Our top gallery picks this week experiment with layers and the spaces where ideas intersect.

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1. Mark Grotjahn employs a palette knife to drag, scrape, and feather densely woven layers of oil paint. Aggressively worked from the center of the painting, the impasto offers a glimpse into the many layers of color comprising the composition at Blum & Poe
2. Askew’s Exodusrefers to the perpetual migration of people within the greater Pacific region. The underlying themes of cultural identity are explored through an experimental style of portraiture, abstraction and graffiti still life paintings depicting traditional Pacific foods at Goodspace Gallery
3. Katharina Grosse presents pictures on canvas which seem as if made for the imposing, lofty space in which they are being shown. Compressed into the two-dimensional, rectangular format of a panel painting, the works point virtually outward, beyond their material bounds at Galerie Johann König
4. Adrian Ghenie’s paintings are all about alienation and the angst that accompanies it at Nicodim Gallery
5. Merion Estes’ Dystopia features new large “tapestry-like” paintings continuing her ongoing body of work exploring the intersection of nature and decoration at CB1 Gallery
6. “The Sound of Creation” is composed of a selection of painted works accompanied by corresponding musical tracks as the result of a creative collaboration between the artist Beezy Bailey, and the composer and music theorist Brian Eno at ArsCulture