Why Are So Many New York Gallery Shows This Winter About Trees?

Things are in a bad state if we’re seeing a revival for Alexis Rockman, an artist whose roiled landscapes were unflatteringly compared to a “bad horror movie” by critic Roberta Smith back in 1992. Twenty-four years later, in a time when images of ravaged forests and blazed wetlands figure more regularly in the media, that horror movie has officially become a reality. Not so surprisingly, these damaged ecosystems now also serve as the subjects for recent paintings in Rockman’s newest show, his first with Jack Shainman Gallery after a long run with the recently closed Sperone Westwater.

During the ’90s, Rockman shot to fame in New York for vast pictures of natural habitats filled with a menagerie of creatures; one 1990 painting of a forest floor in this show is dense with more crawling critters than you can count. Rockman rendered these paintings with such detail that they appear photographic. By contrast, his recent paintings, from a series called “Forest Fires,” are blurry around the edges, often lapsing into de Kooningesque impasto to describe flames eating away at trees. All that remains in focus, now, are tiny boaters and little animals searching for safe harbor.

However hazy these forests may be, Rockman’s position is crystal clear: We are losing sight of an environment that is being steadily destroyed through disasters sped up by global warming. That’s a fair reading of the situation, and one that merits attention in a time of climate denialism. But the “Forest Fire” works suffer because they are unabashedly melodramatic, tugging at the heartstrings through images of forlorn-looking animals when they would better make their point through the bare facts alone. Based on this show, Rockman is still making horror movies whose quality has not improved.

513 West 20th Street, through February 28

Sublime contrasts between big and small—and human and nonhuman—also show up in this show for Matthew Krishanu, a rising British painter currently featured in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India’s top biennial. The exhibition’s standout works are sprawling paintings featuring children ascending banyans, trees that are often imbued with divine significance in India, where Buddha is thought to have sat under one such 2,600-year-old tree at a temple in Bihar and found enlightenment on the spot.

Krishanu’s show does contain works explicitly referencing religion, including some canvases portraying the rituals of Christianity, the belief system practiced by the artist’s father, a white missionary who worked in Bangladesh during Krishanu’s upbringing. But the banyan paintings are the more intriguing works here because they do not lay bare their spiritual aspirations so readily. Take Banyan Tree, Two Boys (2025), in which one child scurries across two splayed branches while another calmly sits astride a trunk. Krishanu paints these boys so that their bodies echo the forms of the tree: the seated boy’s bent leg mirrors a nearby gnarl, for one, implying a harmonious relationship between man and nature that might have pleased Buddha.

The banyans in these paintings are often rendered through a combination of acrylic and oil that has been so thinned down that it appears to run. The drippy aesthetic makes these paintings feel dreamy, if not outright hallucinatory: One canvas depicts a towering tree and the little kid who stares up at it, along with another child who has already ascended its branches. How did that boy get up there? The answer feels unknowable, as nature can so often be.

3 89th Street, through February 21

To my knowledge, there is only one art exhibition in recent history that has been postponed due to a shortage of Christmas trees, and that show is Jura Shust’s current one at Management. Shust was apparently delayed in his search for conifers tossed out post-Yuletide, a strange form of foraging that has now resulted in his sculpture Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession (2024), featuring eight pineless trees trapped in cylinders of resin and stood upright in a metal armature. On paper, the gesture recalls a fondly remembered Klara Lidén show from 2012 in which she stuffed Reena Spaulings Fine Art gallery (located just 10 minutes from Management) with Christmas trees. But Shust’s cold sculpture, with its smooth surfaces and deliberately inorganic mode of display, shares none of Lidén’s prankishness. Rather than undermining holiday joy, this Belarusian artist is more focused on using trees as a byway to reach states beyond our own.

A release informs us that Leaving is steeped in ancient Slavic thought, specifically the age-old belief in parts of Eurasia that pine trees contain gods within. That may also go a long way in explaining Shust’s cryptic video Außerkörperliche Erfahrun, also on view in this show, in which the artist traipses around a tree farm, his camera whirring around him as he does so. As Shust writhes around atop a leafy ground near an opened gate, it looks as though he is possessed by unseen spirits.

Overdetermined though this show may be in its attempt to beguile, Shust’s latest outing does broach intriguing questions about whether plants contain hidden messages. In an effort to begin listening to those encrypted signals, for a series of wall-hung panels on view nearby, Shust used AI to determine the compositions for sculptures based on MRI scans of his own head. Crafted from spruce wood, then finished with soil and resin, these pieces display bulging ganglia and webs of nerves, but human faces never quite come into focus. What, exactly, Shust’s spruces are trying to tell us remains hard to see, though their wood certainly makes for a handsome medium.

39 East Broadway, #404, through February 22

After showing at both the Venice Biennale and Documenta in 2022, Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova repeatedly returned to Arslanbob, a forest in Kyrgyzstan whose groves produce a large share of the world’s walnuts. Amanat (2026), the film that resulted from those travels, is less a documentary about the forest than a surrealist evocation of its milieu, replete with many long takes of people who appear to be slumbering on Arslanbob’s floor. At one point, a crew of reclining people dressed in white appear in a previously vacant wooded area. It’s unclear if they are dead or dreaming, though the forest around them is certainly alive: Ismailova frequently soundtracks her film with the sounds of someone inhaling deeply and exhaling.

Working within a tradition that includes Andrei Tarkovsky, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and other slow cinema pioneers, Ismailova has crafted a film whose leisurely pace and repetitive rhythm demand prolonged viewing. Yet despite Amanat’s sedateness, the film also proposes Arslanbob as an unsettled realm, a place that has acted as a repository for so much cultural memory while the national borders around it were drawn and redrawn across the centuries. Ismailova’s trees bore witness to all that tumult, standing quietly but stoically while their valuable nuts were exported abroad.

Amanat is accompanied by another film installation, Swan Lake (2025), whose two channels play clips from films and TV productions produced in Central Asia during the Soviet era. Ismailova described Swan Lake to me as the nightmare had by someone who fell asleep beneath a walnut tree in Arslanbob; the installation feels fittingly haunted, and even includes footage of Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a psychotherapist whose hypnotisms were broadcast live from Russia during the late 1980s. Swan Lake encourages resistance to such forms of mind control—including by dreaming for oneself. To that end, cozy up in Arslanbob Under Sun (2025), a darkened gallery where a sounds installation made with Mélia Roger can be heard, and zone out to the noises of the squawking birds who call Arslanob’s trees home.

38 St. Mark’s Place, through April 21

Santiago Yahuarcani, one of the great artists to gain international exposure at the 2024 Venice Biennale, makes trees his medium. A member of the Aimeni clan of the Uitoto Nation, Yahuarcani makes his paintings on llanchama, a type of parchment made from logs harvested in the Amazon, where the artist is based. Paint does not take quite so cleanly to llanchama as it does to the weave of a canvas, and so, when Yahuarcani renders his dense cosmologies, his acrylic remains rough, causing it to take on the texture of a coat of wiry fur—an aesthetic that befits the animal-human hybrids who populate his work.

Not all of Yahuarcani’s paintings depict trees. Among the striking beings seen are here are an oversized grasshopper holding a staff, a multi-mouthed owl, and a shaman transforming into an eagle. But because Yahuarcani leaves the edges of his bark cloth bare, so that each painting is framed by an uneven border of blank parchment, one cannot forget that his art is not just about the environment but of it too. His paintings evince a desire to honor nature, and indeed, Yahuarcani has described spending hours with trees before putting brush to llanchama.

This is the opposite of the approach taken by the corporations who extract their resources from the Amazon daily, resulting in widespread deforestation. Yahuarcani’s work implicitly critiques those extractive efforts. The show’s standout work, a 10-and-a-half-foot-tall painting called La savia que se transformó en llanto de sangre (2025), features a tall figure standing before a many-eyed tree that sprouts another person. Running up one root is text reading “La savia que se convirtío llanto de sangre,” or “The sap that turned into tears of blood”—a reference to all the violence wrought upon Indigenous land by non-Indigenous people. Seeking to begin rectifying all that harm, Yahuarcani scrawls his own name on an adjacent root, merging himself with the nature he helps cultivate.

54 Franklin Street, through January 31