Chelsea art galleries and guide to galleries located in the Chelsea art district of New York. This Chelsea gallery directory features art galleries representing a wide variety of artworks. While Chelsea is known for its contemporary art, a number of the galleries also feature artworks by the Masters.

1. Openings In Chelsea Galleries March 3
2. Nyc Art Galleries Map
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NO gallery scene is static, but lately Chelsea’s has been especially in flux.

Its maze of galleries — New York’s most populous — now has the new Whitney poised on its southern edge. Yet towering apartment buildings are rising on nearly every block and rents are escalating, along with rumors. This makes it hard to tell what the future holds for galleries that don’t own their spaces — which is most of them; already some have closed, others have merged or moved. And one of the anchors of the neighborhood, the commodious brick building at 548 West 22nd Street that once housed the Dia Art Foundation, and recently played host to art fairs, is now slated for development. And yet, the neighborhood can still feel like a perpetual art fair — in a good way — with galleries of all sizes and orientations sifting through past and present in exciting ways.

CASEY KAPLAN

The pressure on galleries is reflected in Casey Kaplan’s relocation inland, to West 27th Street east of Seventh Avenue. The current show at the new address is Sarah Crowner’s third solo in New York — and her best yet. Working with a flexible geometric vocabulary, she produces paintings whose taut visual clarity is the result of meticulously sewing together contrasting pieces of painted or raw canvas. Ms. Crowner’s shapes are usually scavenged, suggesting that reality is rife with potential abstraction. A recurring pair of arabesques echoes a design used by the artist Ray Johnson in a backdrop for a 1957 fashion shoot in Harper’s Bazaar. An especially strong blue and white work magnifies a fabric pattern by the Austrian modernist Koloman Moser (1868-1918). In some new works, Ms. Crowner fragments her found shapes for greater complexity, a promising development.

SEAN KELLY

This gallery moved to splendid isolation just north of Chelsea — 10th Avenue, near 36th Street — three years ago when its West 29th Street space succumbed to development. The current show features the new work of Mariko Mori, best known for devising one of the first 3-D art videos, “Nirvana,” which was seen at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Its goofy mysticism included the artist as an exquisitely turned-out, levitating goddess. Ms. Mori’s latest efforts may be the dernier cri in both public plop-art sculpture and California Light and Space perceptual subtlety: Möbiuslike spirals and loops of fiberglass whose pearlescent surfaces blossom with color as you move around them. They’re beautiful and cheesy in about equal parts, but their weightless perfection and fleeting rainbows are something to see.

GALERIE LELONG

Perfectly poised between abstraction and landscape, the small, cogent paintings of the Lebanese-American writer and poet Etel Adnan stood out in Documenta 13 in 2012. Her largest New York show to date includes early pastels and tapestries that have the small fluttering shapes of Cézanne; ink studies of foliage or ink pots; and a film favoring blurry sunsets. But the stars here are the paintings, all new, and the expanses of light and space released by their palette-knifed slabs of singing blues, yellows and reds. Finding verbs in sentences. Sometimes the mountainous forms give way to more geometric arrangements. They prove that no artistic tradition is used up if you put enough of yourself in it.

ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES

You don’t have to be an unequivocal fan of Joan Semmel’s work to be thrilled by this small survey of five decades of explorations of paint, the body and sex. Her fearlessness is the through line, starting with two abstractions from the 1960s whose muscular forms and brusque paint-handling are reinforced by dark, radiant colors. Next come images of coupling bodies loosely painted in bright colors. But most pioneering are those images that eliminate the outside observer, portraying the artist’s reclining body, alone or with a partner, from her own point of view, which also becomes ours.

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY

In her first New York solo in five years, Jamie Isenstein continues her singular pursuit of self-effacing performance art and low-tech kinetic sculpture — mostly in the form of everyday objects animated by small flames, electric fans or the artist. Ms. Isenstein is present if invisible in (and inside) “Mechanical Bed,” where she makes the bedcovers mysteriously bunch up, wrinkle and smoothen, suggesting disembodied slumber. In “Eye Books,” electric fans flutter the pages of two sketchbooks filled with large watercolor images of eyes and eyelashes, as if (sort of) blinking. In two sculptures and nine photographs, Ms. Isenstein opts for a new stillness, creating a remarkable emotional animation through the layering of colorful masks.

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY

The best works in Tomás Saraceno’s show are as much science as art. They put us on intimate terms with spider webs, perhaps the most wondrous of all animal architecture and an inspiration for Mr. Saraceno’s suspended installation pieces. The webs here were built in boxy wire frames by a succession of different spiders then encased in Plexiglas. Exhibited with pinpoint lights in a darkened space, they achieve maximum visibility and reveal an astonishing variety. Some are so fine they look like clouds, while others are seemingly chaotic, fractal networks. All are engineering miracles, and one web is still under construction.

ZIEHER SMITH & HORTON

The galleries Zieher Smith and Sean Horton joined forces last year, doubling their abilities to find young or underexposed talent. The latest is Clare Grill, whose new paintings have a weblike delicacy of their own. Their almost monochromatic surfaces accrue in small free-form shapes of close shades of yellow, pink, magenta, brown or green laid on in textured brushwork. The quietly teeming surfaces bow to Paul Klee, bringing drawing’s intimacy to painting’s expanse. In “Grain” and “Peacock,” the shapes pull apart to reveal fluctuating shadows. Ms. Grill’s control of pictorial space is precise yet magical.

PETZEL

Like Mr. Saraceno, the Dutch artist Willem de Rooij melds art, science and nature, with craft folded in. The first things you see in the restrained spectacle of this show are four lavish bouquets in substantial vases on pedestals. You then notice the monochromatic tapestry panels on the walls; then the play of color among the flowers, the tapestries and the speckled surfaces of the vases and pedestals. Lastly you may notice that the flowers’ colors recur in the variegated warps and woofs of the tapestries, which are made of common thread. These increasingly fine perceptions quietly exalt nature as the source of all human genius.

MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY

Openings In Chelsea Galleries March 3

Alma Thomas (1897-1978) trained as an artist, worked as a public-school teacher in Washington and, once retired, devoted the last two decades of her life to making mosaiclike abstractions in step with their time. Surveyed in 29 canvases and watercolors, her dappled fields, stripes and concentric rings of color bring an energetic bluntness and unencumbered joy to the usual refinements of Color Field and Minimalism. In February the White House website showed its refurbished Old Family Dining Room with a recently acquired Thomas hanging in pride of place — the first artwork in its collection by an African-American woman. Her place in the history of postwar painting awaits definition.

MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY

Chelsea galleries, though referred to in monolithic, often dismissive terms, actually run the gamut from big-box and high-powered to small and scruffy. For proof, visit the artist cooperatives that date from 1970s SoHo at 530 West 25th Street or the block-through building at 547 West 27th Street, a kind of S.R.O. for galleries. One incentive for such a visit is Montserrat’s show of the little-known subway scenes made in the ’70s by Richard E. Brooks, a cinematographer and self-taught painter. They depict lonely men in dark stations or, more strikingly, in the green train cars of the era, jazzed up by the classic wicker seats and inexplicable gleaming white floors and ceilings. The best merge the urban Surrealism of George Tooker with the darker, more robust renderings of Horace Pippin. (Through Saturday.)

DON’T MISS

Ten minireviews can’t do justice to Chelsea’s art offerings. MITCHELL-INNES & NASH has a museum-quality, nearly comprehensive show of Joseph Beuys’s multiples (at 534 West 26th Street, through Saturday). At JACK SHAINMAN Hank Willis Thomas’s archival tour de force, titled “Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915-2015,” presents 100 carefully culled print ads that trace the halting progress of feminism and — by omitting nonwhite women — the even more dispiriting state of racial equality in this country (513 West 20th Street, through May 23). And in a seductive duo show called “Outer Loop” at MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA, Tony Cox’s embroidered paintings and Matthew Ronay’s painted-wood sculptures parlay color, craft and several Asian precedents into some of each artist’s best work yet (545 West 25th Street, through May 9). Beyond this, you’re on your own.

After Gallery-Hopping, Drinks

PORCHLIGHT It’s a bit of a hike to get there, but once you do the reception is friendly at this spacious new Danny Meyer bar. The breakout cocktail is the mezcal-based Gun Metal Blue, which is tinged indigo by blue Curaçao. There are homemade sodas as well. 271 11th Avenue, at West 28th Street, Chelsea; 212-981-6188, porchlightbar.com. ROBERT SIMONSON

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The five must-see artworks at this year’s Whitney Biennial

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