What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in October

Want to see new art in New York this weekend? Check out “Chopped & Screwed” at White Cube on the Upper East Side or see figures by Rita and France-Lise McGurn in TriBeCa. And don’t miss Tetsuya Ishida’s finely rendered nightmares in Chelsea.

Newly Reviewed

Upper East Side

‘Chopped & Screwed’

Through Oct. 28. White Cube, 1002 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; whitecube.com.

The entry of an established international gallery like White Cube into New York, its sixth city after Paris, Hong Kong, West Palm Beach, Seoul and its native London, can’t help feeling like a show of force. “Chopped & Screwed,” the inaugural exhibition, installs work by marquee names — Mark Bradford, Adrian Piper, Georg Baselitz, Julie Mehretu — around a sumptuously renovated former bank building on Madison Avenue, and there’s a chromed-out BMW motorcycle in the middle of the floor.

But Courtney Willis Blair, who curated the show, finds plenty of thought-provoking moments among the heavy names. The motorcycle, titled “The Lover, off the road (after Barbara),” is Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s tribute to the filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who famously rode a BMW of her own. Danh Vo’s bronze cast of a 16th-century Christ figure — gleaming, gnarly, marked with flame-colored seams and dimples — hangs across the room from David Hammons’s 1988 “Air Jordan,” a disconcertingly handsome piece of black inner tube studded with rusted bottle caps bent into the shape of cowrie shells. Between them, the two pieces are a master class in the cultural construction of majesty. The staid vertical stripes of Theaster Gates’s “Civil Color Spectrum” (2023), a red and yellow palette of discarded fire hoses, are a perfect rejoinder to the procession of Klan hoods in a Philip Guston drawing; upstairs, a chrome-plated drain by Robert Gober winks at “Everything #5.1,” Piper’s window cut into the wall. WILL HEINRICH

TriBeCa