Time moves quickly in New York’s art world. With hundreds of galleries showing work and most shows open for little more than a month, it's impossible to see everything. That, at least, is what I tell myself as I obnoxiously sprint into galleries at 5:45 p.m. on Saturday evenings throughout the year. Here are five shows that are worth a leisurely visit before they leave.

“The Language of Flowers,” at CRG Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, on view through Saturday, February 13

The curatorial back–to–basics movement seems to be gathering steam. Recent shows have focused on sand (at Southampton’s Parrish Art Museum), dogs (at downtown’s Art Since the Summer of ’69), and art dealer Ron Warren (at Mary Boone). Now CRG Gallery joins in with this remarkable show of work about flowers. Georgia O’Keefe is absent, but some expected names are on hand, like Robert Mapplethorpe, whose 1984 Calla Lily is an alluring wisp of white smoke, and Yayoi Kusama, who contributes an eerie pink flower sprouting up through a radioactive pink hat. The curatorial conceit allows for welcome surprises, like the mid-century landscape painter Fairfield Porter, who speckles red, orange, and yellow hawkweed across a green field, and Louise Bourgeois, who has cannily titled her eerie, nearly five-foot-tall etching of an iris Baudelaire. Not far from an elegant, tape and tar paper rose crafted by Jim Hodges are two drawings from Andy Warhols late-50s dandy period. One is an ink study of four delicate flowers, the other a perky arrangement on pink paper, embellished with gold leaf. It’s hard to believe that the same artist would be urinating on paintings only 20 years later.

“Stripped, Tied, and Raw,” at Marianne Boesky, 509 West 24th Street, on view through Saturday, on view through February 13

This show’s title manages to be shockingly sexy and perfectly descriptive, no small feat. The six artists here take painting and sculpture, Western art’s two most fundamental mediums, and twist them almost to their breaking points. Two linen paintings by Texan Donald Moffett unzip to reveal lush, monochromatic secrets inside. A lime-green Moffett hangs above a silver Steven Parrino sculpture, a crumbled mass of material slung with tape. Perhaps most curious is Peruvian Jorge Eielson’s Camicia Bruciata, 1963, which turns a blank canvas into a gently worn dress shirt, complete with a starched collar. In back of the gallery, wood panels wrapped in bandages, which date from the early 1960s, reveal Salvatore Scarpitta as the grandfather of these genre-blurring abstractions.

“Demons, Yarns, & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists,” at James Cohan, 533 West 26th Street, on view through Saturday, February 13

Contemporary art, particularly the brand peddled in Chelsea galleries, is an expensive luxury that rarely looks at rich as its price tag. The 13 intricate tapestries in this show, commissioned by the excellently-named London arts group Banners of Persuasion, is a fine exception. Grayson Perry, the only artist in the show with previous needlepoint experience, contributes a characteristically winning work: blood-red at its edges, the frenetic carpet harbors a barb-wired fence, the Pentagon, and Osama bin Laden, as well as a bomb-strapped cartoon terrorist at its center. Gary Hume falters — his portraits work best with the weight and mass of paint, it seems — but Fred Tomaselli and Kara Walker excel in the medium. The latter superimposes the silhouette of a hanged woman over a rich, nuanced image of a burning estate. One hopes that she’ll revisit the medium again soon.

Keith Haring, “Mural for St. Patrick’s Daycare Center (SOMACC) San Francisco, 1985,” at Deitch Projects, on view through February 16

Deitch Projects’ Wooster Street gallery has done it all: doublingas a faux meth lab, serving as a filthy hamster’s nest, and hostinghundreds of more traditional shows. But soon it will be empty. As Jeffrey Deitchprepares to leave New York to become the new director of Los Angeles’sMuseum of Contemporary Art, he has devoted one of his last exhibitionsto a single, virtuosic mural by wunderkind Keith Haring, one of thedealer’s earliest passions. Haring filled the work’s four panels —together they measure 70 feet long — with more than 20 wildly dancing figures. A smiling pig in a polka dot dress stands on two legs, wavinghello; a boy ducks as a toucan leaps onto his head; animalsscurry throughout the frame. The children who attended St.Patrick’s Daycare Center were some lucky kids. On the far right edgeof the work, an innocent-looking young man sporting tiny glasses and asmall tuft of hair quickly squigglesa line on the canvas, hearkening back to a time when an ambitiousPennsylvania-transplant with a piece of chalk could upend the artworld.

“Rip It Up and Start Again,” at Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor, on view through February 20, 2010

This expansive exhibition of legendary downtown artists is the show that stalwart nonprofit Artists Space has been threatening to make for years — five clever retrospectives of undersung greats in one, each organized by a different curator. Artists Space director Stefan Kalmár devotes his section to the inimitable curmudgeon Ray Johnson, one of whose tiny drawings, written in large, cursive letters, reads, “Dear Whitney Museum, I hate you. Love, Ray Johnson.” Daniel Pérezs spooky photographic reproduction of William S. Burroughs’s Bunker, the infamous Bowery apartment he inhabited for years, is alone worth the trip, but work from Charles Henri Ford, Philippe Thomas, and the perennially underappreciated Arthur Russell round out the show handsomely.