Top NYC Exhibitions Opening This Week (May 6 – May 12)

TUESDAY

Dennis Hopper: “The Lost Album” at Gagosian Gallery
May 7 – June 22
Opening: May 7, 6-8PM
980 Madison Avenue
Gagosian Gallery presents photographs from “The Lost Album” of the late Dennis Hopper. This historiaclly significant body of work from the 1960s has not been exhibited in the United States since 1970.  A selection of approximately 200 photographs reveals casual portraits of artistic luminaries (Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg), leading actors (Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, John Wayne), and mythic musicians (James Brown, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane), as well as stirring images of the Civil Rights Movement.

Cecily Brown at Gagosian Gallery
May 7 – June 22
Opening: May 7, 6-8PM
980 Madison Avenue
Brown’s most recent paintings treat the subject of the nude ensemble, revealing an attitude that draws equivocally from the genre of history painting and pop culture.  By freeing her subjects and inspirations from their original contexts, Brown subverts the role of narrative in the construction of genre and points to the slippage inherent in quoting from source.

WEDNESDAY

James Nares: “Road Paint” at Paul Kasmin Gallery
May 8 – June 15
Opening: May 8, 6-8PM
293 Tenth Avenue
These works continue the artist’s ongoing kinetic investigations—exploring the form, direction, rhythm, and repetition of objects in motion.

Jeff Koons: “Gazing Ball”  at David Zwirner
May 8 – June 22
Opening: May 8, 6-8PM
David Zwirner is pleased to present Gazing Ball, the world debut of a new series of sculptures in the gallery’s West 19th Street spaces. One of the most prominent artists working today, Jeff Koons is well known for his bold paintings and sculptures. Typically working in series, his art holds up a mirror to contemporary consumer culture, using the photorealistic, commercial aesthetic familiar from an earlier generation of Pop artists to generate his own unique and universally recognizable style.

FRIDAY

Paul McCarthy at Hauser & Wirth
May 10 – July 26
Opening: May 10
511 West 18th Street, 32 East 69th Street, Hudson River Park at 17th Street
Hauser & Wirth will devote its entire spring program in New York City to Paul McCarthy, one of America’s most challenging and influential artists, via three interrelated exhibitions and an outdoor sculpture presentation. McCarthy has garnered international acclaim for – and provoked lively critical debate with – a constantly evolving oeuvre characterized by wildly dark humor, Bacchanalian chaos, and tragicomic narratives that connect seemingly disparate bodies of work.

Ugo Rondinone: “soul” at Gladstone Gallery
May 11 – July 3
Opening: May 10, 6-8PM
530 West 21st Street
For the series of sculptures included in soul, bluestone — the material out of which the works are made — has been rough-cut into blocks, which are stacked atop one another to form the human figure.  The exhibition itself functions as a sort of hall-of-mirrors turned inwards.  The stone figure is repeated and reflected in several scales, and installed in an immersive raw concrete environment.

Ellsworth Kelly: “At Ninety” at Matthew Marks Gallery
May 11 – June 29
Opening: May 10, 6-8PM
522 West 22nd Street
523 West 24th Street
502 West 22nd Street
The exhibition includes fourteen paintings and two sculptures made in the past two years.  Kelly’s recent work continues the rigorous exploration of line, form, and color he first established nearly seven decades ago, and features new compositions as well as variations on earlier themes.

SATURDAY

Laurel Nakadate: “Strangers and Relations” at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
May 11 – June 29
Opening: May 11
535 West 22nd Street
The gallery’s third solo presentation of works by Laurel Nakadate features twenty large-scale color photographs made during the past two years. During the summer of 2011, Laurel Nakadate began to photograph strangers, inviting friends of friends, Facebook “friends,”and curious members of the online community, to meet her at night in remote corners of the United States and Europe. Under darkened skies, using simple techniques including long exposures, available starlight, moonlight, and a single handheld flashlight, Nakadate created Star Portraits, a series of photographic performances that recorded the urgency of first encounters between the artist and her subjects.

Los Carpinteros: “Irreversible” at Sean Kelly
May 11 – June 22
Opening: May 11, 6-9PM
475 Tenth Avenue
As an exhibition, Irreversible addresses themes of community, the passage of time, and the effects of historic events as endured by the anonymous individuals who comprise a society.  Los Carpinteros’ work conflates conflicting periods, styles and subject matter to articulate the push and pull that major social and political events exert on the citizens who experience them.

Martial Raysse: “1960-1974” at Luxembourg & Dayan
May 11 – July 13
Opening: May 11, 6-8PM
64 East 77th Street
With his signature palette of hyper-saturated colors and his unconventional incorporation of found objects and neon tubing on the surface of canvases, Raysse has been viewed until now through the lens of American Pop art — an altogether inadequate perspective on a seminal postwar artist who departed from Pop’s optimism and fascination with celebrity culture to introduce fresh, albeit disturbing, suggestions of real human confusion and growth behind the shiny surface of all things new.