Art We Saw This Fall

Oct 09, 2023

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From our critics, reviews of closed gallery shows around New York City.

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By The New York Times

Chelsea

Through Dec. 17. Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, Manhattan; 212-421-3292, pacegallery.com.

Sonia Gomes didn't go to art school until age 45. She’d been deconstructing and reassembling fabrics since childhood, but facing prejudices as an Afro-Brazilian woman working with textiles, she thought of what she did as craft. It took a new context to see it as art.

Now, Gomes, 74, is having her first solo show in New York, titled "O Mais Profundo é a Pele" ("Skin Is the Deepest Part"). Rather than a retrospective, it's an assembly of recent work that demonstrates both the range of her approaches to fabric and her mastery of it. Gomes uses found and donated objects and textiles, often twisting, stretching and bundling them to create wiry or knotty forms.

In the series "Entre Pérola e Vergalhão" ("Between Pearl and Rebar"), pearls are embedded in clusters of colorful cushions that sit atop rebar — a metaphor for creating nurturing spaces (and shoring them up). In the "Tela-Corpo" ("Canvas-Body") series, bulges of cloth emerge from canvases painted with biomorphic forms — protrusions that feel integrated, despite being disruptive.

If Gomes has a central theme, that may be it: a sense of willful connection, a determination to use what's on hand to forge something unexpectedly beautiful. My favorite piece, an untitled work (2022) from the "Torção" ("Twists") series, is a mix of media and fabrics wrapped, sewn and tied together to form a loose web. It looks born of struggle, as if wrestled into being, yet it hangs open and light, almost dancing on the wall. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Chelsea

Through Dec. 17. Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, Manhattan; 212-315-0470. galerielelong.com

The tension in Ursula von Rydingsvard's wood sculpture arises from its yin-and-yang coupling of brute strength with refined delicacy. At 80, the Brooklyn-based sculptor is at the top of her hard-fought game. In this exhibition of sculptures and drawings, most of them made in the last two years, you feel the effort (carried out by assistants under her close supervision) that goes into the cutting of blocks of her favorite material, Western red cedar. The lightly grained wood is colored with graphite before the components are assembled into forms, often 10 feet tall or higher, that engage a viewer as animistic emissaries from the natural world.

Born in Germany to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father, she began her childhood in refugee camps after World War II, before her family of nine immigrated to the United States and settled in Connecticut. (The aristocratic name is the legacy of her first husband.) In an artist's statement, she asked, "Why do I make art?" Her long list of reasons began: "Mostly, to survive. To survive living and all of its implied layers. To ease my high anxiety, to numb myself with the labor and the focus of building my work."

Remarkably, that struggle is evident in the art, even in the bronze castings (there is one in the show) that are made from a wooden model. Of the cedar pieces, I was most impressed by "Ursie 1" (2022) and "here & there" (2011). They curve with the softness of aprons and the hardness of shields. ARTHUR LUBOW

Upper East Side

Runs through Dec. 17. Mnuchin Gallery, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan; 212-861-0020, mnuchingallery.com; and Berry Campbell, 524 West 26th Street, Manhattan; 212-924-2178 berrycampbell.com

The painter Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) came to New York in 1955 and had her first gallery solo here in 1961. Those dates make it a bit late to call the artist either Abstract Expressionist or second-generation Abstract Expressionist, as do the news releases for her first solo exhibition in 38 years, "The First Decade," running concurrently in two galleries. These terms have been widely used lately; perhaps they signal historical and market value. Drexler's paintings are pretty and angst-free; they feature amorphous clouds of small dots, dashes and squares of ringing color on raw or stained canvases. They evoke mosaics, textiles and sundry post-Impressionist painters and seem most credible aligned with Color Field painting.

The "first decade" covered here is 1959-1969, a fertile period for new art in New York when younger painters confronted Pollock's allover drip paintings — among them Yayoi Kusama, Frank Stella and Brice Marden. Drexler did too but in a more conventional, people-pleasing direction.

At Mnuchin, the paintings and works on paper date from 1959 to 1964. The best works tend toward lighter, even pastel colors scattered over raw canvas, or toward deep nocturnal tones. The colors grow stronger; larger squares and circles enter the pictures, as do long slender rectangles.

At Berry Campbell, where works from 1965 to 1969 are on view, Drexler's style starts to harden. The colors become repetitive and the clouds of little shapes become dense, crowding the surface. The bunched rectangles morph into bulging, striated shapes suggesting floods, billowing smoke, wasps’ nests or great churning waves. The beguiling airiness of the earlier paintings is gone, which is not a good sign. ROBERTA SMITH

Chelsea

Through Dec. 23. Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20th Street, Manhattan; 212-645-1701, jackshainman.com.

How do you top "Mastry" (2016-2017), Kerry James Marshall's traveling museum career retrospective, considered one of the most important exhibitions of the last decade? In "Exquisite Corpse: This Is Not the Game," at Jack Shainman, his first New York gallery show since "Mastry," Marshall offers a clever solution: Rather than presenting his characteristic large figurative history paintings, he plays 20 rounds of exquisite corpse, the parlor game made famous by Surrealists.

In that game, a piece of paper is passed from one player to another: each draws a segment of the body (head, torso, legs, feet), then folds that section, concealing it. The objective was to undercut conscious, rational approaches and rely on chance to create a fantastical artwork. Only here, Marshall assumes the role of every player: Multiple signatures at the bottom of the works read, "Kerry Marshall," "Marshall, Kerry J." and "K.J.M."

Paintings like "Untitled (Exquisite Corpse Rollerblades)" (2022) offer a playful redux of the reclining female figure while watercolors like "Untitled (Exquisite Corpse Snowman)" (2022) is a surrealistic mash-up of human and nonhuman elements. In Marshall's hands, however, the word "corpse," attached to the Black figure, conjures dark episodes, and "game" suggests, perhaps, how life has been historically rigged against people of color. The trick is that Marshall controls all the elements here, creating playfully curious, hilarious and absurd juxtapositions. It is an exquisite corpse greatly expanded, exploded: Identity is a game; art is a game. Or is it? Marshall toys, exquisitely, with these facts. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Chelsea

Through Dec. 22. Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street, Manhattan; (212) 255-1105, paulacoopergallery.com.

Since the beginning of his career, Paul Pfeiffer has often used the spectacle of professional sports broadcasts, carefully editing existing film to extract existentially intense moments. In one earlier work he digitally emptied a basketball game of all but one player who, in isolation, seems caught in a moment of isolated ecstasy — or agony. In another, he eliminated everything from a basketball game except the ball itself shown magically spinning in midair or careering down the court.

In "Red Green Blue," his latest work, Pfeiffer reveals the whole ball of wax — everything except the center — of a Southeastern Conference college football game between the University of Missouri and the University of Georgia, in the latter's stadium in Athens, Ga. And using eight cameras and six microphones, Pfeiffer shoots it himself and heavily edits it to give us everything but the game itself. Instead he exposes the vast apparatus that creates its pageantry: announcers calling the game, a producer directing cameras, music directors and band conductors leading a large, seated marching band, occasional expanses of fans, and a knees-down view of coaches and players pacing the sidelines. You also see, from a distance, people leaving the stadium, and just beyond, a small 19th-century graveyard in a group of trees (Georgia pines?), adding an elegiac note. Almost everything is seen in close-up: cheerleaders’ necks and smiles, the producer's earpiece and blond hair, the calves and knee braces of the Georgia players. This is the macrocosm seen from the margins, like watching an anthill. It's not quite clear who is making what happen, you just know that, together, they are. ROBERTA SMITH

NoHo

Through Dec. 23. Eric Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 646-998-3727, ericfirestonegallery.com.

Peter Williams's paintings have a quality that I’d describe (without value judgment) as "too-much-ness." His works are loud, with arrays of colors formed into grids, stripes or dots; they feature cartoonish figures in dreamlike states, amid such symbolic imagery as basketballs, African masks, Mickey Mouse ears and flowers. Each painting is a puzzle so jam-packed with feeling and ideas, I can't help but be dazzled by it.

Williams, who died last year, spent his career rendering the many personal and public dimensions to being Black in the United States. He did so with seriousness and humor, using a range of painting techniques and a heavy dose of the grotesque. Much of his work that I’d seen before this current exhibition, "Nyack," was visually bright and emotionally dark, depicting violence. By contrast, the paintings here retain their moral force but approach their subject matter more obliquely.

Take, for example, the show's pièce de résistance and namesake, an 11-foot-long diptych from 2013. The title refers to Williams's childhood hometown, and the composition alludes to John Singleton Copley's 1778 painting "Watson and the Shark." Yet the cubistic scene remains cryptic. A boat full of people seems to shepherd a hidden Black figure to safety, while another one, dismembered, floats in the water below.

Is Nyack a place of refuge or danger? Seemingly both. Like the best puzzles, Williams's paintings compel you to decipher them, but their greatness is in refusing to provide the comfort of an easy or definitive solution. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

NoLIta

Through Dec. 22. Helena Anrather, 132 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-343-7496; helenaanrather.com.

The first thing you notice in the "Miami" paintings of the Iranian American artist Nicky Nodjoumi, who left Iran in 1980 after the new Islamic Republic shut down his show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, are the feet. Several figures appearing upside down, as in Max Beckmann's "Departure," make clear that we’re dealing with dream imagery, in which ideas meet their opposites and you can never be sure if you’re flying or falling. (There are also wine bottles, revolvers, screaming horses, watermelon, a corpse wrapped in a flag, assorted bluish-gray clouds, and various mullahs and politicians making nefarious deals.) The upside-down figures also emphasize the pieces’ vertical composition, which evokes traditional Persian painting even as it creates a breathless feeling of nightmare: Instead of resolving into any intelligible sequence, Nodjoumi's memories, symbols and references simply pile up, one on top of the other.

The other thing about feet, though, is that they are lovely things to paint, utterly familiar but with a curvy, idiosyncratic shape that offers plenty of space for generous swaths of color. Rendered in various shades of rosy pink, the feet that appear in the Miami paintings add something critical. They counterbalance the violence and disorder Nodjoumi just barely slipped away from after the Islamic revolution with beauty — and with something that looks very much like love. WILL HEINRICH

Chelsea

Through Dec. 22, Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 W 21st Street, Manhattan; paulacoopergallery.com.

Photorealism can be a deathly dull exercise: self-regarding proficiency with no point. But Rudolf Stingel never seems interested in egoism; he's too occupied with how a painting is experienced, often slipping in a knock on art's self-seriousness — the rare Conceptualist with a sense of humor. (In 1989, Stingel published a manual for making a Minimalist painting, and then spent the next decade following his own deadpan instructions.)

There's no chintzy carpeting or walls skinned in silver building insulation to set the mood this time, just five sedate paintings of paintings, or, more accurately, paintings of Polaroids of paintings. Stingel photographed several of his earlier abstracts and translated the images to paint, including not just the original paintings but also the plywood or concrete walls on which they were hung, and the softly dappled sunlight that washed over them at the time of their making. The final pictures are true to scale, but whose truth? Depending on your mood, they represent a cannily infinite loop of tactile perception, or the beginning of a headache.

Stingel has been after this sort of thing for 40 years, evidently not tiring of the pursuit, or satisfied with the answers he's able to divine. His theoretical explorations of painting as something mechanical, a process that can be replicated and divorced from human feeling, can occasion an existential crisis. But they also presaged art's current struggle between technology and authorship, one that's far more tedious, largely because it lacks Stingel's wit. MAX LAKIN

Upper East Side

Through Dec. 23. Sprüth Magers, 22 East 80th Street, Manhattan; 917-722-2370, spruethmagers.com.

Barely discernible, the American flag appears only as an apparition, a ghost. Or has it been caught in the process of vaporizing altogether? The flag photographs in "Not Enough to See," a Louise Lawler solo exhibition of new works that opened days before the midterm election, read as a potent metaphor for democracy in the United States in an era when election lies entered the mainstream.

But the photos here actually document the deinstallation in February of the Whitney Museum's epic Jasper Johns retrospective, "Mind/Mirror." They most prominently feature his iconic painting "Three Flags" (1958), seen off-center to the right in the camera's frame in each of the seven iterations of Lawler's pictures on this theme. Each one captures the camera's movement creating a diaphanous blurring effect. Sometimes only Johns's painting is visible within the white space of the museum, as in "Three Flags (swiped again, one)" (2022) where a central white stripe in the painting disappears or blends perfectly into the white of the wall behind it. In others, labeled crates for artworks ready for shipping or storage are also visible on the left.

Lawler's choice to use the term "swipe" throughout her titles in this series also teases a link between elections and dating apps. They also remind us that Johns chose to paint his stack of three flags in encaustic, a medium of pigment suspended in wax that turns to liquid when heated. These flags, like democracy itself, are imposing but ultimately fragile. JOHN VINCLER

TriBeCa

Through Dec. 21. Ortuzar Projects, 9 White Street, Manhattan; 212-257-0033; ortuzarprojects.com.

June Leaf's memorable new show at Ortuzar Projects rounds up decades’ worth of work by the 93-year-old artist. There are unframed drawings of shadowy figures confronting existential dilemmas. There's an expressive, rainbow-colored painting of what looks like a sounding whale. And there are evocative, Torah-like devices constructed from old sewing machine parts and mesh, as well as loads of dashing little figures cut from tin. But "drawing, painting and sculpture" hardly seem like the right words for any of this, because the pieces all come across less as objects than as urgent gestures, thoughtful but intuitive, that Leaf just happened to make with charcoal or sheet metal instead of with her body.

The best work is in the figures, which are deceptively precise despite their rough edges. They hide funny, unnerving details like thumbtacks for breasts or a hinge-like pin sticking down between two legs. Leaf sends her little avatars up and down spiraling staircases and has them walk along thick, kinky strands of wire as if they were in the circus. One little figure flies with hollow wings while a pair of larger ones, in "Two Women on a Jack," ready their drumsticks to play an empty circle of wire — as beautiful a metaphor for the self-willed quality of art as I’ve ever seen. WILL HEINRICH

Lower East Side

Through Dec. 23. Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street, Manhattan; (212) 812-2902, perrotin.com.

This is the first gallery outing for the Brooklyn collective known as MSCHF (pronounced mischief), well known beyond the art world for pranks that poke fun at commodity culture. In this show's most striking piece, that culture comes to include a work of art.

For that work, "Severed Spots," MSCHF's creators spent almost $45,000 on a Damien Hirst print that bore 108 of his trademark spots. They then sliced out those spots to function as separate works by MSCHF, on sale at Perrotin for $4,400 each. The Hirst print, now a spot-free web of holes, is listed at $75,000. Profit is this work's true subject and art supply.

In another project, also on view at Perrotin, MSCHF offers to forge the metal from any gun into a sword: They have already turned a grenade launcher into a massive two-handed blade; a pump-action shotgun is now a Scottish dirk. If Americans want to bear arms, maybe these are closer to what the founding fathers imagined.

The project known as "Wavy Shoes" consists of sneakers from brands like Adidas and Asics redesigned by MSCHF to look half-liquefied, like shoes seen in a fun-house mirror. The price and status of high-end footwear is clearly not about function; by making versions you could never run in, MSCHF puts that fact on view.

Some gallerygoers are going to ask if all this caustic play counts as art. My question, rather, is whether it fits too cozily into the business art genre established decades ago by Andy Warhol and his fellow conceptualists, and then pursued by descendants like Takashi Murakami and Hirst.MSCHF's surgically altered spots could almost as easily be by Hirst himself. BLAKE GOPNIK

Chinatown

Through Dec. 4. 56 Henry, 105 Henry Street, Manhattan; 646-858-0800, 56henry.nyc.

A used scratch-off lottery ticket, torn in four, creates a fractured grid. The legible words and phrase "WIN" and "CASH / 4LIFE" across the top two fragments ironically read only of dashed hopes. While the lotto ticket may be a dud, Al Freeman's artwork depicting it — sculpture hung on the wall like a painting — manages to capture the vivacious energy of a hoarse-voiced belly laugh.

The four works together in "Floors" tell a story in this small but boisterous exhibition, the Brooklyn-based artist's fifth solo show with the gallery. "Lotto Ticket on Dark Wood Floor" (all works are from 2022) is joined by a receipt from CVS promising "$3.00 off" along with a handful of pennies in "Receipt and Change on Pavement." The other two works each illustrate packages of over-the-counter meds: the twinned torn blue packets in "Alka-Seltzer on Blonde Wood" and the crumbled pair spilling their eight tablets like pink polka dots in "Pepto Bismol on Checkered Floor."

All are composed primarily of colored vinyl of the sort you’d find covering the booth at a classic New York diner, also incorporating foam, polyester fiberfill and leather, further suggesting upholstery. This wall-mounted format shows Freeman evolving and honing her craft beyond a clever reimagining of Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture updated for the 21st century. She's a keen observer, quite literally here, of New York streets and floors, with a cartoonist's knack for honing a familiar object down to its essence. Witty, hard-edge and comfy. JOHN VINCLER

LOWER EAST SIDE

Through Dec. 4. 601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street, Manhattan; 212-243-2735, 601artspace.org.

In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a manifesto for "maintenance art." She proposed an exhibition spotlighting the tasks that go into the upkeep of everyday life, including cleaning and caring for others. "Show your work — show it again," she wrote of the repetitive and often hidden nature of this type of labor.

In this group show, curated by the artist Gabriela Vainsencher and 601Artspace's director, Sara Shaoul, the contributors both follow and complicate that brief. Three prints by Ukeles representing work clocks hang near the entrance; their direct conceptual descendants are Walead Beshty's "Copper Surrogates" (2017—22), two wall-mounted L shapes that would be exemplars of minimalism if not for the fingerprints all over them. Beshty stipulates that the sculptures be handled without gloves, so traces of human labor accrue.

Most artists here don't show their work so much as point to the systems that determine its value. In T.J. Dedeaux-Norris's "Untitled (Say Her Name)" (2011-15), the artist, who uses they/them pronouns, tries to separate their lips, which are glued shut. A potent metaphor for the effects of racism and sexism, the silent video evokes a visceral discomfort that for me was heightened by Roman Signer's nearby installation. "Schnarchen (Snoring)" (1992) features a tent and audio track of Signer snoring, alluding to a performance he did in Iceland. It's funny, but listening to Signer sleep while watching Dedeaux-Norris struggle, I couldn't help thinking about who gets license to take it easy and who has to work extra hard to be heard. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

UPPER EAST SIDE

Through Nov. 26. Acquavella, 18 East 79th Street, Manhattan; 212-734-6300, acquavellagalleries.com.

Tom Sachs's new show is called "Spaceships." Fans of the artist's crowd-pleasing shop-class space program won't be disappointed. For those tired of that gimmick, the exhibition also includes a well-tooled Technics turntable made of wood, an upright vacuum cleaner with a vintage Chanel purse for the dirt, and a model Titanic that really sinks. It's the sort of sculpture that back-of-house museum contractors make when things are slow, only more so. His studio staff were there at the crowded opening, discernible among the masses by the 10 Bullets patch on their work shirt breasts: one bullet for each point of Sachs's strict code of conduct. With a skill set that includes construction, woodworking, sculpture and light electrical, they aren't fabricators so much as acolytes of a D.I.Y. religion.

While art workers stand up to management in Philadelphia, and shout down Highsnobiety and Christie's attempt to merchandise their toil, this show speaks of the exhibition technician and the gallery preparator. The unpainted plywood is nice plywood, the screws visible along the self-consciously unerased pencil lines are nice screws. There's even an outright shrine to the Makita 18-volt battery mounted on one wall, ranks of them charging in their cradles, waiting their turn to power the LEDs on screens on the extraterrestrial landers crafted from a self-cleaning litter box or a mop bucket, a stiff little Stars and Stripes planted on its roof. It's a homage to the art handler aesthetic — despite the spaceships. TRAVIS DIEHL

MIDTOWN

Through Nov. 26. Luxembourg + Co., 595 Madison Avenue, Manhattan, 212-452-4646, luxembourgco.com.

Modernist genius is often best encountered in commercial galleries, with their intimate viewing conditions and lack of institutional authority and entrance fees. So it is with "Joan Miró: Feet on the Ground, Eyes on the Stars," the thrilling inaugural show revisiting this Catalan artist's radical early years at Luxembourg + Co. Formerly half of Luxembourg & Dayan in the East 70s, the gallery's new quarters are in the fabled Fuller Building, the great Art Deco landmark at 57th Street and Madison Avenue. At its former street address, 41 East 57th Street, it once housed several of New York's leading galleries; its current address is the more pedestrian 595 Madison Avenue. Go figure.

The show examines Miró's break with traditional painting and adult restraint, after his liberating exposure to French modernism in general and Surrealism in particular. He reduced his medium to exuberant automatist drawing on monochrome fields of color. His biomorphic forms were often simply outlined, as in "The Kiss" (1924), where you can locate the point of contact and maybe a few blue sparks (or hairs, or petals), but not much more. Some forms are slightly filled in, as in the more legible "Painting (The Lovers — Adam and Eve)," from 1925. Standouts include two large works, both titled "Painting" (1936), where Miró improvised on the raw, glowing side of Masonite, mingling black shapes and outlines with daubs of color. They are presaged by two 1924 works sparely drawn in pencil on cigar-box tops painted white. The fissured white suggests both refined earth and floating ethers — a lunar landscape for Miró's weightless mysterious creatures. ROBERTA SMITH

BROOKLYN

Through Nov. 27. Public Art Fund in Brooklyn Bridge Park, 334 Furman Street, Brooklyn; 212-223-7800, publicartfund.org.

When I sat down on a shady bench in Brooklyn Bridge Park recently to contemplate Leilah Babirye's "Agali Awamu (Togetherness)," a suite of nine-foot-tall carved pine sculptures that form part of the five-person show "Black Atlantic," an enormous ship called the SSI Magnificent happened to be gliding past right behind them.

Competing with the constant movement of New York Harbor — not to mention with the steel-belted, glorious Brooklyn Bridge overhead — isn't easy. But Daniel S. Palmer and the artist Hugh Hayden, who curated "Black Atlantic" for the Public Art Fund around the theme of African diaspora identities, use the incongruity to their advantage. Babirye's chunky, darkened figures, each adorned with rusty cogs and bits of metal plating like jewelry, turn their backs to the water, like friends, or maybe just countrymen, who’ve been put to shore in a strange land. Standing within sight of the Statue of Liberty, they serve as a forceful counterpoint to the idea of an America built chiefly by willing immigrants.

The show's other works ride a similar ambiguity, blending comfortably into the lush park even as they disrupt it with a different story line. Kiyan Williams makes a large version of the bronze "Statue of Freedom" that sits atop the U.S. Capitol, and then covers it in soil, as if it had been buried for four hundred years; Hayden contributes a surreal, unnerving rowboat with built-in wooden ribs and whale-like vertebrae; Tau Lewis's meditative, starfish-like steel plates are adorned with African patterns; and Dozie Kanu's concrete couch encapsulates the awkward beauty of a hybrid identity as it sits on Texas-style wire rims. WILL HEINRICH

Brooklyn

Through November. Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. 718-638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.

Art is great, but have you ever stopped to really look at the wonder of a tree? The outdoor plaza of the Brooklyn Museum has been taken over by "The Gray-Green Divide," a site-specific installation by the New York-based British data journalist Mona Chalabi that got me thinking about the contrasting pleasures and privileges of both seeing art and spending time in nature. Her ink and colored-pencil drawings of the 100 most common trees in New York City are reproduced across the walls and steps at the museum's entrance. An accompanying pair of Brooklyn maps reveal that areas with more trees remain considerably cooler, while a chart shows a correlation between neighborhood wealth and the number of trees. My 5-year-old daughter was moved enough by the display to hug a tree along Eastern Parkway because trees are helpers. I too began to see trees differently, as indicators of urban social inequity.

Afterward you can walk from the plaza to the neighboring Brooklyn Botanic Garden or the nearby Prospect Park. I’ve spent countless hours these past two years here feeling as if I escaped the city as I trekked up Lookout Hill or by considering the park's many old and impressive trees, like the Camperdown Elm imported from Scotland and planted near the Boathouse in 1872, later immortalized in verse by Marianne Moore. Chalabi's installation reminded me of one of the most clarifying standards for art. How does any given artwork compare to a tree thoughtfully considered? JOHN VINCLER

eAST VILLAGE

Through Nov. 5. Karma, 188 & 172 East Second Street, Manhattan; 212-390-8290, karmakarma.org.

The 30 female artists featured in "Painting in New York: 1971-83" might be surprised to find themselves in the same room together. Abstract canvases sit alongside depictions of human figures. Traditional paint is augmented or replaced by other materials. Curated by Ivy Shapiro, it is a terrific and illuminating presentation.

Emma Amos's "Zebras" (circa 1980) is painted on a handmade fabric, combining weaving with the more conventional pigment application. Joan Semmel's "Erotic Yellow" (1973) features a semi-explicit image of an interracial couple. Faith Ringgold's geometrically abstract canvasses from 1974 are displayed with a soft sculpture featuring three figures. Ellen Phelan's "Untitled (Water Wheel)," from the 1970s, is propped in the middle of the room. Ida Applebroog's two "paintings" are actually executed on see-through vellum.

Many well-known artists are here, including Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, Pat Steir, Dorothea Rockburne, Howardena Pindell and Mary Heilmann. Some of the most exciting works, however, are by lesser-known ones like Betty Blayton, Vivian Browne and Martha Diamond.

On the wall, Shapiro offers a stellar presentation of painting in an age when the medium was disparaged, and much of the work looks incredibly fresh today. Beyond this, you can only imagine some of the arguments brewing around aesthetics, feminism, race and sexuality, since the painters included here were from older generations than Shapiro's, with plenty of their own artistic feuds and factions. Perhaps these will be addressed in the forthcoming catalog, which features essays by luminary critics like Hilton Als and Lucy Lippard. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

SOHO

Through Nov. 5. Peter Freeman Inc., 140 Grand Street, Manhattan, 212-966-5154, peterfreemaninc.com.

The delicate yet rigorous art of Fernanda Gomes (born 1960, Brazil) is well known internationally, so her first New York solo since 2006 should not be missed. In this beautiful arrangement of over 30 spare wall pieces, floor pieces and installations, each effort makes you see more fully what has come before. Many are on the small side. Most are fit together from scraps of wood, chipboard or parts of furniture found on the street; judicious additions of white paint rarely disguises previous uses. Parts of more complex works can appear in other pieces at other times. Others are temporary and cease to exist at show's end. Here for example, the materials not used for this show are stacked to one side — and yet cited as a work on the checklist.

Among the echoes to be spotted here are a long jagged fragment of lathe broken off another one in a nearby work, or a second, more thoroughly painted version of a 2014 wall relief. The remake hangs in a scrim-topped enclosure — along with five small, seemingly flat squares of painted wood or linen, each reflecting light differently or containing a perceptual surprise. The relief's slightly scruffier ancestor is just outside. Gomes's art unites painting, sculpture and installation, while also drawing on multiple 20th-century traditions. Her ability to filter these precedents through her own sensibility is like her recycling of materials: She makes everything look not new, but fresh, which may be better. ROBERTA SMITH

Chelsea

Through Oct. 29. Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, Manhattan; 212-431-3292, pacegallery.com.

Since the mid-1980s, the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes has cultivated a high-low form of abstract painting in which modernist geometry is juiced up by suggestions of balloons, chandeliers, streamers and other dime-store party fixings. Their implicit potential for eye-popping intensity is now explicit. If the 10 new canvases in this show — her first in New York since 2015 — aren't her best yet, they are certainly the best she has yet exhibited in the city. They show her very much in command, expanding her references, tightening her compositions and clarifying her colors into gorgeous paintings that resist easy digestion.

Milhazes's patterns have been refined and multiplied. She uses several kinds of waves and scallops, all manner of stripes and dots. Fields of gold-black-lavender concentric circles update Gustav Klimt's backgrounds; multicolored circles renew Sonia Delaunay's. Textile and interior design riffs are ubiquitous. Little aggregates of boxy shapes — all straight lines — conjure modernist abstraction from Mondrian forward, while each composition also contains a sprig of peasant-art flowers.

These paintings are in a sense collages, but constructed as carefully as clockworks. They are great fun to parse: full of surprising repetitions and variations (consider the lower right corner of "Cirandinha"). The show's title, "Mistura Sagrada" (or "Holy Mix"), acknowledges their craziness and purity.

Upstairs from the paintings hangs one of the installation pieces Milhazes made by stringing up thousands of party decorations on hundreds of invisible threads. This idea might have been better off resisted. It returns Milhazes's expanding vocabulary to its original sources. ROBERTA SMITH

Chelsea

Through Oct. 29. Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-790-3900, hauserwirth.com.

A river is not a wall. Though it may be pressed into service to mark a border, a river will not stay still. Rivers flow, swell, recede, change course and meander. They may be passable or bridgeable but doing so may be dangerous, illicit, policed.

Zoe Leonard's "Al Río/To the River" documents the Rio Grande where it divides the United States from Mexico. Beginning in 2016, Leonard produced more than 500 photographs tracing its path from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez to the Gulf of Mexico over four years. At times this New York-based artist's camera stays still as the water and world keep moving: a family picnics bankside, a flock of birds take flight from a field. Other sets highlight the riverlike quality of a roadway or tire track. Is the circular dead-end of a dusty dirt road a drop-off point or just a turnaround? In another series, a helicopter rising above a tree line suggests the river as a site of surveillance.

Only a selection are on view, in this U.S. debut of the project, while a larger presentation is opening at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, on Saturday. The accompanying photobook published by Hatje Cantz may be the best way to take in the entirety of the project, but this ample introduction will make you reflect on the languid beauty of rivers and the rigid force of borders. JOHN VINCLER

MIDTOWN

Through Oct. 29. EFA Project Space, 323 West 39th Street, 2nd floor, Manhattan; 212-563-5855, projectspace-efanyc.org.

The games in this group exhibition aren't exactly typical. For one thing, the objective of most is not to win. In Pippin Barr's "Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment" (2011), you can't, no matter how you try; instead, you’re doomed to replay the punishments of mythical characters in comically lo-fi aesthetics. Even when there is a defined goal, it's not necessarily logical: In Jeremy Couillard's "Fuzz Dungeon" (2021), you’re a creature journeying through trippy spaces in search of a "sasquatch sex amulet," whatever that is.

Curated by the artist Nicholas O’Brien, "Voluntary Attempts to Overcome Necessary Obstacles" gathers alternative and experimental games whose impetus is what you might find out while playing them (which you can do in the gallery). Angela Washko's "Mother, Player: Chapter 1 (Demo)" (2022) casts you as a pregnant character making decisions during a pandemic. In Robert Yang's "The Tearoom" (2017), you try to pick up men in a 1960s Ohio bathroom without getting caught by the police. The show's oldest entry, "Escape From Woomera," depicts you as an Iranian asylum seeker trying to escape an Australian detention center.

A modification of a first-person shooter game, "Escape From Woomera" looks clunky compared to more artfully designed recent works. But it was clearly a touchstone for games meant to make players think critically about the world — an idea that comes through even in the show's more abstract contributions. If you start to play but don't know exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, maybe that's part of the point. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

CHELSEA

Through Oct. 29. Lehmann Maupin, 501 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 212-255-2923, lehmannmaupin.com.

"Inverted Monument," the knockout work at the center of Do Ho Suh's latest exhibition, undoes the traditional sculptural trope of placing a great man on a marble plinth. In a poetic act of reduction and undoing, the South Korean-born and London-based artist replaces bronze and marble with blood-red thermoplastic polyester to create a weblike structure — paradoxically chaotic and legible, delicate and sturdy. Instead of rising from the platform on which he stands, the figure hangs from his feet inverted within it. The form that traditionally raises and honors now imprisons, invoking variously Dante's depiction of Lucifer seen frozen in ice, head downward with his legs turned up, in "Inferno," or more contemporary scenes of monuments of slave traders toppled into the sea.

The other works in the show feel like unnecessary add-ons. A video animation and works-on-paper look like exploratory sketches on the upside-down-figure theme. (Sometimes it is best not to show your work.) In the back room, a horizontal arrangement of landscape-oriented photos mostly of sky are all bordered at bottom with building rooftops suggesting various locales. Across from this, "Jet Lag" (2022) consists of a wall of multicolored architectural details rendered in diaphanous polyester: light switches, fire alarms, smoke detectors, a telephone, and a variety of wall outlets hinting at many geographies. These collected elements nod to Suh's signature practice of recreating dwellings in translucent fabric. Good, but there is one anti-monumental reason this show is a must-see. JOHN VINCLER

SoHo

Through Oct. 29. Postmasters, 484 Broome Street, Manhattan; www.postmastersart.com.

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a scientist turned artist, promotes a movement he calls Dataism, documenting "invisible but objective societal processes, connections, associations, affiliations, correlations, causes, and consequences, aspects of reality that are simply not accessible to retinal art."

To that end, in this show called "BarabasiLab: Big Data (Networking the Artworld)," one wall at Postmasters features what looks like a suite of Bauhaus abstractions, but whose nesting rectangles actually represent philanthropic spending by foundations in the United States, from 2010 to 2019. (Art museums reap 0.5 percent of that spending, so the rectangle that stands for them takes up 0.5 percent of the total surface area of the suite's abstractions.)

A single canvas on another wall, bearing a squiggly abstraction in green, yellow, blue and red, might almost be a Kandinsky-inspired response to music; in fact it captures the connections among the few big artists, dealers and museums that dominate the art world.

But here's what's weird about Barabasi's information-heavy art: To squeeze the information out of his work — mostly paintings and prints, but this show includes one video and a sculpture — you can't just look; you need to read a web page with the back story. That makes me think Barabasi's work is more about capturing the vital feel of data in our lives than giving us specific facts.

Or maybe it's about an ancient function of art we’ve come to neglect: To simply point at important things in the world — a mammoth to kill; a god to worship — without regard to beauty or style or anything "retinal." All the work now at Postmasters could look pretty different and still capture the same information. Is it saying that deep down, all art wants to function that way? BLAKE GOPNIK

TriBeCa

Through Oct. 29. Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, 18 Wooster Street, 212-343-7300, deitch.com.

For "Truck Stop," his solo show at Jeffrey Deitch in Tribeca, the artist Mario Ayala is selling Los Angeles. His big canvases depict the vehicular familiars of those sunbaked streets — a Baja-blasted mariscos truck and its chillaxing shrimp mascot; a brake-dusted recreational vehicle that looks like someone's primary residence; a handsome Ford pickup with a psychedelic airbrush design on its tailgate — lightning ripping, cops chasing and aliens abducting. Ayala's paintings heave with winking details: The shrimp smokes a bowl, the perfectly weathered Sunchaser R.V. logo incorporates a lewdly fluting Kokopelli. An actual billboard in the style of those for Work Boot Warehouse, looming over an office trailer set up to screen a video with radioactive road warrior themes, replaces the ad's wholesome pinup girl with the artist's head on the body of David Bowie from the "Diamond Dogs" cover. It's Los Angeles as semiotic sprawl. And Ayala, a virtuoso of this vernacular form, airbrushes all.

Then, there's the bus: a nearly life-size shaped canvas of the butt of a Metro coach. Its number, 90031, is the ZIP code for the heavily Hispanic east-side neighborhood of Lincoln Heights; the smarmy lawyer showing pearly whites in the middle of the ACCIDENTES ad — an injury attorney so ubiquitous in the Southland people dress as him for Halloween — is unmistakably Deitch. The tag reads: WWJDD22. What would Jeffrey Deitch do? He’d get you the money you deserve. TRAVIS DIEHL

CHINATOWN

Through Oct. 22. Martos Gallery, 41 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan; (212) 560-0670, martosgallery.com.

Jennie Jieun Lee might be described as a ceramic artist, but she reaches much further than that in "Marie" at Martos Gallery. Wildly colored vessels thrown in porcelain are filled with flowers Lee grew herself — zinnias, snap dragons, amaranth and dahlias. These are accompanied by ceramic human heads with crazy, runaway glazes, slabs of clay shaped into little garments and globs of slipcast-porcelain strung into an evocative "garland." At the center of the show is a re-creation of the tomb of Marie Laveau (1801-1881), a 19th-century Creole voodoo practitioner who was also a hair stylist to the wealthy of New Orleans and who even intervened on behalf of death-row prisoners.

There is a feral quality to Lee's work that fits her subject and approach: off-center vases covered with cryptic markings; ceramic heads that look like they’re weeping or melting. After Laveau's death, her tomb became a shrine to supplicants who made desperate wishes marked by three X's. Visitors to Lee's exhibition are invited to ask for their own wishes and many have done so, placing coins and trinkets at the base of "Marie's Tomb" (2022).

The show might be called an "interactive sculptural installation" but Lee is obviously shooting much higher, asking, How do you mediate between different worlds? Can art still achieve this level of shamanistic engagement? Using history, malleable clay and a simple invitation to connect, Lee transforms the sterile gallery showroom into a more significant, sometimes even spiritual, space. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

tribeca

Through Oct. 22. Someday, 120 Walker Street, Manhattan, somedaygallery.com.

Did you know Christopher Columbus was a vampire? It's true — at least according to the allegorically muddy "Nosferasta: First Bite," a mockumentary video by Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer and Oba, a Trinidadian artist and musician. Oba also plays himself as the main character: a Rastafarian nightwalker, made by the bloodthirsty Italian back in 1492 as an entree into Indigenous society, navigating green card issues in present-day Brooklyn. The video flips between historical re-enactment and modern folly, mixing post-colonial satire with wacky tableaus like a pair of undead "moonbathing" on a beach in the 15th century or Oba studying for the U.S. citizenship test in the 21st. An ominous fisheye shot of Columbus Circle and its triumphal pillar rams home the fact that, even though Columbus is dead (the dreadlocked protagonist claims he killed his master after trying weed for the first time), his name lives on.

In the gallery, Oba's glittering sculptures reify spiritual traditions in the form of Day-Glo shrines and statuettes encrusted in costume jewelry, cellphones and Pan-African symbols. The teachings of Ras Tafari — respect for human life and resistance to Babylon — serve as shorthand for post-colonial hope, borne through time by racism. Jokes aside, the vampiric metaphor of "Nosferasta" replaces the heroic image of Columbus with that of a lecherous leech feeding on the blood of others, infecting them with his greed. This is different from tearing down statues. Instead, it dissolves them in the bootleg acid of myth. Just in time for the Day Formerly Known as Columbus. TRAVIS DIEHL

Chelsea

Through Oct. 22. David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, Manhattan; 212-517-8677, davidzwirner.com.

When a retrospective of photographs by Diane Arbus opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972, a year after her suicide, it caused a sensation, inspiring passionate commentary, both for and against, and so much interest that lines formed around the block. Fifty years later, the show has been recreated as "Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited," with all 113 prints (plus two that were removed from the MoMA exhibition after vehement protests by the subjects). This is many more than in the best-selling Aperture monograph that accompanied the show, and a few will be unfamiliar even to Arbus devotees.

Along with the exhibition, David Zwirner Gallery and Fraenkel Gallery have jointly published "Diane Arbus: Documents," a lavishly produced compendium of Arbus criticism over the last half-century. (The book reprints three articles by this reviewer among several from The New York Times.) It includes a notorious review by Susan Sontag denouncing what she described as Arbus's "anti-humanist message" and "cut-rate pessimism" — an essay that originally led Doon Arbus, the artist's elder daughter, to exert tight-gripped control and deny permission to run Arbus photographs without her personally vetting the words that accompany them.

Does the shift imply that the work, surviving time's test, no longer requires such monitoring? Really, it never did. An extraordinary feature of Arbus photographs is that the best ones (and there are a great many of them) still provoke discomfited amazement. The initial hubbub has simmered down, but the art remains controversial — and sensational. ARTHUR LUBOW

Chelsea

Through Oct. 22. Matthew Marks, 522 West 22nd Street, Manhattan. 212-243-0200; matthewmarks.com.

Elaine Sturtevant (1924-2014), who worked under the mononym Sturtevant, made copies of other artists’ work, but insisted that she wasn't an appropriation artist — and she was right. In this mind-blowing mini-retrospective, which includes a gray "Jasper Johns" number painting, a small "Keith Haring," and two "Robert Gober" sinks buried in dimly lit AstroTurf, authorship is the least of the concerns. It does come up, but only as a subset of the larger question, "What is an idea?"

The "Johns" and "Haring," though both perfectly recognizable, aren't exact. It isn't quite Haring's line, and the surface of the number painting isn't as labored as Johns would have had it. That is, I think — each piece made me question my own memory of what a "Johns" or a "Haring" was in the first place and what criteria I used for recognizing them. (Johns, Haring and Gober are all mentioned in the pieces’ titles, but that only makes it all the more trippy.)

A 2010 video, also by Sturtevant, compiles snippets from two online archives, the BBC Motion Gallery and iStock, to show a running tiger, a human sprinter, an opening flower and other examples of life in motion to the accompaniment of a pulsing computer beat. When the tiger looked into the camera, its body undulating, its face still, I forgot for a moment which was the art work and which was me. WILL HEINRICH

Upper East Side

Through Oct. 22. Gagosian, 821 Park Avenue, Manhattan; 212-796-1228, gagosian.com.

"Why does money matter so much in what we do, in what we are, in what we become?" Michel Piccoli wails in the last reel of "Contempt," the most commercial film of Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave era. He delivers the line in front of a massive picture window looking out from Capri — a window of the Casa Malaparte, a faded red box thrusting from a limestone cliff into the Tyrrhenian Sea, designed and inhabited by the Italian novelist Curzio Malaparte. Both the author and the film director imbued this dramatic 1940s house with a rare highbrow sex appeal; now, for the right price, you can get the Casa Malaparte look at home.

Three pieces of furniture offered at Gagosian each comprise a long walnut slab supported by two thick cylindrical legs of various heights and materials: low, fluted Carrara marble for the bench; mid-height pine for the dining table; and tall volcanic rock for the console. They’re all-new editions of the house's furniture, authorized by a Malaparte descendant; they appear before giant, actual-scale photographs of Casa Malaparte's windows so stupendous that prospective buyers might consider their own Bridgehampton views rather dinky by comparison. Can you replicate propinquity to literary genius? Can a table suggest the presence of Brigitte Bardot? Like the movie adaptation of "The Odyssey" that Piccoli's character is trying to write in "Contempt," the fixtures here present a rather half-baked classicism — but for a little taste of Capri some of us will sacrifice a whole lot. JASON FARAGO

Brooklyn

Through Oct. 23. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 990 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn; 718-623-7260; bbg.org.

You never need extra reasons to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. But "For the Birds" has installed plenty of fresh excuses to make the trip, in the form of more than 30 whimsical new birdhouses scattered around the grounds. (The project also includes an album of birdsong-inspired music, among other things.)

Commissioned from both artists and architects, the birdhouses cover a wide range of visual possibilities. They’re as small — and as apparently inaccessible to anything larger than a baby hummingbird — as Mary Frank's birch bark "Habitat" in the Shakespeare Garden, or as tall and extravagantly welcoming as Julie Peppito's 14-foot pile of found objects and concrete, "United Birds of America (E Pluribus Unum)." They’re as rickety and charming as an island of recycled mineral oil jugs, designed especially for blue herons, that Chen Chen and Kai Williams installed in the Japanese Garden's pond, or as sleek and ominous as the hardwood tower for crows lurking at the edge of Aster Field. (Erected by a collective called Bureau Spectacular, working with the architect Kyle May, that one is called "A Flock Without a Murder.")

Not every last birdhouse in the garden is equally compelling, or even well constructed. But in a way it doesn't matter, since the scavenger-hunt aspect of the show is so delightful. And anyway, the project's real audience — even its real art — is in the mixed flock of winged passers-by it's been attracting. WILL HEINRICH

Uptown

Through Oct. 2. Wallach Art Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, 615 West 129th Street, Manhattan; 1-212-853-1623; wallach.columbia.edu.

"Dead Lecturer/‌Distant ‌‌Relative: Notes from the Woodshed, 1950-1980" is, among other things, a show about race and abstraction, with work drawn from more than 50 Asian American and African American artists and poets. The title is a mash-up of references to texts by or about the poet Amiri Baraka and the artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jack Whitten. But the art is a deeply pleasurable array of pieces both familiar and surprising, from the cerebral text paintings of Arakawa to the dramatic stoneware of Win Ng.

All of the show's artists, whether famous or overlooked, had to deal with an art world that wanted — and mostly still wants — artists of color to make identity-focused work. Bearing this in mind as you contemplate John Pai's winsome bronzes or Leo Valledor's cool, nearly monochrome acrylics gives their abstraction a special kind of crackle. You can read defiance into their refusal to be more transparently political, or you can reflect on what a burden it is to have anything you do read through a racial and political lens.

In the end, though, abstraction isn't actually less political than anything else, a fact highlighted by Howardena Pindell's 1980 video "Free, White and 21." "You know," Pindell tells herself, in whiteface, "I hear your experiences and I think, well … it's got to be in your art in a way we consider valid." Next to the video is a luscious butter-yellow painting by Beauford Delaney. The only other color is his signature in bright, emergency red. WILL HEINRICH

Brooklyn

Through Oct. 8. 15 Orient Gallery, 12 Jefferson Street, Brooklyn. 303-803-4347, 15orient.com.

The handsome elegance of Thomas Eggerer's collages may at first deceive you. Bold colors and pleasing shapes in this medium could easily feel like a century-old rehash of Kurt Schwitters or Constructivism, but the works in "Selected Collages (2002 to 2022)" zero in on the waning days of the last millennium, particularly the 1980s. Born and educated in Germany, the Brooklyn-based artist, known primarily for his paintings, cracks open clichés of Americana and lets the ghosts slip out.

"Floorgames" (2018) shows the outstretched legs of football players in cleats and padded pants. In "Turn Around" (2008), three cropped rectangles each show cheerleaders’ black miniskirted torsos. "Chain" (2021) creates a network of gray-scale pictures, including photographs of silver necklaces, alongside United Colors of Benetton ads featuring models and flags juxtaposed with snapshots of street demonstrations and protests. Enclosed in a tabletop vitrine, the work includes a constellation of black-and-white coffee lids for dimensional flair. One of three images of fit shirtless young men in "Untitled" (2009) features a Confederate flag in the background.

The exhibition, an X-ray of an era in American history, unlocked from memory one of the answers from Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings about his high school days: working out, lifting weights, playing basketball, having beers with friends and talking about football and girls. A reminder that many of those now in power are a product of these same 1980s. JOHN VINCLER

TriBeCa

Through Oct. 15. Mother Gallery, 368 Broadway, Manhattan; 845-236-6039, mothergallery.art.

Not many gallery exhibitions look as perfect as this one. Titled "Wild Chambers," it presents five ceramic wall reliefs by Julia Kunin, who specializes in slightly crazed, sometimes Baroque forms animated by the gleam and variegated colors of luster glazes, in conversation with five relief-like paintings by Yevgeniya Baras, who builds lines and shapes into somewhat raised, visionary talismans. The pairing fits exquisitely into the modest one-room TriBeCa outpost of Mother Gallery, whose home base is in Beacon, N.Y.

Both artists, who live in New York, use an unresolvable tension between the abstract and representational as a main power source in their work. Kunin's compartmentalized surfaces give glimpses of extruded eyes, mouths and breasts while outbursts of incised drawing add a second level of consciousness. Their effect is both hilarious and primeval and evokes Picasso's "Weeping Woman," minus the tears, as well as Adolph Gottlieb's divided compositions given a matriarchal vibe. Dating from 2015-16, these pieces are among Kunin's best.

Baras uses thick paint, small pieces of wood and canvas collage to give surfaces, shapes and brushstrokes lives of their own, while calling to mind the paintings of Paul Klee, Forrest Bess and Elizabeth Murray. Baras's largest painting (untitled, like the rest) could be a swaddled infant or an erupting volcano. But what matters most is the staccato energy of her green or black bars and lines against the paler, stirred-up fields of lavenders, blues and tans. Like Kunin, Baras imbues the physical and formal aspects of her art with an unusual emotional magnetism. ROBERTA SMITH

lOWER EAST SIDE

Through Oct. 15, François Ghebaly, 391 Grand Street, Manhattan; 646-559-9400, ghebaly.com.

Rindon Johnson's show "Cuvier" at François Ghebaly tries the limits of interspecies small talk. Intensely formal works in stained glass, cowhide and software offer various kinds of knowledge — visual and aural, haptic and intuitive — that bump against a fundamental unknowability. A tall vertical panel of bleached, stretched leather, for example, tracks with Johnson's previous work in hides treated with chemicals and thrashed by the elements. In the new work, the lightened portions evoke ridges and valleys reaching for the sea. Or maybe I see a coastline because I know about the whales.

Specifically, Johnson's show pays tribute to Cuvier's beaked whales. And to know this, you need to read something — a Google search for the show's title, a news release, a review — before you go. Thus: Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist, established the extinction of species. The beaked whales that bear his name were thought to have vanished until live specimens washed up on shore; today, they are famous for mass strandings. Little in the show itself could tell you that the luminous smoky blue panes in one stained-glass piece depict a deep-sea trench where military tests induced one of the largest Cuvier beachings to date. A video game, developed with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, supposedly lets two players conspire to hunt squid from the whales’ perspectives. From mine, I slouched in a gaming chair mashing buttons and flicking joysticks while two blurry, grisaille screens beeped and shifted enigmatically. It's like explaining water to the whales. TRAVIS DIEHL

Lower East Side

Through Oct. 15. Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, 55 Hester Street; 917-675-6681, essexstreet.biz.

Contemporary art tends not to discuss the difficulties of parenting. The rare artist daring to muddy the waters — to peek beyond Hallmark-ready ideas of parental bliss — often focuses on motherhood's chaos and bodily gore. (The soiled diapers Mary Kelly included in her feminist artwork come to mind, or more recent, Heji Shin's grisly-looking photos of babies being born.)

In "Balances," a tauntingly provocative, concept-heavy show by the midcareer artist Ghislaine Leung, parenthood is treated as something demanding diamond-like precision. Visually spare, the show consists of mostly found objects: a baby monitor, child safety gates, a soothing water fountain. The show also features an intentionally infuriating twist. Leung's objects come on display from only 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays — the same blocks of time during which the artist can work in her studio, unencumbered by the demands of child care. Beyond these times, visitors will find the gallery open, but empty.

On one wall, "Hours," an abstract black-and-white calendar marking the artist's time in the studio — drives home parallels between the unforgiving rhythms of parenting and the unyielding austerity of minimalism. "Balances" will certainly speak to caregivers juggling many roles. But Leung's simmering frustrations will also resonate with anyone feeling defeated by workplace standards that held their grip, even as the pandemic made them untenable. This show defies expectations that, as good members of the work force, we must keep life's strains and stressors hidden from view, even when they leave us in an impossible bind. DAWN CHAN

Lower East Side

Through Oct. 16. Reena Spaulings, 165 East Broadway; 212-477-5006, reenaspaulings.com.

European painting was historically saddled with big tasks: Show God creating humanity; depict a religious vision, martyrdom or political revolution. Modern artists largely shrugged off the so-called "burden of representation" by embracing abstraction, but advertising still shoulders this responsibility, as the artist Jutta Koether shows in her exhibition "eVEryTHinG WilL ChaNGe" at Reena Spaulings.

Drawing from advertisements in The Financial Times, the paintings here mine the bombastic and pseudo-sublime messages targeted toward wealthy consumers of yachts, private jets or Europe's new high speed ICE train. They include texts drawn from these ads, like "The World" (2022), which proclaims, "When they ask you where you’re from. The World." Other works include platitudes like "Dream until it's your reality." In contrast to glossy print ads, however, Koether paints in a nervous pink-red palette and a scrawled, post-punk idiom that mashes the florid figuration of Florine Stettheimer with the muscular modern marks of Cy Twombly.

There is also a taunting quality to the show — a modified version of what used to be called "critique." After all, the upper-upper classes are winning in most parts of the world (hence the recent, sharp rise in union movements) and painting usually ends up in their hands. The first painting in a lineup of diminutive canvases here has the phrase "100% Malerei" (which translates, from German, to 100% Painting), as if to say, Yes, dear viewer, you may own a yacht or a private jet, but I still control the means of production for painting, the ultimate luxury product. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Holland Cotter, Jason Farago and Roberta Smith are staff critics.

Dawn Chan, Aruna D’Souza, Travis Diehl, Yinka Elujoba, Blake Gopnik, Will Heinrich, Arthur Lubow, Max Lakin, Siddhartha Mitter, Martha Schwendener, Jillian Steinhauer and John Vincler are contributing critics.

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