The Six Female Artists With Major Solo Shows This Fall

Some paint ghosts. One sculpts with hair. Another is late 60s and one of the more intriguing “new” talents around. All six are positioned for career-making openings in September. In these artists’ hands, figuration isn’t a retreat but an insurgency. It isn’t nostalgic or safe or optically rote. It’s personal, political, pictorially alive, pushing against the flatness of photo-based realism and ultra-on-message art. Some of these artists I’ve followed for years; others are new to me. But each delivers that jolt of recognition. Karen Barbour makes abstract dot-filled dreamscapes that hover between the psychedelic and the childlike. María Berrío’s collaged visions are both intricate and otherworldly, dreamed then chiseled. Ana Cláudia Almeida paints with spectral precision; colors blur, as if you’re seeing underwater. Adebunmi Gbadebo works with human hair, indigo dye, and timeless forms to sculpt memory and Black history, materializing grief and resilience in equal measure. Sasha Gordon’s lush self-portraits are charged with vengeance and vulnerability. Her maniacal technique ravishes. Olivia van Kuiken paints slouched angels, stoned odalisques, girls with deadpan gazes who seem to see something we don’t. That’s true of all emerging artists: They sketch the shape of what’s coming next. Not fully known, already felt. Their work can shift the chemistry of a room and, sometimes, of art itself. — Jerry Saltz

“I’ve been free all these years to do what I want. I was an illustrator; I don’t think I was very good at it, but I made a living doing that. I painted from the time I was in my 20s, but I didn’t want to talk about it too much. It wasn’t how I made my living, so it wasn’t real. This moment in my career — I’m glad. But I’m still in my own world, really. I started a lot of these canvases decades ago. There’s one from 1985 or 1986 that’s had a million different stages. Most recently, my dad was dying, and I started adding to it again. He was hallucinating, and he was an extremely curious and smart person, so for him the hallucinations were exciting. There’s a face in the painting of an old-fashioned man I imagined him seeing. I never expected Peter, my curator, to pick it out for the show. To me, it was this bedraggled thing that’s been evolving since the ’80s, something I did for myself.” — As told to Emma Alpern

“Brainwaves and Wavestorms” at Harkawik, September 5 through October 2.

“Painting has gotten so flat, and I wanted to push against that. I wanted the show to have a very punk attitude. There’s a lot of paint that’s thrown around and sculpted. I mixed wax in with the oil paint, which made it a superheavy body. Most of the paintings are freestanding, which has been an experiment, but they look strong — physically strong. They’re snapshots of figures moving in space, very Eadweard Muybridge. I’ve made a lot of works using those figures as references, but this time I started collaging them and making the bodies foreshortened or pushing them together in subtle ways. I wanted to make it clear in the paintings that they weren’t actual people, that the body was more of a screen for the viewer’s projection. My other shows have been based on books, referencing specific characters or passages or ideas. This show felt like it was falling out of me.” — As told to Paula Aceves

“Bastard Rhyme” at Matthew Brown, September 5 through October 18.

“This is the biggest space I’ve shown in, so I was like, Let me do the most ambitious thing I can do. I’ve been working on it for over a year. I wanted a cohesive narrative around one painting that’s about the relationship I have with myself, how weird it feels to have all these facets that maybe don’t match. There’s one protagonist and three evil women, a trope in horror and revenge movies I wanted to play into. The first painting is based on a scene in The Host that spoke to me when I was 10. A monster is running around a city, and a woman is fiddling with her fingernails in a park. She is so distracted that the monster runs right through her. In the painting, the woman is cutting her toenails, her headphones are on, and there’s an explosion. The whole city is in chaos, but she’s just going to take her time and do her nails first. She is fixated on herself and her priorities.” — P.A.

“Haze” at David Zwirner, September 10 through October 18.

“The first step of my process is a 13-hour road trip to South Carolina. I drive into Fort Motte, to the plantation where my ancestors were enslaved, and dig about a couple hundred pounds of soil and bring it back to my studio. I then have to turn that soil into clay, which is a laborious process of sifting out all these natural elements like rocks and pine needles or broken glass that people have laid in the cemetery. I got the soil for these pieces in July 2024. This has definitely been the longest I’ve worked toward a show. The nature of my materials, their fragility and limitations, is a challenge: I’m using soil that’s dug, that’s not necessarily meant to be clay. I use human hair. I had a piece that was complete, ready to be shipped, and as I was sweeping I knocked it over. For artists who work in ceramics, work breaking is just a part of the game. Ceramics are so fragile that seeing work leave my studio for installation is like an exhale.” — E.A.

“Watch Out for the Ghosts” at Nicola Vassell, September 4 through October 18.

“I think I have over 10,000 papers. I could open a store in the studio. To prepare for a show, I gather all the papers I’m excited to use and throw them on the ground and start to get them ready. I’ve created this technique I call ‘paper painting,’ where I collage using Japanese papers and paint on the collage using watercolors. And more recently, I’ve worked with a contemporary-dance company, photographing and creating a small performance with them, which I then paint. It’s a very intuitive process. The first piece I made for the show, called Soliloquy of the Wounded Earth, is a woman who’s very mysterious on a horse but projects this feeling of hope and courage that guided me through the making of the other works. It came to me immediately, and I resolved it very fast. Sometimes you’re surprised with these pieces that come so fast, but they take your fear away. They lead the way.” — E.A.

“Soliloquy of the Wounded Earth” at Hauser & Wirth, September 4 through October 18.

“It all started with one very, very large-scale oil painting. I was mostly thinking about the movements of a waterfall, but there were a few different cultural references that influenced me. One was a song by the Brazilian singer Tim Maia, and another was Black Orpheus, which offers a very stereotypical idea of Rio, where I’m from. There is a big party scene, and it’s very lively, but the presence of death is everywhere. As I saw this duality in the movie, I began to see the same duality in the canvas. With this show, I was more intentional about the freedom to play. I have some transfers, some oil-pastel drawings, monotypes, and installation work. And I work a little bit on one, a little bit on the other, and things keep influencing each other. One work changes how I see the other. What is in the palette of one goes to the palette of the other. Because of the first work, all the paintings include movement of some kind, like a force falling.” — P.A.

“Over Again” at Stephen Friedman Gallery, September 5 through October 18.