The gallery season runs from mid-September through June, then in July and August galleries are closed weekends.  The more stately uptown galleries start wrapping up their season a bit earlier, and therefore my ALL-NEW Upper East Side gallery tour on Sat. May 21 will be the FINAL Upper East Side tour of the season, while that neighborhood still has a large selection of terrific shows on view.  If you miss this one, you’ll have to wait until October or November for my next U.E.S. gallery tour, so take advantage!

Highlights of my Upper East Side tour will include: (1) early Warhol silkscreened Campbell soup cans, selling for $5 million each in a gorgeous gallery mansion (2) an artist from India who creates huge sculptures of common household objects, and (3) disturbing paintings of Suburbia, displayed in an elegant townhouse gallery.  These are 3 of several exhibits we’ll visit that day, all of them contemporary art.

The Upper East Side is known for having the most beautiful gallery spaces anywhere, and we’ll see a selection of some of the most glorious, before some of these galleries close for the summer altogether.  The art in the Upper East Side is more conservative than in downtown galleries, and therefore we’ll see a lot more painting on this tour than we typically see in downtown gallery neighborhoods.  No computer art, and not even photography on this particular U.E.S. tour.  It will be almost entirely contemporary painting and sculpture, and very accomplished and refined works at that, because that’s what the uptown galleries show.

For edgier kinds of art, do attend my few remaining Chelsea and Lower East Side tours in June, before their seasons end as well.  Quite a number of last-of-season exhibits that opened in Chelsea and L.E.S. this past week alone are going to make for some fantastic gallery tour viewing in the next few weeks.

The season is going to end with a bang.  Or, rather, several of them.

Rafael Risemberg, Ph.D.
Founder and Director
New York Gallery Tours