Four Gallery Shows to Watch This October, from Dupuy-Spencer to Jaar

Travis Diehl names four gallery exhibitions worth seeing this October in his latest "Newly Reviewed" column: new presentations by Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Marc Kokopeli, Michael Assiff and Alfredo Jaar.

The selection is broad in method and subject. Diehl, who writes the recurring review feature, covers Celeste Dupuy-Spencer's visionary pictures, Marc Kokopeli's jewelry store, Michael Assiff's depictions of environmental spoilage, and Alfredo Jaar's riffs on American logos.

Each of the four artists takes a different route into the month's gallery programming. Dupuy-Spencer works in what Diehl characterizes as a visionary mode of picture-making. Kokopeli's contribution takes the form of a jewelry store, a presentation strategy that folds the conventions of retail display into the gallery setting. Assiff turns his attention to environmental spoilage, depicting damage done to the natural world. Jaar, the Chilean-born artist long known for politically pointed installations, builds his new work around riffs on American logos, borrowing the visual language of corporate identity.

The pairing of these four names in a single column captures the range of scale and tone now running through commercial galleries. A jewelry store sits beside visionary painting; ecological imagery sits beside the sharp graphic shorthand of brand marks. Diehl's roundup format, which gathers shorter notices rather than a single extended review, allows that spread.

What connects the group, as Diehl frames it, is the intensity of each artist's engagement with recognizable material — whether that material is the tradition of visionary imagery, the storefront, the degraded landscape, or the logo. None of the four works in the abstract. Each starts from something a viewer already knows and pushes against it.

For readers planning gallery visits this month, Diehl's column functions as a working shortlist. The four exhibitions span painting, wearable-object presentation, environmentally inflected depiction and conceptual graphic work — a spread wide enough to suit most itineraries.

October is a heavy month for gallery openings, and the "Newly Reviewed" feature will continue to track new presentations as they open. Readers who follow Diehl's picks can expect further notices in the weeks ahead as the fall season unfolds.