Summer is basically already here in NYC, which means half of us are plotting our escape. And for those of us who have not – despite perfectly good intentions and an overly optimistic savings account – acquired a second home to flee to, I have a solution. It’s called: NYC galleries, baby. Slip into a cold, air-conditioned room inside a prewar or postwar building filled with millions of dollars of art, and just pretend you live there.
As someone who spends A LOT of time doing exactly that, I rounded up the six best shows to escape to in June. I’m Rose, the author of The Rose Period – a newsletter about the special, the unusual, and the slightly unexpected stories from the art world that you should know – and here’s what to see in June.
This column is sponsored by Showrunner, the most comprehensive guide to art in NY & LA, and Elephant Magazine, a global art publication specializing in artist-led coverage. See the full list of exhibitions on Showrunner.
- Gustav Klimt drawings at Gladstone (through 6/17)
Everyone knows the gold-leaf Klimt kiss that has somehow ended up on suburbia’s tote bags and college dorm walls. This is the other Klimt. Small, intimate drawings — fast, frank, a little erotic, the ones he mostly kept for himself.
If Klimt’s gold-drenched showstoppers are le plat principal, these drawings are the handwritten grocery list tucked into a kitchen drawer. You’re not supposed to see it during the dinner party, but oops…you do! And you know him all the better for it.
It helps that it’s peak escape mode: cool marble, uptown rooms, and a century of history on paper. (Gladstone is presenting the show with Richard Nagy, the dealer who has spent decades championing this corner of Klimt.)
The IYKYK: Klimt never painted a self-portrait. Instead, he focused on “other people, especially women.” He looked at those women so frankly that Vienna was scandalized for years. Come see what all the fuss was about!
- Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner (through 6/26)
A little controversy, anyone? Lisa Yuskavage has spent three decades making paintings people can’t seem to agree on: virtuosic figures — blonde, big-breasted, rosy-cheeked women who always remind me of Vermeer’s Milkmaid, had she lived in Bushwick in 2026.
Some call it sexism, others call it empowerment. Either way, she helped revive figurative painting in the 1990s, and her work now hangs in MoMA and the Whitney.
This show — her tenth with Zwirner — is a mashup of new paintings, works on paper, and, for the first time, collage.
Come for the air conditioning, stay for the color: electric pinks, greens, and oranges.
The IYKYK: Yuskavage studied the Old Masters — Bellini, Bronzino, Rembrandt — with near-religious devotion, and then went home and read Penthouse. Her whole career is a funky little mash up of the two.
- Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian (through 7/2)
Helen is one of the first painters I fell in love with. She’s one of NYC’s infamous 9th Street Women—the postwar group of artists who broke through the Abstract Expressionist boys’ club and changed American art in the process.
When Helen was just 23 in 1952, she poured thinned paint directly onto raw canvas – letting the color soak directly into the fabric. Enter: the stain-soak technique. It was so influential that it inspired an entire generation of painters like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
This show is Helen at her best: big washes of color that drift across the canvas like cotton-candy clouds, somewhere between landscape and abstraction. Some of her largest works are here, and the scale is what I love most. You don’t just look at these paintings—you get lost in them.
The IYKYK: Helen’s Mountains and Seabwas ground zero for soak-stain — and she painted the whole thing from memory, off one summer trip to Nova Scotia.
- Gehard Ritcher at David Zwirner (through 7/10)
Oh, to be a Gerhard Richter painting! The German master is one of the most beloved living artists working today – and his works have fetched some of the highest prices ever paid to a living painter. Charmingly, he started his career as a sign painter.
This exhibition is all about the landscapes. And what a thrill they are to see!
Richter turned snapshots from his travels—Corsica being the trip that started it all—into paintings over forty years. Hung chronologically, the show lets you watch his evolution from photorealism toward abstraction in one tidy lap.
The real magic is the juxtaposition. Richter’s dreamy landscapes hang alongside his abstract paintings—not to highlight their differences, but to show how close they really are.
For me, his tour de force is the hazy trees and mountains. Muted but never dull. They hover somewhere between a place and a memory (thanks to Richter’s signature blur).
The IYKYK: Some of those million-dollar abstracts hanging nearby were made with a tool you’ve got in your shower: a squeegee. Richter drags it through layers of wet paint, dredging up whatever’s underneath — and voilà, a masterpiece!
Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth.
- Phillip Guston at Hauser & Wirth (through 7/10)
Guston is one of those guys whose fingerprints you can spot from a mile away — the cartoon heads, the dangly lightbulbs, and an almost queasy pink. He came up as a star of 1950s Abstract Expressionism, the same New York School as Jackson Pollock (literally his high school classmate).
This show is what happened afterward: when Guston retreated to a quiet Woodstock life with his wife, the poet Musa McKim. It gathers his most tender, domestic paintings — along with his Poem Pictures, drawings he made in direct convo with Musa’s poems.
Musa was an artist in her own right, and thank GOD she’s getting her due.
The paintings are small, strange, and so intimate you feel like maybe you should’ve knocked before looking.
The IYKYK: Guston is famous for making a whole new meaning from pink — I wrote about it in the history of pink here.
- Women Across America 1945-1979 at Eric Firestone Gallery (through 7/11)
How many of you learned about women artists in elementary school? Be honest — was it Frida Kahlo, at best? This show puts an end to all of that.
We’re talking a full survey of American women artists working after World War II. There will be names you’ve heard of — Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner — and names you haven’t: Mary Abbott, Adaline Kent, Nina Yankowitz.
And we cover a lot of ground: Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, the studio-craft movement, feminist art from the ’70s — made by women all over the country, from downtown NYC to the Bay Area to New Orleans. I walked out with notes full of women to rabbit-hole later — and that, dear readers, is exactly the point.
The IYKYK: One of the most famous photographs of American Abstract Expressionism is Nina Leen’s 1951 portrait for Life, “The Irascibles” — a room full of guys and one single gal. That painter was Hedda Sterne – and she has prime time work in this Eric Firestone show.
