The Five Trippiest Shows to See in New York Right Now

From Kim Gordon and ‘Zizou’ to actual dinosaurs and AI-generated artworks in MoMA’s sculpture gardens, our New York correspondent brings you her pick of the best – and strangest – shows from across the five boroughs.

Land Before Time: Three Dinosaurs and a Gondola

Amanita
Until 9 August

Would you rather own a John Chamberlain or a dinosaur? A Chamberlain is less expensive: the auction record for one is US$5.5 million (£4.1m), whereas the record for a dinosaur is US$44.6m (£33.2m). But are dinosaurs as relevant as conceptual art? Again, to date, there have been zero blockbuster movies about conceptual art, whereas the seventh Jurassic Park movie came out just last year, starring Scarlett Johansson.

The show is made up of three dinosaur skeletons excavated in the US, and in the middle there’s one of Chamberlain’s signature crushed steel works, Gondola Marianne Moore (1982). Which one of these has aged better, and how and why did they end up together here? Because they’re both from an ancient era? The intern at the front desk couldn’t tell me, but the best exhibitions are the ones that raise questions. After seeing this, I have more. 

Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Until 19 July

Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Zidane, a 21st century portrait, 2006. Two-channel color video projection, with sound, 90 min at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: Anders Sune Berg, courtesy ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and Gagosian.

If you’re not sick of football at this stage of the World Cup, head to Guggenheim’s basement to immerse yourself in sweaty close-ups of French football star Zinedine Zidane. The 90-minute film by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno was highly acclaimed when it was released in 2006, following ‘Zizou’ from the perspective of 17 synchronised cameras placed around the arena over the course of a single match in Madrid. 

For this special presentation, which coincided with the start of the tournament last month, the museum unearthed this treasure from its collection and has presented it as a monumental two-channel video projection that will hypnotise you into thinking that football is actually a high-brow form of performance art. I met someone at the show who said he was betting his entire tax return on France. That’s beautiful. That’s the real art.

Kim Gordon: Count Your Chickens

Amant
Until 16 August

Installation view of Kim Gordon Count Your Chickens, Amant, Brooklyn, NY. Photo: New Document

Some think Kim Gordon is a stronger musician than an artist, or remember her as the cofounder of Sonic Youth, but they overlook the fact that she trained at the Otis Art Institute in the 1970s and has maintained a lifelong art practice. That duality underpins the range of work Gordon has made over the last two decades, spanning from paintings to ceramics. During this time, Gordon has gained blue-chip representation with 303 Gallery, but music remained tethered to her art-making. 

In an adjacent gallery, she co-curated an exhibition of her noise music peers with Bill Nace, with whom she formed the experimental band Body/Head in 2012, one year after Sonic Youth played their last show. A centrepiece of Gordon’s exhibition is Jeanetta and Alex (2026), a newly commissioned film scored by Gordon showing a sexually tense moment mediated by electric guitars. 

Peter Bradley: Burning On

Karma
Until 28 August

Peter Bradley, Your Embrace, 2026. Acrylic, thread and shellac on canvas.

Peter Bradley believes that colour always comes before concept. His latest paintings, all made this year, reveal a process in which pools of paint collide and settle into luminous forms. The paintings don’t illustrate an idea, but meaning emerges through colour itself. They evoke topographical maps and aerial views, underwater worlds, solar flares or otherwise unseen microcosms. Some are embedded with found objects, reinforcing the sense that each canvas is a living terrain.
Bradley often thinks about rhythm and harmony while he paints. This influence surfaces most directly in works like Coltrane’s Nebula, nodding to the similarly improvisational spirit of John Coltrane while suggesting a cosmic space. Bradley’s method of pouring paint on the canvas allows movement to shape the image and transforms colour into immersive energetic fields.

Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt

Museum of Modern Art 
Until 29 November

UUmwelt, LUMA Foundation, Arles, exhibition view 2021 © Kamitani Lab/Kyoto University and ATR. Photo: Ola Rindal

Pierre Huyghe’s hallucinatory, AI-generated visions have been reborn in MoMA’s sculpture garden after their debut at the Serpentine Galleries in 2018. A series of freestanding screens are fitted with so-called ‘gaze sensors’ that allegedly track where and how visitors look, generating input for the images produced. ‘It’s watching you as you watch it,’ is something Terence McKenna might have said if he had lived long enough to witness the AI era.

Huyghe and Japanese neuroscientists recorded a volunteer’s brain activity as they were told to imagine images, then overlaid that data with computer simulations of cancer cell mutations. The work produces a stream of pixelated images that make you nostalgic for Google DeepDream and other purer forms of AI. 

It’s great for summer and the weeks going into the fall. While the garden’s fountains provide the ASMR, the AI and Modernist sculpture create a dissociative experience. It’s good if that’s the kind of thing you’re into.