The city that never sleeps is gearing up for a frenzied month packed with art fairs of all sizes, along with a heady list of major auctions, and blue-chip venues and emerging outposts alike are unveiling some of their strongest exhibitions of the year, timed to open with Frieze, TEFAF, and their ilk. Across the Upper East Side stalwarts, Chelsea powerhouses and Tribeca’s fast-rising scene, we’ve rounded up ten must-see gallery shows that channel the energy and ambition of the season.

In just a few years, Japanese artist Yu Nishimura has risen to international prominence, captivating collectors with his lyrical, often melancholic paintings suspended in a hazy, ethereal atmosphere—works that mirror similarly blurred psychological and emotional states. At once dreamy and eerie, his scenes disrupt the logical tension between what is felt and what is perceived, translating, through minimal painterly gestures, a complex set of silent feelings and desires that emerge directly from the depths of the unconscious.
For his debut exhibition with the gallery—also his first solo show in the United States—he presents a new poetic body of work characterized by his distinctive blending of traditional Japanese landscape, the simplification of characters found in manga and anime and the framing techniques of cinema. Combining traditional oil and tempera with visual impulses drawn from trailblazing postwar Japanese photography, Nishimura creates paintings that feel both disarmingly simple and universally resonant, as if a memory is sleeping just out of reach, a feeling we try to recall, a melancholic reminiscence surfacing from the nebulous abysses of our subconscious. The show follows his recent auction breakthrough, marked by the sale of Sandy beach (2020) for $296,100 at Christie’s New York—far surpassing its pre-sale estimate of $40,000–$60,000. That result followed an earlier meteoric 125 percent jump in value, when his work Pause (2020) fetched $132,000—almost double its high estimate of $70,000.

Moving intuitively across the canvas, Thalita Hamoui uses light and color as conduits to engage with the mystery of creation. In a process that verges on alchemy, she channels pigments into evocations of nature’s blooming energies, oscillating between magmatic intensity and lighter, more organic terrains. While her richly layered canvases remain primarily abstract, shaped by an organically alternating rhythm of energetic marks, expressive strokes, and gestural swells of color, they also evoke lush tropical landscapes. Clusters of thick brushstrokes suggest overflowing gardens or blooming vistas, infused with a vital spark that ignites the perpetual cycle of creation, transformation, decay and renewal.
Moving between the spirit of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the saturated hues of East Asian........

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