New York Galleries Turn to Under-Recognized Artists Ahead of the Spring Rush
As New York moves toward its May season of fairs and auctions, several galleries are using the weeks before the rush to present artists who remain less familiar to many city viewers. The result is a slate of exhibitions that favors close looking over spectacle, with work that ranges from intimate figuration to political abstraction and photography.
At Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Domenico Gnoli is on view through May 23 at 19 East 64th Street. The Italian artist, who died at 36 in 1970, is hardly obscure in Europe: he had a retrospective at Fondazione Prada in 2021 and appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale. In the United States, though, he has received far fewer exhibitions. That imbalance is part of what makes the show feel timely. Gnoli’s paintings, including “L’inverno (Couple au Lit)” and “Back View,” compress bodies, objects, and surfaces into tightly controlled compositions that can feel both detached and strangely intimate. A bedspread, a wall corner, or the reverse side of a canvas becomes the subject, and the effect is at once coolly analytical and wryly sensual.
At Hutchinson Modern and Contemporary, Raquel Rabinovich is on view through May 9 at 47 East 64th Street. Rabinovich died in January at 102. Born to a Jewish Romanian family in Argentina, she was imprisoned under the Perón regime for civil disobedience before leaving the country permanently. Her work often treats withholding as a political and aesthetic stance. In “It Is So Dark It Is Transparent,” dense black marks nearly erase the surface, while the title emerges only after sustained looking. The painting’s refusal to yield quickly feels central to Rabinovich’s practice, which is shaped by memory, silence, and resistance.
The season also includes Mao Ishikawa at Alison Bradley Projects, her first US show. Born in Okinawa in 1953, Ishikawa is represented in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Her presence underscores the broader pattern at work this spring: New York galleries are not only filling their calendars, but also widening the frame of who gets seen, and when.
