NEW YORK, November 9, 2026 — Seven gallery exhibitions across Manhattan are placing abstraction at the center of the city’s fall art season, presenting works by artists including Norman Lewis, Nairy Baghramian, Virginia Jaramillo, and Mildred Thompson. The exhibitions, highlighted in a new ARTnews survey, span Chelsea, the Upper East Side, and Tribeca, bringing together historical paintings, experimental materials, and contemporary sculpture. While several presentations are already underway, additional exhibitions are scheduled to open November 11 and 12, extending the program into the winter.

The selections reflect the variety of artistic practices associated with abstraction rather than a single movement or historical period. Some artists translate music and natural phenomena into visual compositions, while others investigate personal identity, architectural space, and cultural memory. The exhibitions also place renewed emphasis on artists whose contributions to modern art have not always received the same institutional attention as those of their better-known contemporaries.

One of the most immediate opportunities is “Norman Lewis: Jumping Jive” at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, located at 100 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea. The exhibition, which opened September 10 and closes November 14, explores the relationship between Lewis’s visual practice and the music that shaped his artistic development. Featuring paintings and drawings from more than four decades, the presentation traces his movement from figurative imagery toward increasingly abstract compositions informed by jazz, blues, classical music, and other genres.

Lewis, who lived from 1909 to 1979, was an important figure in the first generation of American Abstract Expressionists. His work frequently combined calligraphic gestures, atmospheric effects, and rhythmic arrangements of forms. “Jumping Jive” examines how musical structures influenced his painting, particularly as he embraced abstraction in the mid-1940s. The gallery has also incorporated music into the exhibition experience through recordings from Lewis’s collection. DJ Adrian is scheduled to play selections from that collection on November 14, the exhibition’s final day.

At Hales Gallery, Virginia Jaramillo’s “Pause in Time” is scheduled to open November 12 and continue through December 18. The exhibition at 547 West 20th Street combines new curvilinear paintings with collaged linen-fiber works, highlighting two distinct elements of Jaramillo’s artistic practice. In the paintings, carefully constructed lines travel across broad fields of color, suggesting movement that extends beyond the physical edges of the canvas. The collages offer a contrasting approach, building layered surfaces from linen pulp, water, and earth pigments.

Jaramillo, born in 1939, has spent decades examining how space, time, and visual relationships shape perception. Her newer works revisit ideas and materials developed throughout her career rather than presenting abstraction as a linear progression toward a single style. The exhibition also coincides with her participation in “Hard Art” at MoMA PS1, creating an opportunity to consider her individual practice alongside a broader history of Black abstraction in the United States.

Mildred Thompson’s “Cosmos Calling,” on view at Galerie Lelong through December 19, approaches abstraction through music, astrophysics, and the movement of celestial bodies. The exhibition at 528 West 26th Street includes works from Thompson’s “Music of the Spheres” paintings and her earlier “Heliocentric Series.” Created during the 1990s, these compositions use intense colors, spiraling forms, and energetic lines to explore phenomena that cannot be directly observed through ordinary vision.

Galerie Lelong describes the presentation as the first public showing in New York of Thompson’s “Music of the Spheres” paintings together with their accompanying electronic compositions. The artist developed sounds inspired by NASA Voyager recordings, using electronic equipment, toy instruments, and found objects. Each planetary composition connects visual and musical elements, expanding the exhibition beyond painting alone. Thompson, who died in 2003, also worked as a writer, musician, and educator, and her interdisciplinary interests remain central to understanding the paintings.

Another Chelsea presentation, “Requiem” at Boesky Gallery, focuses on Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s work from the 1980s and 1990s. Open through December 19 at 507 West 24th Street, the exhibition is the first posthumous presentation devoted to the artist, who died in May 2026. The selected paintings reflect a period when her practice increasingly incorporated expressive brushwork, saturated color, and complex imagery. Although the works operate within abstraction, suggestions of human figures, animals, and architectural elements sometimes emerge from their layered surfaces.

Lovelace O’Neal’s career included sustained experimentation with Minimalism, expressive painting, and personal symbolism. Her canvases frequently resist straightforward distinctions between abstraction and representation. In “Requiem,” that ambiguity becomes a defining element of the exhibition, with individual works suggesting narratives without resolving them into literal scenes. Her participation in MoMA PS1’s “Hard Art” provides additional institutional context for a practice that developed across several major shifts in American art.

On the Upper East Side, Richard Saltoun Gallery is presenting Dia al-Azzawi’s “Let me tell you a story to break the waking night” through December 18. Located at 19 East 66th Street, the exhibition marks the Iraqi-born artist’s first solo gallery presentation in New York. It brings together work spanning several decades and examines the importance of literature, storytelling, and Arabic visual traditions in his practice. Azzawi, born in Baghdad in 1939, has incorporated Arabic script and references to Mesopotamian history into compositions that combine recognizable imagery with abstract forms.

The exhibition includes Azzawi’s 1986 print portfolio inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights,” presented in its complete deluxe edition. A gallery space designed around books and reading further emphasizes the relationship between visual art and literary culture. The presentation connects abstract composition with cultural heritage and collective memory, demonstrating how written language can become both a formal artistic element and a vehicle for storytelling.

Nearby, Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary is showing Alejandro Corujeira’s “La sonora luz de lo invisible,” which runs through January 30, 2027. The exhibition at 47 East 64th Street features 11 works developed over the previous three years. Corujeira, an Argentine artist based in Madrid, uses painting to investigate light, rhythm, movement, and relationships between geometric forms and natural phenomena. His compositions often rely on restrained colors and subtle visual changes rather than dramatic contrasts.

According to the gallery, the exhibition develops Corujeira’s longstanding interest in experiences that resist direct representation. His practice incorporates influences from music, spirituality, and ancient knowledge systems. The resulting paintings offer a quieter interpretation of abstraction, inviting attention to fine variations in surface, line, and spatial relationships. The exhibition also extends the current selection of New York abstraction shows well beyond the end of the fall season.

The most explicitly sculptural presentation among the seven is Nairy Baghramian’s “nameless,” scheduled to open November 11 at Marian Goodman Gallery in Tribeca. Running through January 16, 2027, the exhibition features recent works associated with her “nameless,” “oreiller,” and “selves” series. Baghramian uses materials including neon, glass, aluminum, epoxy resin, and wax to examine the relationship between objects, architectural environments, language, and identity.

The exhibition includes works previously presented at WIELS in Belgium in late 2025 that Marian Goodman Gallery says will be shown in the United States for the first time. Baghramian’s installations manipulate familiar materials and forms, encouraging viewers to reconsider the assumptions attached to naming, representation, and physical objects. The presentation also establishes a dialogue with a wall work by conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, whose use of language provides a different approach to questions of material existence and meaning.

These seven exhibitions coincide with a broader institutional reassessment of abstraction. MoMA PS1 opened “Hard Art” on November 5, with the exhibition scheduled to continue through March 15, 2027. According to the museum, the presentation contains more than 90 works by over 40 artists and examines Black artistic engagement with abstraction from 1969 to the present. The exhibition includes works by Jaramillo, Thompson, and Lovelace O’Neal, all of whom are also featured in the current gallery selections.

The museum’s presentation brings historical paintings into conversation with newer works involving sculpture, video, sound, and other media. That approach complements the diversity visible across the seven commercial gallery exhibitions, where abstraction functions as a means of exploring subjects ranging from musical improvisation to the uncertainty of language.

The exhibitions have different closing dates, with Lewis’s presentation ending first on November 14, several other shows continuing through December, and the Corujeira and Baghramian exhibitions extending into January. Together, they illustrate how New York’s contemporary art galleries continue to present abstraction as an evolving field, connecting established artistic histories with new investigations into the possibilities of painting, sculpture, and material expression.