After the art world's all-too-brief summer break, New York is back in business with a packed slate of major exhibitions kicking off the fall season. This year, The Armory Show has been pushed to the end of the month, from September 24-27, avoiding the usual overlap with Frieze Seoul—an unsurprising bit of coordination now that the two fairs sit within the same portfolio.

The change will spare many international dealers the frantic stretch between the two regions and scenes, though several galleries are opening shows at the beginning of the month, creating early momentum around what has long been one of the calendar's most important slots, typically reserved for the strongest artists. As usual, there will be plenty worth seeing in Chelsea, Tribeca, the Lower East Side and what remains of the Upper East Side gallery scene. To help you navigate the sprawl, Observer has compiled our usual list of the best Armory adjacent exhibitions in New York.

Haas Brothers: Mathemagical

Whimsical and playfully irreverent, the Haas Brothers' creatures are among the few ingeniously crafted characters to have captured such attention—and found so much room to expand their storytelling—without ever being tied to a franchise. Their works move fluidly between art and design, frequently departing from functionality altogether to become purely sculptural, playful and sometimes irreverent creations. With "Mathemagical," the brothers push this universe into a more systematic and technically sophisticated territory. A new series of Accretion paintings begins with nostalgic landscape scenes that are gradually abstracted through layers of thickened acrylic applied according to a reaction-diffusion equation—the same kind of mathematical process used to describe cellular growth and the formation of stripes and spots in animal fur. At the center of the exhibition is Peach Tree, the pair's largest work and perhaps the clearest synthesis of their evolving practice. A carved stone base nods to their ongoing engagement with stone—and an emotional link to their stonemason father—while the bronze trunk uses the same Accretion process developed for the Beasts. Its Venetian glass-bead foliage was hand-beaded by the Haas Sisters of Lost Hills, a group of women from a Central California agricultural community with whom the artists have collaborated for nearly a decade, creating an ongoing social-practice dimension within their production. Intricately blown-glass peaches, illuminated from within, complete the work.