April showers bring May flowers—and fresh art to New York! Here’s our guide of new shows to see in Manhattan this month.
May also brings us Mother’s Day next weekend. Let us help you have an extra special holiday this year: give the gift of a curated art experience or an artwork. Email ns@artmuseny.com to arrange.
Spaces are still available for May’s in-person art tours in Chelsea and virtual presentations focusing on new, emerging and exciting talents in contemporary art! The following slots have availability.
Chelsea Galleries Part I
May 4: 2 pm | May 6: 11 am & 2 pm |May 11: 11 am & 2 pm
Chelsea Galleries Part II
May 13: 11 am & 2 pm | May 14: 11 am | May 18: 11 am & 2 pm | May 19: 11 am | May 26: 11 am & 2 pm
Virtual Art Tours: New, Emerging, and Exciting Artists
Exploring his longtime admiration for Matisse’s still life paintings, Robert Kushner presents a group of new paintings that delight in Kushner and Matisse’s shared love for textiles, pattern and vibrant color. Here, Kushner used Matisse’s still life compositions as a starting point and then transposed his own personal objects that reflect his friendships, travels and memories into Matisse’s compositions. The resulting works are joyous celebrations of life, personal histories and the great artist Matisse.
May 6 - June 19
535 West 22nd Street
Pictured: Daffodils and Dupatta, 2020 | courtesy of DC Moore
In 2017, Robert Polidori photographed ancient frescoes in the ruins of Pompeii using a large-format camera and exposure of up to five minutes. Now, Polidori presents these intricate reproductions of the murals of Pompeii at Kasmin. These large-scale reproductions are transportive and mesmerizing—a definite must-see in Chelsea.
Josiah McElheny’s incredible work creates infinite reflections that expand space around us. For his current exhibition at James Cohan, McElheny was inspired by the vast, hexagonal library described by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story The Library of Babel and the idea of expanding knowledge and truth—what McElheny does with his practice of creating reflective environments. Altering James Cohan’s gallery to mimic the hexagonal Library of Babel, McElheny and his work expands our experience of our environment and creates a feeling of limitlessness.
Presented at two galleries (Salon 94 and Lyles & King), Natalie Frank’s new paper and sculptural works depict complex female characters from fairy tales, art history and literature who are on the precipice of self-discovery and transformation. Through her beautiful brushwork that displays the fresh emotions of her heroines, Frank shows her characters challenging the very structures and conventions inherent to the stories from which they came.
Through May 23
1 Freeman Alley & 21 Catherine Street
Pictured: Woman, Blue, 2021; Bride I, 2021 | courtesy of Salon 94 and Lyles & King
A transatlantic exhibition in both their London and New York locations, Hauser & Wirth presents a retrospective of the work of Sir Frank Bowling. Trained as a painter in London but drawn into the New York art scene due to the American Civil Rights movement and the vibrant community of Black artists in NYC, Sir Bowling and his expansive painting practice is very much grounded in both cities. Celebrating life through color and texture, Bowling’s work features thick impasto, collage, metallic pigment and textured acrylic gels that completely envelope his viewers.
Opening May 13 at Miles McEnery is an exhibition of paintings by the American realist painter Bo Bartlett. Mining the land and people Bartlett from where the artist lives in Georgia and Maine, Bartlett’s paintings evoke Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Eakins but display a contemporary twist.
May 13 - June 19
525 West 22nd Street
Pictured: The Flood, 2018 | courtesy of Miles McEnery
One of today’s most exciting young talents, Arghavan Khosravi creates multi-dimensional work that culls from history painting and depicts the lived experience of women—oftentimes reflecting Khosravi’s own experience growing up in Iran. Much of Khosravi’s work explores the push and pull between the artist’s desire for personal liberation and the constraining ideological autocracy she experienced while growing up in Iran. All painted this last year during quarantine, Khosravi’s new three-dimensional paintings play with geometries and dimensions as well as bold color schemes that enhance the artist’s rich visual language.
Through June 5
170 Suffolk Street
Pictured: Isn’t it time to celebrate your freedom?, 2021 | courtesy of Rachel Uffner Gallery
At Yossi Milo, Hassan Hajjaj has transformed the gallery into a salon to present joyous and celebratory portraits of rockstars, artists, singers, and the artist’s friends. Each portrait expertly pays tribute to the creativity and inner-life of each of Hajjaj’s subjects, who include the artist Hank Willis Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and even Cardi B! Hajjaj frames each work with objects such as soda cans and car paint tins to reflect consumer culture that mediates these subjects’ creativity with the outside world.
Through May 29
245 10th Avenue
Pictured: Afrikan Boy Sittin', 2013/1434 | courtesy of Yossi Milo
The Brooklyn, New York and Pisa, Italy-based artist Joseph Desler Costa appropriates and recycles the dominant aesthetic of 1980s and 1990s advertising to explore the origins of our desires and consumption. Costa’s pastel-colored images combine multiple exposure, borrowed-images and laser-cutting to present works that look part machine-made and part from a dream.
The Brooklyn, New York and Pisa, Italy-based artist Joseph Desler Costa appropriates and recycles the dominant aesthetic of 1980s and 1990s advertising to explore the origins of our desires and consumption. Costa’s pastel-colored images combine multiple exposure, borrowed-images and laser-cutting to present works that look part machine-made and part from a dream.
Through May 29
247 West 29th Street
Pictured: High Jumper, 2021 | courtesy of the artist
Pushing conventional photography’s capacity to document the environment, Richard Mosse uses drones to capture the reality of deforestation in extreme detail to take part in “counter mapping,” a form of activist mapmaking that captures the endangerment of natural landscapes due to human activities. These works are scientific as they are all breathtaking and speak to the necessity of saving our planet.
