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10 Ambitious Gallery Shows to See During Frieze New York

As the city embarks once again upon its springtime marathon of fairs and marquee auctions, galleries across Chelsea, Tribeca, the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side are mounting some of the best sculptural and installation-driven exhibitions New York has seen in years.

Spring has finally arrived in New York, and with it the city's annual two-week art world endurance test: marquee auctions colliding with an almost excessive concentration of fairs that only the Big Apple—the still-undisputed capital of the global art market—could sustain with a straight face. As Frieze, et al., once again pull collectors, curators and art world nomads from across the globe, galleries in Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs are unveiling some of their strongest shows of the year—many of which are surprisingly ambitious, sculptural and installation-heavy, defying the myth that New York's gallery scene has become nothing more than a glossy extension of the market. To help navigate the sprawling geography of shows opening across Chelsea, Tribeca, the Lower East Side and what remains of the Upper East Side, Observer has selected 10 must-see exhibitions worth a stop as you scurry from fairs to auction previews.

The best gallery shows on now in New York

"David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis"

Duchamp and Rauchemberg at Gagosian

Stephen Lichty's "Ghost Stone"

Lucia Hierro's "Moving Day"

Kelly Akashi's "Heirloom"

Giuseppe Penone's "The Reflection of Bronze"

Firelei Báez's "feet squelching on wet grass,nourished by uncertainty"

Sanford Biggers' "The Gift of Tongues"

Bony Ramírez's "El Cielo del Mar"

"David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis"

Through June 13, 2026

Despite emerging from radically different sociopolitical and cultural contexts, David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis not only developed strikingly similar approaches to matter, meaning and event, but sustained a long relationship of exchange and friendship throughout their lives. In the first joint presentation of their work in more than 30 years, White Cube is staging a dialogue between significant works by the African American artist and late Greek Italian artist, revealing how they shared a refined material intelligence that translated into poetics of resistance and political expression constructed through living matter, minimal gestures and performative tension. In both practices, the language of sculpture emerges from what might be described as a charged poverty or symbolic residue rather than polished form—an art-making that starts from the remnants of the realities each inhabited at a particular historical and cultural juncture. "David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis" revisits the artists' first encounter in 1993, when they exhibited together at the American Academy in Rome, which sparked a lifelong friendship. Their shared presentation at Villa Aurelia consisted of two military tents erected in the garden, within which each artist was invited to create a singular site-specific installation.

Duchamp and Rauchemberg at Gagosian

Gagosian, 980 Madison

Through August 22, 2026

For decades, 980 Madison Avenue stood as one of the central anchors of New York's blue-chip art world, crowned by Gagosian, which occupied its fifth-floor galleries for more than 40 years. Then came Michael Bloomberg. In 2023, Bloomberg Philanthropies signed a massive lease for much of the building from landlord Aby Rosen's RFR Holding, effectively displacing several gallery tenants, including Gagosian. A year later, Bloomberg escalated the shift further by purchasing the entire building outright for roughly $560 million. Yet Gagosian ultimately never left the historic address. Instead, the gallery has just unveiled a new 2,275-square-foot ground-floor space designed by Caplan Colaku Architecture—the studio also behind the renovation of Gagosian's Chelsea flagship and past projects for Gladstone and Gavin Brown's enterprise—which opened with an extensive presentation dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, paired with a separate exhibition of early works by Robert Rauschenberg from the Cy Twombly Foundation. Timed to coincide with MoMA's major Duchamp survey, the Gagosian exhibition centers on some of the artist's most iconic readymades, which........

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