In 2020, the beloved Frick temporarily relocated to the former Whitney Museum’s Brutalist Breuer building. Five years later, the museum has re-opened with a glorious 220 million dollar renovation of the original Gilded Age mansion.
The Frick, once the sumptuous Fifth Avenue home of industrialist, financier, and art patron Henry Clayton Frick, has been a part of New York City’s cultural fabric since 1914. Its collection, which opened to the public in 1935, spans museum works from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, as well as sculpture and decorative arts. The highly personal treasure trove includes Goya, Rembrandt, Corot, Degas, Ingres, Brueghel, Millet, Holbein, Whistler, Veronese, Constable, and other masterpieces, and is refreshingly unfocused on religious art. Frick’s preference for landscapes and portraits reflects a modern sensibility.
The newly opened second floor, originally the private living quarters for the family, has significantly increased the exhibition space by 25% with ten additional gallery rooms. These ten smaller rooms are perfect for the domestic ephemera, including important horological treasures, ceramics, and a medal room. A particular highlight is George Romney’s “Lady Hamilton”, which hung above the fireplace in Frick’s bedroom and was the last painting he viewed upon his deathbed. The second floor also houses the 18th-century decorative panels by Francois Boucher, now seen in the sitting room of Adelaide Childs, Frick’s wife.
Starchitect Annabelle Selldorf has added a new auditorium, education centre, museum shop, cafe, and a sweeping marbled central staircase. These new features, along with the expanded exhibition space, make the Frick Collection a must-visit destination. Beginning April 26, a two-week musical festival will premiere in the state-of-the-art acoustical auditorium, adding another layer of cultural richness to the museum.
The first upcoming exhibition, opening in the new special exhibition gallery on June 18, presents three works by Johan Vermeer, focusing on the artist’s depiction of epistolary exchange. This exhibition will provide a unique opportunity to see these masterpieces up close and gain a deeper understanding of Vermeer’s artistic style and thematic focus. The major international loans will join the two other Vermeer treasures that are in the permanent collection.
The Frick Collection opens to the public on April 17 and is truly a moment of cultural celebration. Intimate, elegant, the meticulously renovated Frick remains one of New York’s abiding cultural treasures.
Camille Henro: Several Things – Hauser & Wirth Until 12 April
The day I visited Camille Henrot’s first solo show with the gallery, the artist was busily engaged with a classroom of delighted kids sitting on the green gridded rubber floor. Large-scale and patinaed bronze sculptures, plus a tribe of friendly and untethered canines, further the feel of a surreal playground or gym. Made of wood, steel, and mixed mediums, the dogs, with dangling leashes, range from cartoon cuteness to feral ferocity.
The “Abacus” (2024) series re-invents the ancient counting tool as a child-friendly structure, replete with arches, spirals and stacked beads made of tactile rubber. “Misfits”, a bronze cube, uses the etched metallic fluidity of the bronze cube to suggest the wrinkling of human skin.
Henrot has spoken of her work as “the interplay between the subjective and the objective.” This concept is reflected in her densely layered and abstracted paintings, combining paint, collage and printing in her “Dos and Don’t” series. These works explore society’s rules of conformity, authority and civility, incorporating details such as kids’ homework, German conjugations, medical invoices, and digital error messages. The poet transmutes the poetic in her deliberate and provocative choices, inviting viewers to contemplate how we live in a complex world. Mother to two young sons, the interdisciplinary French artist’s work reflects her familiarity with developmental tools and toys. Henrot has spoken of her childhood memories “when things are too big in a world made for adults.” She has also articulated her hopes that people will enjoy her created space. Camille Henrot offers sheer pleasure in her accessible and appealing work while exploring the creative contemplation of how we live in a complex world.
Catherine Goodman. Silent Music Hauser and Wirth until April 12. Ten large-scaled, brilliantly hued new paintings reflect Catherine Goodman’s profound relationship with drawing and classical art. The artist’s meditative practice has led her to “create a portal into other realms of consciousness.” Her previous work focused on landscapes and portraiture, which was influenced by her studies of Old Masters and her daily drawing practice. These latest monumental abstractions eschew figuration with masterful vitality and dense layers.
Gestural brushwork, often covering subterranean markings, invites the viewer to enter a whorl of colour-satiated energy. Energetic mark-making obscures the figurative shadows beneath the dense pigment. A palette that includes arabesques from sunset orange to forest green to electric blues and bursts of crimson feels weirdly contemporary in its optimism. These images allow the viewer to celebrate colour, energy, and power.
The sublime painting “Lago” is a vortex of explosive colours, counterbalanced by white, yellow, and fleshy pink corner flames. Ghostly white outlines could read as a topographical shorthand or a creature with one all-seeing eye. Framed in expressive swipes of evening blues and violet, the inner nucleus pulses with an energetic impasto vortex.
Goodman’s role as an educator is intrinsic to that of her artistic work. In 2000, she founded the Royal Drawing School in London, where she lives and works. Her forty-year career has been concurrent with teaching. Today, seventy-five artists instruct over three thousand students at the school where she began and continues as Artistic Director and board member.
Kianja Strobert: Marinaro Pennies from Heaven Closes April 5
When was the last time you were genuinely relaxed at an art opening? Imagine sprawling on the art itself, which is shockingly comfortable and visually arresting. Strobert’s installation of handmade pewter-coloured benches evokes communality, leisure, and social constructs. Benches are a much-needed blessing, a place to rest, hang out, and observe the world. How refreshing to be surrounded by great art while sitting. Made of wood, paper mache, metal, plastic and paint, the slatted seating invites viewers to sit, relax and contemplate. The attached ephemera adds a quirky layer of deliberately chosen domestica, flowers, ladles, photos, bread, and fabric. Additional interspersed sculptures can be read as disassembled wooden structures or powerful abstractions “24 Folded Forms” in the backroom festoons the wall with fabric swatches, also made of paper mache. Pieces range from engagingly themed prints, stripes, and blocks of colour to subdued pewter pewter tones. Alone, the pieces can be read as a singular poetic flag. Together, the forms present a seductive, visually rich undulation. The casual folds suggest a hastily hung towel or a singular break in a textile. Other folds are as deliberate and lyrical as traditional origami.
Thomas Scheibitz: Argos Eyes – Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Argos Eyes marks the artist’s return to the US after nearly five years. The exhibition’s title references the many-eyed giant of Greek mythology — the panoptic watchman who always kept one eye open. Like Argos, Scheibitz keeps constant watch, tracking and metabolizing the contemporary pictorial onslaught.
A large table holds an array of shapes and objects in one room. Some are recognizable: an apple painted blue, a postcard stack, a fragment of architectural ornament. Others are abstracted forms, perhaps popping up on a computer screen. Arranged with meticulous precision, like scalpels on a surgeon’s tray — these objects are instruments of his practice. A prolific painter and sculptor, Scheibitz is an observer and collector who finds hoards and layers and creates new forms.
Teetering between abstraction and figuration, a language of line and motif coalesces across both mediums—as though the artist’s forms leap between the paintings and finally into space. Argos Eyes is an electric-hued Atlas Mnemosyne, an encyclopedia of ‘moving accessories’ born, like a Greek deity, directly from the artist’s imagination.
Words/Top Photo: Ilka Scobie © Artlyst 2025 Photos courtesy of the various galleries mentioned