10 Galleries to Visit Now Around SoHo and TriBeCa

And so the hottest gallery neighborhood in New York is … nowhere in particular! With rents ever higher in Chelsea’s old garages and the Lower East Side’s tenements, nearly a dozen homesteading dealers have moved to a few blocks of terra nullius hemmed in by SoHo, TriBeCa and the Civic Center. Centered on Walker Street, these galleries — a mix of Chelsea refugees, peripatetic veterans of downtown and a few new kids — have imparted fresh energy to one of Lower Manhattan’s last ungentrified zones.

This downtown ramble begins in NoHo, where three strong galleries cluster on Great Jones Street. Then cross Houston Street; though boutiques long ago supplanted artists in SoHo, some interesting art spaces remain. Work your way east once you’re below Canal, and, if you’re up for more after the last stop, scarf down some dumplings and strut into Chinatown, home to young galleries like 56 Henry, MEN and New Release.

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NoHo

EVA PRESENHUBER through April 27; 39 Great Jones Street, presenhuber.com. Last year this stalwart Zurich-based dealer opened a New York outpost, where a hot-colored delectation from the Austrian installation artist Gerwald Rockenschaub is on view only through Friday night. Affixed to the main gallery’s walls are rectangles, ovals and triangles of solid blue, violet, gold and green; some are painted, while others are whisper-thin acrylic panels, slightly mirrored and bolted to the wall. The play between paint and object reveals Mr. Rockenschaub as the rare perfectionist who doesn’t take perfection too seriously, and he’s even better when he lets his hair down, as he does in five small, inscrutable paintings — hieroglyphs, really — of dashed black lines on lacquered MDF. If you can’t get there in time, the next exhibition (May 5) promises a very different sensation: seething paintings by Josh Smith, offering expressionistic heat where Mr. Rockenschaub offers geometric cool.

AICON through May 12; 35 Great Jones Street, aicongallery.com. A different kind of colorful minimalism is at this gallery specializing in modern and contemporary art from South Asia and its diasporas. Here the veteran Rasheed Araeen, who emigrated from Karachi, Pakistan to London in 1964, is displaying several new tessellated abstract paintings, though even stronger are his wall-mounted wooden sculptures, formed of repeated squares and diagonals and painted solid colors that sometimes parallel and sometimes interrupt the armature. And also on Great Jones Street, at No. 4, is Eric Firestone Gallery, where a strong exhibition of the painter Joe Overstreet (reviewed by my colleague Roberta Smith) is up until May 5.

SoHo

PETER FREEMAN, INC. through June 2; 140 Grand Street, peterfreemaninc.com. This gallery has one of the most reliably intelligent programs in New York, and currently hosts a melancholy exhibition by the Scottish sculptor Lucy Skaer. A burled block of yew, cut into the shape of an emerald, is topped by a ribbon of unfired clay; streamlined copper ingots have the dynamism of darting foxes; and a window propped against the wall has its panes replaced by pricey lapis lazuli. (Photographs disclose the window was excised from the artist’s childhood home.) As always, Ms. Skaer, a graduate of the powerhouse Glasgow School of Art, stakes her claim for sculpture that begins in pre-existing objects and images but, through memory and poetry, exceeds them.

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RONALD FELDMAN GALLERY through May 12; 31 Mercer Street, feldmangallery.com. Another SoHo holdout, this gallery arrived on Mercer Street in 1982; it often mounts shows of politically engaged work, and takes a particular interest in Jewish and Israeli artists. The group exhibition “Violated! Women in Holocaust and Genocide” features 30 artists whose art portrays the legacy of the Shoah for Jewish women, as well as female suffering in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Darfur. If much of the art here has greater moral clarity than aesthetic ambition, one searing work on paper makes the show worth a visit on its own: a vision of Auschwitz, picturing emaciated female prisoners and sadistic female kapos, drawn by the survivor Ella Liebermann-Shiber one month after the liberation.

BORTOLAMI through May 5; 39 Walker Street, bortolamigallery.com. When the shrewd Italian gallerist Stefania Bortolami relocated from Chelsea to Walker Street last spring, she ratified the emergence of this dowdy north TriBeCa street as an art world thoroughfare. Nicolás Guagnini, an artist on her roster, has curated a cerebral group show, “Human Applause,” whose artists imbue repeated forms with humanistic qualities. Sitting on a gridded bench by Superstudio, the radical Italian architecture firm, is an iPad looping a video by the Venezuelan painter Eugenio Espinosa, performing with a gridded fabric; a painting of repeated amoeboid forms by Claude Viallat, the grand man of the French movement Supports/Surfaces, continues the play between repetition and creation. (Opening this weekend here is a second show of chopped-and-screwed landscapes by the Brazilian painter Marina Rheingantz.)

TriBeCa

ARTISTS SPACE through May 6; 55 Walker Street, artistsspace.org. It hasn’t yet moved into its new permanent home on White Street, but this enduring nonprofit, led now by Jay Sanders, the Whitney’s performance alumnus, is doing what it does best from its Walker Street rental: essential shows by emerging artists and by historical figures too little celebrated. The Chicago painter Miyoko Ito (1918-1983), who was born in Berkeley and interned during World War II, is one of the latter: her strange abstract paintings, informed as much by Giorgio Morandi’s sallow still lifes as by the legacy of Surrealism, come as a revelation. In a palette of chartreuse, ocher, cinnamon and gamboge, Ito overlaid uncommon shapes, such as a rectangle rounded and pinched at the top like a loaf of Wonder Bread, into compositions of preternatural calm.

LUBOV through May 6; 373 Broadway, No. 207, lubov.nyc. A resonant quintet of color photographs by the young artist Jenna Westra currently occupies this postage stamp of a gallery. Three bright young things sit half-dressed on a floor of lucent green; a model in a Mao-collar blouse winces as another squeezes the juice of a lemon into her open mouth; and, in a related video, performers in various states of dress pose, pout, and press their feet to the leaves of a pineapple. If these images draw on the off-kilter glamour of Torbjørn Rødland and Wolfgang Tillmans, Ms. Westra also takes a feminist scalpel to earlier art and literature that equated young women with budding flowers and ripe fruit.

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THE NATIONAL EXEMPLAR through May 20; 59 Franklin Street, thenationalexemplar.squarespace.com. This small space run by the Argentine artist Eneas Capalbo is presenting a lovely art history lesson: a student work by Keith Sonnier, better known for his mature works with neon. Back in 1966, for his M.F.A. thesis show at Rutgers, Mr. Sonnier presented postminimal sculptures with inflatable components, one of which sits on the floor here: a plywood triangular prism, painted a matte lilac, is attached via a flexible duct pipe to a linen bag that takes the same shape when inflated by a whining fan on a timer. It’s an equation of solid and air that turns asymmetric just as soon as it’s complete.

POSTMASTERS through May 12; 54 Franklin Street, postmastersart.com. Magda Sawon, the Polish art dealer and Twitter wit who has run this gallery for more than three decades, made headlines this month when she put out her cap for online donations — necessary, she wrote, as art hardens into a winner-take-all market. Postmasters is a reliable venue for exhibitions by midcareer figures with a slightly kooky posture; case in point, its current show by David Herbert, dominated by a Flying Dutchman of charred wood and a sinister black sewing machine that recalls the torture device in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” A series of comic-like drawings, featuring a bewigged skeleton who dances and cradles a machine gun, doubles down on the macabre.

Chinatown

BAXTER ST. AT THE CAMERA CLUB OF NEW YORK through May 12; 126 Baxter Street, baxterst.org. Our last stop is one of the oldest arts organizations in town: a photographic circle founded in 1884, which counts Alfred Stieglitz and Richard Avedon among its alumni and which relocated four years ago to this street where the courthouse neighborhood melts into Chinatown. Amanda Gutiérrez, a Mexican photographer based in New York, has recently opened an evocative exhibition here: In “Walking in Lightness,” her images of Sunset Park apartment blocks, storefronts and fruit vendors are printed with variable dye shifts or collaged on top of each other. The shifts and overlays become redolent metaphors of home and displacement.