Three exhibitions to see in New York this weekend

Our editors and writers scour the city each week for the most thoughtful, relevant and exciting new exhibitions and artworks on view at galleries, museums and public venues across all five boroughs of New York. This week we recommend:

Guadalupe Maravilla: Seven Ancestral Stomachs

Until 27 March at PPOW, 392 Broadway, Manhattan

The Brooklyn-based Salvadoran artist Guadalupe Maravilla recalls how a chemotherapy appointment in New York left him nearly unable to walk, and how a sound bath he encountered on the way home led to a years-long sound therapy treatment that he credits for his successful recovery from colon cancer in 2013. In this exhibition for the gallery’s newly inaugurated space in Tribeca, Maravilla has produced a series of esoteric and deeply personal retablos, sculptural “stomaches” and free-standing sculptures rich with spiritual symbolism. Some works generate vibrational sounds and are made from materials collected throughout Central America, simultaneously referencing the artist’s personal history of crossing the US border and his solidarity with the pain and trauma experienced by undocumented immigrants. The show follows Maravilla’s first museum exhibition at ICA Miami, where the artist presented a series of large-scale sonic sculptures that similarly evoked healing and cleansing instruments.

Roni Horn: Recent Work

Until 10 April at Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, Manhattan

Roni Horn is a unique artist whose work across virtually every medium manages to encapsulate her sensibilities—her desire for awe, her humour, her love of the poetic—while translating each of them into different kinds of work with an enigmatic touch. In this exhibition, Horn is showing only drawings and work on paper. On view are works from the artist’s Wits’ End series, her Yet series and the massive 406-part drawing LOG, which is arguably a series unto itself. LOG is a diaristic suite of drawings completed daily between March 2019 and May 2020 and displayed together as a single installation. The work maps the passage of time in a manner that recalls On Kawara’s Date Paintings or Byron Kim’s Sunday Paintings, but the touch is uniquely Horn’s. Photography, drawing and collage coalesce into a portrait of grace, grief and time, things that we may have an abundance of at this moment in history.

David Goldblatt: Strange Instrument

Until 27 March at Pace, 540 West 25th Street, Manhattan

The artist Zanele Muholi has curated the first posthumous US exhibition devoted to the South African photographer David Goldblatt, who pointedly explored the complexities and grotesqueness of apartheid throughout his seven-decade career. Muholi, who considered Goldblatt a “mentor, friend and father figure”, has selected more than 40 photographs from the 1970s and 1980s that capture the contradictions Goldblatt observed between the lives of white and Black South Africans. The son of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants, Goldblatt often felt alienated as a teenager and began to photograph the miners and landscape of the white-only town where he was born. Although he did not consider himself an activist, his desire to navigate and document a world that others did not, or could not, resulted in some of the most invaluable records of apartheid and the liberation movement. The show has been organised in collaboration with Yancey Richardson Gallery, which represents Muholi.

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