Five Groundbreaking Postwar Women Artists Lead New York’s Fall Art Season

As the art world makes long-overdue progress toward gender parity, the market for women artists has been steadily rising, finding new acceleration in the post-pandemic years. In today’s more measured market, where collectors tend to gravitate toward artists with secure institutional standing, postwar women artists—whose work has only recently been rediscovered and fully appreciated—are now among the most sought after. They are commanding stable or rising prices at auction while gaining long-deserved recognition in major museum and gallery programs.

According to the 2025 Art Basel and UBS Report, the representation of women artists in galleries continues to grow, rising by one point to 41 percent in 2024. The strongest gains were seen in the primary market, where representation climbed from 42 percent in 2022 to 46 percent. The report also revealed a clear correlation between representation and financial performance: galleries with more than 50 percent women artists reported a 4 percent increase in sales, while those with less than 50 percent saw a 4 percent decline. This aligns with the latest Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, which found that works by women artists now account for 44 percent of collectors’ holdings, up from 33 percent in 2018. The shift is partly driven by women, whose collections comprise, on average, 49 percent works by women, rising to 55 percent in the U.S. and 54 percent in Japan. Artnet’s latest data reflects a similar upward trend: among the 100 top-selling fine artists at auction in the first half of 2025, 13 were women—up from 10 during the same period last year.

This season, as MoMA opens its long-awaited Ruth Asawa retrospective (traveling from SFMOMA), New York’s leading galleries are dedicating their prime fall slots—timed with the marquee November auctions—to pioneering postwar women artists who are finally achieving the global visibility they’ve long deserved. Here are five shows not to miss, each offering a fresh and expansive lens on the women who contributed to redefining contemporary art through fearless experimentation, radical material invention and an unapologetically personal vision that went beyond all postwar trends.

Louise Bourgeois at Hauser & Wirth

French artist Louise Bourgeois stands today as a pillar of the international art world—celebrated by both museums and the market—yet her work has always remained profoundly personal: an intimate and often painful reflection on the existential questions and psychological wounds rooted in her family life, generated in dialogue with the abstraction and conceptual aesthetics of her time. “Gathering Wool,” the new exhibition Hauser & Wirth dedicates to the artist on in New York through January 24, 2026, brings these dimensions into striking harmony, revealing how Bourgeois used abstraction not as escape but as sublimation—a process of catharsis through which she sought to both contain and surrender to the chaos of emotion and to the greater law of entropy that governs all things, all bodies, all forms of earthly existence.

The show captures her extraordinary ability to turn personal memories, psychological tension and familial relationships into a language that oscillates between figuration and abstraction. This delicate balance—most visible in her late sculptures, reliefs and works on paper, many never before exhibited—embodies the perpetual negotiation between order and disarray, fragility and control, that defines both her art and her inner world. “Her mind works in both ways at once—she never saw them as opposites or hierarchies. Even when she makes an abstract piece, it operates through the same psychological mechanism; it comes from the same inner place,” Philip Larratt-Smith, longtime curator of Bourgeois’s estate and foundation, told Observer during our walkthrough.

A bright gallery installation featuring suspended and standing metal and glass sculptures, including a large curved steel arm balancing a glass vessel with blue liquid, accompanied by framed abstract works on the wall, evoking themes of balance, nature, and transformation.

While her work is often framed through her conflicted relationship with her father that animated all her earlier works, the emotional axis of this exhibition turns toward the figure of the mother—a nexus of guilt, grief and inquiry into the shifting roles of care, dependence and identity one covers within a family and life trajectory. The haunting installation Twosome (1991), first shown in MoMA’s “Dislocations” and then unseen in New York for over three decades, anchors this exploration: a small red tank slides rhythmically in and out of a larger one, evoking the duality of birth and separation, intimacy and loss. The piece is accompanied by a video of Bourgeois’s 1978 performance A Fashion Show of Body Parts, where Suzan Cooper sings “She Abandoned Me.” Bourgeois had a fear of abandonment from her age and most of her works turned into a way to exercise it.

Upstairs, the atmosphere lifts into a dreamlike reverie that mirrors the artist’s studio process, where materials, forms and metaphors of the body and psyche merge in a constant state of metamorphosis. Her fascination with symbolic numerology (notably the number five), biomorphic structures and the tension between containment and release reflects an unending effort to impose shape on the unshapable. Ultimately, the exhibition reveals how Bourgeois’s practice—born from the deeply personal yet reaching toward the universal—found in abstraction a language of pain that transformed into one of resilience and poetic order.

Joan Mitchell at David Zwirner

Three abstract expressionist paintings by Joan Mitchell hung on a minimalist white wall, each featuring dynamic layers of green, blue, and ochre brushwork on pale backgrounds, creating a rhythmic visual dialogue across the gallery space.

Following the 2023 show focused on the 1970s in Joan Mitchell’s oeuvre, David Zwirner now turns its attention to an extensive group of works made between 1960 and 1965—a brief but critical juncture in the artist’s development. “To Define a Feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965,” on view at the gallery’s 20th Street location through December 13, offers a fresh perspective on this formative chapter, allowing a deeper appreciation of the delicate balance between emotional life and painterly experimentation that defined Mitchell’s approach to abstraction. “Works from this period are not widely known, having been shown in just a handful of exhibitions, making their presentation together significant for understanding Mitchell’s artistic evolution,” Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, told Observer.

This period marked a moment when Mitchell no longer had the steady rhythm of exhibitions that defined her career in the 1950s and 1970s. She had major solo shows in New York and Paris in the early ‘60s, but then there was a lull until 1965, when she exhibited again at Stable Gallery. The works on view come from these in-between years—when Mitchell, living in Paris, was free to experiment with full autonomy, painting without the pressure of the continuous cycle of shows that would later define her practice. It was a time of introspection and unfettered exploration, yet also one of personal loss and new awareness, when the studio became both a refuge and a laboratory.

The early 1960s works reflect her engagement with material concerns in Parisian painting at the time—thick layers, heavy impasto and bold gestures—but also a growing desire to push those materials toward something emotional, even bodily. One can feel that tension in the brushwork, as Roberts notes. More muted, earthy tones dominate the palette, often resulting in magmatic, dissonant conglomerations of pigment—as if Mitchell were fearlessly pushing color and matter to their limits, to the edge of collapse, where beauty verges on chaos. Throughout this period, she also played with asymmetry: her compositions frequently hang slightly off balance, reflecting her fascination with natural, organic processes rather than formal perfection.

Among these are what critics later called her “black paintings.” Interestingly, there is almost no actual black pigment in them; the depth comes instead from layered greens, browns and siennas so dark they read as black. As Roberts confirms, Mitchell was fascinated by the threshold—how far she could push color toward disappearance while keeping the painting alive.

Here, Mitchell brings her experimentation with the expressive and evocative possibilities of oil paint to a climax, embracing the entropic principle that governs all of nature—the endless cycle of germination, decay and renewal. In several canvases, gradients of green blend with autumnal reds and browns, evoking the fragile transience of seasonal life suspended between bloom and disintegration. In others, livelier blues and watery painting ideas meet and merge with dense, earthy masses of pigment, suggesting the Mediterranean waves crashing against the rocky shores of southern France and Corsica, where Mitchell spent her summers.

On her canvases, these abstract impressions translate the continuous flow of forces and energies shaping both nature and emotion. Her drawings from this period, often in charcoal and also included in the show, echo this inquiry. They are parallel experiments, probing the same dialectic of balance and imbalance, density and openness, but through a more immediate, tactile medium. Seen together, the works reveal Mitchell’s fearless spirit—her willingness to test the limits of paint, harmony and form. The canvases never fully resolve; they hover on the brink of collapse yet somehow hold together. That lyricism within instability is precisely what makes this period so vital to understanding her evolution.

The works in “To Define a Feeling” may be Mitchell’s most daring tests of painting’s expressive range, challenging the traditional idea that harmony is the measure of beauty and embracing instead dissonance as the truest means of capturing the mutable essence of perception—our shifting sense of the world and of ourselves—probably the only honest, existential position from which to experience and paint reality.

Jay DeFeo at Paula Cooper

Jay DeFeo is probably best known for her most ambitious life experiment with paint, which culminated in The Rose: an epic 11-foot-high, 7-foot-wide painting-sculpture that took eight years of obsessive layering, carving and sedimentation. Estimated at over a ton in weight, it became what DeFeo herself described as “a marriage between painting and sculpture,” something that “grew out of itself”—a living organism born from the physical density of paint and plaster. When she was evicted from her Fillmore Street studio in 1965, The Rose had to be cut from the wall by crane and taken to the Pasadena Art Museum for its debut; long hidden afterward, it was eventually restored and now hangs at the Whitney.

A new exhibition on view through December 13 at Paula Cooper Gallery allows viewers to appreciate how her fearless experimentation with paint was not an isolated event but a lifelong pursuit. DeFeo’s first show with the gallery, “Garnets on the Boulder – Jay DeFeo Paintings of the 1980s,” features works from 1982 to 1989 and presents the most significant gathering of her oil paintings since her 2012–2013 retrospectives at SFMOMA and the Whitney. Having returned to oil after sixteen years, DeFeo rediscovered the tactile pleasure of the medium and a renewed embrace of color. These works are sensuous yet rigorously intuitive abstractions, expressing the possibilities of paint through a free flow of form and line that precedes all linguistic or figurative codifications. Layering and reversing on the canvas, she creates an autonomous universe of chromatic and formal suggestions, where moody, industrial tones are suddenly interrupted by luminous bursts of white or fiery flaming strokes, igniting them with new organic vitality, motion, energy and a sense of luminous eruption from darkness.

The fragile oscillation between obscurity and illumination reflects the sense of tragedy and renewal intertwined in DeFeo’s own life. The 1980s marked a turning point in her career: she began to receive long-deserved recognition, achieving commercial success and securing a stable teaching position in the Art Department at Mills College—the first such position of her life. Yet that same year, she lost her mother to cancer, a grief she processed through travel and artistic expansion. In 1983, DeFeo visited Japan and Hong Kong, where she was struck by the spatial divisions in Japanese woodblock prints—an influence that can be traced in her later compositions, defined by what she described as “the esthetic harmony resulting from the uniting of the geometric and organic forms.” The years that followed brought further journeys to California’s Alabama Hills, Africa and Europe, each fueling new series of paintings. When she returned to the Bay Area in 1988, she was diagnosed with lung cancer but continued to paint with fierce determination. Her work shifted toward the metaphysical, shedding earlier precision for looser, more urgent gestures and subtle tonal modulations. One of her final pieces, Smile and Lie, completed shortly before her death, distills that last luminous phase—a quiet, resolute claim for life, through the energy of creation and paint.

Agnes Martin at Pace

There’s the grid of Minimalism and then there’s Agnes Martin. Even though she was working at the same time as artists pursuing minimal means and geometric rigor, Martin’s grids were more the result of a private ritual of control, an almost ascetic exercise of precision and order meant to hold off, or at least organize, the chaos around her. Using precise mathematical calculations, she created meticulous abstract compositions in intricate grids and bands of alternating colors, aiming to reflect the invisible, secret order of the cosmic structure behind all the apparently chaotic, entropic flow of forces and energies that constantly reshape reality.

In Martin’s work, the grid isn’t a cool modernist structure but a breathing surface—a repeated act of concentration where pencil lines, pale washes and near-imperceptible shifts of tone become tools for steadiness rather than display. In this sense, Martin’s approach to mark-making is closer to the philosophical and spiritual act that accompanies all painterly gestures in traditional Eastern art.

Famously, Agnes Martin was so self-critical that she destroyed a large number of her own paintings, especially early in her career and during periods of transition when the work didn’t achieve the serenity or “innocence” she sought. At one point, in the late 1960s, she reportedly destroyed nearly all the paintings in her studio in a spontaneous action that ended up making her surviving work even more precious and valuable, marked by the very scarcity the art market covets. But it was not an act of despair but of discipline. She saw art as the manifestation of a pure state of mind and anything that failed to embody that state had to go. It was her way of maintaining integrity, erasing what was merely effort to leave only what felt like truth.

Soon after this radical gesture, Martin made her most ascetic life decision: leaving behind the chaotic, rambling reality of the Coenties Slip to live in solitude and silence in New Mexico. There, she spent the remainder of her life fully immersed in the philosophies of Zen Buddhism that had guided her practice from the outset, as well as in meditative explorations of space, form and metaphysics. Devoting her life to articulating transcendence through seemingly simple forms, Martin once wrote that “artwork comes straight through a free mind—an open mind.”

“Agnes Martin: Innocent Love” at Pace features 13 canvases created by Martin in the later years of her life—luminous works where she masters the phenomenological properties of color to express the unbridled imagination of childhood, but also finally seems to reconcile with the inevitable degree of imprecision and approximation to perfection that life brings and with her own self, as revealed by the much more serene titles Tranquility, Gratitude, Blessings and I Love Love. This group of radiant canvases reflects Martin’s intense, lifelong interest in the spiritual essence of painting and her conviction that beauty is untethered to any single subject or meaning. The show also marks the final chapter of Pace’s series, celebrating its 65th anniversary, featuring artists who have been integral to the gallery for much of its history.

Faith Ringgold at Jack Shainman

Following the history-making survey dedicated to the artist at the New Museum in 2022, it is New York dealer Jack Shainman’s turn to celebrate Faith Ringgold—this time in the Beaux-Arts sanctum of his magnificent new Tribeca gallery, with a career survey on through January 24, 2026. Like the other artists in this selection, Ringgold was deeply rooted in the New York art scene of her time, yet always claimed her own singular voice as an American Black artist, transforming an intensely personal narrative into a language of collective memory and resistance drawn from the shared traditions of her community.

While many artists of her generation confronted racial injustice through overt political imagery, Ringgold’s power lay in her ability to merge autobiography, history and craft into something unmistakably her own. Though profoundly political in her commentary on the oppression, erasure and racial divide endured by Black communities in the United States, her work speaks through the voice of the storyteller rather than the agitator—inviting empathy rather than mere reaction. The “superrealism” of her paintings captures the Black experience with the gravity of an epic, yet always imbued with a quiet dignity that ennobles her subjects.

Her soft materials and story quilts—bridging painting, fabric and text—transformed domestic media into instruments of protest and storytelling, reclaiming spaces traditionally coded as feminine or private and charging them with a radical agency rooted in the simple act of care and connection.

The exhibition is the gallery’s first presentation dedicated to the legendary American artist, author, educator and activist since announcing representation of her estate earlier this year. Featuring a wide range of works—from her early tankas and rarely seen paintings to her signature story quilts—the show highlights key bodies of work that chart Ringgold’s evolution as both artist and activist, as her practice continually adapted to the urgency of political and social change.

All the vitality of Black culture finds full expression in her late “jazz paintings,” where Ringgold returns to the improvisational energy that had shaped her early years in Harlem, translating rhythm and movement into color and form. Vibrant in their syncopated patterns and bold compositions, these works are animated by the same lively spirit of jazz not only as a musical form but as a philosophy of freedom, invention and resilience.

The portrait that emerges is of an artist driven above all by a profound humanistic spirit and deep capacity for empathy—an ever-evolving storyteller who experimented with the material lexicon of art in a distinctly personal and unapologetic way, creating highly symbolic works that stand both as acts of resistance and as vessels of collective memory.

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Five Groundbreaking Postwar Women Artists Lead New York’s Fall Art Season

Louise Bourgeois at Hauser & Wirth

Joan Mitchell at David Zwirner

Jay DeFeo at Paula Cooper

Agnes Martin at Pace

Faith Ringgold at Jack Shainman

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