Chelsea Galleries New York

Chelsea may be the New York art neighborhood that many people love to disdain. It also may be approaching a tipping point, where new apartment towers outnumber galleries. But the place is not monolithic. Its scores of galleries come in all shapes, sizes and annual budgets, and as usual they offer a ton of art to be seen. Here is but a small sample.

THE KITCHENthrough May 12; 512 West 19th Street, thekitchen.org. Chelsea’s busiest, most multimedia alternative space is presenting the outstanding “Charles Atlas: the past is here, the futures are coming.” It reviews the long, often brilliant career of Mr. Atlas, who has few equals when it comes to blurring the lines among art, documentary, dance and film. Eight video collaborations made from 1982 to 2016 with different choreographers dazzle with their different camerawork and editing — especially those created with Michael Clark and Yvonne Rainer. The centerpiece is “2003,” an enormous five-channel-video montage of Mr. Atlas’s dance films and various interviews and current events, like the Iraq war. The totality equals a crash course in New York choreographic history that reveals an ingenious symbiosis of dance and film.

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERYthrough June 2; 100 11th Avenue, michaelrosenfeldart.com. Claire Falkenstein (1908-1997), who, outside her native California, has never had a full-scale retrospective in this country, is generally known for her exquisitely excessive sculptures dating from the mid-1950s — welded metal tangles embedded with bright pieces of Venetian glass. “Claire Falkenstein: Matter in Motion” explodes this narrow view with nearly 50 works, introducing a relentless exploration of abstraction in early paintings on canvas and also curved perforated aluminum; sculptures of wood and glazed ceramics; and one fantastic mixed-media relief. Her dialogue with artists like David Smith and Jackson Pollock is but one fascination. More rewriting of art history, please.

GARTH GREENANthrough May 19; 545 West 20th Street, garthgreenan.com. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s robust combination of the painterly, the political and much else has only gotten stronger, especially in the Trade Canoe series dating to the early 1990s. Three additions to it dominate her first show in New York since 2013. In them the big canoes are piled with symbols of conflict between American Indians and settlers, including skulls, schematic buffalo heads (which conjure arrowheads), the names of extinct animals and other texts, and portraits of Geronimo and George Armstrong Custer. Denser is better, as in “Trade Canoe: Ghost Canoe,” but everything exudes multiple passions: for art history, color, oil paint, endangered cultures and setting the record straight.

303 GALLERYthrough May 25; 555 West 21st Street, 303gallery.com. Doug Aitken has stepped back from the large video spectacles for which he is known to make a small one, “New Era.” It occupies a hexagonal space that alternates wall-size mirrors and video screens, often to great kaleidoscopic effect. It centers on Martin Cooper, now 89, who as an engineer at Motorola invented the mobile phone and on April 3, 1973, placed the first mobile-phone call, from a street in Manhattan. His voice-over proceeds from an initial optimism that the world might become one, to observations about aging and technology that seem more like a lament. Mr. Aitken’s camera takes in vast stretches of barren terrain and highway cloverleafs. He also manipulates images of the original phone’s keypad, creating patterns resembling housing developments that turn deliriously hallucinatory. In keeping with Mr. Cooper’s darkening view, there is a prevailing sense of isolation and anonymity, alternating with breathtaking beauty, especially of the earth itself.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERYthrough May 12; 513 West 20th Street and 524 West 24th Street, jackshainman.com. Hank Willis Thomas’s art always hits its mark, but the question is, does he aim high enough? “What We Ask Is Simple,” his especially ambitious show suggests a steeper angle. Seen in dimmed lighting, it occupies the gallery’s two spaces, and its most plentiful works are wall pieces on glass that lead double lives. Initially they look mostly blank — some have textures suggesting abstract painting, others have fragments of figures. Shine a cellphone flashlight on one or flash-photograph it, and crowded, sometimes violent vintage photographs appear. They show various civil rights protests — Birmingham and St. Augustine (anti-segregation), London (women’s suffrage), Nuremberg in 1933 (anti-Nazi). The shock is magical yet emotionally unsettling, reminding you of people’s courage in the face of oppression, history’s erasures, and the way the past recedes into darkness. The problem is that the images and the history they preserve gets a little lost in the brilliant, if slightly gimmicky, technique.

ANDREW KREPSthrough May 12; 537 West 22nd Street, andrewkreps.com. Here, the German photographer Annette Kelm and the maverick Darren Bader have side-by-side shows. In “Knots,” Ms. Kelm continues to fuse advertising, Conceptual Art and Surrealism using odd juxtapositions and gorgeous colors. The show is a bit uneven; the best works put flowers or plants in strange company. In “E/either e/Either n/Neither N/neither,” Mr. Bader has mounted a small three-ring circus that centers on language, using books, soap, his father’s piano and his own poetry, which is printed on green crime-scene tape that has been strewn about the floor and Lawrence Weiner-style graphics splayed across the walls. As is usual with Mr. Bader, the general effect is obscure, irreverent and looks good.

CHEIM & READthrough May 12; 547 West 25th Street, cheimread.com. A few years ago, Ghada Amer, long known for translating images of women from pornographic magazines into embroidery on canvas, started applying these motifs to glazed clay. The dripping glaze affords her subjects a bit of privacy, like the dangling thread in the canvas pieces. The contrast between the two mediums here suggests that clay currently serves Ms. Amer better. She connects with its materiality and the images — appearing on free-standing sheets of curving wall pieces — are less photographic than before. This excellent development should encourage Ms. Amer to expand her imagery too.

FLAG FOUNDATION through May 19; 545 West 25th Street, ninth floor, flagartfoundation.org. Here you’ll find two thoughtfully dovetailed shows that span generations. “Painting/Object” presents the work of five young artists who work in and around painting in very physical ways: Sarah Crowner, Sam Moyer, Julia Rommel, N. Dash and Erin Shirreff (who also has a multimedia solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. on 22nd Street through May 19). They variously use sewing, stone, adobe, hemp and photography. Downstairs, an important precedent is honored in “Ellsworth Kelly: Black and White Works,” organized by Jack Shear, husband of the artist, who died in 2015. Kelly’s affection for black and white is well known, but Mr. Shear spins it afresh across photography, drawing, sculpture and especially Kelly’s relief-like paintings. “Gate-Board,” a combination of white board and black string from 1950 is, alone, worth the elevator ride.

PACE GALLERYthrough May 12; 510 West 25th Street, pacegallery.com. Unlike David Hockney’s crystalline retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this show is an energetic messy update in which he pursues his new reverse perspective paintings glimpsed at the Met, partly by eliminating the bottom corners of the canvases. This tips some familiar motifs — the Grand Canyon, the hills of Yorkshire and Malibu, his blue terrace — toward the viewer as on a tilted plate. The reversal is clearest in “Still Life” and “Walk Around the Hotel Actalan” and diagramed in “Moving Focus.” What’s great about Mr. Hockney is the way he makes his ideas about painting so pictorially accessible. Two mural-size photographic drawings of the artist in his studio surrounded by many of the show’s paintings offer further delights in perspective.

A Few More

Chelsea’s cup runneth over at the moment; so here are some of my other suggestions. The inimitable John Bradford continues his raucous faux-naïve narrative renderings in “Hamilton, History, Lincoln and Paint” (through May 5 at Anna Zorina Gallery, 533 West 23rd Street; annazorinagallery.com). The paintings of Angelina Gualdoni, inspired by Gauguin and pre-Columbian ceramics, show new growth at Asya Geisberg Gallery (through May 12 at 537B West 23rd Street; asyageisberggallery.com). And Gedi Sibony has nearly filled Greene Naftali’s ground-floor space with a large white cube turned inside out, using white-enameled metal panels familiar from kitchens. It’s titled “The King and the Corpse.” Its scale is regal; its funkiness sends up Chelsea’s prevailing cleanliness (through May 5 at 508 West 26th Street; greenenaftaligallery.com).

Art lovers in New York City can embark on one of the most exciting adventures of their lives by exploring the myriad galleries in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood (between 14th and 34th Streets west of Sixth Avenue). Though the occasional old master shows up in Chelsea, here you’ll find thousands of challenging, progressive and political works in multiple formats by the most famous contemporary artists and rising stars.

Matthew Marks Gallery represents both up-and-coming and established artists © New York City / Alamy Stock Photo

David Zwirner exhibits work from artists such as Yayoi Kusama © Scott Houston / Alamy Stock Photo

‘Sand of Bank’ by the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping stands in the Gladstone Gallery, New York, USA © Johannes Schmitt-Tegge/dpa/Alamy Live News

Representing artists like Matthew Barney, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ugo Rondinone, Allora & Calzadilla, and Shirin Neshat, the Gladstone Gallery has established itself as one of the most well-respected art spaces in NYC. Exhibitions at its two Chelsea addresses lean toward the conceptual, political and philosophical. The gallery produced four of the five feature-length films in The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), Barney’s best-known work.

A woman ponders the Carmen Herrera installation at Lisson Gallery © Lisson Gallery

Gagosian Gallery has two spaces in Chelsea © Edd Westmacott / Alamy Stock Photo

‘Anthony McCall: Split Second’ was held at Sean Kelly © Jason Wyche / Courtesy of Sean Kelly

Jeanine Guzman contributed additional reporting to this article.