Art This Week in Culture

Here Are the 12 Must-See Exhibitions on View in New York’s Galleries This Month

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Robert Irwin’s studio, Venice, California, 1962. Photography by Marvin Silver and courtesy of 125 Newbury. 

Irwin/Bell: The ’60s
Where:
125 Newbury
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: A portal to Venice, California, in its most experimental era, “The ’60s” revives the seismic moment when Robert Irwin and Larry Bell exploded the boundaries of their artistic contemporaries. Irwin’s hypnotic aluminum discs and meticulous line paintings meet Bell’s otherworldly glass cubes, creating a visual duet that balances the hand-crafted with the futuristic. 
Know Before You Go: Expect to get lost—literally—in Bell’s shimmering cubes and Irwin’s immersive discs, which warp light, time, and your perception of space. This isn’t art for passive viewing; it’s a sensory recalibration.

The Souvenir” by Hopie Hill
Where:
Charles Moffett
When: December 13, 2024 - February 1, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: With a wink to Dutch Golden Age still lifes and a flair for domestic mysticism, Hopie Hill spins intimate tableaux that balance motherhood, memory, and the fleeting glow of modern-day abundance. Think Clara Peeters meets West-Coast backyard chickens—and of course, a lemon or two. 
Know Before You Go: Hill’s debut solo show is both an ode to and reckoning with the city of Los Angeles. Drawing on personal triumphs and heartbreaks, her paintings tell tales through careful arrangements of citruses, roses, and symbolic oddities pulled from her urban surroundings.

Jack Goldstein” 
Where:
Galerie Buchholz
When: Through January 18, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Peeling back the layers of Jack Goldstein’s artistic genesis, this exhibition marries his early sculptures, immersive sound works, and text pieces—in other words, the quieter counterparts to his renowned films and paintings.
Know Before You Go: The show benefits from Helene Winer’s curatorial touch. She organized Goldstein’s first institutional exhibition in 1971, as well as later projects at New York’s Artists Space and Metro Pictures gallery.

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Gary Simmons, Going Through Progressions #6, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Thin Ice” by Gary Simmons
Where:
Hauser & Wirth
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Gary Simmons’s first solo show at Hauser & Wirth in New York is a masterclass in confronting America’s fractured psyche. His new body of work—employing his signature erasure technique—blurs, degrades, and reimagines racial motifs across sculpture, paintings and drawings.
Know Before You Go: Expect disorientation—Simmons choreographs discomfort with precision. Watch as Bosko, a disturbing relic of 1920s animation, performs a haunting pirouette across canvases like a stop-motion ghost. 

This Was Here” by Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.
Where:
Jeffrey Deitch
When: Through January 18, 2025
Why It's Worth a Look: A deeply personal snapshot of Los Angeles, Alfonzo Gonzalez Jr.’s paintings—part realism, part dreamscape—capture the beauty of working-class neighborhoods, elevating mundane urban signage to monumental still lifes. With abandoned cars, flashy billboards, and graffiti, the artist documents a city shaped by its people, a visual embrace of vibrant individuality. 
Know Before You Go: Gonzalez isn’t just painting the city—he’s archiving it. As a former graffiti artist and second-generation sign painter, his work is steeped in the textures and tensions of LA life. Keep an eye out for the sly critiques embedded in every brushstroke—this isn’t just a love letter to LA; it’s a conversation about who gets to define its narrative.

Lucid Dreamer” by Reginald Madison
Where:
Rachel Uffner 
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It's Worth a Look: Like dropping the needle on a Sun Ra record, Reginald Madison’s work is otherworldly, improvisational, and alive. Twenty years of his practice come together in this visual jam session, where roofing tar and found wood are exalted alongside oils and canvas. 
Know Before You Go: A student of found materials, the artist’s career first began when he came upon a box of painting supplies in a garbage can under Lake Shore Drive in his native Chicago.

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Noah Davis, Isis: Feminine Creation Principal, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

“Ancient Reign” by Noah Davis
Where:
David Zwirner 
When: Through January 25, 2025
Why It's Worth a Look: “Ancient Reign” feels like stepping into Noah Davis’s creative subconscious. It's a world where fragments of color, texture, and imagery collide to tell stories that resist resolution. Curated by his widow, the artist Karon Davis, this exhibition captures Davis’s gift for alchemy, turning torn pages and cardboard scraps into compositions brimming with energy.
Know Before You Go: These collages are whispers, not shouts—fragments that pulse with quiet urgency. They’re as much about the spaces between as the forms themselves.

naked city” by Greg Carideo, Magnus Maxine, and Jay Payton
Where:
Silke Lindner 
When: Through January 4, 2025
Why It's Worth a Look: Through the eyes (and hands) of Greg Carideo, Magnus Maxine, and Jay Payton, urban life is stripped to its raw elements—discarded shoe heels, yesterday’s newsprint, and shimmering aluminum—then reassembled into subjective maps of metropolitan existence.
Know Before You Go: “Naked city” takes its cues from the radical psychogeography of Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, splintering New York into fragments of memory, movement, and material.

Drunkard’s Path” by Corinne Jones
Where:
Situations
When: December 14, 2024 - February 1, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: The Memphis-born, New York-based artist has a knack for defying boundaries, blending thick textures, bold colors, and geometric precision into compositions that feel both grounded and otherworldly. With a deep connection to history and an eye toward the abstract, Corinne Jones captures the tension between past and present, order and chaos, creating a meditative yet thought-provoking experience for the viewer.
Know Before You Go: Jones channels the legacy of the Drunkard’s Path quilting pattern, infusing her thickly layered abstractions with the tension of escape and the pursuit of freedom. 

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Les Levine, Discourage Order, 1990. Image courtesy of the artist and Ulrik.

“Analyze Lovers” by Les Levine 
Where:
Ulrik
When: Through January 25, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Les Levine reimagines our near mythical idea of Vincent van Gogh, not as a chapter in art history but as a fable pieced together from the cultural anxieties and obsessions of our time. With billboards riffing on van Gogh's potato harvesters and a documentary featuring art-world icons, Levine reveals how myths aren’t uncovered—they’re curated, packaged, and sold in a relentless machinery.
Know Before You Go: This is van Gogh unplugged, stripped of Kirk Douglas dramatics and auction-house glamour. Expect a multidisciplinary exploration where archival fragments, billboard abstractions, and video interviews collide.

“Ayiti Toma II: Faith, Family, and Resistance”
Where:
Luhring Augustine
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It's Worth a Look: "Ayiti Toma II" pulses with the rhythm of a land that defies erasure. In partnership with El-Saieh Gallery and Central Fine, Tomm El-Saieh curates a symphony of Haitian art where Vodou spirits, vibrant drapo, and ancestral whispers collide with contemporary chaos. This is history made tactile—wrought in metal, threaded with beads, and painted across canvas.
Know Before You Go: "Ayiti Toma II" is the second in an ongoing series from El-Saieh exploring Hatian culture. This iteration takes a cross-generational look at the depth of faith and familial ties among this community. 

“The Boys Club (Redacted)” 
Where:
Susan Inglett Gallery
When: Through January 25, 2025
Why It's Worth A Look: “The Boys Club” dismantles the glitzy machinery of mass media with a Pop art toolkit, peeling back the shiny veneer of sex, drugs, fame, and wealth to expose the power games underneath. Featuring a solid roster of artists—Nina Hartmann, Marilyn Minter, Troy Montes Michie, Natalie Ochoa, Erica Rutherford, Beverly Semmes, and Susan Weil—the show reclaims the personal from the public spectacle.
Know Before You Go: This isn’t a nostalgic nod to Warhol’s gloss; it’s a full-throttle interrogation of how media feeds us fantasies while devouring our identities.

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