As the fall art season hits full stride, downtown Manhattan hums with openings, launches, and gatherings that stretch from the Bowery to Broadway. On the Lower East Side and through the bridges to Chinatown, a mix of young galleries and established project spaces are testing the edges of painting, sculpture, and performance—works exploring the body, information overload, and emotional residue all share the stage this week. Thursday’s cluster of openings on Elizabeth, Canal, and Henry Streets promises a dense circuit of discovery, while Soho’s design showrooms open their doors for a communal aperitivo, blurring the line between gallery and gathering.
By Friday, the energy shifts west into Tribeca, where blue-chip and independent spaces alike offer a range from introspective figuration to global abstraction—Ana Mendieta’s elemental gestures echoing alongside new experiments in form, material, and myth. The weekend closes with intimate book launches and artist-led projects back on the LES, reaffirming downtown’s enduring pulse as a place where conversation, community, and creation overlap.
Lower East Side/Two Bridges/Chinatown | Thurs
Company, 145 Elizabeth St, ‘Divorce Paintings’ by Jeanette Mundt, ‘Gentle Tug on Thigh’ by Jonathan Lyndon Chase
Westwood Gallery, 262 Bowery, ‘New Sculptures’ by Don Porcaro
Magenta Plains, 149 Canal St, ‘Information Noise Saturation’ by Joseph Nechvatal
Time Again, 105 Canal St, OAS Dossier 2 launch party, 7pm-9pm
Artifact Projects, 155 Suffolk St, Paintings by Vlada Hauser, Monika Gloviczki, Olayinka Kasali, Natsuyo Takahashi
Blade Study, 17 Pike Street, ‘Tread Water’ by Jiwoong
Gern en Regalia, 105 Henry St #5, these lines grow like trees around your crown of sky’ with Felipe Pagan, Orange Li, Sid Maurer, Jenna Beasley, Will Alexander, Ingrid Yi-Chen Lu
New York Life Gallery, 167-169 Canal Street, 5th Floor, ‘Max’ by Sam Penn
Amanita, 313 Bowery, ‘Spirit Economy’ by Craig Boagey
Umarell, 187 East Broadway, ‘81 Drawings’ by Marcus Jahmal
Soho | Thurs
‘Aperitivo in Soho,’ 6pm-8pm
Amura Lab, 60 Grand St
Original BTC, 56 Greene St
Salvatori, 102 Wooster St
Vispring, 459 Broome St
Lower East Side | Fri
Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 Bowery, ‘Relical Horn’ by Samuel Sarmiento, ‘On the Dotted Line’ by Domenico Zindato
Karma, 188 East 2nd Street, ‘The View from Inside’ by Yvonne Jacquette
Karma, 22 East 2nd Street, ‘End of the Line’ by Mathew Cerletty
Blank Mag Books, 17 Eldridge St, Tomkins Square Park: Forty Years’ by Clayton Patterson, Cheryl Dunn, Alain Levitt, Adam Zhu, Nolan Zangas, 6pm-9pm
Tawny, 173 Henry St, Petal Books releases & art show with several artists and authors, 7pm-11pm
Tribeca | Fri
James Cohan, 48 Walker St, work by Eamon Ore-Giron
James Cohan, 52 Walker St, work by Eamon Ore-Giron
Theta, 184 Franklin St, work by Maya Hewitt
apexart, 291 Church Street, ‘“A Lotus Blooming in a Sea of Fire curated by Song Hà
Sebastian Gladstone Gallery, 36 White St, ‘TERMINAL CLASSIC’ by Timo Fahler
R & Company, 64 White St, ‘Hypernatural’ by Joyce Lin
Mendes Wood DM, 47 Walker St, ‘Slicing Apples’ by Hiroshi Sugito
Marian Goodman Gallery, 385 Broadway, ‘Back to the Source’ by Ana Mendieta
Friedrichs Pontone, 273 Church Street, work by Hwang Seontae
Jane Lombard Gallery, 58 White Street, ‘In Between’ by Samantha Keely Smith, ‘JLG Projects presents: Fertile Ground’ by Megan Bogonovich
Space ZeroOne, 371 Broadway, ‘Contours of Zero: Emerging Korean Artists in New York’ by Jungki Beak, Khia Hong, Jihee Kim, Kai Oh, Junghae Park, Jeenho Seo Min, Jung Song, Jiyoung Yoo
Lower East Side | Sat
Harman Projects, 54 Ludlow Street, ‘Love Bite’ by Alison Friend
Sitting Room Gallery, 195 Henry St, Everything is Important’ book release, 7pm-10pm
Letas, 138 Eldridge St, ’lacancircle’ by Sadie Laska, 3pm-6pm
From the industrial edges of Two Bridges to the cast-iron calm of Soho, this week’s exhibitions capture the restless rhythm of the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and Tribeca art scenes. Together, they reflect the shifting pulse of downtown Manhattan—where legacy and experimentation, tradition and disruption, continue to coexist within a few square miles.
Among the highlights, Jeanette Mundt’s “Divorce Paintings” at Company Gallery (145 Elizabeth Street) stands out as a defining moment in the artist’s evolving practice. In her third solo exhibition with the gallery, Mundt reexamines painting’s capacity to hold memory, motion, and instability. Drawing on sources as varied as Cézanne’s A Modern Olympia and the pop iconography of American Beauty, she collapses art history and mass media into lush, tactile surfaces that blur the boundaries between revelation and erasure. The works pulse with physicality—layered, pressed, and reassembled—embodying the friction between permanence and change that defines so much of life in contemporary New York.
Whether winding through the new installations on Canal Street, the book launches on Henry, or the gleaming design events in Soho, the city’s creative network feels especially charged this week. Downtown remains what it has long been: a laboratory for reinvention, where artists like Mundt continue to prove that even in the age of the feed, painting—and New York itself—still has the power to stop time.
Keywords: Lower East Side art openings, Chinatown galleries, Two Bridges exhibitions, Tribeca art shows, Soho design events, downtown Manhattan art scene, Jeanette Mundt Company Gallery, Divorce Paintings NYC.
Featured work above by Jeanette Mundt at Company
