Lehmann Maupin

The exhibition, encompassing all three floors of the gallery, also includes the first US presentation of Vicuña’s monumental quipu, NAUFraga (2022), since its premiere at the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as a new film based on unseen footage shot while participating in Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece. The works on display are informed conceptually by the principles of “Arte Precario,” or Precarious Art, the artist’s own autonomous aesthetic system that foregrounds ephemerality, intangibility, and that which disappears. As an artistic corollary to the instability and shakiness that abounds in our political climate, Vicuña’s precariousness allows her to grapple with issues ranging from immigration to environmental destruction. At the same time, her syncretic visual vocabulary prompts speculation on alternative possible futures, or worlds capable of realizing political, feminist, ecological, and conceptual reparation. 

through January 11, 2025

Pace

Hope Makes Visions will focus on Frank’s later work from the 1970s onward: the decades he spent experimenting with various cameras, printing methods, and media. Curated by Shahrzad Kamel, Director of The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, the exhibition takes its title from a sketch Frank made of his work Fire Below—to the East America, Mabou (1979), which was included in a bequest the artist made of his photographs and papers to The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation upon his death in 2019, and one of many discoveries that inspired this presentation of previously unseen works from his oeuvre.

through December 21, 2024

Yossi Milo 

A House Called Tomorrow, which shares its title with a poem by Alberto Rios, is presented at a pivotal moment for Mirchandani. The exhibition coincides with the artist’s relocation to New York after more than a decade in California—a move that marks the beginning of a transient chapter in her life and parallels her experiences of immigrating from India as a young adult. Using autobiography as a window, Mirchandani negotiates how architectures of space, self-image, and relationships evolve across shifting socio-political landscapes. The artist manifests this in paintings that depict herself and her loved ones, and draw connections between a deep familial archive and her life in the present.

through January 11, 2025

Karma

Henni Alftan’s oil paintings are often recursive, commenting on the conditions of their existence both as individual paintings and as associatively linked to one another. Working with images that are, in her words, “not realistic but offer a plausible suggestion of the visible world,” she explores how painting’s essential elements—such as color, form, and composition—can convey maximal subtext with minimal visual information. The works in Stop Making Sense both propose continuity and refute it, with certain canvases echoing and framing the other as they revel in the tensions created when an image’s promise of wholeness is disrupted.

through January 11, 2025

Almine Rech

Depicting subjects, the conceptual offspring of the artist himself, Calleja’s figures demand attention. Characters stand before us with an enigmatic air; their narratives seemingly frozen yet filled with colorful clues that spill out across flat surfaces and often materialize as sculptural mayhem throughout the gallery. Adorned with phrases and accessories, the figures maintain bold expressions that are captivating, particularly enhanced in their bulbous eyes and wry smiles.  

through December 14, 2024

Hauser & Wirth

With ‘Earth & Sky,’ Lorna Simpson debuts a new body of work exploring our relationships––physical and metaphysical––to unseen forces that work upon us individually and generationally, alternately challenging and empowering our sense of our own humanity. The exhibition encompasses a series of massive paintings inspired by a 1929 textbook ‘Minerals from Earth and Sky,’ along with a pair of monumental paintings depicting the impact of fired bullets. Presented in a temple-like atmosphere in which both human scale and geological time are upended, Simpson’s works are accompanied by a new text-based wall sculpture referencing a story recounted in the same textbook, describing the astonishment of an unnamed Black sharecropper when a meteorite falls from the sky and lands at his feet, still warm to the touch from its dark flight.

through January 11, 2025

Karma

Over the course of the past four decades, Ouattara Watts has created densely layered paintings embedded with a kaleidoscopic range of materials and symbols. In his often-monumental works, numbers, fractals, and otherworldly forms painted by the artist are brought into relation with sacred objects, photographs, and textiles gleaned from flea markets. Watts’s syncretic approach also pulls from his studies of Picasso, Baudelaire, and Surrealism, his African heritage, and his interest in Egyptology, among other cultures from around the world. The five paintings from the 1990s exhibited here are key waypoints in the development of his idiosyncratic artistic language. 

through December 21, 2024

Vito Schnabel Gallery

Ai Weiwei is among the most progressive global thinkers of our time, a controversial artist, and a master of craft. He famously works with materials spanning millennia, employing fabrication techniques as old as the antiquities that sometimes appear in his works. Toy bricks may seem counterintuitive within this oeuvre dotted with precious materials including porcelain, jade, gold, bronze pearl, and marble, but the logic is predictably innovative. Ai’s art has always intersected the worlds of design and contemporary manufacture, where LEGO and Woma bricks dwell, and his practice is famously transparent about the processes of human labor, which are also evident in these sculptural canvases. Since first being deployed in his 2014 exhibition @Large on Alcatraz, toy bricks have evolved to play an outsized role in Ai’s image practice. The increasing complexity and size of these works demonstrate his discriminating attention to detail and unparalleled commitment to craft.

through February 22, 2025

Yossi Milo

Built around mazes, spirals, and garden motifs, the exhibition reframes the chaos of contemporary life through tropes and stories from ancient art history, taking the Labyrinth as both its theme and structure. The frenetic scenes Welch creates — made up of thousands of pieces of hand cut marble, stone, ceramic, and glass — cast a collision of modern and archaic elements that unfurl within the mire of an unruly garden maze. The artist’s material and literary combinations result in a distinctive pictorial intensity, a visual language whose commotion mirrors that of the modern era. Continuing his exploration of contemporary tumult through story and archetype, the artist hones his focus on the meandering paths of the mythical Labyrinth as a setting for this new body of work.

through November 9, 2024

Lehmann Maupin

As a key member of the influential art collective ‘Space & Time’ throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Sung’s artistic practice was shaped by conceptual art and the political turmoil of South Korean democracy. His work often features everyday objects and deconstructs established forms, using his body to engage the public and transform the mundane into the provocative. Sung’s practice is process-oriented, focusing on ephemeral works and unique performances documented as photographic installations

through November 9, 2024

Dia Chelsea

For more than 30 years, artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen has continually investigated the possibilities inherent in film—as a material, documentary tool, and storytelling medium—resulting in work that is formally inventive and politically pointed. Often delving into power relations, McQueen’s films and videos capture the experience of living both within and in opposition to hierarchical structures, critically examining current social issues by drawing on the histories of cinema and video art and the reduced formal vocabulary of Minimalism.

through December 21, 2024

Almine Rech

In Alexandre Lenoir’s solo exhibition, the top left corner of one of his canvases contains the enigmatic and alluring phrase “Tape the sky at the beginning.”  Direct and instructional, yet profound and poetic, this phrase illuminates the crux of Lenoir’s distinctive artistic process and its rigorous, conceptual, physical, and metaphysical underpinnings. First and foremost, the phrase refers to Lenoir’s signature method of trapping paint beneath masking tape to replicate nature, represent an image, and, as displayed in the works in the exhibition, showcase his continued experimentation with material and color. The lyrical scrawl also offers insight into Lenoir’s studio practice, a crucial conceptual element of his work. Indeed, the text was written as a direct “instruction” to a studio assistant. These instructions are part of what the artist calls his “protocol” or “recipe” for a painting. 

through October 19, 2024

The Painting Center

Stemming from her creative research into European pre-Lenten carnival culture and its relation to the spring equinox, Marlatt's new work addresses fluctuating seasons and the challenge of climate change. Utilizing figures of folklore like Jack Frost, or personifications of the seasons like Persephone, Marlatt's paintings position these deities prominently into the landscape to narrate the story of transformation and loss.

through November 23, 2024

MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art announces a retrospective of German contemporary artist Thomas Schütte, which will provide a holistic survey of his career from 1975 to the present. On view in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions from September 29, 2024, through January 18, 2025, the exhibition will include Schütte’s sculptures, drawings, prints, and experiments in architecture. Taking aesthetics, form, and history as its focus, the exhibition aims to provide a deeper understanding of the artist’s practice and introduce new audiences to one of the most significant sculptors working today. Presented solely at MoMA, this will be the first museum survey of Schütte’s work in the United States  in over 20 years and will feature a selection of rarely seen works, in addition to those for which he is well known.

through January 18, 2025

Whitney Museum of American Art 

Presented at the Museum in two parts, Edges of Ailey consists of an immersive exhibition in the Museum’s 18,000 square-foot fifth-floor galleries—featuring works by more than eighty artists and revelatory archival material—and an ambitious suite of performances in the Museum’s third-floor theater, including AILEY in residence for one week each month during the exhibition. 

through February 9, 2025