Blink and You’ll Miss It! 3 New York Shows With Painfully Short Runs

Once upon a time, gallery exhibitions had much shorter runs than they do now. Jasper Johns‘s pivotal debut with Leo Castelli on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 1958 ran from just January 20 to February 8. In 1981, Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities” drawings had only a three-week run at Metro Pictures in SoHo. These days, a standard run is perhaps five or six weeks, or longer. (Nan Goldin’s current show at Gagosian in London has been up for two months.)

What accounts for the change? There’s a lot more competition for people’s attention now, given the proliferation of galleries (never mind streaming services) in recent decades, so a longer run makes sense. Also, mounting shows is expensive, and they are not necessarily how art gets sold. A successful dealer told me recently that, while he loves staging exhibitions, works tend to sell only when he carts them to a far-flung fair, where collectors actually buy. Strange times!

A modest countermovement is afoot, though: Intriguing exhibitions have been appearing with startlingly short runs. Here one minute and gone the next, these short-run affairs will not wait around for you, and they proffer potential thrills, as well as bragging rights. Like a limited-time retail sale, they reward those who act. “Oh, you didn’t know about that show?” you can tell your peers. “You missed it? That’s too bad.”

Below, three exhibitions that are on view, very briefly, in New York right now.

1. “Ryan Foerster: Going Green,” Kerry Schuss Gallery, March 7–14

The freewheeling New York artist Ryan Foerster just finished a solo exhibition at Kerry Schuss at the end of last month! But here he is again, back for an encore. Last time, he showed scintillating, fiery red photographs that he made by leaving film out in his Brighton Beach studio while he was away in Europe. This time, his experimental photographs are green—the result of using Kodak film, instead of Fuji, which he left outside as it snowed. They’re abstract records of a tough winter. They are beautiful. They have endured. Like the marks in the images, the show happened by chance. Foerster installed the works so that they could be photographed, and Schuss, one of our most adventurous dealers, told him to leave them up and do a quick show. Thank goodness.

2. Tenko Presents: “On the Never Never” at Reena Spaulings Fine Arts, March 8–March 28

Since 2022, Tenko Nakajima Glenewinkel has been staging scrappy, short shows under the name Tenko Presents throughout Tokyo: in her house, a karaoke parlor, a construction site, and—why not?—some actual galleries. Now she has landed in New York for a three-week stand at Reena Spaulings, which is still keeping it cool after all these years. Her six-person group features both Reena artists (Stephan Dillemuth, Josephine Pryde) and curveballs, like Seiji Inagaki, the creator of captivating erotic drawings that I should not describe here, and Thomas Cap de Ville, whose scrapbooks with explicit imagery are pieced together with tape. The tone is punkish, fetishistic, and very pleasing. Someone please convince the dealer to get a permanent space.

3. “Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart” at Mnuchin Gallery, March 11–15

This is not a gallery show, but its run is short and it would be a shame to miss it. It’s a preview of an auction of works collected by the storied dealer Robert Mnuchin, who died last December, at the age of 92. Sotheby’s will offer some of his holdings in May at the Breuer Building, but for now they reside a few blocks north, in the Upper East Side townhouse where he staged potent exhibitions of leading 20th-century names, guiding the taste of his era’s wealthiest collectors. There’s an airy and beguiling 1983 Willem de Kooning, a brawny 1960 Franz Kline, and Jeff Koons’s Louis XIV (1986)—art for Masters of the Universe. The highlight is a smokehouse 1957 Mark Rothko, all smoldering reds and browns, which Sotheby’s thinks may sell for as much as $100 million. When I stopped by this week, a couple sat on the gallery’s spiral staircase, alone together, soaking it in. A wise move. For a few days, these works are available to us all, free of charge. After the bidding finishes, there’s no telling if we’ll ever see them again.