The Galleries

The dominant force in the blue-chip market, with a programme run at museum scale and a budget to match. The original space at 555 West 24th set the Chelsea white-cube template — a plain grey box with a roof light and nothing to distract from the wall — and the rest of the district copied it. Treat the three addresses as a single circuit rather than one stop; they are a few minutes apart and almost never showing the same kind of thing.

Three interconnected buildings, the flagship among them a Selldorf-designed five-storey block on West 20th that was the first new gallery building in New York built to passive-house environmental standards. Zwirner runs the rare operation where the living artists and the historical estates are equally serious, and the shows are hung with more restraint than the square footage would allow.

Pace’s Chelsea headquarters is the most ambitious gallery building in the district: eight floors, a roof terrace, a dedicated space for moving image, and lifts sized for work that will not go through a door. The gallery has been trading since 1960 and the roster reaches from Alexander Calder and Agnes Martin to artists in their thirties, which makes the building a reasonable one-stop education if your time is short.

The Swiss gallery has built its reputation on estates and on artists the museums had underserved, and it publishes and researches like an institution — catalogues here are frequently the standard reference on their subject. The Twenty-Second Street building runs several exhibitions at once across separate floors, so a single visit is usually three or four shows.

Shainman has spent four decades backing artists the market reached late and then all at once — El Anatsui, Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Nick Cave, Toyin Ojih Odutola. The Twentieth Street gallery is the intimate half of the operation now that the vast Lafayette Street hall has opened downtown, and it is the better room for painting.

Lawrence Luhring and Roland Augustine have run a deliberately unhurried programme for forty years, weighted towards artists who work slowly — Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Wool, Pipilotti Rist, the Japanese photographers of the Provoke era. Three New York rooms now, each doing something different, and this is the one that behaves most like a Chelsea gallery.

Rachel Lehmann and David Maupin opened in 1996 and were unusually early to build a roster that was genuinely international rather than American with visitors — Do Ho Suh, Lee Bul, Nari Ward, Cecilia Vicuña, Teresita Fernández. The Twenty-Fourth Street space runs two exhibitions at a time and the second is often the more surprising.

The New York arm of a Paris gallery, and the most consistently political programme on this list — Alfredo Jaar, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ana Mendieta’s estate, Nancy Spero, Leon Golub. The work is rarely comfortable and always well made, which is a harder combination than it sounds.

Paula Cooper opened on Prince Street in 1968 and is generally credited with starting the whole downtown migration; she moved to Chelsea in 1996 and started the next one. Sixty years of minimal and conceptual art — Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Robert Gober — shown in a room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling that is worth the visit on its own.

Marks opened on West 22nd in 1994, before the district existed as such, and the buildings he assembled there remain the most disciplined exhibition spaces in the neighbourhood — small, plain and lit so carefully that the rooms disappear. Ellsworth Kelly, Nan Goldin, Robert Gober and Jasper Johns have all shown here.

Barbara Gladstone spent forty years showing artists who were hard to sell and impossible to ignore — Matthew Barney, Anish Kapoor, Shirin Neshat, Ugo Rondinone — and the gallery has continued in that key since her death in 2024. Installations here are frequently the most physically ambitious in the district.

A few blocks north of the main run and correspondingly calmer. Taggart deals in post-war American painting and works with collectors of the secondary market, so there is less spectacle here and considerably more willingness to talk if you stop and ask something real. A good last stop when the megagalleries have worn you out.

Founded in 2013 by the designer and publisher Katie Michel, Planthouse is at once a gallery and a press — it prints editions as well as showing them, and the two halves inform each other. It moved up from NoMad in 2025 and now sits on the fourth floor of a West 26th Street building, which makes it the kind of stop you reach on purpose rather than by wandering past.

A single-storey brick box built in 1920 as a truck garage — one of the last of its kind among the cast-iron facades — with sixteen-and-a-half-foot ceilings over four thousand square feet. It was Gagosian’s downtown gallery from 1991 until it decamped for Chelsea in 1999, then two decades of design retail, and since late 2023 a Hauser & Wirth room again. The programme here is deliberately slower than the Chelsea rotation: fewer shows, held longer. Manuela, the gallery’s own restaurant, is a few steps away at 130 Prince.

Climb a flight of stairs in an ordinary walk-up and you arrive at a loft filled to a depth of twenty-two inches with soil — thirty-six hundred square feet of it, a hundred and forty tons, seen through a glass barrier from a doorway. De Maria installed it in 1977 and it was meant to last three months; the Dia Art Foundation, the patron set up in 1974 to look after works too large or too odd for museums, made it permanent in 1980 and has maintained it since. There are no wall texts. The attendant will answer anything you ask.

The Earth Room’s companion, three blocks west and made two years later. Five hundred solid brass rods, each two metres long and five centimetres thick, in five rows of a hundred under stadium lighting; laid end to end they would run a kilometre. The trick is the spacing — each gap is five millimetres wider than the last, so the rows appear to recede in perfect parallel when in fact they splay. Nineteen tons of brass, on a floor reinforced to carry it. See both in one afternoon: they were made as a pair, and the second explains the first.

A five-storey cast-iron building from 1870 that Judd bought outright and treated as a single work: one floor for eating, one for sleeping, one for working, each left exactly as he arranged it, with pieces by Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg and Ad Reinhardt hanging where he put them. It is the clearest surviving statement of what the artists who colonised these lofts actually wanted from them — light on four sides, nothing subdivided. The guided visit is small and books out well ahead; give us as much notice as you can and we will try.

Founded in 1977 by Martha Beck and still the sole American institution devoted to works on paper as a medium in their own right rather than as studies for something else. The scale is humane — two connected galleries you can see properly in forty minutes — and the range runs from mediaeval manuscripts to artists showing for the first time. One of the few survivors of the era when this street was the centre of the art world, and open on Sundays.

Deitch Projects operated at 18 Wooster from 1996 to 2010 and was, by common agreement, the closing act of SoHo as an art neighbourhood — parades, performances, queues around the block. The space became the Swiss Institute; Deitch took it back in 2016 and added a larger room on Grand Street. The shows remain the most theatrical in the neighbourhood and are worth checking even when the artist is unfamiliar, because the installation usually is not.

It began as a private collection hung in a SoHo loft in the sixties by Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman, who bought work no gallery would then show, and became a fully accredited museum in 2016. The collection now runs past thirty thousand objects. Exhibitions are long and thoroughly researched rather than fashionable, and admission is by donation, so a twenty-minute look costs nothing.

Greenan closed in Chelsea, took a short hiatus and reopened this month on Greene Street — two spaces a few doors apart, and about the clearest signal yet that dealers are willing to pay SoHo rents again. The programme has long specialised in American artists whose reputations arrived decades late, particularly Native American artists and the women of the sixties New York scene.

Mier opened here after building his reputation in Los Angeles and Brussels, and the Crosby Street room — narrow, top-lit, on a cobbled block that still feels like the old neighbourhood — is among the more convincing arguments that SoHo is being reconsidered.

A dealer’s dealer, moving between living artists and carefully chosen historical material with no interest whatever in spectacle. The room is calm and the staff will talk to you properly if you ask a real question. Pair it with Ronald Feldman a few streets south for an hour that looks nothing like a Chelsea afternoon.

Open on Mercer Street since 1971 and never moved — which makes it, more than any building here, the surviving thread back to SoHo’s first decade. The Feldmans showed Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Hannah Wilke and Andy Warhol when doing so was a risk rather than a credential. Note the short afternoon hours; this is the one entry that will catch you out if you arrive at ten.

After four decades in midtown, Goodman moved her flagship downtown in late 2024 and restored a cast-iron warehouse rather than building a white box inside it — facade, brick and column grid all still there across two floors of galleries, viewing rooms and offices. The roster is one of the deepest anywhere: Tacita Dean, Steve McQueen, Julie Mehretu, William Kentridge, Gerhard Richter. Go for the building as much as the show.

Opened in 2021 as 52 Walker, a curator-led space run by Ebony L. Haynes with full independence from the main gallery’s roster — closer to a Kunsthalle, the European model of an exhibition hall that shows art without selling it, than to a dealer’s showroom. In 2026 Haynes took a global curatorial role and that programme went travelling; the Walker Street space is now simply David Zwirner’s Tribeca gallery. The room itself, low and wide and very well lit, is unchanged.

The most theatrical room on this list and the least like a gallery. Shainman took twenty thousand square feet at the eastern end of the Clock Tower Building — McKim, Mead & White, completed around 1898 for the New York Life Insurance Company — and restored rather than whitewashed it: coffered ceilings nearly three storeys up, arched windows, marble columns you cannot get your arms around, the old vaults still in place. Enter at grade on Lafayette and take the lift up to the hall.

Stefania Bortolami moved down from Chelsea in 2017 when her building was sold, and other dealers watched to see whether it worked. It did, and the migration followed. The programme is European in temper and unusually rigorous, with a long-running project that places a single artist in a building somewhere in America for a year at a time.

Kreps has been showing difficult, research-driven work since 1996 and was among the earliest blue-chip dealers to commit to Tribeca. The Cortlandt Alley space is worth finding for its own sake: a three-block cobbled service lane that is one of the last stretches of nineteenth-century Manhattan standing more or less intact, and consequently the location of roughly every film that needs an alley.

Alexander Gray and Ted Bonin moved the gallery here after seventeen years in Chelsea. The programme is built around artists whose importance was recognised late — post-war Black American abstraction, feminist conceptual work of the sixties and seventies — and the group shows are frequently better art history than what the museums are putting on the same month.

Founded in 1983 in the East Village by Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington, P·P·O·W built its reputation on politically direct figurative work — David Wojnarowicz, Carolee Schneemann, Martin Wong — at a moment when almost nobody else would take it. That the estates it now represents are among the most sought-after in the country is a reasonable verdict on the judgement.

Francesca Kaufmann and Chiara Repetto have run one of the more consistently interesting galleries in Italy since the nineties, with a roster weighted decisively towards women artists — Andrea Bowers, Simone Fattal, Eva Rothschild, Latifa Echakhch. The New York room opened in Chelsea in 2013 and moved to Walker Street, where it shares a building with two other dealers, so a visit is never a single stop.

Nolan moved downtown this summer and opened the doors on 9 September, taking over the room Timothy Taylor built out here. Thirty-five years of the gallery’s history has been in works on paper and in European artists the American market underrates — Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Barry Le Va — and the inaugural Tribeca show is exactly in that line.

Fuentes spent fifteen years on the Lower East Side building a reputation for finding artists and estates before anyone else did, then took a proper Tribeca space. The eye has not changed with the square footage, which is the useful thing about this gallery: it is still the place to see a name you will be hearing about in three years.

Founded in 1999 by a group of artists on the Lower East Side and still run in much the same spirit — loose, funny, allergic to gravity, and consistently ahead of the institutions on which painters matter. One of the friendlier rooms in the district if the white-cube silence elsewhere has started to wear on you.

Jorg Grimm opened in Amsterdam in 2005 and the New York room carries the same weighting towards painting made slowly and with visible effort. A good corrective stop on a Tribeca afternoon: after a run of conceptual installations, a gallery that simply believes in pictures.

Ales Ortuzar came out of David Zwirner and opened here in 2018 with a specialism in artists and estates that history mislaid — frequently women, frequently working outside New York. The exhibitions are researched to a museum standard and usually come with a publication worth taking home.

One of the oldest alternative exhibition spaces in the city and the one with the longest record of showing artists years before the market arrived — Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo and David Wojnarowicz all had early exhibitions here. There is nothing for sale, which changes the temperature of the room noticeably. Note the Wednesday-to-Saturday week.

The downtown room runs at a different pace from the Chelsea gallery: a single project, mounted carefully and left up. Worth checking the dates before you walk over, because the gap between shows here is longer than the district norm and the door is genuinely shut in between.

Three rooms within a few streets, running a programme that leans towards estates, twentieth-century masters and loan exhibitions organised with foundations — the sort of show a museum might mount, without the ticket. A street-level gallery opened at 980 Madison in 2025, which makes the building far easier to walk into than the old upper-floor arrangement.

Zwirner took this five-storey house in 2019 for exhibitions that would be swallowed by the Chelsea buildings — historical surveys, works on paper, single rooms of a single thing. The rooms are proportioned like the houses the work was originally made for, which is frequently the point.

Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy and Amalia Dayan operate from a discreet townhouse off Fifth Avenue, and the exhibitions are driven by connoisseurship rather than by a roster — twentieth-century masters, tightly argued, hung four or five works to a room. This is the closest thing in New York to visiting a private collection, and the staff will talk at length if the room is quiet.

Jay Jopling’s gallery was the room that made the Young British Artists, and it opened this New York space in 2023 — not in Chelsea, pointedly, but in a Madison Avenue building over three floors. The programme mixes the British roster with artists shown here for the first time.

A townhouse a few streets north of the Frick, run as the intimate counterpart to the Chelsea buildings. Shows here tend to be single-artist and closely hung, and the domestic proportions make difficult work considerably easier to spend time with.

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers have built four decades on artists working with image, language and gender — Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Rosemarie Trockel. The New York outpost is a single well-proportioned floor, and the shows are correspondingly concentrated.

Small, scholarly and entirely uninterested in volume: Starr mounts perhaps four shows a year, each built on a single tight proposition about an American or European artist of the last century, with a catalogue that is usually the best thing written on the subject. Twenty minutes here is worth an hour almost anywhere else.

John Van Doren and Augusto Arbizo run a programme balanced between the estates of American post-war artists — Richard Diebenkorn, Al Held — and living painters at mid-career. The building is shared with Alexandre two doors along, which makes this stretch of Seventy-Third the most efficient hundred yards uptown.

Alexandre has dealt in twentieth-century American art for thirty years — Lois Dodd, Neil Welliver, Rackstraw Downes, the painters who kept looking at landscape while everyone else stopped — and shows contemporary artists working in the same tradition alongside them. Next door to Van Doren Waxter; see both.

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn moved the gallery into the 1915 Wyckoff Mansion in 2021 after a restoration by Rafael Viñoly, and it is now among the most beautiful commercial rooms in the city — a marble staircase, a garden, and a programme that mixes contemporary art with ceramics, design and outsider work. Directly across from the Guggenheim, so the pairing writes itself.

Almine Rech has run galleries in Paris, Brussels and London since 1997 and keeps two New York rooms with quite different characters. This is the smaller and calmer of them, given over to focused presentations rather than full-scale exhibitions.

Kelly opened privately in SoHo in 1991, showed Marina Abramović, Joseph Kosuth and Tehching Hsieh when performance and conceptual art were commercially unpromising, and moved into this Toshiko Mori–designed conversion in 2012. It is one of the most architecturally distinguished gallery interiors in New York and the scale allows work — Anthony McCall’s light projections, Mariko Mori’s installations — that almost nowhere else can take.

Daniel Buchholz runs what is arguably the most intellectually serious gallery in Germany, and the New York room — a floor of a townhouse a hundred yards from the Museum of Modern Art — carries the same programme: Wolfgang Tillmans, Isa Genzken, Lutz Bacher, and historical exhibitions researched to a standard the museums rarely match.

Kern left Chelsea in 2016 for a narrow midtown house and turned the constraint into the idea: exhibitions unfold vertically, a floor at a time, so you climb through a show rather than walking round it. The programme is wry and figurative — Nicole Eisenman, Chris Martin, David Shrigley — and the building is a genuine pleasure.

Kaplan has been trading since 1995 and moved here from Chelsea, into a Flower District building he shares with two other dealers. The programme is quiet, sculptural and precisely installed, with a long commitment to artists who work in series over decades — Matthew Ronay, Sarah Crowner, Jordan Casteel.

A single room on an upper floor, run since 2003 with an unusually consistent commitment to figurative painters early in their careers. Nothing here is a spectacle and the shows are frequently the best hour of painting available in the city that month. Five minutes further west than Casey Kaplan; do the two together.

Rosen shows work that is difficult on purpose — performance, institutional critique, artists who make the viewer part of the problem — from an upper floor in the Garment District. It is not for everyone and it is never boring. Ring the bell.

Lonti Ebers built twenty-five thousand square feet across four interconnected buildings on a residential East Williamsburg block — galleries, artists’ studios, a courtyard and a café — and runs it as a foundation rather than a gallery. Nothing is for sale, exhibitions are commissioned rather than borrowed, and they stay up for months. The architecture alone justifies the trip.

The gallery took this Bushwick warehouse in 2012, well before the neighbourhood was an obvious destination, and has used it since for long single-artist projects that would be uneconomic on a Chelsea rotation — frequently work by artists from the gallery’s historical programme, hung for six months at a time. Check the dates: it opens around the exhibition rather than continuously.

A non-profit in a nineteenth-century industrial building beside the Manhattan Bridge anchorage, with a vast raw gallery and a studio programme that has supported several hundred artists since 1995. The room is the draw as much as the work — brick, iron columns and a ceiling that lets people build.

Founded in SoHo in 1972 by twenty women including Howardena Pindell and Nancy Spero, at a point when the commercial galleries were showing almost none, and still run as a co-operative. Three exhibition spaces, changing monthly. A hundred yards from Smack Mellon, so the two are one stop.

Jennifer and Aaron Carvalho built a gallery out of two adjacent industrial buildings with a planted courtyard between them, and the result is one of the more civilised places to look at art in the borough. The programme is largely painting, international, and better than the location would lead you to expect.