If the city’s art calendar has any say in the matter, February is no time to hibernate. While the rest of the world waits for spring, New York’s gallery world is burning bright, and two shows in particular deserve a place on every serious art lover’s schedule before the month slips away. One is a farewell to an irreplaceable photographic process; the other is a confrontation with raw, monumental space. Both are, in their own very different ways, unforgettable.

The Last Dyes | William Eggleston da David Zwirner, 533 West 19th Street Through March 7, 2026

There are exhibitions that feel like openings, and then there are exhibitions that feel like closings, the kind that carry the quiet gravity of something ending for good. William Eggleston’s The Last Dyes di William Eggleston da David Zwirner belongs firmly in the latter category, and all the more powerfully for it.

Eggleston, now 86 and living still in Memphis, Tennessee, pioneered the use of dye-transfer printing for fine art photography in the 1970s. The process itself is painstaking and deeply analog: an original Kodachrome image is split into three separation negatives, each immersed in baths of cyan, magenta, and yellow dye, then pressed one by one onto a special fiber paper by hand. The result is a richness of color that no digital reproduction can quite capture. When Kodak stopped producing the necessary materials in the early 1990s, Eggleston quietly began stockpiling what remained. Decades later, working alongside master printers Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, he has finally used the last of those reserves to produce this final body of work. When the show closes, the process closes with it. There will be no more.

What hangs on the walls of West 19th Street are images drawn from Eggleston’s celebrated Outlands and Chromes series, as well as several photographs first seen at his landmark 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which changed the course of photography as an art form. They are pictures of the American South taken between 1969 and 1974: vast skies streaked with cirrus clouds above rundown roadside structures, cars and signage rendered as dense blocks of saturated color, strangers made into quiet emblems of a time and a place that no longer exists. In the interiors, the contrast between shadow and light achieves something almost Baroque, deep, palpable blacks against an isolated brightness that pulls the eye like a spotlight.

One self-portrait is worth the trip alone: Eggleston lying in a darkened room, his head on a white pillow, his face and oversized hand looming close to the lens. It is sculptural, almost sacred, an image that belongs somewhere between Caravaggio and a roadside motel. It is also, like everything here, printed in a process that will never be used again.

Negative Sculpture | Michael Heizer da Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street February 10 through March 28, 2026

A few blocks south and west, a very different kind of encounter awaits. Michael Heizer has spent more than five decades asking a single, relentless question: what if sculpture is not the thing itself, but the space the thing leaves behind? Negative Sculpture nello spazio Gagosian sulla West 21st Street is his latest answer, and it is genuinely breathtaking.

The centerpiece of the show is a pair of new works, Convoluted Line A and Convoluted Line B, both completed in 2024. Each is a winding steel earth liner embedded into a raised concrete floor, curving across the gallery with the delicacy of a pencil line drawn at a scale that makes the body feel small. Together, they stretch nearly 88 feet in length. The room becomes the artwork. Walking through the space, you are not looking at sculpture so much as inhabiting it.

Heizer is the artist who once removed 240,000 tons of sandstone from the Nevada desert to create Double Negative in 1969, a work so large it could only be seen properly from the air. He has spent decades since building City, a complex of monumental earthworks in the Nevada desert, now finally open to the public, a project drawing on Native American mound-building traditions and the pre-Columbian ceremonial cities of Central and South America. Negative Sculpture brings that same philosophical preoccupation indoors, without losing any of its force.

There is something almost meditative about standing in the room with these works. The absence they define feels heavier than presence. Early drawings related to the sculptures are also on view, giving rare insight into how an artist of this scale begins to think through form on paper before committing it to steel and concrete.

Heizer once said that if you are going to make a sculpture, you might as well make one that competes with the Golden Gate Bridge. These two works are indoor pieces, measured in feet rather than miles. And yet, they compete with everything.

Two shows, two very different worlds, and both in Chelsea. There is no better reason to lace up your boots and head west this February.