Frieze New York draws collectors, curators, and the art curious to the city every May, but some of the best work on view this week isn’t inside the fair at all. While the main event unfolds at the Shed, galleries across Manhattan are mounting some of their most ambitious shows of the year in an effort to catch the attention of the city’s most discerning collectors. Here are the exhibitions worth working into your schedule.
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Where: Matthew Marks
When: Through June 27
Why It’s Worth a Look: Fritsch is returning to Matthew Marks 30 years after her first exhibition with the gallery. Her latest exhibition revisits models she made as a student in Düsseldorf in 1979, blown up to monumental scale, including a car with a caravan, a twenty-six-foot-long tunnel, and a thirteen-foot-tall chimney.
Know Before You Go: Fritsch is one of Germany’s most significant living sculptors: She represented the country at the 1995 Venice Biennale and has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
Where: Charles Moffett
When: Through June 20
Why It’s Worth a Look: Dacres, a first-generation American sculptor of Jamaican descent, transforms reclaimed tires into busts and braided abstractions that explore the injustices levied against Black and Brown people throughout American history. By unsettling the classical art form of the bust with unconventional materials and references to natural hairstyles, Dacres vaunts Black aesthetics and contributions to art, hidden for too long.
Know Before You Go: As a former New York public school teacher, Dacres crafted a series of wall-mounted “medallions” dedicated to Harlem, where she lives and works.
Where: Margot Samel
When: Through June 20
Why It’s Worth a Look: With his pastel-on-raw-linen paintings, Brodsky enters the canon of artists obsessed with the mundane and the extreme annals of New York life. In his paintings, hunched figures hold hands, swing bodega bags, pet dogs, and take out the trash.
Know Before You Go: This is Brodsky’s first solo exhibition in New York and his debut with the gallery. The Moscow-born artist moved to New York to attend SVA in 2014, and has been exploring the city through his canvases ever since.
“Copy/Trace” by Jasper Johns
Where: David Zwirner
When: Through June 26
Why It’s Worth a Look: How can one recontextualize the work of an artist as revered as Jasper Johns? Independent curator Jeffrey Weiss takes a shot by looking at two of the most persistent strategies in Johns’ practice: copying and tracing. The show features drawings, prints, and works on plastic from the 1960s through the 2010s, including four major drawings on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago in which Johns pressed his oiled face and hands onto paper before covering the imprints with charcoal.
Know Before You Go: The show runs concurrently with a Johns retrospective opening at the Guggenheim Bilbao in late May and an exhibit at New York’s Craig Starr Gallery on view through June 27.
“Moving Day” by Lucia Hierro
Where: Marc Straus
When: Through June 28
Why It’s Worth a Look: Hierro makes sculptures of packing boxes and containers that reference Pop Minimalism and conceptual art while staying grounded in the artist’s experience growing up as a Dominican American artist in Washington Heights.
Know Before You Go: Her new show is intimate, made in the aftermath of losing both of her parents over the past year and a half. The relics and refuse she sculpts explore her own grief and sense of displacement through the experience.
“Remain” by Mitchell Charbonneau
Where: Off Paradise
When: Through July 7
Why It’s Worth a Look: For his third solo at Off Paradise, following up 2023’s “Foundations,” Charbonneau continues his investigation of the everyday object. “Remain” features a body of copper and lead reliefs, all rendered in a tight range of whites and grays. They’ll be presented alongside a new collection of painted glass and bronze sculptures titled “Figure Study.”
Know Before You Go: Charbonneau’s work is a reconsideration of the everyday and even useless objects that furnish our lives: air fresheners, empty cans of Monster Energy drinks, and dented folding chairs.
“Thicket” by Meg Webster
Where: Paula Cooper Gallery
When: Through July 24
Why It’s Worth a Look: Webster has been making sculpture from soil, salt, moss, and organic matter since the early 1980s. Webster continues this practice with “Thicket,” which includes a layering of branches, berries, plant cuttings, and flower buds shaped into a towering spiral.
Know Before You Go: Webster’s primal, environmental forms often revolve around the motif of a spiral, from her 2024 installation at Dia Beacon to Stick Spiral, which is housed permanently at the Guggenheim.
Where: Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer
When: Through June 20
Why It’s Worth a Look: Konrad Fischer gave Nauman his first European show in Düsseldorf in 1968. Founded in Los Angeles in March 2025 as an outpost of that storied Düsseldorf/Berlin institution, Okey Dokey opened its most recent New York office last November.
Know Before You Go: The gallery takes its name from Konrad Fischer’s quirky way of signing off letters (in fact, he used it so much that Sol LeWitt had a stamp inscribed with the phrase made just for him.)
“GOLDFISH” by Taro Masushio
Where: Ulrik
When: May 15 — June 13
Why It’s Worth a Look: Through conceptual photography and immersive video installation, Masushio explores queer identity in “GOLDFISH.” The exhibition highlights a set of photographs he took in his late teens—reaching across time to create a personal archive—and interpolates them with film projections throughout the gallery.
Know Before You Go: Masushio is part of the 50+ artist cohort showing at MoMA PS1’s quinquennial, “Greater New York,” on view through Aug. 17.
“Ark” by Deondre Davis
Where: Gordon Robichaux
When: Through June 21
Why It’s Worth a Look: Davis’s paintings move between abstraction and a kind of accumulated personal record. The self-taught artist’s new body of work, anchored by five new paintings, was made during a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa last year. The Chicago-born, LA-based artist drew from the desert’s vast landscape and architecture.
Know Before You Go: The exhibition’s title, “Ark,” refers to a place for safekeeping, and each painting is named after a place from the 1920-60s that was a refuge for queer communities.
Where: Lyles & King
When: May 14 — June 13
Why It’s Worth a Look: These three artists are united by a shared interest in instability—of the body, of materials, and of the boundary between one thing and another.
Know Before You Go: Ouyang works across video and sculpture, pulling from art history, cinema, and urban planning diagrams. Galvão’s new paintings propose a world underwater and slightly out of time, exploring the influences of natural forces. Pan works in ink on muslin, beginning from photographs of her own body and objects in the studio before cutting and rearranging them into a destabilized yet intimate picture.
Where: Galerie Buchholz / Pace Gallery
When: Both open May 13
Why It’s Worth a Look: This is the biggest Paul Thek moment in New York since his retrospective at the Whitney in 2010—two simultaneous solo shows, a new biography that charts his relationship to Peter Hujar, and a conversation at Buchholz between the book’s author, Andrew Durbin, and artists Moyra Davey and Rebecca Quaytman.
Know Before You Go: At Buchholz, the focus is on newspaper painting, drawings, and sculptural installation spanning 1969 to 1987. At Pace, the show is a wider survey of Thek’s paintings, including late works made after he received his AIDS diagnosis.
Where: Casey Kaplan
When: May 14 — July 24
Why It’s Worth a Look: Beasley sculpts wall-based slabs and freestanding structures from polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, housedresses, military uniforms, and other textiles that hold personal and historical memory.
Know Before You Go: Beasley inaugurated Storm King’s Tippet’s Field last year with his largest work to date, a 100-foot-long series of triptychs exploring the American landscape tradition.
Where: Silverlens New York
When: May 14 — June 27
Why It’s Worth a Look: De Guia grew up in Baguio City—the location of the former American military base Camp John Hay—in the Philippine Cordilleras, and his large-scale assemblage paintings carry that history. His show turns the gallery into a kind of excavation site, its walls stacked with works of colonial propaganda, Catholic devotional imagery, medical diagrams, agricultural charts, and tourist-brochure graphics.
Know Before You Go: De Guia is also a central figure in the Cordilleras artist collective network in the Philippines; in 2012, he inaugurated the AX(iS) Art Project, a biennial art festival in which artists and curators create site-specific installations in Northern Luzon.
Where: VeneKlasen
When: Opens May 13
Why It’s Worth a Look: A 30-year survey of works on paper from the Italian artist, this exhibition explores David’s transformation of the body and hybrid figures with an anxiety-ridden eroticism.
Know Before You Go: This is the second show from VeneKlasen, the gallery founded this year by Gordon VeneKlasen, former longtime partner at Michael Werner.
Where: Duane Thomas
When: May 15 — June 15
Why It’s Worth a Look: These soft sculptures—formed from painted muslin and stuffed—occupy a middle ground between painting and three-dimensional form.
Know Before You Go: Pettibone crafted these sculptures in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in conversation with artists like Eva Hesse, bringing a material historically coded as domestic into a serious artistic context.
Where: Anton Kern Gallery
When: May 12 —July 2
Why It’s Worth a Look: The show is Ethridge’s edit: He selected and arranged work from two Araki series alongside his own. The unifying factor? Flowers.
Know Before You Go: Ethridge’s contribution, Floral Arrangements, began as pinhole photographs of carnations and daisies in thrift-store vases in the mid-1990s. From Araki, there’s Flower Cemetery, 2017—bouquets embedded with plastic dinosaurs and action figures—and Tokyo Nude, 1989, which sets female nudes against the unremarkable backstreets of the city.
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