London is always a go-to for summer art blockbusters. The National Portrait Gallery’s show of Paul McCartney’s early Beatles photographs is sure to please crowds and the pre-Raphaelite retrospective at the Tate is bound to break records. For traveling art lovers looking for something more obscure, contemporary, and of the moment, however, New York’s sister galleries are always an interesting bet. We’ve scoured the finest London galleries that share sister spaces at Manhattan. Including up-and-comers, forgotten masters, and established art stars, these are shows worth traveling for. 

Lisson Gallery’s 67 Lisson Street location presents rising star Sarah Cunningham, who fills the venue with her unique brand of gestural, semi-abstract landscape entitled “The Crystal World,” inspired by the J.G. Ballard novel of the same name. Painted in the jungles of Panama during a residency, these vivid interior landscapes echo the novel, which is about a jungle that slowly turns its occupants into crystals. 

Ms. Cunningham does well with this dystopian theme. Amorphous forms and shapes laden with emotion and wonder arise and combat each other in her densely labored surfaces, creating electrifying spaces that fuse the actual and the imaginary. Like the author, Ms. Cunningham seeks to blend the exquisite and the ominous, and she does so with abandon — until August 26. 

The Michael Werner Gallery at 22 Upper Brook Street presents the late and obscure Gaston Chaissac, a personal passion project of Mr. Werner. Chaissac was a disciple of Otto Freundlich, living in poverty and obscurity for most of his life until he was discovered toward the end of his career. Chaissac’s signature compositions are collections of bright segments and blobs with the occasional quirky, smiling face. 

Not so much Freundlich’s beautifully modulated color abstraction but a playful extension of his formal concerns that teeter on the edge of coherence. The range and innovation are astonishing and refreshing. There is a whimsical humanity and guilelessness in his work, complimented by his sublimely sophisticated sense of color. It all makes you wish he had lived longer — until September 13. 

Things take an unsettling turn at White Cube Mason’s Yard, located at 25-26 Mason’s Yard. South African painter Cinga Samson specializes in allegorical paintings populated by hyperreal figures gathering in ominous crowds. His figures — uniformly dressed in white shirts, sneakers, and blazers — have white vacant eyes and appear to be enacting secret meetings or ceremonies. Their blank-eyed obscurity serves as both a mask and a provocation, while the palette hovers somewhere around twilight. 

The rigorous neoclassical styling of each canvas only serves to add another layer of oppressive unreality. Whatever these figures represent — ciphers that stand for archetypal selves situated outside of ordinary time — they appear to be doing the complex and often unpleasant work of collective trauma, ritualistically addressing the civil unrest and violence that has haunted South Africa for so many decades — until August 26. 

From his jarring anti-war sculpture ‘invitation card,’ made at the age of twenty, to his most recent canvases delving into the theme of light, the London-born Bill Jacklin celebrates seven decades of painting, sculpture, and works on paper at London’s Marlborough gallery, currently installed at their 6 Albemarle street location. A transplant to New York City for many decades, many of Mr. Jacklin’s paintings portray familiar New York scenes, such as the Coney Island seashore, Grand Central STerminal, Skaters at Madison Square Garden, or a Chelsea meat truck. 

Mr. Jacklin’s canvases generally center on a single, crystalline point of light-saturated clarity around which the rest of the scene swirls in dreamy soft focus. The effect is one of illumination and timelessness that never succumbs to sentimentality. This is exquisite figurative and abstract work that lives in its own gentle, light-infused world — through September 16. 

Klara Kristalova enlivens Lehman Maupin at No. 1 Cromwell. A resident of a small town in northern Sweden, she has cultivated a reputation for work that evokes a wild, deeply peculiar sense of both nature and the feminine. All of them hinge on the confluence of the personal and the natural. 

Many of her ceramic figures have an earthy humor that rests on the inclusion of an odd detail, such as the painted claws on the feet of a child-sized ceramic mouse. Others appear freighted with ecological concerns. Her tiny figure of what appears to be a fairy is actually a woman weighed down by a giant butterfly. Like all compelling art, she generates a response at a level that is difficult to verbalize but impossible not to feel — through September 9.