Ocula’s Picks for the Must-See Exhibitions Around the World This September

Across Europe, Asia, and South America this season, contemporary artists are reimagining modern and ancient perspectives through diverse media—from AI-powered video lightscapes to repurposed front pages of The New York Times. And while the forms are legion, one thing they all have in common is their power to make you think and feel, and perhaps emerge from any of these galleries and event spaces scattered across the earth with an altered perspective. Here are the shows at Ocula’s member galleries our team has hand-picked as worth the visit.

1. Sho Shibuya, Falling from the Sky (20 August–17 September 2025) at Unit, London

Sho Shibuya continues his acclaimed ‘Sunrise’ series by painting morning skies onto his signature medium—the front pages of The New York Times. The Japanese-born, Brooklyn-based artist depicts morning rain showers in these delicate illusions, using acrylics to mark trompe-l’œil raindrops across the pages’ surfaces. Catch these unique pieces at Unit, London, from now until 17 September, and be forcibly reminded to take stock of the quotidian moments of overlooked beauty that sail by as the world rushes at us on a daily basis.

Praneet Soi Mashrabiya Experimenter 13 August–26 September 2025
Hindustan Road, Kolkata

2. Praneet Soi, Mashrabiya (13 August–26 September 2025) at Experimenter, Hindustan Road, Kolkata

Kolkata-born artist Praneet Soi has been documenting traditional artisanal workshops in his home region since at least 2008. Until late September, his new exhibition at Experimenter in Kolkata weaves his research from Srinagar, Guangzhou, and Amsterdam into layered works that cross politics, culture, and form through the use of a range of materials—from bodily silhouettes fashioned from plywood and metal to abstract shapes carved from Kashmiri fir tree wood and painted with coloured river clay.

3. Ayşe Erkmen, I still insist (9 September–4 October 2025) at Dirimart, London

Dirimart kicks things off on 9 September at its new London venue with Ayşe Erkmen’s first U.K. solo show since 2013. This first international expansion by the Istanbul gallery sees it landing in the thick of Mayfair at the centre of the capital’s bustling art scene. Erkmen’s show will further bridge the two cities with an installation that brings wooden pieces once found behind the walls of Dirimart’s Istanbul address into its new London space, and a sound piece that whispers the names of businesses around the gallery’s flagship locale that have since been displaced and transformed by gentrification.

4. Clay Ketter and Felipe Mujica, Threads of Echoes (11 September–4 October 2025) at Bartha_contemporary, London

Two artists whose collaborative practices reflect deep ties to place and collective memory are brought together at London’s Bartha Contemporary this month. Swedish American artist Clay Ketter presents pieces from his ‘Gulf Coast Slab’ series—large-scale photographs of foundations left behind by Hurricane Katrina—which reveal a kind of fragile beauty that lives beyond devastation. Meanwhile, Chilean artist Felipe Mujica’s hand-dyed, geometric fabric ‘curtains’, created with Nicaraguan artisans during a 2019 residency, find a home somewhere between abstraction and traditional craftwork.

Daniel Senise Vivo Confortavelmente No Museu Galeria Nara Roesler 21 August–11 October 2025
Rio de Janeiro

5. Lee Jinju, Discontinuouscontinuity (13 August–9 October 2025) at Arario Gallery, Seoul

Spread across four floors, this exhibition of painter Lee Jinju’s work at Arario Gallery in Seoul dives deep into her signature style of delicate, multilayered storytelling. The paintings offer fragmented, autonomous scenes that are nevertheless connected linearly so as to reflect the painter’s psychological process as she worked meticulously to build up the veiled layers and surreal details that make up this selection.

6. Daniel Senise, I Live Comfortably in the Museum (21 August–11 October 2025) at Galeria Nara Roesler, Rio de Janeiro

Digging into his collection of fabric imprints taken over the last few decades from the floors and walls of ruins, historical sites, or his own workspaces, Brazilian artist Daniel Senise creates work with a unique sense of place as he seeks to reconstruct ghostly chambers and imagined rooms of the past. At Rio’s Galeria Nara Roesler until 11 October, visitors may walk among walls hung with Senise’s collages of paint, bitumen, and charcoal to be transported to these otherworldy sites.

Natascha Schmitten Lamina Galerie Christian Lethert 5 September–17 October 2025
Cologne

7. Natascha Schmitten, Lamina (5 September–17 October 2025) at Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

Using ink, acrylic, and oil, German painter Natascha Schmitten transforms nylon fabrics into ethereal compositions that shift between transparency and opacity. Balancing painterly gestures with an architectural sensibility, she creates works that are alive with motion. With cryptic titles like Double-stranded and Milkyways V, they appear suspended somewhere between the unknown regions of outer space and the inside of the human body. Take in Lamina until 17 October at Galerie Christian Lethert in Cologne, where Schmitten’s works are staged within fragile spaces that seem to inhale and exhale light.

Jinjoon Lee Champagne Supernova BB&M 23 August–18 October 2025
Seoul

8. Jinjoon Lee, Champagne Supernova (23 August–18 October 2025) at Gallery BB&M, Seoul

Jinjoon Lee’s new Seoul show centres on a video piece shown on a monumental LED wall, which combines AI, virtual reality, and biometrics to visualise iris scans as pulsating light sequences. In an age where the ever-increasing frequency of human data collection is on the minds of many, Lee brings such concerns to a new level of abstraction, providing a new perspective on this thorny subject. At once poetic and critical, the titular work is not to be missed—and it’s paired with Lee’s acrylic paintings capturing the multitudes of worlds hidden within the multicoloured strands of the human iris.

9. Wanda Pimentel, Path in Black and White (16 August–25 October 2025) at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro

The first showing of Wanda Pimentel’s work in her native Rio de Janeiro since her passing in 2019 promises to be an insightful look into her story as an artist, with a focus on her early black-and-white drawings that depict the animal kingdom through a stark but dreamlike filter. There’s a restless energy to the drawings, which leave almost no square inch of paper unmarked, and which signal the experimental approach Pimentel would take in her more famous later works.

10. Louise Bourgeois, Rocking to Infinity (2 September–26 October 2025) at Kukje Gallery, Seoul

Fabric works from the last two decades of Louise Bourgeois’ life have been wrapped around the walls of Kukje Gallery’s K3 space in Seoul, creating an intimate and inescapable environment in which to lose oneself within her paintings of clock faces and excerpts from her writing. Meanwhile, at the gallery’s Hanok space, coffee filters are used as a canvas for Bourgeois’ mind in a selection that has only been shown once before—a must-see for any art-lover who finds themselves in Seoul before 26 October.

11. Ralf Peters, Sweets and Paradise (6 September–22 November 2025) at Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt

Well-known German photographer Ralf Peters brings two new series of his conceptual work to Bernhard Knaus Fine Art in Frankfurt, which question the nature of reality by staging real landscapes as surreal fever dreams. Poppi Paradise, for instance, shows a funereal city street on which an endless covering of colourful flowers has erupted—it’s a striking image that pokes at how we process and perceive the world around us. Expect more of that feeling from other works at this show, which is open until 22 November. —[O]

Main image: Ralf Peters, Poppi Paradise (2025) (detail). Inkjet print on aluminium dibond. 160 x 160 cm. Courtesy Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt.