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.

Upper East Side

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

“Untitled,” 2022, Danh Vo’s bronze cast of a 16th-century Christ figure at White Cube.Danh Vo, via White Cube
David Hammons, “Air Jordan,” 1988, tyre, bottle caps and wire, at White Cube.David Hammons, via White Cube

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 was forced to sell her own bike, Blair says, toward the end of her life. 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

Through Oct. 14. Margot Samel, 295 Church Street, Manhattan, 212-597-2747; margotsamel.com.

A gallery wall features murals, which have been drawn directly into it, and three paintings of female figures in red and yellow hues; on the floor are two crochet figurative sculptures and a bust on a pedestal.
Installation view of France-Lise McGurn and Rita McGurn’s “Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos” at Margot Samel.via the artists and Margot Samel, NYC; Photo by Lance Brewer

Do you see a family resemblance? Dozens of figures fill the gallery from floor to ceiling — in paintings, murals drawn directly on the walls, and soft sculpture and fabric works that inhabit the floor — but it’s the mother-daughter pair responsible for crafting them that raises the question.

The work of the artists Rita McGurn (1940—2015) and France-Lise McGurn (born 1983), both center on figuration, but the contrast in their styles is stark enough that you can, as I did, divide the show accurately in two without looking at a checklist. Two of the nine paintings are by Rita, as are the 15 sculptural works — busts, figures, or carpets — mostly made of wool.

Rita never trained as an artist (attending art school only as a model), yet she created a substantial body of work rarely exhibited in her lifetime. France-Lise studied painting at the Royal College of Art in London and has exhibited at Tate Britain. It makes you wonder: Were France-Lise’s studies more or less of an influence on her eventual art practice than sharing space with her mother’s accruing artworks and witnessing their creation?

Here, the daughter’s lyric, sketched paintings and murals, which render bodies, gestures and faces in few strokes, contain and surround the mother’s delightfully outsider, crocheted beings. The bonds of family are often complex and unknowable. The gallery can barely contain the private catalyzing force of this, put on display without any sentimentality. JOHN VINCLER

Chelsea

Through Oct. 21. Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, Manhattan, 212-741-1111; gagosian.com.

Tetsuya Ishida, “Prisoner,” 1999, acrylic on board, at Gagosian.Tetsuya Ishida Estate, via Gagosian

During a decade-long career tinged by the economic malaise that shrouded Japan in the 1990s, Tetsuya Ishida practiced a kind of realist-Surrealism, depicting unnatural things happening within the recognizable confines of postindustrial life: salarymen swelling to the size of office blocks in which they’re entombed; sullen shut-ins disappearing into the furniture. His pictures suggest an airless worldview where the only thing worse than not having a job is having one.

In Ishida’s finely rendered nightmares of techno-automation and modern isolation, 76 of which are in view here, bodies transmogrify into despondent machinery or are dismembered and factory-packaged, barely veiled allusions to the dehumanizing effects of corporate capitalism.

Ishida’s protagonists are recognizable in another way, too: all sharing the artist’s round, guileless face, though not as autofiction. They are, as he said, “self-portraits of other people.” Their repetition functions as a two-way mirror: a kindness that declined to trap others within his scenes of abjection, but also refused to absolve a viewer of a shared suffering.

There are traces of cyberpunk manga in Ishida’s body horror, but his work largely diverged from dominant Japanese styles. Unlike the more palatable and chromatic Neo Pop of his contemporaries that shunned the unrelenting bleakness around them, Ishida, who died in 2005 at 31, channeled Surrealist forebears like Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington, embracing a mesmeric gloominess. These are unlovely images, hard to look at. Ishida knew we look away at our peril. MAX LAKIN