New York City Art Shows to See Right Now

2 hours ago7 min read2 comments

The New York art scene currently hums with a resonant, almost therapeutic energy, a sentiment crystallized in two particularly compelling exhibitions that deserve your immediate attention. At the Gladstone Gallery, Kader Attia’s ‘The Body’s Legacies’ continues his profound exploration of colonial trauma and repair, a theme he approaches not as a distant academic but as a visceral sculptor of memory.His installations, often incorporating medical archives and repurposed objects, function like cinematic flashbacks, forcing viewers to confront the physical and psychological scars history leaves behind. It’s challenging work, the kind that lingers in your mind long after you’ve left the white cube, reminiscent of the unflinching social critiques in the films of Ken Loach.Meanwhile, at the Museum of Modern Art, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s ‘A Countervailing Theory’ offers a different, though equally potent, form of solace. Her mytho-futuristic drawings and animations create a lush, alternative cosmology where Black and female bodies are agents of cosmic power and geological time.The intimacy here is one of scale and story; her figures, often depicted in moments of quiet ritual or dynamic flight, suggest a healing that is personal, ancestral, and planetary all at once. It’s a narrative as richly layered as a novel by Toni Morrison, where every stroke and symbol builds a world you want to inhabit.And yet, in a delightful counterpoint to this thematic weight, one must not overlook the pure, unadulterated sensory pleasure of ‘Monet’s Late Years’ at The Met. While it may seem a world away from Attia’s political urgency or Sunstrum’s speculative fiction, this focus on the Impressionist master’s final, immersive Water Lilies series provides its own form of healing—a meditation on light, perception, and the sublime beauty of a single, fleeting moment.To walk through these rooms is to understand cinema before it was invented; the brushstrokes dissolve into a flickering, almost cinematic experience of nature itself. What unites these disparate shows is a masterful command of visual language, each artist, from the contemporary to the canonical, using their medium not merely to represent the world, but to actively transform our experience of it. This is the true power of a New York art season: the ability to journey from the depths of historical reckoning to the heights of imaginative world-building, all within an afternoon, emerging not just informed, but fundamentally changed.

#New York City

#art exhibitions

#Kader Attia

#Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

#Monet

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