8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in October

Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie traveled from New York to Los Angeles—with a stop in Chicago—to highlight the top solo shows for October. From Shara Hughes’s psychologically charged large landscape paintings at David Kordansky Gallery in New York and Yukimasa Ida’s wildly gestural abstract portraits at Mariane Ibrahim in Chicago to the late Chicano artist Luis Jiménez’s dynamic figurative sculptures and drawings of cowboys and dancers celebrating Mexican-American and Southwestern culture, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.

1. Shara Hughes | David Kordansky Gallery, New York

An abstract artist primarily known for her vibrantly painted, imaginative landscapes, Shara Hughes has been exhibiting her expressive artworks since the mid-2000s. However, her major breakthrough occurred when she displayed her colorful canvases at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where her art received widespread critical praise. Ahead of a November 2025 survey at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, the gallery is showcasing nine new large-scale paintings in her first solo show in New York in six years. Painting psychologically charged, personally interpreted landscapes inspired by post-Impressionist movements like Fauvism, Synthetism, and Symbolism, her lush, vibrant canvases emphasize subjectivity over realism while dynamically highlighting structure and form.

Through October 18

2. Cady Noland | Gagosian, New York

An American conceptual artist who uses found objects and appropriated images to expose the violence in everyday life, Cady Noland is widely recognized for her critical, often unsettling sculptures and installations that explore the darker aspects of American culture. The daughter of abstract, color field painter Kenneth Noland, she gained critical praise as an artist critiquing the American Dream in the 1980s and ‘90s, but later stepped back from the art scene for nearly 20 years. Back with a vengeance over the past several years, her current exhibition presents Noland at her best, using barricades, emptied Budweiser cans, consumer objects, and signs, along with images of celebrities, gangsters, and guns to emphasize the glorification of violence. Throwing a wrench into her programmed chaos, work by her late friend, artist Steven Parrino, is displayed as an exhibition within her exhibition, creating a compelling dialogue between his counterculture work and hers.

Through October 18

3. Omar Ba | Templon, New York

One of today’s leading contemporary African artists, Omar Ba was honored with the opening exhibition when Templon launched its New York outpost in 2022. Back then, the Senegalese artist was splitting his time between Dakar, Geneva, New York, Brussels, and Paris, but his new body of paintings, which captures family and friends from photos of the past and present, has mostly been created at his studio in New York. Depicting workers, farmers, nurses, and singers, the paintings present everyday people from his homeland and diaspora who stand out with their charismatic personalities, stylish clothing, and sense of dignity and achievement. Using various mark-making techniques, the skilled painter expertly integrates his subjects into naturally patterned backgrounds, blending abstraction with figuration to create a striking style of portraiture where his figures seamlessly merge with their blooming environments.

Through October 25

4. Pedro Reyes | Lisson Gallery, New York

A celebrated Mexican artist known for his large-scale works that blend sculpture, architecture, video, and performance to address important social and political issues, Pedro Reyes believes that art can serve as a powerful tool for societal change. Recognized for producing works and projects that challenge simple classification, the Mexico City-based artist smoothly shifts between different media, with his latest exhibition of new sculptures and mosaics continuing this tradition. Combining monumental stone works that reflect the traditions of Mexica and Olmec carving with a collection of detailed wall mosaics on a smaller scale, the exhibition turns the gallery into a sculptural landscape—an enchanted jungle of myth, material, and movement. From motifs that range from purely abstract to those that evoke animal shapes, Reyes draws on Mesoamerican cosmology, making his modernist artworks feel connected to a pre-Columbian vibe.

Through October 18

5. Yukimasa Ida | Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago

Inspired by the Japanese philosophy of “ichi-go ichi-e,” which translates to “a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” Yukimasa Ida explores the ephemeral nature of life through painterly portraits that merge abstraction with naturalism. Using spatulas, brushes, and bare hands, the Tokyo-based artist employs impasto and wet-on-wet painting techniques to capture fleeting moments by distorting figures and forms, preserving ephemeral memories to create vibrant, flowing figures that he sees as snapshots in time. Primarily facial abstractions, with the exception of one haunting landscape, his nine new paintings depict people he has met during his travels, as well as several self-portraits and a depiction of dad, whom we assume to be his father. Ida captures the psyche of his subject as well as a distorted memory of them, using color, form, and mark-making in highly engaging ways. 

Through October 25

6. Luis Jiménez | Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles

Primarily known as a sculptor, though he also created related colored-pencil drawings and prints, Luis Jiménez is best recognized for his cast fiberglass sculptures, which he sprayed with automotive paint and coated with epoxy. Celebrated for his iconic 1969 Man on Fire sculpture (a version is on view in the Whitney Museum’s “Sixties Surreal” show), inspired by an Aztec warrior who was tortured to death with fire by the Spaniards and Buddhist monks who self-immolated in protest of the Vietnam War, the late Texas-born, New Mexico-based artist focused on themes central to the Mexican-American experience and Southwestern culture. His work often featured cowboys, dancers, motorcyclists, or stories about immigration and labor. Spread across the gallery’s two L.A. locations, the “American Dream” exhibition vibrantly combines sculptures and drawings that explore these topics while highlighting Chicano lifestyles.

Through November 8

7. Manoucher Yektai | Karma, Los Angeles

Manoucher Yektai, an Iranian-born American artist and poet who died at 97 in 2019, was best known for his vivid, improvisational paintings of still lifes, landscapes, and portraits that blurred the line between abstraction and representation. A founding member of the New York School—an informal group of avant-garde American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active during the 1950s and 1960s—Yektai combined his Persian roots, Parisian education, and American modernism to develop a uniquely expressive style of painting. Curated by acclaimed writer and editor Negar Azimi, this survey spans twenty years of the late painter’s work, from 1948 to 1969. It explores his engagement with postwar art movements and Beaux-Arts traditions, highlighting his experimentation with Surrealist-inspired abstractions, Abstract Expressionist still lifes, Minimalist color studies, and portraits with thick impasto, along with other improvisational works, both large and small.

Through November 1

8. Danielle Orchard | Perrotin, Los Angeles

A contemporary American painter known for her seemingly candid figurative art, which often depicts female subjects in leisure scenes, Danielle Orchard seamlessly merges influences from modern movements, such as Cubism and German Expressionism, with references from art history to explore contemporary themes. Focusing on female figures in intimate, everyday moments, her first solo exhibition at the gallery’s Los Angeles location—and her sixth with Perrotin since joining in 2021—highlights themes of early motherhood by exploring pregnancy, breastfeeding, first haircuts, and childcare, along with social gatherings with other women to share parenting concerns. Paying homage to Picasso and Matisse with her depiction of female figures, which feature large eyes, cubist shapes, and reclining odalisque poses, she employs bold brushwork and unexpected colors to craft captivating, atmospheric images of women simply yet symbolically being themselves.

Through October 18