The 12 best art galleries in New York City

Karma is the New York gallery of the moment, and the one that best shows where the city’s energy has gone. Brendan Dugan started it in 2011 as a bookshop and publisher in the East Village, and it grew into a gallery with an unusual double program: artists in their prime, among them Reggie Burrows Hodges, Woody De Othello, Ann Craven, Maja Ruznic and Marley Freeman, and older or overlooked ones whose reputations it has remade, from Thaddeus Mosley and Alan Saret to the estates of Gertrude Abercrombie and, most recently, Yvonne Jacquette. Karma Books remains central, and the gallery has a space in Los Angeles.

Its Chelsea gallery on West 26th Street is the main stage now, with a Tribeca space at 38 White Street due to open in November with Mosley’s early sculpture; the East Village spaces have closed. The current show, Jacquette’s paintings of cities and fields seen from the air, runs through October 31.

David Zwirner opened in SoHo in 1993 and moved to West 19th Street in 2002; the gallery now runs four buildings on West 19th and 20th Streets, including the concrete Annabelle Selldorf building at 537 West 20th, with a Tribeca space on Walker Street and galleries in Paris, London, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. The roster is one of the two or three strongest anywhere: Yayoi Kusama, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Kerry James Marshall, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Lisa Yuskavage, Chris Ofili and Wolfgang Tillmans, with the estates and foundations of Ruth Asawa, Alice Neel, Josef and Anni Albers, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, and Diane Arbus shared with Fraenkel in San Francisco.

Zwirner’s shows are museum-grade in scale and catalogues, and its publishing arm is the best in the trade. This autumn the 19th Street spaces have Nate Lowman, Thomas Ruff and Scott Kahn; on October 29 Yoshitomo Nara, in his first exhibition with the gallery and his first major New York show in years, takes over both 537 West 20th and 533 West 19th.

Larry Gagosian opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980 and has built the largest gallery business in the world, with around twenty spaces on three continents. New York has four: two on West 24th Street, at 541 and 555, one on West 21st, and Park & 75 on the Upper East Side. The artists are the ones you would expect, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, Jenny Saville, Urs Fischer, Ed Ruscha, Rachel Whiteread and Georg Baselitz, along with the estates of Richard Serra, Cy Twombly and Brice Marden, and younger arrivals such as Jadé Fadojutimi, Anna Weyant and Deana Lawson.

What Gagosian does better than anyone is the historical survey with major loans, and Chelsea has one now: six decades of Marden at 522 West 21st Street, through December 12. On West 24th, Lawson’s mirror-framed photographs and Jordan Wolfson’s sculptures run to October 24, and in November 555 West 24th opens Baselitz’s last paintings and sculptures, made before his death this spring.

Pace was founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960 and moved to New York in 1963; since 2019 its headquarters has been the eight-story building at 540 West 25th Street, with exhibition floors, a library and a rooftop, and a second space across the street at 508–510. Under Marc Glimcher the gallery has spaces in London, Geneva, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Berlin. The program runs from the estates of Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson and Chuck Close, and the Calder Foundation, to Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Kiki Smith, Lynda Benglis, Arlene Shechet, Torkwase Dyson, Loie Hollowell, Adam Pendleton and Jeff Koons, who joined in 2021.

The 25th Street building is a destination in itself, with several shows at once and David Byrne’s life-size drawings on the stairwell landings as a bonus. Until October 24 it has Benglis’s sculpture from 1972 to 2024, Dyson’s deep-sea paintings and, across the street, Shechet’s monumental metal and ceramics. Note that the galleries close at 4 pm on Tuesday, October 6.

Barbara Gladstone opened her gallery in 1980 and ran it until her death in 2024; it continues under partners Gavin Brown, Max Falkenstein, Caroline Luce and Paula Tsai, with two Chelsea spaces, at 515 West 24th and 530 West 21st Streets, a townhouse at 130 East 64th and galleries in Brussels and Seoul. Gladstone has always been an artists’ gallery first: Matthew Barney, Ugo Rondinone, Anish Kapoor, Carroll Dunham, Alex Katz, Shirin Neshat, Wangechi Mutu, Arthur Jafa, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Elizabeth Peyton and Joan Jonas, with the Keith Haring and Robert Rauschenberg foundations.

The 24th Street space has the first show here by the London painter Joseph Yaeger, watercolor on gesso, through October 31, while Rondinone fills 530 West 21st. Jafa’s largest museum survey to date is at the New Museum at the same time.

Matthew Marks opened in 1991 and was one of the first galleries to move to Chelsea; it has two spaces there, at 522 West 22nd and 523 West 24th Streets, and two in Los Angeles. Its program is the most exacting in the city: Jasper Johns, Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Katharina Fritsch, Martin Puryear, Vija Celmins, Peter Fischli, Nan Goldin, Ron Nagle and Gary Hume, with the estates of Ellsworth Kelly, Anne Truitt, Ken Price and Luigi Ghirri. Shows are installed with unusual care and often come with the only catalogue a given body of work will get.

Leidy Churchman’s thirteen new paintings on consciousness and perception, with Tibetan Buddhist references, are at 22nd Street through October 24; Hume is at 24th Street. The two spaces are a three-minute walk apart.

Paula Cooper opened the first art gallery in SoHo in 1968, with a show against the Vietnam War, and has run her gallery with the same convictions ever since; it moved to West 21st Street in 1996 and now has three buildings there, at 521, 529 and 534. The program is the history of Minimal and Conceptual art carried into the present: Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Jennifer Bartlett, Sherrie Levine, Hans Haacke, Mark di Suvero and Joel Shapiro, with Christian Marclay, Sophie Calle, Tauba Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Walid Raad, Eric N. Mack, Liz Glynn and Sam Durant.

The three spaces usually run three shows, and this autumn they are Auerbach’s work on natural turbulence at 521, Mack’s textile installations at 534 and Glynn’s copper American Progress at 529. Auerbach and Mack close on October 24.

Marian Goodman started as a publisher of multiples in 1965, opened her gallery in 1977 and introduced a generation of European artists to New York; she died in 2024, and in the same year the gallery left West 57th Street, after decades, for a large new space at 385 Broadway in Tribeca. The roster is a roll call of the artists who matter most: Gerhard Richter, William Kentridge, Steve McQueen, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Julie Mehretu, Giuseppe Penone, Gabriel Orozco, Nairy Baghramian, Annette Messager and Tony Cragg, with galleries in Paris and Los Angeles.

The Tribeca building gives the gallery the kind of room 57th Street never did. Cragg’s sculpture and Edith Dekyndt’s installations are on through October 24, and Baghramian opens in November. Tribeca’s other galleries, among them Bortolami, P.P.O.W., James Fuentes and Andrew Kreps, are all within a few blocks.

Rachel Lehmann and David Maupin founded their gallery in 1996 and have made it the most international of the Chelsea programs, with spaces in Seoul and London and a long record of bringing artists from Asia, Africa and Latin America to New York: Do Ho Suh, Lee Bul for many years, Nari Ward, McArthur Binion, Teresita Fernández, Liza Lou, Catherine Opie, Billy Childish, Erwin Wurm, Kader Attia, Mandy El-Sayegh and Lari Pittman. Since 2018 it has been in a Peter Marino building at 501 West 24th Street.

The ground floor shows Rana Begum’s first New York solo presentation of her sculptural work through October 24, and on October 29 Pittman opens twelve new paintings with a reception from 6 to 8 pm. The gallery is at the corner of Tenth Avenue, a good place to start a Chelsea afternoon that ends at Gagosian and Pace up the block.

Sean Kelly opened his gallery in 1991 and in 2012 moved it north of the Chelsea district to a 22,000-square-foot former warehouse at 475 Tenth Avenue, at West 36th Street, with a Los Angeles gallery since 2022. The program leans toward conceptual and performance-based work and photography: Marina Abramović, Antony Gormley, Kehinde Wiley, Anthony McCall, Idris Khan, Dawoud Bey, Alec Soth, Candida Höfer, Laurent Grasso, Jose Dávila, Julian Charrière and Hugo McCloud.

The main gallery is tall and dark enough to show McCall’s solid-light works as they should be seen, and this autumn it does: three of them, from 1973’s Line Describing a Cone to the new Swarm, through October 31, with Luke Agada’s paintings alongside. The walk up Tenth Avenue from the Chelsea galleries takes about fifteen minutes.

Jack Shainman opened his gallery in Washington in 1984 and moved it to New York soon after; it has been on West 20th Street in Chelsea since the late 1990s, and in 2024 added a landmark space in the Clock Tower building at 46 Lafayette Street, with The School, a converted schoolhouse in Kinderhook, New York, for the largest shows. Shainman championed Black artists long before the market did: Nick Cave, Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas, El Anatsui, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Odili Donald Odita, Rose B. Simpson and the estates of Barkley L. Hendricks and Gordon Parks, with Richard Mosse, Becky Suss and Shimon Attie.

The Chelsea space has Suss’s night interiors through October 31; the Lafayette Street gallery is showing Gordon Parks. If you can get upstate, The School is worth the two-hour train ride.