Six New York City Art Shows to See Right Now

3 hours ago7 min read

The New York art scene currently hums with a particularly resonant energy, offering a collection of exhibitions that feel both timely and transcendent. Among the most compelling is Kader Attia’s profound exploration of intimacy and repair, a theme that runs like a delicate thread through his work, challenging viewers to consider the psychological and physical scars of history and colonialism.His installations, often incorporating found objects and medical archives, function not merely as art but as a form of philosophical inquiry, asking how we mend what has been broken, both individually and collectively. This dialogue with healing finds a vibrant, mythic counterpart in Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s show, where her multi-disciplinary practice—spanning drawing, animation, and painting—creates sprawling narratives that weave African cosmologies with speculative futures.Her figures, often androgynous and suspended in dreamlike landscapes, perform acts of personal and geological transformation, suggesting that healing is not a passive state but an active, cosmic process. The sheer visual poetry of her work, with its lush color palettes and intricate mark-making, offers a powerful counter-narrative to Western historical canons, inviting a re-enchantment with the world.And then, in a delightful and necessary shift of pace, we have the enduring brilliance of Monet. While it might seem a conventional choice, encountering his work now provides a masterclass in a different kind of intimacy: the deep, sustained relationship between an artist and his subject.His series paintings, whether of haystacks or the water lilies at Giverny, are not just depictions of light and atmosphere but chronicles of obsessive observation, a meditation on the passage of time itself. To walk from Attia’s politically charged reparations to Sunstrum’s afrofuturist myths and then into the immersive, tranquil world of a Monet is to experience the full spectrum of what art can accomplish—it can provoke, it can dream, and it can soothe.These shows, alongside other notable installations across the city’s galleries, from Chelsea to the Lower East Side, create a rich tapestry that speaks to a collective yearning for meaning and connection in a fractured moment. They remind us that the gallery space is not an escape from the world, but a crucial forum for its most pressing conversations, rendered in pigment, light, and form.

#editorial picks news

#New York City

#art exhibitions

#Kader Attia

#Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

#Monet

#intimacy

#healing

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