5 Under-Recognized Artists Getting Their Due in New York, Spring 2026

Domenico Gnoli’s L’inverno (Couple au Lit), from 1967, must rank among the least intimate images of a very intimate act ever committed to canvas. In it, the Italian painter shows a man and a woman in missionary position, with a sheet pulled all the way up to their hairlines. Though it’s possible to get a glimpse of the man’s legs between his mate’s unnaturally long thighs, Gnoli paints the scene so that there’s more attention to the paisley bedspread, which appears to seal these people’s bodies in place. Like so many other works by Gnoli, this one is pallid and cold. In its own funky way, it’s also delicious.

To call Gnoli, who died at 36 in 1970, under-recognized feels wrong, given that he had a retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2021 and appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale. But he truly isn’t well-known in the US, which has seen few shows devoted to him. It’s a fact that’s surprising, considering how current his art feels right now. Back in 2018, when the figuration craze really got going, Andrew Russeth remarked in this magazine that younger painters are “attuned to humor (slapstick looms large), fixated on the body, rapacious in their mining of both art history and the broader culture (from TV to Internet memes), and most of all, determined to impart pleasure.” Nearly all of those qualifiers could apply to Gnoli.

The paintings in this exquisite show, one of the year’s best in New York so far, depict a range of off-kilter subjects: a woman’s wavy brown hair, the corner of a brick wall, a starchy chemise lain across a table. Most paintings here are claustrophobically composed, so that their subjects are pressed uncomfortably close to the viewer, and quite a few adopt a clinical palette of whites and greys. (Even when pink appears, Gnoli blunts the hue’s vibrancy.) These paintings are all jokey studies in emotional detachment, a sensibility made plain in Back View (1968), in which Gnoli paints the verso of a canvas. Called upon to present itself for admiration, the painting gives us its backside.

Through May 23, at 19 East 64th Street

Raquel Rabinovich’s painting It Is So Dark It Is Transparent (1998) seems at first to simply be a thicket of black scrawls; they’re laid atop each other so densely that the painting nearly looks like a monochrome. In fact, the void contains a hidden message: the painting’s title, written in Jasper Johns–like stencils that only emerge from the inky background upon extended viewing. My iPhone camera seemed to have an easier time making out Rabinovich’s mysterious words than I did at first, which makes sense: the painting is about all which the eye cannot see.

Rabinovich, who died at 102 this past January, specialized in somber, minimalist paintings like that one, which contend with the concept of withholding as a kind of protest. “Silence is a continuing refuge for me,” she once said. Born to a family of Jewish Romanians in Argentina, she was briefly imprisoned under the Perón regime for civil disobedience. Amid political upheaval during 1960s, she then left Argentina for good. She studied in France and Scotland, then moved to US in the ’60s and, in the ’90s, moved to Rhinebeck, about 100 miles north of Manhattan.

In that town, Rabinovich continued creating works in her “River Library” series, for which she enlisted collaborators to help harvest mud from faraway rivers. One piece from the series, included in the Hutchinson Modern show, features brown matter drawn from Peru’s Urubamba River, which Rabinovich affixed with glue onto paper so it looks like an open book. Much like Rabinovich, that mud is a transplant to the US from Latin America, though you’d only know it from reading the checklist. It’s a work that speaks quietly, in a language that’s understandable only to those already familiar with it.

Through May 9, at 47 East 64th Street

In its quest to expand the very notion of what constitutes America, the 2026 Whitney Biennial has made Mao Ishikawa, one of the few photographers in the show, a star. She has turned her lens on both Okinawa, the island where she was born in 1953, and cities across the US, often searching for commonalities among communities close to her home and far beyond it. But rather than making work about marginalization, Ishikawa frequently focuses on moments of celebration.

Many of the 30 photographs in her current Alison Bradley Projects show, billed as Ishikawa’s first in the US, have a rude, raucous quality. One shot from her 1975–77 “Red Flower (Akabanaa)” series features a group of topless women on the beach. Several twist up their faces as the tide unexpectedly rolls in, while another behind them sucks down a drink from a glass bottle. That Okinawans were at the time protesting the US’s handover of the island to Japan is largely not obvious from the image itself.

Other ensuing works continue the upbeat quality: one 1986 picture, from a series about Philadelphia’s Black community, features a nude woman who raises her hands and yells for joy. But a group of self-portraits shot around 2001 and 2002, after the artist received a diagnosis of rectal cancer, evince a more elegiac quality, with Ishikawa shown gripping a port for a colostomy bag in her torso. Looking her viewer dead in the eye, Ishikawa does not sentimentalize her illness. Yet in others pictures from the series, she flashes a big smile, as if to convey that there is still happiness to be found in living another day.

Through June 6, at 526 West 26th Street, #814

Most game-changing exhibitions take place in galleries or museums. But the one that reshaped postwar art history in Hawai‘i was held in 1954 in a condemned home. That year, four artists, each born in Hawai‘i to Japanese parents, showed their work in a house on Honolulu’s Metcalf Street; the director of the institution then known as the Honolulu Academy of the Arts saw it and brought it the museum. Thus was born the group known as Metcalf Chateau, whose name evokes grandeur (even though the site where it was formed faced demolition). That was intentional: this group, whose membership would come to include three more artists, was using abstraction to reimagine a world that was hostile to people of Japanese descent.

The Abstract Expressionism–inspired world the Metcalf Chateau artists conjured was gorgeous. Satoru Abe, a painter who died last year, is represented here by Skyward (1962), a painting in which three orbs composed of tree-like forms float freely through the clouds, unbound from the laws of gravity and naturalistic representation. Plant matter returns in paintings by Tadashi Sato, whose Untitled (Rock with Twig), from 1964, features three thin twigs set alongside a rock that appears to glow, beaming its inner light into a grayish void.

Not every work in this quietly remarkable show is so transcendent. An untitled Bumpei Akaji relief made ca. 1960 is greenish, lumpy, and hard, recalling infected flesh. It’s worth remembering that Akaji was drafted into the US armed forces in World War II, and that he saw combat in Italy. This piece doesn’t explicitly depict the horrors of that conflict, but it does evoke them, albeit obliquely, in the form of thin, alien beings that are connected by vein-like threads of copper. Altered by all they have witnessed, these people are gathered in small groups, standing watch.

Through May 9, at 515 West 26th Street

By the time Antonio Henrique Amaral painted Bla Bla Bla in 1966, Brazil was already two years into a military dictatorship that would stretch on for nearly two more decades. The painting is evocative of the chaos of the moment: it features two faces, each with three mouths, that yap away at each other, creating what I’d imagine to be a cacophony of crosstalk. Rather than outright depicting the upheaval he saw firsthand in São Paulo, Amaral got at it by painting unnaturally altered bodies, changed, perhaps, by the policies of a repressive regime.

Amaral’s paintings teeter between humor and horror. Tricephalic (1965), another work in this show, features a giant yellow being whose hollow head becomes a bowl, in which two nude women stand. That pair is enjoined by one big thumb whose nail is in dire need of trimming. Sexus (1967), meanwhile, depicts two green feet attached to a many-tongued orb. At the orb’s center is a giant eye—or is it a mouth?—that stares back at us menacingly. These paintings recall the anthropomorphism of a different Amaral: Tarsila do Amaral, a Brazilian modernist who happened to be Antonio’s great-aunt.

But rather than looking backward, the Nara Roesler show seeks to project the Amaral legacy forward, pairing his work with the art of Thiago Barbalho, a Brazilian painter who is several generations young. Hung claustrophobically alongside works by his forbear, Barbalho’s semi-abstractions pale in comparison because they offer none of Amaral’s shocking body horror. The exhibition does, however, convincingly suggest that biomorphism remains a staple of art-making in Brazil, which only recently crawled out from the clutches of another government accused of authoritarianism.

Through May 2, 511 West 21st Street