521 West 21st Street through October 24. Paula Cooper’s other spaces on the block have Eric N. Mack’s textile installations and Liz Glynn’s copper American Progress.

New sculpture by the British artist, whose stacked and twisting forms in bronze, steel, wood and stone have been among the most recognizable in contemporary sculpture for forty years. Marian Goodman’s Tribeca building, at 385 Broadway, has the scale these pieces want, and Cragg is at his best when given it.

Through October 24, alongside Edith Dekyndt’s Notes on What is What. Nairy Baghramian follows in November.

Photographs from Sugimoto’s Diorama series, begun in the 1970s at the American Museum of Natural History, in which the museum’s stuffed animals and painted backdrops become, under his long exposures, indistinguishable from life. New washi-paper screens extend the idea, and the show as a whole is about how museums stage an artificial nature.

At 504 West 24th Street through October 24, with a survey of the Brazilian artist Leonilson next door at 508. Yu Hong’s altarpiece-like paintings open at Lisson in November.

Three of McCall’s solid-light works, in which a projected beam, made visible by haze, becomes a sculpture you can walk through: Line Describing a Cone, from 1973, the piece that made his name; Skylight, from 2020; and the newly debuted Swarm. Sean Kelly’s tall main gallery, at Tenth Avenue and 36th Street, is one of the few in the city that can show them properly.

Through October 31, with Luke Agada’s first show with the gallery alongside. The gallery is a fifteen-minute walk north of the Chelsea district; go late in the day, when the room is darkest.

Locke’s third solo show with P.P.O.W. centers on new Odyssey boats, a fleet of model ships in the devotional tradition once hung in churches for safe passage, here encrusted with beads, medals, coins and imagery drawn from his own altered share certificates, to evoke histories of migration and trade. Nineteenth-century Parian ware busts of Queen Victoria and Princess Alexandra are dressed up with found materials in his Souvenir series, and there are new watercolors.

Locke’s commission for the Metropolitan Museum’s facade made him a familiar name in New York; this is the fuller account. At 390 Broadway, second floor, in Tribeca, through October 24.

Lewis (1909–1979) was the one Black painter at the center of Abstract Expressionism, and his small, rhythmic canvases of the 1940s and 1950s, with their processions of figures dissolving into calligraphic marks, have been reclaimed over the last decade by museums that long ignored them. Michael Rosenfeld has represented the estate for years and knows the work better than anyone.

At 100 Eleventh Avenue, at West 19th Street, through November 14. Lewis is also in Geometries at the Studio Museum in Harlem, among nearly thirty artists working with line and grid.