Artists Revisit the Nude in Must-See Shows Across New York

You wouldn’t necessarily know it, but Seung Ah Paik’s Self Configuration: Indian Yellow 1 (all works 2026) is a self-portrait. Set against a mustard-colored background is a woman’s nude torso attached to a fleshy mass containing another torso, another leg, and a breast. Paik’s face is nowhere to be found in this painting, which looks back to both Hans Bellmer’s Surrealist doll assemblages of the 1930s and feminist revisitations of the nude of the 1970s. Depending on who’s looking at Self Configuration, this painting may appear horrifying or gorgeous. If you ask me, I’d say both adjectives are applicable.

We are all no more than walking meat sacks, which is something that Paik both recognizes and refuses to romanticize. Working with pigment affixed to long stretches of unbleached cotton, she often paints skin so thinly that it appears ashen and dry. The calloused feet she represents are in need of a pedicure; her tangles of veiny arms and legs are ridged with thin yellow lines. Nothing about the body is made beautiful by this Pittsburgh-based painter, who was born in Seoul and trained in that city and London.

Perhaps that’s why her elegant “Autolandscape” series, where the artist can be seen looking down or facing away, feels like a letdown. Here again, Paik declines to present her face to the viewer. But the sharpness of these works, with their pale blue backgrounds, makes for easier looking. By contrast, the towering paintings from the “Self Configuration” series feature arced backsides and knotted arms that rarely ever come fully totally into focus. That’s why they’re so entrancing.

Through May 30, at 39 Walker Street.

The background of a self-portrait can sometimes be more telling than the image of the artist contained within. That much is at least true of Joan Semmel’s Statuesque (2025), in which the nude artist places one leg on a stool and leans her weight across it. Semmel nearly fills the canvas with her body, rendered in drippy, thinned-down oil paint that threatens to cross the blue outline separating her purplish torso from the yellow field adjacent to it. That her washy paint leaks from the figure into its surroundings is no accident.

Nude bodies have been Semmel’s focus for decades—her excellent ones from the ’70s are included in a mini-survey at the Jewish Museum uptown—and though she has been painting herself for much of that time, she is currently the lone subject of her oeuvre. Now in her 90s, Semmel appears in every one of her new paintings, leaving little to the imagination in the process. She continues to paint herself with a brilliant matter-of-factness, seemingly in defiance of the fact that aging female bodies are still rarely depicted in artworks shown in commercial spaces. One 2025 painting of herself in a white chair, her legs slightly spread apart, is even titled Here I Am.

Yet however direct works such as that one may be, Semmel also applies her semitranslucent strokes in multiple hues, making it so that her figures feel spectral, as though they were coming apart in real time. It’s an effect most notable in the works in this remarkable show where she represents herself two times over. One of them, titled Partners (2024), features the artist in repose, pushing herself up with one arm, with another version of herself stationed nearby. The lying figure is partially see-through, providing a clear view of the second Semmel’s face. It looks a bit like a soul leaving its body.

Through May 30, at 394 Broadway.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget Juanita McNeely’s 1985 painting Pre-Abortion Law Remembrance, in which a nude woman splays her legs before a faceless figure wielding hooks and machinery. A creature with a dog-like face blankly stares on as this evil wraith does its worst, tearing apart his female subject, whose abdomen has already been split open. McNeely had herself received an abortion before it was legal in the US, in 1967, nearly dying in the process, and she depicted her experience in a harrowing 1969 painting now owned by the Whitney Museum. But that work pales in comparison to this later one, which is even more graphic.

Pre-Abortion Law Remembrance is one of eight works in this concise exhibition, which shows how McNeely, who died in 2023, had a knack for painting bodies in states of physical and psychological torment. Often, her subject matter was not quite so explicitly political as it was in her 1969 painting—her titles didn’t always reference current events. But the act of repeatedly depicting mixed-up, contorted female bodies, as McNeely did throughout her career, speaks well enough for itself. Whether intentionally or not, she seems to have shown that violence against women did not end with the expansion of their rights in this country.

The works in the James Fuentes show are all characterized by cascades of blue-tinted objects that threaten harm to the women around them: Twisted, from the late ’80s, features a tumult of tables and chairs that rains down upon a cowering woman, and Caught (2007) shows a horse-headed female figure wrapped up in a fishing net. However terrible these paintings may be, they also feel like necessary ways of reflecting back the violence McNeely witnessed. One 2000 painting, for instance, features a nude figure pressing its arms and legs against two tall mirrors and screaming. The painting is titled Holding Back—not that that is something McNeely would ever have done.

Through May 16, at 52 White Street.

This small survey is a perfect marriage of artist and curator: Rocío García is a Cuban artist who paints pictures of bodies under duress, while Carmen Maria Machado is an American writer of Cuban descent who specializes in body horror. Both are closely attuned to uneven power dynamics, which may be one reason García and Machado thought to foreground the artist’s Los patinadores (The Skaters, 2023), in which a quartet of headless, nude men chained at the neck skates through a prison cell. García painted these chiseled men Day-Glo pink, lending them a homoeroticism that appears at odds with their forbidding cell. That we are meant to take pleasure in looking at their decapitated bodies only makes these pictures even more uneasy.

Bound figures recur across García’s paintings here, though it’s not always clear whether the conditions of their restraint are consensual, since the artist leaves us without information needed to make that assessment. The 2021 painting Lluvia azul (Blue Rain), for one, shows a nude woman placing flowers in a vase while, to her right, another woman lies on a bed, her feet cuffed together. Whether that second woman is the seated one’s paramour or her victim, or some strange combination of the two, is left ambiguous.

And sometimes, it’s not even clear whether García’s bodies even belong to human beings. In one painting, she portrays a man—once again one without clothes and a head—seated on a bare mattress, rifle in hand. His legs culminate not in feet but flower-like appendages. Might he represent a dehumanized authority figure, The Man personified? García leaves that ambiguous, too, lending this painting its charge.

Through September 20, at 26 Wooster Street.

E’wao Kagoshima, the recent subject of a long-overdue survey at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, remains one of the New York art scene’s best-kept secrets. Born in the Japanese city of Niigata in 1945 and based in New York since 1976, Kagoshima is known for paintings of humanoids that exist in surrealist worlds all their own. But this show puts a focus on a lesser exhibited side of his art—works focused on cyborgian beings and corporeal perturbations.

Ulterior Gallery’s exhibition is dominated mainly by Kagoshima’s collages, the oldest of which was produced ca. 1976. That one—which Kagoshima did not title, as is the case with all but one of the works in this exhibition—features a noseless figure dangling from a string of frankfurter-like forms. He’s about to drop into the blue abyss, which seems like a metaphor when you consider the word emblazoned across his fingernails: “MONGOLOID,” a racist, ableist epithet used to demean Asian people as subhuman. This figure appears to be the monster society made him into.

Kagoshima was equally attuned to all that technology had wrought upon humanity, a topic he tackled in one 1980 collage prominently featuring a photo of a lithe man clipped from a gay porn magazine. Wearing only a jockstrap, this hunk has a partially disassembled television for a face, its screen bearing an image of a smiling woman. This collage reworks an old adage—we are what we consume—and suggests that our bodies become altered in the process.

Through June 6, at 424 Broadway, #601.

Jo Messer’s newest paintings are so densely loaded with strokes that they may at first appear abstract. Step back a few paces, and watch in awe as bulging feet, slender legs, and erect phalli emerge from the ether. It’s an effect most notable in Bait me in (all works 2026), a painting composed of three panels, the central one of which features a cascade of fish with gaping mouths. On either side are more of Messer’s piled-up bodies. The work’s title underscores that this is a painting about the art of seduction—the act of reeling someone in hook, line, and sinker.

Messer’s paintings owe quite a bit to Cecily Brown, whose most famous gestural abstractions are about states of orgiastic pleasure. But where Brown, more than two decades Messer’s senior, tends toward the baroque and the grandiose, Messer works at a scale that is comparatively more intimate. Plus, the younger artist never entirely hides her figures, making it so that you cannot forget that her bodies are always present, even if they do exist in uncertain states of visibility.

Messer’s sensual paintings sometimes tip over into outright eroticism, and they are not necessarily better for it. Here kitty kitty has a subject that’s about as plainly obvious as the painting’s name: two figures doing it doggystyle. That sexually explicit image won’t quite recede into the background, even though that act ought to be harder to see in order to make its point more effectively. Still, when Messer is working in a subtler mode, pulling paint around so that it both hides and reveals her figures, she proves that she’s an artist worth watching.

Through May 17, at 56 Henry Street and 105 Henry Street.