Chelsea: Art Historical Heroes

Jasper Johns: Copy/Trace focuses on two related processes running through Johns's practice across six decades — copying and tracing — as deployed in drawings, prints, and works on plastic. Curated by Jeffrey Weiss, the exhibition brings together works in which Johns copies one of his own paintings, leaves bodily imprints, or traces existing images through translucent supports. Drawn from museums, private collections, and Johns's own holdings, the presentation illuminates how meaning and making are inextricably linked in his work.

May 7 - Jun 26

Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance surveys four decades of painting from 1960 to 1992, featuring more than twenty of Frankenthaler's largest and most ambitious canvases arranged by decade. Taking its title from a 1975 essay by poet Barbara Guest, the exhibition traces Frankenthaler's continual reinvention — from diluted oil on untreated canvas through her shift to large flat slabs of acrylic color, to the layered accumulations of her final decade. Allusions to landscape, conversations with art history, and the fluid interplay of freedom and restraint run throughout a practice she described as "inner amorphous worlds or depths exploding on the surface."

Apr 30 - Jul 2

Anselm Kiefer: Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still presents new paintings exploring feminine archetypes and landscape as symbolic form, drawing on Rilke, Caspar David Friedrich, and classical mythology. Executed in oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, and verdigris sediment of electrolysis — a material produced by electrical current through copper and salts — the heavily textured surfaces embody the luminosity and transformation found in nature. Nymphs, mythological metamorphoses, and the goddess Tyche emerge from dense landscapes, while a painter's palette suspended over bare winter limbs invokes art's potential to hold both natural reality and artistic truth simultaneously.

May 15 - Jun 27

Giuseppe Penone: The Reflection of Bronze marks Penone's first New York exhibition with Gagosian, presenting two major bodies of work curated by Adam D. Weinberg. Rooted in the Arte Povera artist's late-1960s exploration of trees, the sculptures use bronze to trace time and perpetual change — not as permanent substitute for organic material but as a profound response to enduring artistic questions. Structured across three rooms, the exhibition opens with a cork-lined environment and Marsia (2024), two connected branches evoking the flayed satyr of Greek myth, one bark-covered, one bare.

Apr 22 - Jul 2

Life with P. explores a lesser-known side of Philip Guston’s practice, focusing on works inspired by his marriage to poet Musa McKim and their life in Woodstock. The exhibition includes Guston’s “Poem Pictures,” drawings responding to McKim’s writing, along with large figurative paintings never previously exhibited. It coincides with a new publication featuring McKim’s journals from 1966–1976, edited by their daughter, Musa Mayer.

Apr 21 - Jul 10

Carol Rama: I See You You See Me gathers key works spanning six decades of the radical Italian artist's career, from 1947 through 1998. Working across paint, textile, sculpture, and bricolage, Rama forged connections between desire, sacrifice, eroticism, repression, and rebellion in ways largely dismissed during her lifetime. Organized by Carlo Knoell, the exhibition brings renewed focus to the formal breadth of a practice that has exerted growing influence on contemporary artists who recognize in Rama an unwavering belief in visual art as a tool for liberation.

May 12 - Jul 31

Kenneth Noland: From Center to Edge brings together works spanning his career in color field painting and postwar abstraction. Using acrylic on canvas, staining techniques, and shaped supports, Noland explored how color interacts with structure through circles, chevrons, diamonds, and bands, focusing on clarity, surface, and spatial tension.

Apr 30 - Jun 6

Romare Bearden: Figure in Collage traces the evolution of Bearden's approach to the human figure across four decades, from rarely seen 1946 Iliad drawings through the 1964 Projections to the 1977 Odysseus series. The earliest works reveal calligraphic linework that foreshadows the cutout forms of his later collages, while the Odysseus series links Homer's ancient quest to Black American life and the search for home — influenced by the luminous landscape of St. Martin, where Bearden built a home in 1973. Weaving together West African religion, Greek mythology, the Bible, and memories of Harlem and North Carolina, Bearden conceived of ritual as a fundamentally human practice connecting peoples across time and place.

May 7 - Jun 26

David Zwirner is pleased to present Gerhard Richter’s celebrated photorealist landscape paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s, which will be paired with a considered selection of works from his Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings, 1976–2017) series. Taking place at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York, Gerhard Richter: Landschaften will feature loans from significant private and museum collections, as well as works lent from the artist’s personal collection. Richter began to engage the subject of landscape almost six decades ago in the late 1960s, creating atmospheric compositions based on snapshots from his travels. These paintings evoke art-historical precedents while eschewing traditional notions of the aesthetic sublime. In the following years, he continued to create landscape paintings based on photographic sources, often working on them at the same time as his abstract paintings so that each body of work might inform the underlying pictorial concerns expressed by the other. Displayed in dialogue in this exhibition, these two aspects of Richter’s oeuvre will together illustrate the artist’s enduring investigation into the nature of images and the perception of reality—how it is personally interpreted, mediated by the external world, and visually portrayed through painting.

May 7 - Jul 10

Joan Brown: The Golden Age presents fourteen paintings and sculptures from 1981 to 1988, centering on the vibrant late work made in the decade before Brown's untimely death at fifty-two. Inspired in part by Henri Rousseau, the works feature flattened compositions and graphic directness, with unlikely animal companions — lion and lamb, peacock and snake, cat and rat — coexisting in peaceful harmony. Images drawn from disparate cultures and history are collaged together, including a self-portrait of Brown standing inside the mouth of an ancient Egyptian bolti fish, symbol of regeneration. Art, for Brown, was a mirror for her current state of being and a vehicle for awe.

May 7 - Jun 27

Katharina Fritsch presents five large-scale sculptures, three of which return to models Fritsch originally made as a student in Düsseldorf in 1979. Now realized at monumental scale, Car and Caravan stretches over thirty feet, Tunnel runs twenty-six feet in dark green, and Chimney stands thirteen feet tall in red — each modeled after toys or hand-built studio maquettes. Together with Vase and Shell, the five sculptures are arranged to loosely resemble a face when viewed from above. Familiar imagery is pushed to destabilizing ends, performing what one critic calls "material transubstantiation on quotidian stuff."

May 7 - Jun 27

Vija Celmins: Prints 1983 to 1985 presents key works from an especially generative moment in Celmins's career, including ocean prints cropped to eliminate shore and horizon, the Concentric Bearings series combining multiple printing plates into provocative juxtapositions of night skies, airplanes, and Duchamp sculpture, and Strata (1983), which assembles twenty-five copper plates into a densely packed field of stars ranging from miniscule dots to glowing circles. Working across engraving, drypoint, mezzotint, and aquatint, Celmins pursues what she calls "impossible images — too big, spaces unbound."

May 1 - Jun 27

This exhibition brings together paintings from across the career of British artist Leon Kossoff (1926–2019). Kossoff built his practice around sustained observation and spontaneity, returning repeatedly to the same subjects—North and East London streets, rail stations, and the people closest to him. His paintings are dense, structurally rigorous, and deeply felt, treating portraiture and cityscape as ongoing dialogues rather than fixed records. A key figure of the School of London alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach, Kossoff held painting as an enduring means of capturing lived experience.

Apr 16 - Jun 20

Avanti! is an exhibition of large-scale sculptures and drawings by Mark di Suvero. Exhibited for the first time, Avanti! incorporates a twenty-three-foot beam suspended within a steel circle, activated by a viewer's shifting body weight. Nelly and Tables Turn'd join it, the latter a kinetic stainless steel work evoking balance at monumental scale. Works on paper, including interactive "sliding drawings,” extend di Suvero's commitment to bodily engagement.

May 2 - Jul 17