The city that never sleeps is gearing up for a frenzied month packed with art fairs of all sizes, along with a heady list of major auctions, and blue-chip venues and emerging outposts alike are unveiling some of their strongest exhibitions of the year, timed to open with Frieze, TEFAF, and their ilk. Across the Upper East Side stalwarts, Chelsea powerhouses and Tribeca’s fast-rising scene, we’ve rounded up ten must-see gallery shows that channel the energy and ambition of the season.
May’s NYC gallery shows
“Yu Nishimura: Clearing Unfolds”
David Zwirner
Through June 27, 2025
In just a few years, Japanese artist Yu Nishimura has risen to international prominence, captivating collectors with his lyrical, often melancholic paintings suspended in a hazy, ethereal atmosphere—works that mirror similarly blurred psychological and emotional states. At once dreamy and eerie, his scenes disrupt the logical tension between what is felt and what is perceived, translating, through minimal painterly gestures, a complex set of silent feelings and desires that emerge directly from the depths of the unconscious.
For his debut exhibition with the gallery—also his first solo show in the United States—he presents a new poetic body of work characterized by his distinctive blending of traditional Japanese landscape, the simplification of characters found in manga and anime and the framing techniques of cinema. Combining traditional oil and tempera with visual impulses drawn from trailblazing postwar Japanese photography, Nishimura creates paintings that feel both disarmingly simple and universally resonant, as if a memory is sleeping just out of reach, a feeling we try to recall, a melancholic reminiscence surfacing from the nebulous abysses of our subconscious. The show follows his recent auction breakthrough, marked by the sale of Sandy beach (2020) for $296,100 at Christie’s New York—far surpassing its pre-sale estimate of $40,000–$60,000. That result followed an earlier meteoric 125 percent jump in value, when his work Pause (2020) fetched $132,000—almost double its high estimate of $70,000.
Yu Nishimura, Along the Skyline, 2025 (detail).
Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner
“Thalita Hamoui:
Nascer de Terra”
Nascer de Terra”
Marianne Boesky
May 1-June 14, 2025
Moving intuitively across the canvas, Thalita Hamoui uses light and color as conduits to engage with the mystery of creation. In a process that verges on alchemy, she channels pigments into evocations of nature’s blooming energies, oscillating between magmatic intensity and lighter, more organic terrains. While her richly layered canvases remain primarily abstract, shaped by an organically alternating rhythm of energetic marks, expressive strokes, and gestural swells of color, they also evoke lush tropical landscapes. Clusters of thick brushstrokes suggest overflowing gardens or blooming vistas, infused with a vital spark that ignites the perpetual cycle of creation, transformation, decay and renewal.
Moving between the spirit of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the saturated hues of East Asian painting traditions and the uniquely Brazilian influence of the Tropicália movement of the late 1960s, Hamoui succeeds in creating compositions that are at once vibrant and glowing with internal light and energy. Titled “Nascer de Terra”—which translates literally to ‘born of the earth’ or ‘earthrise’—Hamoui’s U.S. debut solo exhibition presents a new body of work that intertwines generational memory and folklore into imagined geographies, alive with the vital pulse of tropical nature.
“Nascer da Terra” is Hamaoui’s debut U.S. solo exhibition.
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery
“Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting”
Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York
Through June 14, 2025
Larry Gagosian is rolling out the big guns this May, with two major shows across his New York locations. He bids farewell to his historical Uptown space on Madison Avenue with a Picasso exhibition, “Tête-à-tête,” and an expansive survey of Willem de Kooning’s work curated by star curator Cecilia Alemani that takes over the dealer’s newly renovated 24th Street space in Chelsea.
Featuring a high-quality selection of works by the artist spanning five decades, from 1944 to 1986, the show includes two monumental sculptures: Clamdigger (1972) and the monumental Standing Figure (1969–84). The exhibition promises a fresh look at de Kooning’s oeuvre. “Endless Painting” is the perfect title for a journey into Willem de Kooning’s relentless exploration of the infinite variations and expressive possibilities of color, line, and space. From his ferocious representations of the feminine form animated by violent brushstrokes to his later, more musical compositions of sinuous life that articulate space and forms, the exhibition foregrounds visual motifs that recurred throughout de Kooning’s career.
“Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” was curated by Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Art.
Artwork © 2025 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Maris Hutchinson, courtesy Gagosian
Anastasia Komar’s
“LUCA”
“LUCA”
Management
Through June 1, 2025
For her latest solo presentation with Management, visionary artist Anastasia Komar unveils an ambitious immersive installation that reaches back to the primordial origins of life to speculate on humanity’s future. A giant transparent membrane, bathed in apocalyptic red light, occupies the space like an ectoplasmic form—one that already contains within it the seeds of survival. In this speculative “Last Universal Common Ancestor” (LUCA), Komar proposes a radical fusion of the organic and inorganic. If the artist’s role is not to provide answers but to pose hypotheses, then Komar offers a striking demonstration of mythopoeia as a tool for imagining—and testing—more sustainable modes of coexistence between human and non-human life. Heightening the multisensory, uncanny atmosphere is a haunting soundtrack by Kamron Saniee, composed in close collaboration with the artist.
Anastasia Komar’s “LUCA” is on view at management.nyc through June 1.
Courtesy of the artist and management.nyc
“Theodora Allen: Oak”
Kasmin Gallery
May 7-July 25, 2025
Ethereal and mystical at once, Theodora Allen’s enigmatic paintings occupy an archetypal space suspended beyond time and origin. Drawing from her readings and the vast continuum of visual culture, Allen operates within a symbolic realm where archetypes resurface through the act of painting, as the artist surrenders to a collective consciousness that binds humanity across ages and geographies. In the series presented here, she frequently conjures gates, doors and portals, creating a dynamic tension between the physical and the imaginative, between the immanence of sensory reality and something transcendental beyond it.
Having developed her own symbolic lexicon over the years, Allen reintroduces elements from earlier works alongside new imagery, exploring the mutable power of symbols: how they circulate, how they are shaped and reshaped by shifting beliefs and societal forces and how they, in turn, shape the history of human expression across time and space. Charged with a singular aura, Allen’s paintings seem to hold both an ominous and oracular power, illuminating hidden truths about the past, the present and possible futures.
Theodora Allen, The Rising Up IV, 2025; oil and watercolor on linen, 26 x 20 inches.
© Theodora Allen. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York. Photo by Marten Elder
“Ilana Savdie: Glottal Stop”
White Cube
May 2-June 14, 2025
Marking her solo debut with the gallery, fast-rising Yale graduate Ilana Savdie brings to White Cube’s uptown space all the electric energies of her lively abstract metamorphosis of bodies and biomorphic forms. Pulsing with vibrant hues, her paintings stage a magmatic fusion of forms that defies containment, dissolving the boundaries of the individual body in favor of corporeal and metaphysical excess—an overflow that channels generative force. Driven by a vis elastica, Savdie’s work embraces a world of bodies and entities in perpetual, fertile flux, resisting any attempt to pin them down within binary logics or fixed identities.
Ilana Savdie, March of the Cards, 2024; Oil, acrylic, and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel, 218.4 x 254.0 cm | 86 x 100 in.
© the artist, photo © White Cube (Lance Brewer)
Rosana Paulino’s
“Diálogos do Dia e da Noite”
“Diálogos do Dia e da Noite”
Mendes Wood DM
May 2-June 14, 2025
One of the most resonant voices to emerge from Brazil’s contemporary art scene in the past decade, Rosana Paulino uses her multimedia practice to rigorously examine social, ethnic and gender dynamics. She foregrounds, with particular urgency, the lived experiences of Black women and the persistent violences rooted in Brazil’s colonial and racial histories. Informed by ancestral symbologies and spiritual traditions, her work performs a mythopoeic excavation, exposing myth as a dual force: a mechanism of domination and a strategy of resistance.
Through the dissection and reassembly of personal and collective memory, Paulino confronts the long shadow of colonialism and the erasure of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian knowledge systems. Her densely symbolic practice not only restores silenced histories and ancestral wisdom, but also reframes critical discourse on race, gender and power. With rare imaginative force, she expands these conversations beyond the art world and academia, reaching toward a more universal reckoning with the human condition across time.
Rosana Paulino is one of the most vital voices in contemporary Brazilian art today.
Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM
“Alicjia Kwade: Telos Tales”
PACE Gallery
May 7-August 15, 2025
Following the announcement of her gallery representation in 2023, Alicja Kwade debuts her first major exhibition with Pace Gallery in New York in “Telos Tales.” The show spans Pace’s two West 25th Street locations with a series of ambitious new works. At the core of the project are three large-scale sculptures in which powder-coated steel frames gradually morph into amorphous, tree-like bronze forms, evoking the continuous flux of evolution and the transformation of matter itself. A second series, Phase Chase I–III, furthers Kwade’s obsession with time’s passage, which translates into a relentless pursuit to give temporal flow a tangible, physical and sensorial presence.
Throughout, Kwade explores the boundaries between the organic and the industrial, forging powerful installations that envision and test new models of coexistence and balance between entropic and natural forces. Probing the tensions between perception, reality and causality, Kwade’s work exposes the arbitrary nature of evolution while simultaneously pointing to the existence of an inherent, mysterious cosmic order—a mathematical rhythm that quietly governs the ceaseless motion of matter and energies.
“Telos Tales” spans the gallery’s two West 25th Street locations.
Courtesy of Pace Gallery
Xingzi Gu’s “Fluffing the foliage”
CLEARING
May 7-June 21, 2025
CLEARING gallery has reserved one of its prime slots for the young and gifted Chinese painter Xingzi Gu. With their nuanced, dreamlike atmospheres, Gu’s paintings are poetic meditations on the porous boundaries between sensory experience and its emotional and psychological reworking. Using diluted washes of pastel and jewel-toned acrylics, she constructs symbolic compositions that are completely detached from physical reality. At the same time, Gu’s ethereal tableaux are marked by a singular tactile delicacy, where figures seem to drift through vaporous atmospheres, as if surfacing from the recesses of resuscitated memory. These forms emerge in an extremely precarious state—melting, merging and dissolving into the hazy surface—flickering between presence and absence, caught in the fragile tension of remembrance and erasure, between reality and reverie.
Xingzi Gu’s paintings are poetic and dream-like.
Courtesy of the artist and CLEARING
“Moffatt Takadiwa: Second Life”
Nicodim
May 6-July 5, 2025
Following his representation of Zimbabwe at the last Venice Biennale, Moffat Takadiwa now brings his intricate, multilayered practice to New York. His densely textured sculptures and tapestry-like installations recirculate primarily Western post-consumer waste, investigating the economic, geopolitical and sociopolitical dynamics embedded within materials and their cycles of production, distribution, consumption and rejection. A constellation of repurposed toothbrush tubes, fragments of computer keyboards, and bottle caps finds their “Second Life,” as the exhibition title suggests, as part of elaborate aesthetic and political statements that interrogate consumerism, inequality, post-colonialism and environmental crisis. Beyond his artistic practice, Takadiwa is also the founder of Mbare Art Space in Harare, where he plays a pivotal role in mentoring the city’s emerging artists and establishing the world’s first art center dedicated to repurposing reclaimed materials.
Moffat Takadiwa, Fashion Brands (a), 2025; computer and laptop keys, toothbrushes, buttons and various accessories, 68 x 54 in.
Courtesy of Nicodim and the artist
