Cultivating a Tight-Knit Scene: 10 Galleries to Visit Now on the Upper East Side

NEW YORK — This neighborhood — the area called “above East 50th Street” on gallery apps like See Saw and Artforum — is thriving. It’s also experiencing an art-fair effect, with international galleries opening project spaces or satellite galleries in a highly concentrated area.

Posted 11:31 p.m. Apr 26, 2018 — Updated 11:31 p.m. Apr 26, 2018

MARTHA SCHWENDENER

, New York Times

The galleries that have opened additional spaces on the Upper East Side in recent years include Almine Rech, Boers-Li, Clearing, Galeria Nara Roesler, Galerie Buchholz, Mendes Wood DM and, next month, Kurimanzutto, from Mexico City. I might have included any of these — not to mention others farther uptown in Harlem — in the roundup below, except I was restricted to exhibitions that were open and viewable when I was writing this. Any other week, I could have provided a list of another 10 galleries just as strong — and another 10 after that. Here is what you can see right now:

1. Gitterman Gallery through May 12; 41 E. 57th St., gittermangallery.com. One of the tenants of the Art Deco Fuller Building is Gitterman, a gallery devoted to photography and now showing the work of Khalik Allah, a young filmmaker and photographer. (Allah’s most recent film, “Black Mother,” was shown at this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films.) The photographs here were shot in Harlem, at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. Together, they are like a sheet of drawings by an old master, a study in facial expressions that suggests a range of experiences, from the ecstatic to the infernal.

2. DAG through June 15; 41 E. 57th St., Suite 708, discoverdag.com. Also in the Fuller Building, DAG has locations in New Delhi and Mumbai and added New York to its roster three years ago. Its current show is devoted to Chittaprosad (1915-1978), an Indian artist and Communist activist whose pen-and-ink drawings and prints document historical moments, and political movements, from the struggle for independence in India to the Bengal famine of 1943. Writing newspaper articles as well as drawing nuanced portraits of emaciated adults and children, Chittaprosad showed in smart ways how phenomena like famine in India were intertwined with geopolitics and economics.

3. Pace through May 5; 32 E. 57th St., pacegallery.com. Three floors here are occupied by different Pace operations, including Pace/MacGill and Pace African and Oceanic Art, are devoted to “How to Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone by Yourself,” a terrific survey of art by Yto Barrada. Her canvas works recall the striped paintings of Frank Stella — but also, pointedly, pieces by artists in 1960s North Africa. Her photographs document seemingly mundane events, as in “Marks Left by a Football” (2002), taken in Tangiers. Barrada’s films feature toys and other objects that conjure childhood and personal and political histories. Gentle and often funny, her work demonstrates a stubborn refusal to settle down in a place, a time, or a medium.

4. Anton Kern through May 19; 16 E. 55th St., antonkerngallery.com. Last year, Anton Kern moved from Chelsea to this elegantly updated townhouse on 55th Street. The space is currently filled with photographs by Anne Collier, an artist who injects the mass-media appropriations of the Pictures generation with emotion and gender politics. Her “Crying Women” series, for instance, depicts subjects you would not see in magazine advertisements: They’re having minor (or perhaps major) meltdowns. Here, she also plays off Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings. Photographing images of crying women from early-1960s comic books, with tears dripping from their sexy lashes, she turns them into formal fodder, mixing the lugubrious with the languorous.

5. Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery through May 6; 695 Park Ave., leubsdorfgallery.org. Hunter College has two notable galleries: The Artists Institute and the Leubsdorf Art Gallery, which has a wonderful exhibition, “The School of Survival: Learning With Juan Downey,” that focuses on this artist’s teaching projects in the 1970s. Downey (1940-1993) was one of the wilder post-60s artists. Here, he is represented by cybernetic drawings, documentary photographs and a video that shows him making an inflatable plastic sculpture with his students. An official Hunter course observation, written by a professor who sat in on one of Downey’s classes, adds period character.

6. Craig F. Starr Gallery through May 25; 5 E. 73rd St., craigstarr.com. Although Eva Hesse (1936-70) is best known for her sculptures and installations using latex, fiberglass and other unorthodox material, she was also an inventive painter and draftswoman. “Eva Hesse: Arrows and Boxes, Repeated” includes early grids and abstract gouaches and a 1968 version of her “Accession” series of boxes. In each of these open steel-mesh containers, she would weave rubber tubes through the grid, creating a minimalist form that looked as if it were growing hair or coming alive.

7. Michael Werner through May 5; 4 E. 77th St., michaelwerner.com. The German art dealer Michael Werner opened his first gallery here in 1990. His current show, “Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Bronzes From the 1980s,” reflects Werner’s stable of (mostly male, mostly European) artists. The dark, murky canvases and expressive abstract bronzes are drawn partly from Kirkeby’s studies in the 1960s, when he traveled in Greenland and the Arctic while working on a master’s degree in geology.

8. Half Gallery through May 9; 43 E. 78th St., halfgallery.com. A pocket-size gallery that lives up to its name, Half Gallery shows a solid lineup of young painters who approach the canvas with conviction and a twisted vision. In Ginny Casey’s “Skeleton Key,” the murky-hued paintings are populated with curvy, vaguely surrealistic objects, like a chair with arms, a metronome the size of an armoire or a key too large for any human’s door.

9. Gagosian through May 25; 976 Madison Ave., gagosian.com. In the portfolio of galleries that make up the Gagosian empire, the bookstore might be the most fun. This is at least the case with the display of Jonas Wood’s prints that is there right now. The works spill into the book-selling space, which Wood has covered with wallpaper in a tennis-ball motif. Other prints play around with images of vases, remaking historical Greek versions or those painted by Matisse into goofy creations, like a vessel that has the words “Diet 7Up” on it. Sports, often ignored in “fine” art, is also a favored theme; Wood conjures the image of the slacker artist sitting on his couch, watching basketball, tennis or gymnastics, if he must.

10. Acquavella Galleries through May 25; 18 E. 79th St., acquavellagalleries.com. “The Worlds of Joaquín Torres-García” offers a survey of the work of this Uruguayan-born artist (1874-1949), who lived in Paris and New York during vital creative periods. A collage with a label for bullion “en cubitos” playfully shows off his Cubist knowledge, while a pair of painted overalls titled “New York Suit” (1920s) feels very New York Dada. The rest of the gallery has paintings made of grids filled with images of architectural fragments and symbols from history, various religions or perhaps dreams.

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