9 Must-See Shows during Frieze New York 2024
New York’s long-lingering winter has finally broken into spring, as if summoned by the city’s centennial earthquake or the total eclipse. Either way, the weather has coincided almost perfectly with Frieze New York’s arrival, and with it, a bevy of other must-attend fairs, including NADA, TEFAF, Future, Independent, and Esther—the latter a new alternative fair making its debut in Midtown.
Since last year’s edition of Frieze, New York’s gallery community has taken several major hits, including closures of downtown galleries such as JTT and Denny Gallery. Despite these rising challenges and increasing economic constraints, the city’s gallery network remains energized. These nine must-see gallery exhibitions—ranging from a monumental show by octogenarian Argentine artist Marta Minujín to an environmental benefit exhibition hosted by tastemaker Charles Moffett—give visitors and locals a taste of New York’s enduring local gallery scene.
An alum of The Artsy Vanguard 2022, Sahara Longe left the United Kingdom at age 20 to study portraiture at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy. There, painters were limited to using only five colors for the first two years—a constraint she credits for fostering her meticulous attention to color and detail. Longe, now 30, is presenting her second solo exhibition, “Sugar,” at Timothy Taylor, featuring 12 new enigmatic paintings, echoing the haunting sensibilities of Secessionist painter Otto Friedrich and Symbolist Ferdinand Hodler.
These works attend to more personal themes than her previous works, which were defined by scenes of crowds and social interactions. Instead, she is focused on the quieter moments of individual experience, created by applying raw pigments—including vermillion, lilac, raw sienna, and ochre—to thick-grain linen. A highlight of the exhibition is Bad Dreams (after Ferdinand Hodler) (2024), an oil painting depicting a naked female figure embracing a shadowy figure in bed. This work, with loose brushstrokes and greater attention to light and shadow, indicates her move toward a more impressionistic style, where her subjects, often women, are enveloped in ethereal states.
“We’ve really had to fight a long, hard battle to be considered fine art,” said Melissa Cody, a fourth-generation Navajo weaver, in a recent interview with Artsy. Cody’s work descends from the Germantown Revival, named after the government-made wool from Pennsylvania that was historically supplied to the Navajo during the Long Walk—the mass displacement of the Indigenous tribes in 1863. This style emerged at a crossroads of traditional methods and historical circumstances as Navajo weavers integrated commercial dyes to develop bold, innovative designs. Cody will showcase 18 of these weavings, spanning 25 years of her career, at Garth Greenan Gallery.
Her piece Scaling the Caverns (2023), an 8-by-4-foot wool tapestry with bright yellow, green, and red, exemplifies the intricate geometric designs and a bold color palette typical of this style. Cody has also recently incorporated digital technology into her practice, using Jacquard looms to produce elaborate designs and dazzling color fields in works like Dopamine Dream (2023), marrying traditional weaving techniques with modern precision.
Running concurrently with her gallery exhibition, Cody’s solo show, “Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies,” is on display at MoMA PS1 until September 9th.
Jennifer Rochlin, Late Afternoons, 2023. Photo by Keith Lubow. © Jennifer Rochlin. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Jennifer Rochlin, Tulalip Bay, 2023. Photo by Keith Lubow. © Jennifer Rochlin. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Jennifer Rochlin finishes her ceramic vessels with autobiographical paintings, handprints, and bite marks. Her first solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, “Paintings on Clay,” features these large-scale, hand-built terra-cotta vessels that serve as three-dimensional canvases. On these unapologetically warped ceramics, Rochlin layers glazes and uses various tools to etch details into the clay, allowing her to embed a physical and emotional story onto each piece.
Shortly after graduating with an MFA in painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rochlin was hired to kickstart a high school ceramics department—a medium she’d never explored before. This unexpected turn, however, proved serendipitous as the Los Angeles–based artist developed her distinctive approach to the medium. Her bite marks and handprints add an unexpected, tactile dimension, while her painterly scenes—ranging from intimate portraits to expansive landscapes—are rendered in flowing glazes. Key works like Trans-Siberian Railway (2023) capture a fleeting cinematic memory, with figures and floral motifs spiraling around the clay.
Jay Lynn Gomez, My Past Self Painting My Present Self, 2024. Photo by JSP Art Photography. Courtesy of Jay Lynn Gomez and P·P·O·W, New York.
Once a nanny for a wealthy Beverly Hills family, Jay Lynn Gomez lived alongside celebrities, often surrounded by paparazzi who would crop her and her colleagues out of their photos. This became the basis for her paintings, which examine visibility and disenfranchisement. Her exhibition “Under Construction” at P.P.O.W is her first major showcase since her move from Los Angeles to Boston.
Alongside paintings and installation work inspired by her lived experience, it includes a series of hormone box covers painted on with vivid childhood scenes as well as abstract expressions, as symbols of the turbulence and resilience of the trans community (Gomez herself recently transitioned). A key work is My Past Self Painting My Present Self (2024), which uses acrylic on hormone medication packaging to intertwine personal evolution with broader themes of identity and labor. Through these works, Gomez explores themes of visibility and invisibility among disenfranchised communities, offering a deep reflection on transformation and recognition.
Portrait of Maurizio Cattelan. Photo by Alberto Zanetti. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Courtesy of Maurizio Cattelan and Gagosian.
A jester, a prankster, enfant terrible: These monikers are often lobbed at Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan to dismiss him as nothing more than a provocateur. Yet in his first solo gallery exhibition in more than two decades at Gagosian, Cattelan confronts the contradictions of contemporary America with his characteristic blend of irony and insight. Entitled “Sunday,” the show follows in the footsteps of his notorious golden toilet, America (2016)—a representation of elite excess and socioeconomic inequality. In this show, as reported by the New York Times, Cattelan will install 64 gold-plated steel panels shot through with bullets, showing the viewer their own reflection, riddled with the aftereffects of gun violence.
Described by curator Francesco Bonami as “the most famous Italian artist since Caravaggio,” Cattelan’s ability to engage both the art world and wider audiences is evident from his recent international exhibitions, including his work at the Vatican pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
At 81, Argentine conceptual artist Marta Minujín will present a series of informalist paintings and assemblages with her “Los eróticos en Technicolor” sculptures, shown together for the first time since 1963 at her first solo exhibition at kurimanzutto. Titled “Making a Presence,” the exhibition follows Minujín’s 1966 assertion that “easel painting is dead,” presenting dynamic works she creates using immersive installations, unconventional materials, and provocative performances.
This exhibition unites these two pivotal series from the ’60s: the “eróticos” sculptures focusing on Eros, the Greek god of love, and the assemblages and paintings symbolizing Thanatos, the personification of death, symbolically representing these Freudian impulses. Her “Los eróticos en Technicolor” sculptures, made from cotton fabric and foam rubber and painted with fluorescent tempera, are soft sculptures hanging from the ceiling that represent entangled organic forms. These works are juxtaposed with her chthonic, gestural paintings. “Making a Presence” revisits the radical beginnings of Minujín’s career by placing her early experiments in the context of contemporary notions of vulnerability and society as a whole.
A recent graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, Katherine Qiyu Su creates kaleidoscopic abstractions that recall her hometown, Beijing—a place she hasn’t stepped foot in for more than 500 days. Her exhibition at Half Gallery, “How Far is the Foreign Lands,” curated by Stavroula Coulianidis, presents intimate reflections of her upbringing, seen through the lens of her personal nostalgia.
This series of seven paintings uses abstraction to explore her childhood memories, dissecting how personal experiences are remembered, reshaped, and sometimes distorted over time. Her chromatic abstractions are layered, each stratum representing a different distant yet integral memory. These complex, multilayered images challenge perceptions of identity, evolving from vivid recollections into abstract, organic patterns on linen.
Michelle Blade, Salmon Creek Greenhouse, 2024. Photo by Thomas Barratt. Courtesy of Charles Moffett.
Tiffany Bozic, Guatemala Puzzle Piece, 2024. Photo by Tom Barratt. Courtesy of Charles Moffett.
As Frieze descends on New York, downtown tastemaker Charles Moffett is putting the planet first with its upcoming exhibition “Not Too Late,” highlighting an increasingly pertinent issue in the art world. The show will feature a survey of work from all 10 of the gallery’s represented artists—including Alec Egan, Bari Ziperstein, and Maggie Ellis—among contributions from more than 10 additional artists, including C’naan Hamburger, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Michelle Blade.
This group exhibition is organized in collaboration with Art to Acres, an initiative dedicated to funding conservation projects that protect vital lands. For this show, proceeds from the artwork will be donated to preserving the Brazilian Amazon. This collective endeavors to change the sustainable character of the art world, transforming art appreciation into meaningful environmental change. Art to Acres founder Haley Mellin (whose first solo exhibition just opened in Berlin as part of Gallery Weekend) will also contribute work to the benefit exhibition.
Hugh Hayden, American Gothic, 2024. © Hugh Hayden. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery.
Hugh Hayden, Elvis, 2024. © Hugh Hayden. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery.
Hugh Hayden worked as an architect for about a decade before embarking on a career as a full-time sculptor. His work anthropomorphizes the world around us, transforming timber, houses, and day-to-day objects into objects that appear to be alive, adorned with sinuous branches and sharp growths. In his new exhibition, “Hughmans,” at Lisson Gallery in New York, Hayden examines the American experience through a series of works and a site-specific installation that probes the idea of mundanity by humanizing his sculptures.
The New York show follows his recent solo show with a similarly homophonic name, “Hughman” at Lisson’s Los Angeles space and features an installation of bathroom stalls that house various artworks, a reflection on privacy within public spaces. Each stall reveals a distinctive piece, including sculptures embodying Pinocchio, cast metal skillets, and garments adorned with bark, which serve as symbols of identity and assimilation.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the number of works featured in “Sugar.” The show includes 12 paintings, not nine.
