Are you overwhelmed by the dizzying number of gallery exhibitions and museum shows opening this September? With the tide of art events slated for the fall it might be easy to miss these up-and-comers. But if you don’t know these five artists now, you will soon. Here’s where to catch them this September.

Isaac Chong Wai at Zilberman Gallery, Berlin

Performance still of Isaac Chong Wai. Courtesy of Zilberman Gallery.

A live performance will inaugurate the opening of Chinese-born artist Isaac Chong Wai’s first Berlin exhibition in early September. The young artist’s multimedia practice, which entails video, photography, installation, and performance, centers on the complex dynamics between the individual and collective society. In his work, Chong engages his own body with those of other performers in ways that quietly, and movingly, shift between notions of independence and unity. 

“What is the future in the past? And what is the past in the future?” is on view through September 11, 2019, at Zilberman Gallery, Goethestraße 82, 10623 Berlin

Misheck Masamvu at Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

Misheck Masamvu, Cat’s Cradle (2019). Courtesy of Goodman Gallery.

From the language of the Shona people of southern Africa, a hata is a cushion worn to soften the load carried upon one’s head. In a wider sense, the hata has become symbolic of the various ways individuals seek to ease their burdens, be they physical, emotional, or ideological.

In “Hata,” his third exhibition with the gallery, Misheck Masamvu explores such avenues of relief and respite (for him, through drawing, painting and sculpture) amid the socio-political realities and tumults of his post-independence homeland of Zimbabwe and its painful national history. Through turbulently rendered and explosively colorful new works, Masamvu depicts figures somewhere between the animal and human state: for the artist this is a point of genesis, potential, and rebirth that is only made possible through chaos and suffering.“It’s not something you’re giving without risking yourself. It’s how you are reaching out to someone in a tragic moment, but when you’re in that moment of rescue you’re risking your life,” Masamvu said. “That point of sacrifice is what I’m trying to show.”

“Hata” is on view through September 28, 2019, at Goodman Gallery, third floor Fairweather House, 176 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town

Jong Oh at Sabrina Amrani, Madrid

Installation view of “Sunstone,” (2019). Courtesy of Sabrina Amrani Gallery.

Jong Oh might be better thought of as an explorer of space than an artist in the traditional sense. He has no studio, instead opting to create works in situ and responding to the interactions of light, season, and space through his elegant and subtle creations of plexiglass, painted thread, rope, and chains. The exhibition’s title, “Sunstone,” is a fitting one. The Vikings first used the mineral to navigate by sea; in overcast skies its reflective surface was used to determine the sun’s location in the sky. In his second exhibition at the gallery, Jong’s nearly invisible sculptures and installations (that are sometimes accompanied by hand-drawn shadows) are powerful reminders of the slight but orienting effects of light.  

“Sunstone” is on view through December 21, 2019, at Sabrina Amrani, Madera, 23 28004 Madrid

Liliane Tomasko at Kewenig Galerie, Palma de Mallorca

Liliane Tomasko, fabric of dreams (2019). Courtesy of Kewenig Galerie.

Enter a nocturnal world of dreams in this exhibition of new paintings by Swiss-born artist Liliane Tomasko. The evocative and often melancholic scenes of Tomasko’s earlier work (empty rumpled beds, curtained windows) have given way to abstract acrylic and acrylic spray-paint renderings of an unconscious and imagined world inspired in part by the amygdala, an almond-shaped area of the brain that is both the seat of memory and dreaming. “I was fascinated to learn that this small part of our brain lies nestled in darkness, protected from light and outside impact,” the artist wrote earlier this year. The exhibition, which is set in the centuries old Oratori de Sant Feliu, has a transcendent, even mystical  feel.

“Amygdala” is on view through September 14, 2019, at Kewenig Galerie, Oratori de Sant Feliu, Palma de Mallorca

Udo Nöger at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York

Udo Nöger, Zeit Fiessend 3 (2019). Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery.

German-born artist Udo Nöger’s monochrome paintings have a glacial beauty that come as a refreshing shock to summer-saturated eyes. In his first solo show at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, the artist has done away with the archaic mark making of his earlier works, drawing focus here to only the movement and presence of light.

His canvases, which seem to possess an internal radiance, are created through an architectural approach, employing three layers of canvas, each set at a distance from the another. On the innermost layer, Nöger carves out biomorphoric shapes. Once having completed his composition on this primary layer, he coats the top-most canvas with mineral oil to create a translucency that allows the underlying shapes to surface with haunting effects, as cool whites and grays appear to shift to purples and blues throughout the changing light of the day.

“Painting With Light” is on view through October 5, 2019, at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, New York