8 Must-See Solo Gallery Shows in September
From Susan Te Kahurangi King’s creation of a vast, parallel visual universe using graphite, colored pencil, crayon, pen, and ink to Marc Dennis’ hyperrealistic oil paintings that inventively reinterpret classical art-historical masterpieces
Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie journeyed from New York to Los Angeles to highlight the top solo shows for September. From Marc Dennis’ hyperrealistic oil paintings that inventively reinterpret classical art-historical masterpieces at Harper’s and Katia Santibañez’s intricate, grid-based abstractions that explore the intersection of geometry and the natural world at DC Moore Gallery in New York to Susan Te Kahurangi King’s creation of a vast, parallel visual universe using graphite, colored pencil, crayon, pen, and ink at James Fuentes Gallery in Los Angeles, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.
1. Valerio Adami | David Nolan Gallery, New York
A celebrated Italian painter and printmaker associated with European Pop Art and the Narrative Figuration movement, Valerio Adami is widely recognized for his distinctive style, marked by bold, flat areas of saturated color outlined by thick black lines. Making his solo debut with the gallery, which is inaugurating its new Tribeca space, the 91-year-old, Bologna-based artist is exhibiting a lively selection of drawings and paintings from the 1960s, a period of significant success for Adami, when his work was highlighted at the Venice Biennale and at Documenta III. The exhibition “Alice in the Land of Violence” explores themes that have long intrigued Adami, including tributes to fellow artists, the private worlds of hotel rooms and bars, his passion for travel, music, and literature, and the realms of theater and political ideas—all filtered through a signature style shaped by comic books and advertising imagery.
Opening September 9
2. Marc Dennis | Harper’s, New York
A Brooklyn-based American painter, Marc Dennis is best known for meticulously detailed oil paintings that blend classical art-historical masterpieces with contemporary pop culture, humor, and irony. Blending the exceptional technical skill of 17th-century Old Masters with contemporary stories, this work examines themes of identity, social consumption, and the dynamic between audiences and historical art. Returning to the gallery for his second solo show, the “Sugar on My Tongue” exhibition showcases a new series of hyperrealist oil paintings that continue Dennis’s exploration of Western art’s illusionistic traditions, infusing them with his characteristic humorous twists. By recasting still life as theatrical tableaux, he contrasts the seriousness of Old Master paintings with the exaggerated humor of modern kitsch.
Opening September 10
3. Katia Santibañez | DC Moore, New York
Katia Santibañez is a French-born American abstract painter known for her intricate, grid-based works that explore the intersection of geometry and the natural world. Born in Paris, she initially studied microbiology and biochemistry before turning to fine arts. By layering repetitive forms on meticulous grids, she bridges rigid human structures and organic shapes, dividing her time between studios in New York City and the Berkshires. Her third solo exhibition with the gallery, “And Yet Again,” explores structure and order within the grid, starting with a geometric matrix that forms the core of each piece. This matrix defines the size of the squares, within which Santibañez carefully paints a repeating spiral motif. The spiral appears in every grid section, imparting a dynamic sense of motion inspired by the natural world.
Through October 3
4. Melissa Joseph | Charles Moffett, New York
Melissa Joseph, a multidisciplinary artist based in New York, creates fiber works, textile portraits, and mixed-media sculptures that explore memory, family history, and diasporic themes. Born in Pennsylvania to an Irish-American mother and an Indian immigrant father, she offers a unique perspective as a second-generation American. Her solo show, “Casserole Culture,” features 15 new pieces, including mixed-media sculptures and large needle-felted paintings that reflect resilience, creativity, and family bonds. Joseph primarily uses found objects and needle-felting on industrial felt, drawing on women’s labor, craft traditions, her personal experiences as a biracial American, and the cultural blends of diasporic life. The exhibition also showcases her exploration of new terrains in needle-felted paintings, where her textiles take on a painterly feel—her needle acting as a brush and wool resembling a colorful palette.
Opening September 9
5. Huidi Xiang | YveYang, New York
Born in China and educated in art and architecture in the United States, Huidi Xiang creates sculptural objects, immersive installations, and spatial systems that inhabit the liminal space between virtual worlds and physical reality. Her physical artworks often begin as pixels and data on a screen, then transform into tangible, sensory materials such as wood, aluminum, resin, and 3D-printed components. By dissecting pop-culture phenomena, video game aesthetics, and classic animation, she constructs alternative narratives that blur the boundary between labor and play. In the exhibition “the tail remembers,” the Brooklyn-based sculptor presents a series of new, intimate bronzes—hanging wall works and floor or tabletop pieces displayed on handmade wooden plinths—that poetically and joyfully highlight the tail in her finely crafted work.
Opening September 9
6. Tanya Merrill | 303 Gallery, New York
An American figurative painter with strong interests in environmental issues, art history, and storytelling, Tanya Merrill creates paintings and drawings whose subjects are rooted in our cultural past yet metaphorically address contemporary concerns. A native New Yorker and the only child of creative parents, Merrill grew up visiting galleries and museums and discussing art with family and friends. She studied creative writing and visual arts and, after a year in Florence studying Renaissance art and Italian cinema, began to consider a future in the arts. Her expressive, subtly humorous paintings and drawings examine humanity’s complex relationship with nature, power structures, and cultural depictions of gender and sexuality. The new paintings in her exhibition “Land animal, house animal” weave in references to historical artworks and impressions of domesticity, motherhood, and partnership—creating layered, folkloric scenes that function as modern-day allegories and fables for decoding 21st-century concerns.
Opening September 10
7. Carole Vanderlinden | Karma, Los Angeles
Carole Vanderlinden is a contemporary Belgian artist known for her improvisational painting style. She creates complex, layered works that blur the line between abstraction and figuration, resisting a single style and treating each canvas as a spontaneous confrontation between painter and medium. She uses thick, hand-mixed oil paints to create dense, compact surfaces with textures ranging from matte to glossy, and draws color inspiration from historical paintings, Eastern European cartoons, vintage children’s books, and exotic textiles. The paintings in the exhibition “Fragmented Thought,” created over the past three years, feature recurring motifs such as plants, skies, and houses—conveying her unique visual style, marked by hybridity, ambiguity, and open-ended formal elements. Although the Brussels-based artist’s work is often pictorial, she does not focus on subject matter. Instead, she explores the elusive connection between form and content.
Through September 12
8. Susan Te Kahurangi King | James Fuentes Gallery, Los Angeles
Susan Te Kahurangi King, a self-taught contemporary outsider artist from New Zealand, has gained international acclaim for her prolific, expressive, and intricate drawings that blend hypnotic dreamscapes with pop-culture characters. Born in 1951, King experienced a decline in verbal skills in early childhood. By age eight, she had ceased speaking altogether due to severe autism spectrum disorder. Instead of verbal communication, King used drawing as her primary means of expression and exploration. Over the years, she has created a vast, parallel visual universe using graphite, colored pencil, crayon, pen, and ink. Her exhibition “The Page Before Me,” her first with the gallery and her solo debut on the West Coast, offers a broad overview from the late 1950s to today, including some of her earliest drawings and her largest work to date.
Through September 12