May 8, 2026

Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker.

The big show opens this weekend, and art seems to be just about everywhere in New York City. Tonight, I’m going to take you around town to see the incredible variety of works on offer. Downtown in Tribeca, you can see work by Robert De Niro’s father. Uptown, there’s a Scottish artist who paints abstractions on mirrors. And the very popular Danielle McKinney is back with a new show following her retrospective in Palm Beach.

Up top: The popular Gerhard-Richter.com has disappeared without explanation, Tiffany will host an art auction, and our partners at the Independent are moving to a new location.

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Also mentioned in this issue: Joe Hage, Damien Hirst, Loïc Gouzer, Jussi Pylkkänen, Elizabeth Dee, Matthew Higgs, Emma Webster, Michael Ovitz, Tamara Mellon, Ben Weyerhaeuser, Sarah Harrelson, Andrew Schoelkopf, Felix Rödder, and many more…

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Color in Motion

Nudo extends beyond a single design. With the Nudo bracelet, color unfolds across the wrist in a silhouette made to move with you. Each detail is crafted by hand and designed to catch the light. It embodies Pomellato’s creative ethos – jewelry without constraint.

As always, we start with a few smaller items…

Terms of Art

Where’s Gerhard-Richter.com?: Most people familiar with the Gerhard Richter market are aware of the compendium of all his works that was available, until recently, online. While not an official catalogue raisonné, the website performed many of the functions of one, with the added benefit of tracking auction prices. Many attribute the explosion of Richter’s market nearly 20 years ago, in part, to the existence of this website. So I was surprised when an appraiser mentioned to me several weeks ago that the site had gone away without any explanation. Naturally, I inquired about this at David Zwirner gallery, Richter’s current dealer. A representative responded that the gallery didn’t have a comment, but that “there is a phenomenal catalogue raisonné that spans six volumes that the artist is very proud of, here.”

The disappearance of the website seemed to be shrouded in as much mystery as its origins. Gerhard-Richter.com was the first in a series of artists’ websites built by a company associated with Joe Hage, a British litigator who likes to keep a very low profile; on a podcast in January, Damien Hirst said Hage “lives in the shadows.” Hage, who also owns the publisher and printmaker HENI, was often mentioned as a central figure in the Richter secondary market as it rose, and he seems to have had a good relationship with the artist. Hirst went on to call Hage his manager and then declared, in his Hirstian way, that “he’s Richter’s manager, he manages the [Francis] Bacon estate, he manages Peter Doig.” (There is a similarly comprehensive website for the works of Francis Bacon that is still online.)

It’s not clear to me that Hage has filled the role of manager with Richter or Doig, certainly not to the extent that he does with Hirst. But after a little digging, I did learn that the Richter Archives is planning to launch a new site for the artist some time in the future. So we won’t be without an online presence for Richter’s body of work forever.
Fair Warning x Tiffany: Loïc Gouzer’s next Fair Warning live auction will be held May 20 on the 10th floor of Tiffany’s landmark 57th Street flagship store. Banksy’s Girl and Balloon on Found Landscape, from 2012, is estimated at $13 million—the highest ever for a Banksy work. The painting, from Banksy’s Crude Oil series, features the artist’s best-known motif on a thrift-store-find painting. The live auction will be conducted by Jussi Pylkkänen. The artwork is now on view at Tiffany.
The Independent’s new home: I am not doing a talk at the Independent this season—the scheduling just didn’t work out—but I will be at the fair. I’m excited to see what Elizabeth Dee and Matthew Higgs have come up with on the “basketball pier.” The fair opens Friday at Pier 36 on the Lower East Side.

Now, let’s get to the main event…

Art Gangs of New York

As thousands of art tourists throng Manhattan for the planetary alignment of Frieze, TEFAF, and the Independent art fairs, endless gallery exhibitions are opening to capture their share of this river of capital. Herewith, a guided tour through some of the shows you won’t want to miss.

Marion Maneker

Art openings tend to come in waves. There were some last week, some this week and we’ll see more next week. Everyone wants their show to land on the agendas of the vast influx of curious art shoppers who will be in town next week to visit Frieze, TEFAF, and the Independent art fairs, not to mention the 1,635 works on view at the auction houses. If that sounds overwhelming, add these dozens upon dozens of new gallery shows, which have to be timed to perfection so they seem new and exciting and don’t get buried under the avalanche of big names.

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The Language of Nudo

Color sits at the center of Nudo. Each stone is selected for its nuance and individuality. The signature “naked” setting allows the gemstone to be the focal point, emphasizing its shape and depth. The result is a collection that feels effortless and distinctly personal, with pieces made to be worn every day, layered freely, and shaped by you.

Emma Webster, whom I interviewed last Wednesday, had the press preview and opening of her show, Rues and Leaves Themselves Alone, at the Petzel Gallery that same night. There I ran into Michael Ovitz and Tamara Mellon. I also got to spend some time with Emma’s partner, Ben Weyerhaeuser, whose podcast, Friday Heaters, and Instagram page are endlessly entertaining. (Mrs. Wallpower and I also saw Ben and Emma the next night at Sarah Harrelson’s annual glam fest at the Guggenheim for Cultured’s Cult 100 issue.) As our Inner Circle interview illustrated, Webster’s large-scale paintings are built from models she creates in digital form—a diorama-like twist on still-life painting. It’s a fascinating process, and the results are reminiscent of long traditions in painting while also feeling uncannily new.

I’ve also had the opportunity to visit a number of other noteworthy shows that haven’t received enough attention. As I look back on the past few weeks of openings, I realize I’ve left a few important ones out. With that in mind, I want to bring you along on my tour of the city these last few days as I’ve been dropping in on galleries and seeing people.

Back to Black

On Wednesday, I went to Tribeca to see Schoelkopf’s show New York City Circa 1960, which is focused on artists like Elaine de Kooning, Pat Passlof, Milton Resnick, Robert De Niro Sr., Wolf Kahn, and many others. It’s a privileged window into the now-famous 10th Street scene in Greenwich Village. The show is drawn from the collection of Robert Ellison, a painter, collector, gallerist, and so forth. Ellison was an aesthetic godfather to the gallery’s owner, Andrew Schoelkopf, and, among other things, a leading collector of ceramics. He was an expert on the work of George Ohr and donated important works to the Met.

Schoelkopf’s gallery has been in business for 25 years, specializing in American art, and this show is a fitting way to commemorate that anniversary. While I was in Tribeca, I stopped by Marian Goodman to see the Julie Mehretu show that’s been all over Instagram, the re-creation of Peter Hujar’s Gracie Mansion photography show at Ortuzar, and Luhring Augustine’s show of new paintings by abstract painter Emily Kraus. Kraus’s rhythmic abstractions are created using a “cube-like apparatus of her own design, a structure composed of steel struts that function as rollers, around which she loops raw canvas,” according to the gallery. Once she’s put the pigment on the canvas, she pulls it through the structure. The result is her hypnotic and unique images.

After my Tribeca tour, I ran uptown to have lunch with gallerist Felix Rödder and see his new show of work by the Scottish sculptor Karla Black. Rödder is building a program focusing on mid-career artists whose work is under-recognized, and Black is a perfect example. Her one museum show in the U.S. was cut short by Covid. When I saw the gallery show, Rödder had just been entertaining museum curators and stoking interest in Black’s brass mirror works, smeared with abstract patterns, that bring to mind rococo works by Fragonard or Flora Yukhnovich, who took inspiration from the French artist, too. Black also makes candy-colored gossamer paper sculptures that feature in the show.

Chelsea Girls

Yesterday, I finally had a chance to catch up on what’s happening in Chelsea. My first stop was Gagosian’s 21st Street location, where the gallery has installed a selection of large-scale Helen Frankenthaler paintings from each decade of her career. We’re in the midst of a Frankenthaler moment this season, and this show is acting as a reference point against which several large Frankenthalers at Sotheby’s and Christie’s will be measured. The good news is that all of these works are captivating. There’s a good chance the Frankenthaler market will reprice after collectors have seen all of this work.

I also stopped in at Tina Kim Gallery to see their show of works by Pacita Abad, the Philippines-born artist who traveled the world connecting with Indigenous craftspeople and learning their methods. Abad’s pieces are often fabric-based and hang, but they also function as colorful abstract works with real depth. Vito Schnabel has a selection of often-huge Francesco Clemente works made over the last 28 years under the rubric of a travel diary, all of which draw from the symbolism of Eastern and Western religions. One block south is Hauser & Wirth’s Philip Guston show, built around touching works on paper that Guston made from his wife’s poems.

Before I headed home, I went to Marianne Boesky to see the latest Danielle McKinney show. McKinney had a career in photography before taking up oil painting during the pandemic, so the retrospective of McKinney’s work currently at the Norton Museum in Florida only spans five years. Nevertheless, McKinney’s work is extremely popular among collectors. This show, which opens with a room of watercolors on paper, continues the evolution of McKinney’s moody, small works, usually set in dark, luxurious environments. In the past, McKinney’s faces were detailed, but here the brushwork is more gestural and restrained. Her images seem both familiar and synthesized from her imagination. And, of course, there are enough lit cigarettes in the images to make a blues singer feel right at home.

That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend. We’ll meet back here on Sunday night.

M

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