First stop was White Cube, where Ilana Savdie had draped the downstairs gallery in latex curtains decorated with latex paint swirls. The scrims are pinned back to create openings that allow viewers to see her work in more intimate chambers. Savdie has been the subject of a great deal of collector and critical interest since before her show at the Whitney in 2023. Raised in Colombia and educated at RISD and Yale, she’s got a C.V. packed with exhibitions at museums in far-flung places like Australia, Belgium, Germany, and Marfa, Texas. Savdie herself has a lot to say about her work. But don’t let her overblown ideas put you off; her painting, always challenging and technically interesting, is getting better and better. The 10 works at White Cube, almost all dated this year, combine large washes of beeswax encaustic in Savdie’s signature color palette of deep purplish blues and bright reds and yellows, framing jumbles of colorful, complicated sections that oscillate between pure abstraction and references to insects, internal organs, and other body parts. Or, as the gallery puts it: “Shape-shifting configurations unfurl orifices, entrails, and other bodily fragments.”

Across the street, at Almine Rech, there’s another great Picasso exhibition from the holdings of the artist’s descendants, including still lifes drawn from the collection of the artist’s grandson, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, who also just happens to be married to Almine Rech, herself. (A few blocks away, at Gagosian, you can see some of Picasso’s daughter Paloma’s collection.) I had a chance to walk through the show with Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga, curators of the 40-plus works created between 1908 and 1962. The show opens with a 1908 still life painting by Picasso on loan from MoMA.