Celeste Rapone, House Spirit, 2025. Copyright of Celeste Rapone and courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen, and Josh Lilley, London
BY ELISA CAROLLO
From Ambera Wellmann’s visceral debut at Hauser & Wirth to Sasha Gordon’s first Zwirner solo, September delivers a high-energy lineup of exhibitions across the city.
As it does every year, The Armory Show signals the start of a bustling art season in New York City as the art world returns from summer retreats in the Hamptons, Upstate or further south in France and the Mediterranean. Since the launch of Frieze Seoul—this year overlapping with the iconic New York City fair—many mega galleries have pushed their openings to the second or even third week of September. Still, the city’s galleries are as usual set to host a new wave of blockbuster exhibitions and shows of emerging talent, each vying for a prime slot in the art calendar and acting as a proving ground for the year ahead. With that in mind, Observer has assembled a lineup of this month’s must-see New York exhibitions to keep firmly in view.
Celeste Rapone's "Some Weather"
Marianne Boesky, New York
September 4 - October 18, 2025
Celeste Rapone is another artist who gained significant attention during the pandemic, with many collectors landing on a waiting list to acquire one of her compelling canvases. Conceived as parallel selves or alter egos, her characters stage allegorical commentaries on the millennial condition, grappling with societal pressures, psychic unease and the overwhelming influence of media while also navigating timeless existential questions around the absurdity and beauty of human existence. Challenging the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, Rapone layers pigment and texture to create images that are tactile even as they borrow from the digital aesthetics of screens. Against unnervingly flattened backdrops, she stages exaggerated and surreal depictions of the human form, engaging with simultaneous layers of reality and sensation to suggest that millennial life is already a multiscreen, multidimensional experience shaped by overlapping narratives and communications unfolding at once. With humor that sharpens rather than softens darker introspective themes, her characters appear trapped and compressed within this overwhelming entanglement, fighting to assert their physical and sensual presence—as bodies in space, as flesh and as sites of multiple inner and outward events. By probing the intersections of identity, social dynamics and human experience, Rapone’s visual storytelling lays bare the complexities of shifting notions of gender, sexuality and personal history.
