9 NYC Art Exhibitions Worth Your Time Right Now — May 2026
From Penone's bronze trees at Gagosian to Iris van Herpen's biomimicry couture at the Brooklyn Museum — the New York shows worth leaving the house for.
Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses — Brooklyn Museum, New York 2026
Katherine Bernhardt
CANADA NY, 60 Lispenard Street·May 15 – Jun 20
Bernhardt spent five years restoring a maximalist 1980s house in St. Louis and the house gave it all back. Saturated, fluorescent, radically flat — paintings of kitchenware, family members, and packaged goods that treat the domestic as the only subject worth having. No irony. No institutional reach. Just a painter paying serious attention to her actual life.
Katherine Bernhardt, 6:01 AM, 2026
Giuseppe Penone
Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street·Through summer
Penone has spent sixty years asking what a tree remembers. The answer, across three cork-lined rooms at Gagosian, involves a double bronze branch and the Greek myth of Marsyas — the satyr flayed alive for beating Apollo at music. One branch with bark, one bare. Arte Povera at its most uncompromising. This is the kind of show that makes you walk out thinking differently about your own skin.
Giuseppe Penone, The Reflection of Bronze, installation view, Gagosian New York
Rues and Leaves Themselves Alone
Emma Webster
Petzel, 520 West 25th Street·Through June 6
You are on the edge of a forest where night is always falling. Webster's paintings — built from 3D scans, broken virtual dioramas, and cave-painting logic — propose landscapes that cannot be perfectly represented, only approached. A cow glows green. A flying horse dives into a Turner sky. A deer has two heads. Then you walk into the accompanying video game and find the same forest again, colder and stranger. Two renderings of the same impossible place. Neither is the real one. Both are.
Emma Webster - Onward! 2026
David Hockney
Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street·May 15 – Aug 14
Hockney quarantined in Normandy in 2020, turned off all the lights to see the moonlight more clearly, and drew it on an iPad — the backlit screen his only light source. Fifteen paintings of the night sky, their first New York showing. The iPad is not a compromise. It's what made the work possible. Sixty years of looking at how light moves, and this is where it got to.
David Hockney - 3rd July 2020, No. 3
Erwin Wurm
Lehmann Maupin 501 West 24th Street New York·Through June 6
Figures with pillows where their heads should be. Empty suits cast in bronze, suspended mid-motion, no body inside. Wurm keeps proving that sculpture is an economy — that personality survives the removal of every feature we think makes it readable. The most you'll feel from the least you've been given.
Erwin Wurm, Double Dream, installation view , New York 2026
Tromarama
The Kitchen, 163B Bank Street·Through June 13
The Indonesian collective fed an AI their personal archives and watched what came back. The installation uses Scrooge McDuck, a 1971 Marxist Disney critique, and "When You Wish Upon a Star" played on recorders — abstracted into something genuinely unsettling. Their first US institutional show. The question it asks about collective myth and machine remix is the most urgent cultural question of the moment. Free entry.
Tromarama, Upon a Machine, installation view, The Kitchen New York 2026
Group show, curated by Eric Sullivan
The Hole, New York·On view now
Flameworked, kiln-formed, cast, microwaved. From the late Klaus Moje — who changed what the medium could mean — to Hanna Hansdotter's defiantly craft-oriented vessels to Barry McGee, Thaddeus Wolfe, Tom Fruin and twenty-five others. The Hole has been doing medium-specific surveys for a decade. This is the sharpest yet, and the most fragile. Handle accordingly.
Deborah Czeresko, Big Fruit (large), 2026
Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses
Brooklyn Museum
5th Floor, Schapiro Wing·On view now
140 haute couture pieces from the designer who treats clothing as physics rather than fashion. Biomimicry, fractal geometry, neuroscience — worn by Björk, built for something other than a red carpet. James Turrell and Tara Donovan in the room alongside coral and fossils. North American debut. The strongest fashion exhibition in New York in years. A full AD feature is coming — we're going in person.
Iris van Herpen, Sculpting the Senses, haute couture exhibition, Brooklyn Museum 2026
Frida and Diego: The Last Dream
MoMA
11 West 53rd Street·Through Sep 12
We include this one honestly. The installation is clumsier than the paintings deserve and the pretzel cart on 53rd has seen this crowd before. Go anyway — weekday morning, stand in front of the work, ignore the apparatus. The original argument is still in there. Two people for whom love was not convenient, not optimised, not a match percentage.
Frida and Diego: The Last Dream, MoMA New York 2026
