纽约艺术展览攻略 | 从布鲁斯·纳曼到吉尔·韦尔林

Stay up-to-date with our ongoing guide to the best new and upcoming New York art exhibitions and events for your diary

Exhibition view of ’Late Night Enterprise’ at Perrotin New York. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of Perrotin

In the 20th century, New York cemented itself as the home of Abstract Expressionism and subversive Pop Art. These days, the city is a canvas for a new school of artists pushing the boundaries of media and holding social justice as their primary message.

World-renowned institutions such as MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, and the Guggenheim continue to draw tourists and art aficionados in equal measure, and leading commercial galleries such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, Perrotin and David Zwirner all occupy vast square footage, some with multiple locations.

Manhattan’s art fairs – The Armory Show, Frieze and Independent among them – have become much-anticipated annual fixtures in the art calendar. After a hiatus of in-person art experiences, New York City is ‘back’, and proving that it remains a powerhouse of creativity, originality, commerce, and connection.

Best New York art exhibitions: a guide

Exhibition: ‘Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks’Location: GuggenheimDates: Until 13 June 2022

Installation view, ’Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, until 13 June 2022. Photography: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2021

Masks and role play have been recurring devices the portraiture of British artist Gillian Wearing, for which she’s transformed into the likes of Meret Oppenheim, Eva Hesse, and Andy Warhol in drag. She’s aged herself digitally, ‘worn’ her 17-year-old self, and seen actors ‘wear’ her using face-swapping AI. ‘Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks’ (until 13 June 2022) marks the first retrospective of Wearing’s work in North America. Featuring more than 100 pieces, the show traces the artist’s evolution from early Polaroids to her latest self-portraits, all of which explore identity as performance, with masks cast as both props and metaphors.

Exhibition: Looking Back / The 12th White Columns Annual – Selected by Mary ManningLocation: White ColumnsDates: 22 January - 5 March 2022

Courtesy of Mary Manning

New York’s oldest non-profit alternative art space invited photographer Mary Manning to select the works for its 12th White Columns Annual - the first iteration of the serial group show to run since the start of the pandemic. Previous selectors - tasked with curating a show based on works or artists they have encountered in New York during the past year - have included artists, curators, writers, collectives. Manning was selected in part due to their prolific mileage covered and their support of emerging New York artists (they often post highlights on their personal Instagram @maryymanningg). Titled ’Looking Back’, featured artists include Nicole Eisenman, Nan Goldin, Gordon Parks, Arthur Simms, Diamond Stingily, Sophie Stone and more.

Exhibition: ‘Toni Morrison’s Black Book’, curated by Hilton Als Location: David Zwirner, 525 West 19th StreetDates: Until 26 February

Installation view, ’Toni Morrison’s Black Book’, David Zwirner, New York, until 26 February, 2022. Courtesy David Zwirner

A group show is examining the prolific output and cultural significance of Toni Morrison, specifically the late novelist’s The Black Book (1974), which the show’s curator, Hilton Als describes as ‘a seminal historical document that changed the way Black American history is taught’. The show, as Als notes, ‘will add visual components that italicise the beauty and audacity of her work.’ On view in Chelsea will be a selection of archival materials and works by contemporary artists including Robert Gober, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Irving Penn among others, some of which have been commissioned for the exhibition in response to Morrison’s writings.

Exhibition: Bruce Nauman: ‘His Mark’Location: Sperone WestwaterDates: Until 12 March 2022

Installation view of Bruce Nauman: ‘His Mark’. Credit: Sperone Westwater, New York

In Bruce Nauman’s new show ‘His Mark’, six large video projections are installed on three floors of Sperone Westwater’s downtown Bowery location. The artist presents close-ups of his hands - a longstanding fixture in Nauman’s work - repeatedly mark-making an ‘X’, echoing the theme of a history book Nauman was given by his grandson Milo: when asked to sign his name on a treaty with the Canadian government, Native American chief of the Blackfoot Band signed an ’X’. It led the artist to consider the connection between mark-making and representation. In places, the film is manipulated or duplicated, the repetition becoming transfixing, moving the viewer from a state of reality into ambiguity, or even abstraction. This is Nauman’s fourteenth show with the gallery since 1976.

Exhibition: ‘Late Night Enterprise’Location: PerrotinDates: Until 19 February 2022

Kayoda Ojo, Death Star, 2022 and Richard Kennedy, The War of the Rose?, 2021. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artists and Perrotin

After dark activities is the focus of a new group show at Perrotin’s New York outpost. A dominatrix heel emerges with a stingray in a work by the late Breyer P-Orridge wryly titled Shoe Horn. Elsewhere is Sophie Calle’s black and white Sleepers photographic sequence, Richard Kennedy’s 15 feet-high acrylic painted net ‘blankets’ and Charlie Le Mindu’s hair sculpture. Kayode Ojo’s suspended disco ball and cast-off clothes speak to pleasure, ecstasy, fetish, pulsating nightlife, underground clubs, and the associated economies, in contrast to our comparatively pedestrian daily lives.

Exhibition: Elliott Puckette Location: Kasmin GalleryDates: until 26 February 2022

Elliott Puckette’s wall-mounted, three-dimensional cast bronze sculpture Random Walk, 2021, on view as part of the exhibition ’Elliott Puckette’ at Kasmin, until 26 February 2022. Photography: Stephen Kent Johnson; Art direction: Michael Reynolds

At Kasmin gallery’s 509 West 27th Street location, Elliott Puckette is taking her decades-long obsession with the line into a new dimension. Puckette is best known for her abstract paintings comprising swirling arcs and meandering squiggles. Crossing the line into sculpture, the artist has created two new bronze works which are displayed alongside painstakingly-created paintings and works on paper on varying scales. As the artist recently told us ‘I wanted to see if the ephemeral nature would still hold in the sculptures, in something as substantial as bronze. It’s a contradiction that interests me.’

Exhibition: Takesada Matsutani: ‘Combine’Location: Hauser & Wirth 22nd StreetDates: 3 Feb – 2 Apr 2022

Exhibition: max bill & georges vantongerloo ‘crossover’Location: Hauser & Wirth 69th Street Dates: 27 Jan – 26 Mar 2022

Max Bill, unendliche schleife (Endless Ribbon). Conceived 1935-1953 (executed 2015). Black granite. Photography: Stefan Altenburger. © 2021 ProLitteris, Zurich / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New YorkCourtesy the max bill georges vantongerloo foundation and Hauser & Wirth. Collection Angela Thomas Schmid, Zumikon

Over at Hauser & Wirth’s 69th Street, ‘crossover’ explores the lifelong friendship, creative affinity and written correspondence between artists Max Bill and Georges Vantongerloo. With Piet Mondrian, Vantongerloo was a key member of the Dutch art movement de Stijl. Bill, a student of the Bauhaus, was deeply involved with the Paris-based abstraction-création artist collective beginning in 1933, a group that Vantongerloo was also a member of since 1931. ‘crossover’ highlights the lasting achievements of Bill and Vantongerloo through paintings and sculptures, and also coincides with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ release of A Subversive Gleam: Max Bill and his Time. 1908–1939.

Installation: Rashid Johnson, The ChorusLocation: Metropolitan Opera Dates: Until June 2022

The Broken Nine, by Rashid Johnson, 2020, ceramic tile, mirror tile, oyster shells, spray enamel, bronze, oil stick, branded red oak, black soap, wax. Photography: Martin Parsekian

As New York art exhibitions go, they don’t get much more theatrical than Rashid Johnson’s latest work. A two-part installation is not set within a conventional gallery but in the Grand Tier and Dress Circle of the Metropolitan Opera. While the Lincoln Center’s stage is showcasing seat-filing showstoppers such as Puccini’s La Boheme, upstairs, the two large scale mixed-media mosaics will enjoy an audience during the performance interval. Typical of Johnson’s work, which often incorporates found materials from everyday life, the two works – The Broken Nine 2020 and 2021, collectively titled The Chorus – depict nine figures in ceramic tile, mirror, spray enamel, soap and wax. Continuing the line of important artists who have worked with the Metropolitan Opera – including Marc Chagall and David Hockney, and more recently Cecily Brown and George Condo – Johnson brings his contemporary perspective to this storied institution.