From Gustav Klimt to Utagawa Hiroshige, New York’s museums and galleries will be presenting several powerhouse art exhibitions this year. It’s going to be a brilliant competition on who can create the most compelling and profound but also crowd-pleasing display. We cannot wait to see!
There’s an exhibition for just about every taste. And many curators will be introducing new viewpoints on artists and art movements, you think you know. So be on the look-out for these unique interpretations.
There’s a lot going on this year. So, here are our top 11 art exhibitions in New York for 2024!
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GOING DARK: THE CONTEMPORARY FIGURE AT THE EDGE OF VISIBILITY
Date: until April 7, 2024
Location: Guggenheim Museum New York
If you didn’t already know, Guggenheim has been presenting Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility for the last few months in their rotunda. The exhibition consists of more than 100 works by a group of 28 artists, the majority of whom are Black and/or female. Most of the works date from the 1980s to the present. However, a few date from the 1960s and ’70s including pieces by iconic artists David Hammons, Faith Ringgold, and Charles White.
Going Dark presents works of art that feature partially obscured or hidden figures. It is a tactic whereby artists visually conceal the body through darkening, shadowing, rotating figures, blurring, brightening and other strategies. This artistic element helps the viewer explore a key tension in contemporary society: the desire to be seen and the desire to be hidden from sight.
MARY WEATHERFORD: SEA AND SPACE
Date: January 18–March 2, 2024
Location: Gagosian New York
Gagosian will be presenting Sea and Space, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Mary Weatherford at the gallery’s 980 Madison Avenue location.
Weatherford’s new paintings were made last summer at Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton, New York. Similar to Gustav Klimt and Friedensreich Hundertwasser, they were produced by applying shellac ink and raw pigment (eg. metallic gold) onto handmade Gampi Torinoko paper.
Weatherford’s new works are dominated by the color green. They are visual references to arboreal and aquatic environments. There are also allusions to outer space.
Weatherford’s work has been exhibited in several museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.
Date: January 27 – March 2, 2024
Location: ACA Galleries New York
ACA Galleries will be presenting paintings and works on paper by Richard Hambleton. They will feature dark and eerie silhouettes painted on urban surfaces.
Hambleton (1954-2017) is a Canadian artist celebrated for his pioneering role in the 1980s street art movement. He is reverently called “The Godfather of Street Art”. He gained widespread recognition for his enigmatic and massive silhouettes, “Shadowman”, that appeared on urban landscapes internationally, including the Berlin Wall.
Hambleton’s works have been shown at museums around the world including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA), The Brooklyn Museum, and The Andy Warhol Museum.
In 2017, a film about Hambleton called Shadowman premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
INDIAN SKIES: THE HOWARD HODGKIN COLLECTION OF INDIAN COURT PAINTING
Date: February 6–June 9, 2024
Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York
The MET will be presenting Indian Skies, a collection of Indian paintings and drawings from the Mughal, Deccani, Rajput, and Pahari courts dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The collection is recognized as one of the finest of its kind.
This exhibition will present over 120 works, including stunning portraits, beautifully detailed text illustrations, studies of the natural world, and devotional subjects.
Date: February 15 – May 6, 2024
Location: Neue Galerie New York
Neue Galerie New York will be presenting landscapes and a rare print portfolio by Gustav Klimt alongside photography, fashion, and the decorative arts of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops). The exhibition will include highlights from Neue Galerie’s holdings, such as Park at Kammer Castle and Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden), alongside important loans from museums and private collections in Europe and the United States, including Harvard Art Museums, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Wien Museum.
Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter whose works have sold for millions of dollars. In 2003, Landhaus am Attersee sold for $29 million. In 2006, Adele Bloch-Bauer I sold for $135 million and Adele Bloch-Bauer II was sold for $88 million. In 2016, Adele Bloch-Bauer II sold again for $150 million.
The Apple Tree I sold for $33 million. Birch Forest sold for $40.3 million. And Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter sold for $31 million. Klimt’s last painting, Lady with a Fan was sold by Sotheby’s London in 2023 for £85.3 million ($108.4 million) to a Hong Kong collector, the highest-priced artwork ever sold at auction in Europe.
Klimt’s fame increased in 2015 when the film, Woman in Gold debuted. It starred Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, and Katie Holmes. The film is based on the true story of Maria Altmann who fought the government of Austria to reclaim Gustav Klimt’s iconic painting of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer called Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. It had been stolen from her relatives by the Nazis and placed in an Austrian museum by a Nazi-collaborating curator.
Date: February 22, 2024 and February 22 to April 13, 2024
Location: David Zwirber
David Zwirner will be presenting concurrent exhibitions of new work by Huma Bhabha at both of their galleries in New York.
At the uptown gallery, a selection of new smaller-scale sculptures alongside a suite of new works on paper will be presented on February 22nd. Bhabha’s large-format multimedia drawings are conceived in tandem with her sculptures, presenting enigmatic visages that appear at once monstrous, animal, alien, and deeply human.
At the Chelsea gallery, from February 22 to April 13, Bhabha’s new cast-iron and patinated-bronze sculptures will be exhibited. These totemic sculptures will be one of her largest ones to date. They will leave viewers examining notions of permanence, monumentality, and history.
Bhabha’s has had exhibitions in museums across North America and Europe, including the National Gallery in London, the Saatchi Gallery in London, State Hermitage Museum in Russia, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She also features regularly at Art Basel.
“THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND TRANSATLANTIC MODERNISM”
Date: February 25 – July 28, 2024
Location: Metropolitan Museum of Art New York
The MET will be presenting the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism this year. It will feature 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, exploring the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South.
Featured artists include Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring. These artists will be shown in direct juxtaposition with portrayals of international African diasporan subjects by European counterparts ranging from Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso to Germaine Casse, Jacob Epstein, and Ronald Moody.
The exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new development of the modern Black subject as central to the development of international modern art.
Date: Member Previews, March 28–30 | Non-member March 31–July 20, 2024
Location: Museum of Modern Art New York
MoMA will be presenting works by Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist who lived through World War I and II. She made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut and lithography, which focused mostly on themes of motherhood, grief, and resistance. She brought visibility to the working class and asserted the female point of view as a necessary and powerful agent for change.
This exhibition will showcase approximately 120 of her works drawn from public and private collections in North America and Europe. This includes drawings, prints, and sculptures.
“HIROSHIGE’S 100 FAMOUS VIEWS OF EDO (ft. TAKASHI MURAKAMI)
Date: April 5 – August 4, 2024
Location: Brooklyn Museum
For the first time in 24 years, Brooklyn Museum will be presenting one of their greatest treasures: Utagawa Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo. The Museum’s complete set of these celebrated prints is among the world’s finest, full of vibrant colors preserved by decades in the dark.
“Originally published in 1856–58, the series captures the evolving socioeconomic and environmental landscape of the city that would become Tokyo. Through both the prints and complementary objects drawn from the Museum’s collection, you’ll be immersed in mid-nineteenth-century Edo and see it through the eyes of the ordinary people who populate Hiroshige’s settings. You’ll encounter all four seasons in scenes of picnics beneath cherry blossoms, summer rainstorms, falling maple leaves, and wintry dusks. The exhibition also includes modern photographs to show how Hiroshige’s scenes morphed into today’s Tokyo.”
ADAM PENDLETON: AN ABSTRACTION
Date: May 3 – June 20, 2024
Location: Pace Gallery, New York
Pace Gallery will be presenting An Abstraction, an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by New York-based artist Adam Pendleton, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York.
An Abstraction will showcase 12 paintings and 13 drawings by Pendleton. They will hang within a monumental, site-specific architecture consisting of five black triangular forms. These sculptural walls will reorder the gallery into new, unexpected spaces and extend the visual language of the exhibited works.
The exhibition will include the artist’s new Black Dada and Untitled (Days) bodies of work. These works will feature a variety of marks—spray painting, stenciled geometric forms, and expressionistic brushstrokes—to blur distinctions between painting, drawing, and photography and propose painting as a documentary and performative act.
Pendleton has had a series of significant solo exhibitions at museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2022; and Mumok Vienna in 2023.
HARMONY AND DISSONANCE: ORPHISM IN PARIS, 1910-1930
Date: November 8, 2024 – March 9, 2025
Location: Guggenheim Museum New York
Guggenheim will be presenting Harmony and Dissonance in their iconic rotunda this autumn. The exhibition will consist of 100 artworks that will examine the vibrant abstract art of Orphism.
Harmony and Dissonance will explore Orphism’s development in Paris. It will also address the impact dance, music, and poetry had on it. The exhibition will showcase artists like Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Mainie Jellett, František Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, and by the Synchromists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell.
BALISSANDE FINISHING SCHOOL 