Which southern value of the mid-19th century is reflected in simms’ portrait of the stranger?

TriBeCa

Mika Horibuchi

Through March 26. Bortolami Gallery, 55 Walker, Manhattan. 212-727-2050; bortolamigallery.com.

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Several years ago, an 82-year-old grandmother in Japan took up watercolors, producing a series that included landscapes with cherry blossoms and a portrait of her cat. These are the identical subjects of the technical wonders in the exhibition “Watercolors,” but they are not by this grandmother, nor are they watercolors at all.

Instead, the oil paintings here are made by the Chicago-based Mika Horibuchi in her New York solo debut. After gifting her grandmother a set of paints, she received in return point-and-shoot camera prints, mailed from Hiroshima Prefecture, documenting her grandmother’s progress. Inspired by this exchange, Horibuchi began painting facsimiles of these photos.

The painting “Watercolor of a Carnation and Velvet Flower Stem” looked somehow more real when I looked at it on my phone immediately after photographing it, as if the screen tamed the painting’s dynamic strangeness, rendering it simply into a pretty picture of a pair of flowers. Horibuchi overlays the sensory experience of the flat gloss of a drugstore photo print with the organic wash of watercolor on paper to create something vividly new: a painting that is at once a scaled-up reproduction of its source image and also a philosophical reflection on perception. The paintings are weirder cousins of Vija Celmins’s meditative copies of both stones in painted bronze and photographs of open water made in erased graphite pencil. Horibuchi’s virtuoso paintings examine the amateur and monumentalize the ephemeral and the tender without any sentimentality. JOHN VINCLER

Midtown

Shiko Munakata

Through March 20. Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan. 212-832-1155; japansociety.org.

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Shiko Munakata (1903-1975), a self-taught artist from a poor family in northern Honshu, wanted to be the Japanese van Gogh. Unlike van Gogh, he enjoyed great success in his lifetime, particularly with his woodblock prints, which, in a break with most earlier masters of the form, he carved himself. In the early 1960s, Munakata traveled along the 53 former official rest stations of the Tokaido, the Shogunate-era road connecting Kyoto to Edo, as Tokyo was known, to make 61 scenic prints on white paper, half in black sumi ink and half with additional colors applied by hand.

This series, which hasn’t been shown in the United States for over 50 years, is the highlight of “A Way of Seeing” at Japan Society, an exhibition that also includes the dozen large woodblock prints of Munakata’s charming “Ten Great Disciples of Buddha” series. Hung only an arm’s breadth apart in two double rows that bisect the gallery, the Tokaido prints pass like tantalizing glimpses from the window of a clattering train. Black and white, in Munakata’s hands, become a Buddhist poem about the power of context: White can be both sky and earth, and black anything from a towering tree trunk to a lattice of cool shadow. Mount Fuji also appears in many guises: Seen from Hara, the iconic volcano is a Modernist black triangle, flecked with white but dense as oil paint; from Matsubara, it floats over a gorgeous fog of royal blue daubs bordered in rosy pink. WILL HEINRICH

TriBeCa

David Diao

Through March 12. Postmasters, 54 Franklin Street, Manhattan; 212-727-3323; postmastersart.com.

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A century ago, Marcel Duchamp presented everyday objects — a urinal, a shovel — as “readymade” art. An “assisted readymade” was a found postcard of Mona Lisa with a mustache added; a “reciprocal readymade” was supposed to take art, like a Rembrandt, and put it to work as an everyday ironing board.

In David Diao’s 14th Postmasters solo show since 1985, the 79-year-old artist takes an everyday object that already derives from art and uses paint to turn it back into the kind of art it derives from. It’s something like a “readymade assisted reciprocal readymade” — the art equivalent of a skater’s triple axel.

The not-so-everyday object that Diao based his work on hangs from the Postmasters ceiling: It’s the “Berlin” chair conceived by the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld in 1923. Built — uncomfortably — from eight rectangular planks of white, gray and black wood, it’s a functional riff on the Constructivist abstractions that Russian painters had just developed. Diao has taken Rietveld’s functional components and used them as forms in some new abstract paintings.

In one, the chair’s eight shapes are placed vertically, in rigorous order, like bars in a bar-graph. Another piles them messily on top of each other, evoking the dynamic compositions of the Constructivist El Lissitzky.

But these aren’t Duchamp’s “antiretinal” exercises in artistic irony. Diao’s sleek surfaces are gorgeous and complex, like the plaster walls in a palazzo. His colors and compositions are thrilling.

His “conceptual” paintings truly give retinal pleasure. BLAKE GOPNIK

TriBeCa

Joaquín Torres-García

Through March 12. Ortuzar Projects, 9 White Street, Manhattan; 212‑257‑0033; ortuzarprojects.com.

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Ortuzar’s show of dozens of wooden toys by Joaquín Torres-García, plus a few toy-inspired paintings and sculptures, is full of utterly delightful, playful objects. In their delight, however, they manage to raise important questions about the nature of art.

Torres-García, born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1874, is best known as an early adopter of modernist painting. The Ortuzar show, “Toys,” explores the serious energy he also spent designing handmade toys, which paid his bills for a while in the 1920s.

His wooden dogs have interchangeable parts — long or short ears; cropped tail or curly — so the kids who got them could play at build-your-own breed. His “Funny People” series captures all the different “breeds” of human a child might come across in a big city. The simplicity of their modernist forms makes them perfect fare for budding brains. (Or did toys get simple before art ever did?) Someone should reissue the playthings in this show: They’d bring joy to children and parents.

But how should a gallerygoer consider these toys? Are they lesser objects, because they were “mere” moneymakers? Or does their close contact with everyday functions make them that much more compelling?

By calling them “art,” do we risk pulling a Duchamp on them, when we should be appreciating them for their simple play-value for kids?

In the end, does their playfulness make them better toys or better art?

I have a feeling Torres-García would have answered, “Yes.” BLAKE GOPNIK

Chinatown

‘Rafael Sánchez, Kathleen White: Earth Work’

Through March 12. Martos Gallery, 41 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan. 212-560-0670; martosgallery.com.

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Rafael Sánchez and Kathleen White were both formed by New York City’s underground scene of the 1980s and ’90s. Sánchez, Cuban-born, was doing cross-gendered performances work in downtown drag clubs; and White, born in Fall River, Mass., was part of the Lower East Side art world when they met in 2004. They then lived together until White’s death from cancer in 2014.

Along with cultural turf, they shared lived histories: the AIDS crisis, urban gentrification, Sept. 11. As is evident in this moving, intricately textured two-person show, both drew on a personal experience of those years in their art. At one point Sánchez made assemblages from light bulbs in memory of friends who had died of AIDS. (A single photograph here seems to refer to that work.) White made sculptures from the wigs of deceased drag queens whose possessions had been thrown out into the street.

Despite the thrum of mortality, their art pulses with joy, in part through their witty use of found materials: dust, makeup, cinder block, telephone-book pages. The installation intermingles work in ways that suggests how they were different as artists (simplistically put: Sánchez looks more conceptually oriented, White more hands-on expressive.) But we also sense how they were alike. Two small paintings hung side by side — Sánchez’s “Onement in a Field” (2002) and White’s “Moon” (2005-2006) — could be depictions of the same evening sky vista seen by two people with a shared vision and distinctive temperaments, sitting side by side. HOLLAND COTTER

Chelsea

‘In Support’

Through March 12. The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Manhattan. 212-255-5793; thekitchen.org.

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Since 1986, the nonprofit art and performance space the Kitchen has occupied a former film studio on West 19th Street. The building is due to be renovated this spring, but to bid farewell to its interior, a well-loved time capsule from the ad hoc days before art fully corporatized, the curator Alison Burstein and the production manager Zack Tinkelman invited four artists to, in Burstein’s words, “perform the building” by installing new works and mounting performances all over its hallways, offices and exhibition spaces.

Fia Backstrom, who installed speakers, texts on plastic film and patches of brightly colored paint on ceilings and in stairwells, will perform on March 10, 11 and 12. Papo Colo set a dreamy two-channel video and three enormous unstretched paintings on the normally off-limits roof, overshadowed by tacky new apartment buildings. Clynton Lowry’s “Invisible Art Handler” series uses discreetly mounted QR codes to call up videos of the building’s routine maintenance tasks. And Francisca Benítez, with a handsome series of lush green photos and videos, documents the folk irrigation systems of central Chile.

The unusual installation of all this work primes you to see art everywhere you look. (Are those two clamps on a broken window sculpture? What about the fire extinguisher labeled “fire extinguisher”?) It also helps you see the entire social ecosystem in which art happens — the artists, the curators, the visiting public and the physical structures in which they all meet — as a rare and beautiful kind of art work in itself. WILL HEINRICH

Chelsea

Stephanie Syjuco

Through March 12. Ryan Lee Gallery, 515 West 26th Street, Manhattan. 212-397-0742; ryanleegallery.com.

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While the country debates what histories are taught in schools and how, the Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco dives into the archives to reveal how history is made in the first place. Her current exhibition, “Latent Images,” emerged from a research stint at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. There she rooted through boxes and files, taking pictures of documents and photographs that someone, at some point, believed were important enough to keep in a national repository. She blew up her snapshots, printed them out in segments on letter-size paper, reassembled them, rephotographed the stitched-together image, and then reprinted them at a high quality. We can see Syjuco’s manipulations clearly in the final photographs — the tape that holds the parts together, the artist’s gloved hand as she moves a paper around on her desk.

Some of these are presented on a low table in “Partial Anarchival Index (Working Platform),” from 2021. Here, the viewer can, at a remove, experience this sifting through the past. Others, like “Better America” (2021) are framed on the wall. Here we see a gloved hand holding a slide, labeled to indicate that it was part of a mass-produced teaching curriculum from the 1920s and 1930s, meant to instill in students nationalist and anti-socialist values. The film itself has become illegible over time — an abstraction of colored stripes. The metaphor is perfect: History is, far from being a given, a messy process of creating a whole from the fragmentary and sometimes unreadable past. ARUNA D’SOUZA

Lower East Side

Julia Rommel

Through March 5. Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street, Manhattan; 212-227-2783, bureau-inc.com.

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When I saw my first Julia Rommel exhibition at Bureau in 2019, I was taken with the anarchic joy of the New York-based artist’s geometric abstractions, a mode that usually leaves me cold in its perfecting rigor. Unlike the pristine quality of Ellsworth Kelly or Carmen Herrera, Rommel’s paintings are rough-hewed. Constellations of staples dot some of her surfaces or protrude from her edges, stretcher bars are teasingly exposed, patches of coarse linen remain unprimed or splattered with paint. Still, her judicious use of shape and vibrant eye for color keep up the family resemblance to the tradition.

The title of her exhibition, “Uncle,” may refer to a family relation or to the exclamation a kid might yell to another as an arm is being bent in the wrong direction. Rommel’s signature technique is to fold her surfaces as she works, distressing her cloth substrate, which makes her geometries pop with a sculptural quality that demands you come in for a closer look. Here you’ll find minute details, like abstract expressionist flourishes of color in the space of less than a square inch in an otherwise color-blocked composition. Her work has evolved to include monochromatic sequences of vertical rectangles divided by precise, decisive folds, painted in either languidly expressive broad brush strokes, as in the magma of “Red Nude,” or shown in pristine compositions, as in the deep green of “New Grip.” A pleasurable ease radiates off these paintings, happily obliterating how difficult this is to pull off. JOHN VINCLER

Lower East Side

Louisa Matthiasdottir

Through March 10. Tibor de Nagy, 11 Rivington Street, Manhattan; 212-262-5050; tibordenagy.com.

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Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1917, Louisa Matthiasdottir came to New York in 1942 and stayed, either in the city or upstate, until her death in 2000. Like her husband, Leland Bell, and other artists of their coterie, Matthiasdottir was a figurative painter, but one for whom the figure was as much a pretext for arranging blocks of color as an end in itself.

In “Hestar — Paintings in Iceland,” a strange and wonderful show at Tibor de Nagy, those color blocks are devoted to the stocky little horses (“hestar”) introduced to her native country by Nordic settlers. Rendered mostly in silhouette, without eyes, against glowing green heath and blue stripes of ocean and sky, these repeating figures might make you think of more recent conceptual painters like Ann Craven or Josh Smith. But Matthiasdottir’s compositions aren’t as simple as they look. A horse in a green field, with its bulky torso and narrow legs, is actually the perfect means of exploring the way solid objects distort our perception of their backgrounds. In “Black Horse With Pink Shirted Rider,” the animal’s feet are all level but the ground seems to rise, and change color, under its belly. The chestnut-colored equine in the glorious “Dark Horse, Yellow House, Red Roof I,” meanwhile, sheds golden light like an electric lamp. WILL HEINRICH

Union Square

Agosto Machado

Through Feb. 27. Gordon Robichaux, 41 Union Square West (enter at 22 East 17th Street), Manhattan, 646-678-5532,gordonrobichaux.com.

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This terrific show, a solo wrapped into a group exhibition, is multidimensional in every sense. It’s a time capsule of a golden age of queer downtown performance, a glimpse into the life of an underground legend and an entrancing species of installation art: the archive-as-assemblage.

New York City-born, of Chinese-Spanish-Filipino descent, Agosto Machado hung out at the Warhol Factory in the 1960s, was in the streets for Stonewall, and present when La MaMa opened its doors. He participated in productions by theater immortals like Charles Ludlum and Ethyl Eichelberger; posed for Peter Hujar; and collaborated with Stephen Varble and with the Cockettes.

All the while, he collected souvenirs of the people he knew (Jack Smith’s stage props; Candy Darling’s shoes) and work by generations of downtown artists, among them Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Arch Connelly, Caroline Goe, Gilda Pervin, Tabboo! and Martin Wong. Many colleagues and friends were taken out by AIDS. The highlights of the show, titled “The Forbidden City,” are shrines to them, created from snapshots, news clips, personal relics and prayer cards.

All of this material comes straight from storage in Machado’s apartment, and there’s lots more still there. Item by item, it makes for a fascinating and moving show; taken together it’s a monument to the memory of an era and population who must not be lost. Some institution should acquire and preserve it, every last scrap, and hire Machado as a forever curator. HOLLAND COTTER

Midtown

‘Cosmic Geometries’

Through Feb. 26. EFA Project Space, 323 West 39th Street, second floor, Manhattan. 212-563-5855 x244; projectspace-efanyc.org.

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The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint was as much a pioneer of abstraction as a mystic. So, in 2020, when the artists Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder formed a collective devoted to artwork by women, nonbinary, and trans people interested in spirituality, they named it after her.

Hilma’s Ghost’s first big project was creating a set of tarot cards. Now the duo has curated “Cosmic Geometries,” which expands on the deck, by continuing its exploration of connections between abstraction and mysticism. Aided by Sarah Potter, a witch, Ray and Tegeder used tarot as a guide for laying out the show. For each of the 25 artists, they pulled a card that’s displayed alongside the work.

Even if, like me, you don’t know much about tarot, you can appreciate its apparent curatorial powers. “March ’94” (1994), a bold and radiant canvas by Biren De, hangs next to Jackie Tileston’s painting “14. Muon Seance Aftermath” (2021), which evokes unseen forces in a quieter, more hermetic way. With their playful dances of color and shape, Marilyn Lerner’s “Queen Bee” (2020) and Rico Gatson’s “Untitled (Double Sun/Sonhouse)” (2021) look like a ready-made pair. Barbara Takenaga’s transcendent painting “Floater (Revised)” (2013—15) is unique, yet I felt echoes of it in the vibratory rhinestones of Evie Falci’s “Thalia” (2016).

It’s exhilarating to see a knockout exhibition that celebrates abstraction’s spiritual searching. These works are rooted in culture and form, but reminders, too, that when it comes to art, we’re often seeking something deeper. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Tribeca

Jessie Edelman

Through Feb. 26. Denny Dimin Gallery, 39 Lispenard Street, Manhattan. 212-226-6537; dennydimingallery.com.

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Jessie Edelman’s new paintings seduce with abandon. The seven canvases in “Getaway” are alive with contrasting, if not clashing arrangements of gorgeous color; variations in paint-handling and distortions of style, space and scale. They contrast flattening patterns and plunging or tilted depths, modernist sophistication with gleeful naïveté.

These new works feature lush tropical promontories and turquoise bays seen from above: the safety of well-appointed modernist interiors that conjure Phillip Johnson’s famous Glass House. Jungle growth and area rugs alike are painted in thick slurries of brushwork. The scenes resemble over-lighted real estate ads sourced from the internet and are surrounded — framed, really, but also encroached upon — by bands of bright floral pattern that have a life of their own. They suggest cheap peasant textiles sometimes mixed with touches of Emilio Pucci or Lilly Pulitzer. The borders’ paint application is deft and smooth, like mass-produced “craft,” as are the decorated tourist-souvenir candlesticks in paintings like “Getaway” and “Candlesticks,” which has van Gogh’s “Starry Night” floating overhead.

These paintings imply excesses of surplus income, subverted by a kaleidoscopic energy that discourages single readings. For example, the floral patterns can be read as wall paper or tablecloths. If the latter, the real estate scenes are reduced to the size of postcards or snapshots plopped down while the maid is serving breakfast by the pool. Edelman’s work is fun to unpack and ultimately beautiful, if you like beauty with a side of humor. ROBERTA SMITH

NoHO

Thomas Sills

Through Feb. 26. Eric Firestone, 4 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 646-998-3727, ericfirestonegallery.com.

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Thomas Sills (1914-2000) is, for many contemporary viewers, a discovery: Much of the work in “Variegations, Paintings From the 1950s-70s” at Eric Firestone was in storage before being mounted here. Sills was hardly unknown during his lifetime, though. He socialized with New York School painters like Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko and had several solo exhibitions at the historically significant Betty Parsons Gallery before receding from the art world around 1980.

Sills’s paintings here include many of the traditional mid-20th-century New York School concerns. Abstract canvases with colored interlocking forms like “Travel” (1958) and “Son Bright” (1975) have a vibrant, dynamic tension similar to works by Lee Krasner and Piet Mondrian, who played with the painterly grid, and with the fleshy, promiscuous pink favored by de Kooning. Sills’s surfaces are also notable. He used rags instead of brushes to finish his paintings, and this gives the pigment a particularly even look, beautifully integrated into the canvas surface.

So why was he forgotten? One reason was that Sills was a largely self-taught African American artist. Born to sharecroppers in North Carolina, he moved to Harlem as a child before becoming part of the New York art world. Another reason: There are some pretty weird, spectral canvases here, like “Easter Holliday” (1955) and “The Morning” (1954), which has a perky, pink bird at its center. Spiritualist and transcendentalist painting, which flourished outside New York, is being re-evaluated today (think Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton). Sills’s jazzy, cool and skillful abstractions offer another case of welcome rediscovery. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Midtown

Chris Martin

Through Feb. 26. Anton Kern Gallery, 16 East 55th Street, Manhattan; (212) 367-9663, antonkerngallery.com

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It’s thrilling to think of an exhibition — even a small one — of the gorgeous, funky, spiritual paintings of Chris Martin at the Whitney or the Museum of Modern Art, not to mention the Brooklyn Museum. But who do I kid? Although in his late 60s, this hero of the Williamsburg painting scene (who has also shown in Manhattan galleries since 1988) is represented in none of these museums; he’s never even been in a Whitney Biennial.

In a museum, these paintings would attract art novices of any age. With their allusions to immense night skies, preoccupation with outer space and their elegant improvisational brushwork, they are unusually accessible. Frequent additions of glitter, sequins and magazine images further demystify abstraction. And although often enormous, Martin’s paintings are never overwhelming. Their alluring lightness all but invites us to enter their vast spaces, and float away.

In an untitled painting, a dense field of brown glitter becomes a garden for a collage of gleaming marijuana leaves. “Jupiter Landscape” dots a fiery terrain with white ovals ringed in yellow. And the show’s tour de force, “Telescope Sphinx in Outer Space,” is collaged with photographs of Jupiter, the pyramids of Giza and Greta Garbo. On its very low horizon, Martin reviews motifs from his earlier work. One large untitled painting is unlike any Martin I’ve ever seen; working with a very broad brush, he created a vortex of color and light finished off with a restrained scattering of little gold stars. ROBERTA SMITH

Chelsea

‘Surrealist Collaboration’

Through Feb. 26. Paul Kasmin Gallery, 297 10th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-563-4474; kasmingallery.com.

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In 1925, the story goes, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert and Marcel Duhamel took turns drawing on a sheet of paper folded into multiple horizontal panels. Only when it was unfolded would they discover if they’d produced a dream image, a prophetic indictment of a disordered civilization, or a joke. Though they also painted, printed leaflets, shot film and circulated petitions, this parlor game — later called “exquisite corpse,” after a line in a poem written with the same technique — may be the Parisian Surrealists’ most lasting contribution. It’s also the focus of a rich show, subtitled “Poetry, Art, Literature, Ingenuity and Life Itself,” presented by Paul Kasmin Gallery and the private dealer Timothy Baum.

The exhibition’s wide range of historical ephemera includes a painfully earnest manifesto signed by Diego Rivera; candid photos of Breton and company; “dessins communiqués,” in which multiple artists responded to a single verbal prompt; and alternate styles of exquisite corpse done with photographs or on stiff black paper. But the real hits are the raggedy, spontaneous originals, which demonstrate that making sense of a painful and terrifying world, if you really put your mind to it, can be fun. One 1928 example, by Breton, Duhamel, Max Morise and Tanguy, shows an orange-furred creature with a pair of smokestacks atop his head like horns, a flowerpot for a mouth, a green coconut brassiere, visible intestines, and a pair of tiny bleeding corpses for shoes. WILL HEINRICH

Lower East Side

Maja Ruznic

Through Feb. 26. Karma, 188 & 172 East Second Street, Manhattan; (212) 390-8290, karmakarma.org.

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Figures with mask-like faces materialize as if from a mist in Maja Ruznic’s latest paintings. Sometimes the figures do not appear at all, as in the allover abstraction of “Mother (Green Purple),” which uncannily reads like a dreamy moonlit reimagining of Monet’s water lilies. In the 33 paintings and works on paper on view, all from 2021, Ruznic conjures many other artists while remaining firmly her own. Her abstract paintings and backgrounds recall the saturated tones of Clyfford Still and, at their best, approach the reverential awe of Mark Rothko. The insectlike shape of “Mother & Child (Green)” suggests the spider-mother monsters of Louise Bourgeois. “Father (Consulting Shadows I)” evokes the geometries and theosophical symbolism of Hilma af Klint. “Mother (Blue-Yellow Hand)” seems to refer to Marlene Dumas’s toddler daughter, depicted in “The Painter” with hands in contrasting red and blue. Here, in Ruznic’s inversion, the titular mother’s hands are covered in blue and yellow paint, as if reaffirming her role as artist after becoming a mother.

The works here were made after giving birth mid-pandemic and document the sleep-deprived night-space of early motherhood. Despite the many references, this isn’t busy postmodernism nor academic pastiche. Ruznic’s gathering of nocturnes are coherent and lyrical, often strongest when not trying to do too much. While fewer works would have made for a more refined exhibition, the small paintings and works on paper can make you wonder how they relate to the eight larger paintings, providing an opportunity to speculate over how the artist works. JOHN VINCLER

Upper East Side

John Willenbecher

Through Feb. 26. Craig F. Starr Gallery, 5 East 73rd Street, Manhattan. 212-570-1739; craigstarr.com.

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Over the past several decades, the self-taught artist John Willenbecher has gone relatively overlooked. But his exhibition “Works From the 1960s” proves that even his earliest output is well worth revisiting. The show begins with wall-mounted shadowboxes containing items of the sort one might find at rummage sales.

Arranged into simple configurations and painted sinister shades of black, white or gray, these found objects includeChristmas ornaments, balusters and a handmade roulette wheel, not to mention rows and rows of balls. At times embellished with numbers, these spheres invoke lotteries, secret ballots or Newton’s Cradles. Some strange game is clearly afoot. Five gilded, cryptic letters — “PANSA”— gleam near the bottom of “Unknown Game #3”(1963). (The artist has long remained tight-lipped aboutwhat that word might mean.) In a second room, a group of artworks are more straightforward about their subject matter: astronomy and color. The drawing “Study for Sunup Sundown” (1966) conjures the blues and pinks of a changing sky.

A trained art historian, Willenbecher owes much in his compositions to Joseph Cornell’s boxes and Louise Nevelson’s all-black assemblages. And his interests in hazard and chance certainly connect him to Dada artists like Marcel Duchamp. Revisited now, though, Willenbecher’s works resound at a uniquely contemporary pitch, at a time when every next TV show features diabolical trials and contests. Precise and ominously elegant, his shadowboxes evoke the archetypal villain of the moment: the untouchably powerful maestro ensuring that the house always wins. DAWN CHAN

Chelsea

‘The Unseen Professors’

Through Feb. 26. Tina Kim Gallery, 525 West 21st Street, Manhattan. 212-716-1100; tinakimgallery.com.

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As the writer and curator John Yau points out, grouping the sculptors Minoru Niizuma (1930-1998), Leo Amino (1911-1989) and John Pai (born 1937) as “Asian Americans” is a little reductive — but it may also be the neatest way of encapsulating why they haven’t gotten more attention. Born in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, Amino briefly attended college in California before moving to New York, while Niizuma, raised and educated in Tokyo, didn’t get here till 1959. Pai, who lives in Connecticut, left Korea with his parents as an 11-year-old.

Juxtaposed by Yau in “The Unseen Professors,” though, their works complement powerfully. Pai’s welded steel skirts the border between math and craft, while Niizuma’s chunky marble sculptures reveal the beauty of the stone without eliding the ambivalent violence of carving it.

But it’s Amino, if you missed last year’s show at David Zwirner, who’s likely to be the revelation. Experimenting with polyester resin after it was declassified following World War II, Amino made transparent boxes enlivened with streaks of primary color, transforming the ordinary experience of viewingsculpture by making his objects seem, from certain vantage points, less than solid. The angled facets of “Refractional #21,” a geometric composition of triangles and rhomboids, flicker like an old movie as you move around it, while “Refractional 27A,” whose colors float like clouds in a frozen fish tank, seems to exist not in three full dimensions but only in two and a half. WILL HEINRICH

Chelsea

Etel Adnan

Through Feb. 19. Galerie Lelong & Co., 528 West 26th Street, Manhattan; (212) 315-0470, galerielelong.com.

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This poignant, rigorous show presents numerous drawing-like paintings — small still lifes outlined in black oil on stark white canvas. All were made in 2021 by Etel Adnan, the Lebanese-born writer, poet and painter who died in Paris last November, at 96. She is best known for bright, semiabstract landscapes that synthesized memory and imagination. Here she scrutinizes her intimate surroundings, as suggested by the show’s title — “Discovery of Immediacy” — rendering one, two or a few small objects, set on the table at which she worked, but it would seem, also relaxed. Jauntily outlined, they include glasses, bottles, cups and saucers, jars, vases of different flowers as well as pieces of fruit. Their lines are rough, insistent and not entirely stable; they were painted in one sitting and allowed no corrections, which left such niceties as light and space to the viewer’s imagination. Their energetic style bristles: it is less Matisse than Max Beckmann. It’s impatient, as if the artist were depicting the instruments of long, convivial conversations and wanted to get back to them. ROBERTA SMITH

Chelsea

Kristin Oppenheim

Through Feb. 19. 303 Gallery, 555 West 21st Street, Manhattan; 212-255-1121, 303gallery.com

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Kristin Oppenheim started making immersive art in the early 1990s, some time before “immersive” became a tired art-world buzzword. Her sound and sound/video pieces were always spare, subtle, even Minimalist. You had to be still and find the immersion within before the larger one emerged. Oppenheim’s primary sound has been her own voice: singing a cappella versions of pop songs whose music and meanings she manipulates for her own purposes. Previous appropriations include “Sail On, Sailor,” “Hey Joe” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

In “Bang Bang,” Oppenheim’s first New York solo since 2002, Nancy Sinatra’s 1966 cover of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” inspires a sound/video piece. The crucial phrase has been reversed to “I shot you down,” implying female agency but also the casual violence of our time. Meanwhile, on a large screen, oddly shaped fragments of light rapidly flash and mutate across a deep blue background. The lights suggest highly irregular stars, streetlights, or both, blurring, perhaps, in the eyes of someone who has been shot and is lying on the sidewalk. ROBERTA SMITH

Chelsea

‘Feminism and the Legacy of Surrealism’

Through Feb. 19. Thomas Erben Gallery, 526 West 26th Street; Manhattan. 212-645-8701; thomaserben.com.

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Writing about the Metropolitan Museum’s thought-provoking “Surrealism Beyond Borders” exhibition, Jason Farago recently described Surrealism as less a movement than a “language of refusal” that pushes back at “constraints on the human subconscious, and on human freedom.” In a gratifying complement to the Met show, “Feminism and the Legacy of Surrealism” at Thomas Erben Gallery brings together art works from the 1970s to the present by eight women who, while they postdate the movement proper, are all conversant in this slippery but potent language.

Elizabeth Murray’s 1972 painting “Madame Cézanne Falling Out of Her Chair,” a gaudily colored cartoon-strip that shows the artist’s wife collapsing during one of his famously endless sittings, is a joke that conceals a jab. An untitled self-portrait by Brenda Goodman, from the following year, shows the artist as a tortured cloud of moving arms, but gray winglike forms suggest that she’s the swan as well as her own Leda. In “Studies for ‘Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting,’” a 2013 series of black-and-white snapshots by Elaine Stocki, naked women handle a canvas whose faded imagery is harder to make out than the shadows they inevitably cast against it. Synthesizing jabs, jokes, allusions and evasions is June Leaf’s delicate portrait of the human being as a mysterious compromise between body and mind: A foot-high wire sculpture of what looks like a sewing machine, it sits on a metal plate labeled “The Machine That Makes Itself.” WILL HEINRICH

Chelsea

Carl Andre

Through Feb. 19. Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, Manhattan. 212-255-1105; paulacoopergallery.com.

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Ten cedar beams piled against the wall make up the work called “5VCEDAR5H.”

Sixteen steel plates, each 20 inches a side and laid out edge-to-edge, form the piece “4th Steel Square,” which functions like an area rug on the gallery floor.

Three blocks of gray granite, 18 inches by 6 inches by 6 inches, are placed two up and one across, with the title “Manet Post and Lintel.” They recall the stacked stones of Stonehenge, but shrunk.

Such works by Carl Andre, including the other dozen or so in this delightful show, are usually treated with great sobriety, as art-making at its most rigorously conceptual by an 86-year-old High Priest of minimal art. But as I took in the selection, which spans 1976 to 2021, the works came off as a touch absurd, even properly absurdist: “Manet Post and Lintel” might just about be called “Homage to Spinal Tap.”

Andre belongs in the great but neglected tradition of the modern artist as joker, tweaking the nose of established “high” culture. Manet, Duchamp and Warhol, not to mention David Hammons and Hannah Wilke, can all be placed in that camp and enjoyed for the heft of their naughtiness.

But Andre’s sculptures at Paula Cooper also struck me as more straightforwardly, deliciously playful. They reminded me of what a 5-year-old friend of mine gets up to when presented with just about any objects that can be stacked.

As any child psychologist will tell you, the human brain is built on such play. BLAKE GOPNIK

Chinatown

John Seal/Calliope Pavlides

Through Feb. 20. Harkawik, 30 Orchard Street, Manhattan. 212-970-3284; harkawik.com.

Most of the 11 photorealistic oil paintings in John Seal’s “Picture in Picture” at Harkawik, the year-old Lower East Side offshoot of a slightly older space in Los Angeles, contain meticulous depictions of other paintings. One shows a canvas of tropical oranges by Henri Rousseau hanging in a California orange tree, another a postcard of “Vigilance” by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes tacked up inside an otherwise empty gilded frame. In an excellent essay that serves as the exhibition’s publicity release, the writer and art historian Edward Sterrett unravels the ideas invoked by such an approach: the strange geographic trajectories of paintings as objects, the medium’s surprisingly long history of reflecting on itself, what it means to live in the contemporary sea of images. What struck me more, though, thanthe paintings’ conceptual implications, which are pretty well traveled at this point, if still relevant, was how neatly Seal’s flat style keeps them in the background. In “Slipping Between,” my favorite example, he superimposes renditions of two fruit bowls like an accidental double exposure. It’s no less engaging to look at than it is to think about.

In “Generator,” a suite of energetic colored pencil drawings also showing at Harkawik, the very young painter Calliope Pavlides does something similar. Imagery that floats between surreal and whimsical is part of it, but it’s really about her color choices — she uses an appealing mix of yellows, blacks and pinks just dissonant enough to feel interestingly unresolved. WILL HEINRICH

Meatpacking district

Winfred Rembert

Through Feb. 12. Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, Manhattan. 917-639-3113; fortgansevoort.com.

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Beauty and horror meet in Winfred Rembert’s complexly assertive paintings. Sometimes radiant colors, tactile surfaces and folk-artish figures convey visual joy and personal dignity. Other works offer fearsome portrayals of growing up Black and male in Georgia during the Jim Crow era. In several of these, workers or convicts bend over endless expanses of white, picking cotton, overseen by white men on horses. In another, a young Black man crouches in the open trunk of a car as angry white men crowd forward; behind them are trees hung with nooses. Yet another shows a Black youth hanging upside down, on the verge of being lynched. The youth is Rembert, who lived to tell the tale, which is what is seen here.

The 23 paintings in the show, “Winfred Rembert: 1945-2021,” are finely detailed in tooled and dyed leather, a combination vital to their warmth. On the first floor of this small brick building hangs scenes from Rembert’s childhood; on the second, scenes from his brush with death; on the third, images of his seven years in prison. Afterward he married and moved to Connecticut, and around 1996, he began translating his memories into the dyed leather, using techniques learned in incarceration. For the fullest account of Rembert’s oddly majestic life, there’s his illustrated autobiography, “Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South,” published last year, which I highly recommend. ROBERTA SMITH

Brooklyn

Keisha Scarville

Through Feb. 12. Higher Pictures Generation, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn. 212-249-6100; higherpictures.com.

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The 12 photographs in Keisha Scarville’s solo show at Higher Pictures Generation seem to marry opposites: black and white, figurative and abstract, legible yet enigmatic. They show mainly pieces of richly patterned fabrics and parts of bodies, but nothing appears complete. In “Negotiating/Maneuver (5)” (2021), a woman’s face is obscured below her eyes by a line of shadow (and her body further cut off by the frame). At the edge of “Within/Between/Corpus (3)” (2021), fingers touch what seems to be a leg, but they provide only a small identifiable reprieve amid a sea of cloth.

Scarville is a Brooklyn-born, Guyanese-American photographer whose work often takes up, in poetic ways, her family heritage. It’s fitting that this exhibition is titled “Li/mb” — both because of the arms and legs pictured and because of her interest in the Caribbean limbo dance, which may have originated on the slave ships of the Middle Passage. In the gallery, two sculpted hands hold an outstretched rope near the ground; above them hangs “Within/Between/Corpus (1)” (2020), a photograph that features another photograph, of a Black woman and child, at its center. To limbo is to bend yourself to pass through a series of increasingly constrictive challenges. The installation suggests that this skill may be an inheritance in Black families.

More than scenes or objects, Scarville’s charged photographs seem to represent a state of being. Limbo can mean confinement but also something more metaphysical: a sense of being in transition, never one thing or the other but always in between. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Lower East Side

Holly Coulis

Through Feb. 12. Klaus von Nichtssagend, 54 Ludlow Street, Manhattan. 212-777-7756; klausgallery.com.

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It’s exciting to see an artist come into her vocabulary the way Holly Coulis has in “Eyes and Yous,” her fourth solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Since her New York debut, nearly 20 years ago, she has covered a lot of subjects, from Napoleon to the common house cat, and has developed a recognizable style of flat but brightly hued shapes — most recently oranges and lemons — bordered with contrasting colors. It’s a clever and often very appealing way to enjoy the pleasures of abstract painting and even graphic design without the burdensome self-seriousness that afflicts them both.

But now the oranges and lemons have gotten bigger. Sometimes they overlap, creating Brice Marden-like patterns within which Coulis can juxtapose lucid blocks of orange, pink and green, and sometimes she crops them until they’re unrecognizable as fruit. Most crucially, she’s also begun painting their outlines with a dry brush that skips and streaks. It’s a small change with an outsize effect: By enriching their visual texture, revealing their multiple layers and capturing the sensuous motion of the painter’s hand, these streaky outlines make plain just how substantial the paintings are. In “Mist Eyes,” four red-bordered lemons are superimposed in a kaleidoscopic double Venn diagram; in “Day You,” the figurative pretext is like an anchor keeping Coulis’s deliriouscolors tethered to earth. WILL HEINRICH

Meatpacking district

Winfred Rembert

Through Feb. 12. Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, Manhattan. 917-639-3113; fortgansevoort.com.

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Beauty and horror meet in Winfred Rembert’s complexly assertive paintings. Sometimes radiant colors, tactile surfaces and folk-artish figures convey visual joy and personal dignity. Other works offer fearsome portrayals of growing up Black and male in Georgia during the Jim Crow era. In several of these, workers or convicts bend over endless expanses of white, picking cotton, overseen by white men on horses. In another, a young Black man crouches in the open trunk of a car as angry white men crowd forward; behind them are trees hung with nooses. Yet another shows a Black youth hanging upside down, on the verge of being lynched. The youth is Rembert, who lived to tell the tale, which is what is seen here.

The 23 paintings in the show, “Winfred Rembert: 1945-2021,” are finely detailed in tooled and dyed leather, a combination vital to their warmth. On the first floor of this small brick building hangs scenes from Rembert’s childhood; on the second, scenes from his brush with death; on the third, images of his seven years in prison. Afterward he married and moved to Connecticut, and around 1996, he began translating his memories into the dyed leather, using techniques learned in incarceration. For the fullest account of Rembert’s oddly majestic life, there’s his illustrated autobiography, “Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South,” published last year, which I highly recommend. ROBERTA SMITH

Brooklyn

Keisha Scarville

Through Feb. 12. Higher Pictures Generation, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn. 212-249-6100; higherpictures.com.

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The 12 photographs in Keisha Scarville’s solo show at Higher Pictures Generation seem to marry opposites: black and white, figurative and abstract, legible yet enigmatic. They show mainly pieces of richly patterned fabrics and parts of bodies, but nothing appears complete. In “Negotiating/Maneuver (5)” (2021), a woman’s face is obscured below her eyes by a line of shadow (and her body further cut off by the frame). At the edge of “Within/Between/Corpus (3)” (2021), fingers touch what seems to be a leg, but they provide only a small identifiable reprieve amid a sea of cloth.

Scarville is a Brooklyn-born, Guyanese-American photographer whose work often takes up, in poetic ways, her family heritage. It’s fitting that this exhibition is titled “Li/mb” — both because of the arms and legs pictured and because of her interest in the Caribbean limbo dance, which may have originated on the slave ships of the Middle Passage. In the gallery, two sculpted hands hold an outstretched rope near the ground; above them hangs “Within/Between/Corpus (1)” (2020), a photograph that features another photograph, of a Black woman and child, at its center. To limbo is to bend yourself to pass through a series of increasingly constrictive challenges. The installation suggests that this skill may be an inheritance in Black families.

More than scenes or objects, Scarville’s charged photographs seem to represent a state of being. Limbo can mean confinement but also something more metaphysical: a sense of being in transition, never one thing or the other but always in between. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Nolita

‘Notes on Baroque Living: Colette and Her Living Environment, 1972-1983’

Through Feb. 12. Company Gallery, 145 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan. 646-756-4547; companygallery.us.

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The 1970s was a golden age of downtown performance art, with the most interesting work taking place outside of commercial galleries. On the streets of SoHo Betsy Damon was appearing as a ghostly eco-feminist wraith and Stephen Varble as a gender-challenging living sculpture. Farther downtown, an artist who went by the name Colette turned her Pearl Street loft into an ever-changing installation of satiny fabrics and theatrical lighting effects, in the midst of which she embedded herself like a jewel.

In that environment and in many others — store windows, nightclubs, and eventually museums — the Tunisian-born artist, who now calls herself Colette Lumiere, cast herself, tableau vivant-style, as updated versions of historical figures, fictional or real, including Frida Kahlo, Ophelia and Joan of Arc, while moonlighting as the lead singer of the band Justine and the Victorian Punks. Her career continues today, but the 1970s had its own golden age, an immersive sampling of which — costumes, props, photographs of shrines-to-self — has been assembled in Company’s Lower East Side space by the curator Kenta Murakami, in collaboration with the artist Cajsa von Zeipel.

Today more than ever, commercial galleries function primarily as purveyors of individual objects, so it’s heartening to find shows like this that present and preserve environments and careers. Such was the case with David Lewis’s wonderful display of rooms from John Boskovich’s Los Angeles home in 2020, and in Company’s overview of the filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s work last season. If this is a trend, may it continue and grow. HOLLAND COTTER

Lower East Side

Shane Darwent

Through Feb. 12. Spencer Brownstone Gallery, 170-A Suffolk Street, Manhattan. 212-334-3455; spencerbrownstonegallery.com.

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Doing the fine galleries of the Lower East Side, I’ve always noticed, and enjoyed, all the makers of shop signs and store awnings happily mixed among them. With the ongoing demise of so many small shops, I’ve wondered where those makers might be placing their products — and recently came across a possible answer. “Sun Smoke,” Shane Darwent’s second solo at Spencer Brownstone, presents a series of black vinyl awnings — standing on end; flat on their backs; hovering just off the floor — that do double duty as minimal sculpture. They work very nicely as exercises in shape and composition that cleverly deploy, and recast, a humble material normally found along city streets.

But on the Lower East Side, and right now, these recent pieces by Darwent, 38, seem more site- and time-specific than that. Despite being based in Tulsa, Okla., Darwent seems to have plugged into issues that vex New York City now: His “Nocturne (Wedge),” rears up like an obelisk, slightly broken, as though in commemoration of our lost retailers. “Nocturne (Sandstone)” pairs an awning with a glum boulder; hunkering low to the ground, it might be the Tomb of the Unknown Bodega. BLAKE GOPNIK

Lower East Side

Jiha Moon

Through Feb. 5. Derek Eller Gallery, 300 Broome Street, Manhattan. 212-206-6411; derekeller.com.

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There are so many references in Jiha Moon’s artworks, it can be hard to know where to begin. In “Stranger Yellow,” her show of ceramic sculptures and ink-and-acrylic paintings at Derek Eller Gallery, I spotted bananas, fortune cookies, peaches and Ukiyo-e-inspired creatures; I saw echoes of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Yellow Brushstrokes,” traditional Chinese landscape painting and face jugs from the American South. This cross-pollination is partly a product of biography: Moon grew up in South Korea before moving to the United States in her late 20s. She studied art in both places and eventually settled in Atlanta.

But it’s not just hybridity that makes Moon’s art so thrilling; it’s the way these sources of inspiration and pieces of iconography coexist and pile up within individual works. Often the results are delightfully absurd and cartoonish, like the sculpture “Peach Mask Face Jug” (2021), which comes alive with thick, grinning red lips and white teeth, while being adorned all over with faces, foods, hearts and more. Sometimes they’re transportingly meditative, as in the 10-foot-long painting “Yellowave (Stranger Yellow)” (2021), whose undulating brushstrokes could represent a seascape, a storm or something more abstract, like tendrils of memory.

Moon’s visual blitz may not be self-important, but it is studied. The key to navigating it here is yellow, a potent color that’s also a slur for Asian Americans. Moon reclaims yellow and weaves it like a thread through her web of signifiers, suggesting that even as our identities become more layered, there’s still a core element that remains. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Upper East Side

Lutz Bacher

Through Feb. 5. Galerie Buchholz, 17 East 82nd Street, Manhattan. 212-328-7885; galeriebuchholz.de.

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We live in a golden age of conspiracy theories, which flourish during moments of political instability. The Conceptual artist Lutz Bacher’s “The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview” project, which originated in the late 1970s, reflects an era when conspiracy theories proliferated in the wake of Watergate, the Vietnam War and a number of high-profile political assassinations.

Bacher’s subject is Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s assassin. For this project, Bacher created black-and-white photomontages of Oswald and his family and his arrest, as well as a fictional interview that highlights the mystery and uncertainty around Oswald’s actions and his own assassination. Videos running on monitors show Bacher reading parts of the interview. (The project also echoes the obsessions of two other prominent artists who’ve had recent Buchholz shows and explore the excesses and effects of American fame and early death: Cady Noland and Isa Genzken.)

Down the street from the main gallery is the Betty Center, Bacher’s archive of handwritten notes, photographs and other ephemera housed in ring binders. The archive, which she designated as a discrete artwork, got its name from a newspaper article about her husband, Donald C. Backer, an astrophysicist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, that erroneously identified her as Betty. This mistake sounds like archetypal conspiracy theory fodder; for Bacher, it provided the perfect, ready-made title for an artist who worked under a pseudonym and remained, until her death in 2019, playfully and strategically aloof. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Chelsea

Chitra Ganesh

Through Feb. 5. Hales, 547 West 20th Street, Manhattan. 646-590-0776; halesgallery.com.

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It’s often noted in the biography of the Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh, that she studied semiotics at Brown University, the American epicenter for an academic field that examines the uses and interpretation of cultural signs and symbols. This is not an insignificant detail; it’s crucial to unlocking how she approaches a vast range of images and ideas. Ganesh’s painted, drawn and sewn assemblages are like Borgesian libraries or delirious, encyclopedic archives. They combine South Asian cosmologies, Bollywood posters, queer histories, comics and science fiction to suggest hybrid narratives and utopias. Ganesh is at the height of her semiotician-creator powers in her current show, “Nightswimmers.”

“Death Dancer” (2021), a delicate image painted with watercolor and tea on paper, features an underworld guardian inspired by Citipati, a Tibetan deity who symbolizes death’s eternal dance. Other works here explore sexuality, motherhood and how nature and humans are intertwined. “Untitled” (2021) is a lush assemblage of pressed flowers, paint and glistening flakes of mica (silicate minerals) on paper. In the work, the head of a female figure with a bricked-up belly and stone-arched vulva morphs into a blossoming cherry tree.

Birth, efflorescence, reincarnation and resilience prevail in “Nightswimmers.” Canny viewers will also detect an undercurrent of activism. The sentence, “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds” is spelled out in thread, sewn into one of Ganesh’s works. Often heard at present-day rallies, this battle cry can be traced back to ancient Greece, reminding us that art, beauty and struggle are often interlinked. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Upper East Side

Hilma af Klint

Through Feb. 5, David Zwirner, 34 East 69th Street, Manhattan. 212-201-0420; davidzwirner.com.

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Hilma af Klint is back in New York. You might think the Swedish mystic painter, little known in her lifetime (she died in 1944) would have little left to say after her wildly popular Guggenheim retrospective in 2018. The watercolors in “Tree of Knowledge” at David Zwirner, however, is revelatory and sublime.

The show includes eight vertically oriented works made with watercolor, gouache, graphite and ink on paper. Where the Guggenheim show blasted you with epic concepts — starting with Af Klint’s “Paintings for the Temple,” this series is more terrestrial. Filled with spiraling tendrils and birds, delectable pastels and seemingly significant symbols, they conjure medieval illuminated manuscripts, Persian miniatures and scientific illustrations.

Why do we love Af Klint so much, and why was she overlooked during her lifetime? In addition to the sexism of the early 20th-century art world, she consciously hid her works. However, she’s benefited from the rise of digital technology and network culture. When her work was first shown in this country in the 1980s, the art critic Hilton Kramer dismissed her paintings as “colored diagrams.” Now we love diagrams and artists who make them, like Mark Lombardi.

Af Klint’s “Tree of Knowledge” combines elements of Christianity, Hinduism, Norse folklore and her beloved Theosophy. The works function like spacious diagrams: open portals that suggest cosmic and spiritual significance. Her work remains conceptually open enough for viewers to draw their own conclusions, insert their own meaning and feel transported to other glorious worlds. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Lower East Side

Wade Guyton

Through Jan. 30. Reena Spaulings Fine Art, 165 East Broadway, Manhattan. 212-477-5006; reenaspaulings.com.

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At least since Rembrandt, artists have depicted their studios; the best works in “Supply Chain,” a show of Wade Guyton’s recent images, move that tradition into our inkjet age.

All the works speak to the place and the way they were made, but the most compelling picture does that directly. It’s an inkjet on canvas, untitled, that runs the height of a gallery wall, depicting the Guyton studio kitchen; perched toward the front of that room, a big Epson printer is spitting out a tidy image of an apple orchard. The studio setting gives an impression of mess: Plaster is peeling from a brick wall; bare bulbs screw into cheap ceiling fixtures. The print that shows us this scene shares in its abjection: Smears of red ink half ruin the surface, implying a printer on its last legs; the image has a stutter that splits it in two, as though processed by a failing computer.

But both the studio and its image yield signs of care. In Guyton’s kitchen, the gleam on a connoisseur’s espresso machine implies a commitment to aesthetic precision. Guyton’s image of that kitchen is printed on pristine canvas immaculately fixed to its stretcher; such diligence suggests that his smears and stutter were produced by equipment carefully adjusted — or deliberately glitched — to yield them.

The expressive messes we associate with art-making have always had a dose of artifice. Guyton lets us see that artifice at work. His studio’s image is as carefully groomed as the trees in his orchard shot. BLAKE GOPNIK

TriBeCa

‘8 Americans’

Through Jan. 22. Chart, 74 Franklin Street, Manhattan. 646-799-9319; chart-gallery.com.

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The last two years have brought a public reckoning over Asian American identity. The pandemic and a new wave of xenophobia have led to a surge of hate crimes against Asian Americans, sparking discussions of their experiences of racism. Simultaneously, books like Cathy Park Hong’s “Minor Feelings,” Jay Caspian Kang’s “The Loneliest Americans,” and the anthology “Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts” have grappled with questions of politics and belonging.

Into this milieu comes “8 Americans,” an exhibition featuring an intergenerational group of Asian American artists, including established figures like Byron Kim andJean Shin and newer talents like Antonia Kuo and Timothy Lai. Skin is a prominent theme — Kim’s paintings of the subtle discolorations of bruises, Jennie Jieun Lee’s slippery ceramic faces — as are the ways technology distorts it, seen in Tishan Hsu’s human-machine hybrid and Kang Seung Lee’s jarringly intimate scans of his friends’ tattooed bodies. There’s an undercurrent of damage, tempered by the possibility of art as a form of repair: For example, Hyegyeong Choi’s drowned Ophelia is, per the work’s title, “quieter and colder,” but also brightly colored and beautifully painted. Shin has patched pieces of a fallen hemlock tree with leather scraps to make intriguingly hybrid sculptures.

Exhibitions built around identity can be tricky; a shared heritage doesn’t guarantee shared concerns. This one hangs together well but falls into another trap: seven of the eight artists are of East Asian descent. Amid vigorous debate over the meaning of the term “Asian American,” even a small show should better explore its breadth. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Chelsea

Tomás Sánchez

Through Jan 22. Marlborough, 545 West 25th Street, Manhattan. 212-541-4900; marlboroughnewyork.com.

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There’s a Thoreauvian spirituality to Tomás Sánchez’s landscapes — 15 of them created since 2014 are on view here — perhaps because they’re imagined places, unvisitable, and thus largely unblemished. Take for example the unreal stillness of “Aislado” (2015), a verdant island floating in a milky void, slightly washed-out, as if seen in a dream. This effect carries over into several small drawings, like “Contemplador de nubes” (2018), whose towering cumulonimbus form suggests unstable air and shaky reality.

Lone figures sometimes appear among the trees, contemplating the infinite, attempting transcendence. Whether they’ve reached paradise or are lodged in purgatory largely depends on the viewer’s state of mind, which, considering outside conditions, can be as volatile as the shroud gathering over the river valley in “Diagonales opuestas en un paisaje interior” (2014). Sánchez’s clouds are expressive bodies, excised from lagoons like a low-hanging dread, or creeping into the frame the way an intrusive thought can.

Some light polemics disturb the placid naturalism, just as disaster does with increasing regularity. Sánchez’s realist touch is especially fearsome in “Con la puerta abierta” (2015), a 6½-by-8-foot canvas dumping ground of spoiled earth and blackening sky, stretching out forever. The wasteland reads like a depressing game of “Where’s Waldo?”: Discarded antiquities languish amid water bottles and other plastic horrors. If you’ve been paying any amount of attention, the cataclysmic results of modernity shouldn’t come as news, so it’s a credit to Sánchez that he continues to render our capacity for self-destruction with terrible majesty. MAX LAKIN

TRIBECA

Helène Aylon

Through Jan. 22. Kerry Schuss Gallery, 73 Leonard Street, Manhattan. 212-219-9918; kerryschussgallery.com.

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In Judaism, when a person dies, their family covers the mirrors in their home as a sign of mourning. This custom inspired Helène Aylon’s poignant “Mirror Covering” (1987), which anchors her exhibition “Reflections,” organized by Kerry Schuss Gallery and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects.

Aylon was born into Borough Park’s Orthodox Jewish community and married a rabbi when she was 18. In her late 20s, she began studying art at Brooklyn College, where she took classes with Ad Reinhardt, and was widowed at 30. She decided to become a secular artist, and started experimenting formally to make muted, somewhat mysterious abstract paintings (three are included in “Reflections”). In the 1980s, she turned to public eco-feminist art, and in the ’90s embarked on a major project about Judaism. Aylon died last year, at 89, of Covid-19.

“Mirror Covering” represents a nexus of the different phases of her career. The work features 11 roughly human-size mirrored panels partly swathed in gauze and connected to stretch about 21 feet long. They represent the 11 million people who died in the Holocaust, speaking to Aylon’s social and Jewish concerns. Yet the gauze also evokes the reclaimed fabric of feminist art, and the work’s simple wooden structure, leaning against the wall, calls to mind postminimalism. These associations enrich “Mirror Covering” — it’s not a singular memorial but an open-ended work of art and mourning. When you stand before it and see yourself hazily reflected amid the discolored gauze, you may have the sense, however fleeting, of hovering between worlds. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Lower East Side

Tishan Hsu

Through Jan. 15. Miguel Abreu, 88 Eldridge Street, Manhattan. 212-995-1774; miguelabreugallery.com.

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In a short span of time, digital technology has entered our bodies and transformed our consciousness. Few artists have created works that visualize this integration as skillfully as Tishan Hsu, which you can see in his first exhibition at Miguel Abreu, “Skin-Screen-Grass.” The show includes works based in photographic imagery, but digitally tweaked or transformed into sculptures, wall reliefs and wallpaper.

“Watching” (2021) is an inkjet print whose composition mimics the layout of a smartphone screen. “Grass-Screen-Skin: New York” (2021) functions like an architectural skin: photographs of grass (and other objects) turned into inkjet-on-Mylar wallpaper. A QR code in the work links to a nearly three-minute video that features grass growing through a metal grid, humans touching their skin and eerie insect sounds. (It’s one of the best works I’ve seen that uses this device.) “Phone-Breath-Bed” (2021) is a steel sculpture shaped like an institutional bed on wheels, mounted with photographic images and silicon body parts. The work is particularly uncanny in this moment, when I.C.U. Covid patients appear merged with medical equipment or new cars, like the Tesla, are described as “smartphones on wheels.”

Hsu gained attention in the 1980s with a handful of exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Then he receded from view. The hackneyed adage of an artist being “ahead of his time” is, in his case, true. His art works in which the human body and technology are fused seemed like science fictions in the ’80s; now they are science facts. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Chinatown

Arthur Simms

Through Jan. 15. Martos Gallery, 41 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan. 212-560-0670; martosgallery.com.

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A vast world of energies and ideas are packed into Arthur Simms’s show “And I Say, Brother Had a Very Good Day, One Halo,” which surveys more than 30 years of his work. References to his native Jamaica, the African diaspora and Aboriginal art are integrated here into sculptures that include glass bottles, human hair, toys, tools and knives. His technique of wrapping with rope is also uncannily similar to so-called folk and outsider artists like the Philadelphia Wireman or Judith Scott, but it is self-consciously meticulous and masterly: Simms even embedded syllabuses from his university art courses in several works.

Some of the sculptures here look like fantastical weapons; others, supernatural vehicles of transport. Knives poke from the edges of “To Explain, Expound and Exhort, To See, Foresee and Prophesy, To the Few Who Could or Would Listen” (1995), while “Left Foot, Right Foot” (2007) is a pair of black roller skates with a halo of feathers. Skateboards, bicycles and tricycles also appear in several works.

If defense or flight seem highlighted in this show, so is the healing potential of sculpture, corresponding with current exhibitions of Milford Graves at Artists Space in Manhattan and Guadalupe Maravilla at the Museum of Modern Art. In Simms’s work, carefully placed swatches of hair and nails driven into surfaces, as in the Central African nkisi (power figures), remind us that objects are not just aesthetic, but bearers of energy, and discarded objects collected and repurposed by artists just might serve ameliorative ends. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Tribeca

Pat Phillips

Through Jan. 15. Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, Manhattan. 212-343-7300; deitch.com.

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Disembodied hands, arms, and legs drift through Pat Phillips’s “Consumer Reports.” They sell bootleg Gucci bags and get swallowed up by snakeskin belts and proffer credit cards. Like Philip Guston’s, the limbs convey a particular horror, one that abstracts our capacity to inflict violence, here in the pursuit of luxury goods. In “Gold Blooded” (2021), massive fists control a scaled-up game of Rock’em Sock’em Robots outside Dapper Dan’s Harlem boutique, recalling the time, in 1988, when Mitch Green and Mike Tyson pummeled each other outside the store.

Phillips’s work is of a piece with the recent flourish of Afro-surreal expressionism, depicting a culture curdled by capitalism. “Pop the Trunk” (2020), a picture of a speaker and a pistol in an open car trunk as an ample Fendi-clad backside hovers nearby, is like an update of Dalí’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” You can practically hear Big K.R.I.T.’s “My Trunk” thump through the aerosol.

Phillips, who got his start by painting train boxcars, continues to work in the graffiti tradition, both stylistically (a keen sense of motion) and spiritually (a healthy disregard for power structures). Phillips paints the floating arms emerging from a smashed storefront and cradling boxes of Nikes with Michaelangelian intensity, committing the looting last year, amid the George Floyd protests, to canonical posterity. Nearby, “Body Amore Level 1,” an array of cast-iron folded polo shirts, lovingly merchandised, attracts like a lure. But like the conspicuous consumerism that has become raveled with the American experience, it’s mostly a trap. MAX LAKIN

Upper East Side

James Ensor

Through Jan. 15. Gladstone 64, 130 East 64th Street, Manhattan. 212-753-2200; gladstonegallery.com.

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In Belgium, he’s something of a national hero, but James Ensor — one of the darkest and most gripping artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, painter of death-haunted masquerades and etcher of morbid self-portraits and spiders — has never enjoyed the American fame of Vincent van Gogh, Edward Munch or other masters of fin-de-siècle anxiety. Perhaps his time has come with “James Ensor: An Intimate Portrait,” a grotesque carnival at Gladstone Gallery’s uptown townhouse, which has been curated by the Ensor specialist Sabine Taevernier and includes numerous loans from public and private collections in Flanders.

Ensor was born in the seaside city of Ostend in 1860, and in two teenage self-portraits here he stares us down with youthful authority, the paint troweled thick with a palette knife. He would later deploy that palette knife like a rapier, though his anxiety attained even greater depths in black chalk drawings like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” whose murderer is drowned in black hatches, and etchings like an 1889 self-portrait in which the artist’s face is only a skull. Faces, throughout Ensor’s art, keep deliquescing into ghoulish disguises; over the fireplace here at Gladstone, flanking a little oil of ruddy-faced gossipers, are four Japanese masks from Ensor’s own collection. And everywhere there is contagion, metaphoric or literal, as in a watercolor-tipped etching of bourgeois and beggars and barefoot fishermen enveloped in tendrils of smoke. The 2021-vintage title, which Ensor wrote in the suffocating clouds, is “Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague All Around.” JASON FARAGO

TRIBECA

Richard Marquis and Verner Panton

Through Jan. 8. R & Company, 64 White Street, Manhattan. 212-343-7979; r-and-company.com.

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A 20-year stalwart of Franklin Street, the design gallery R & Company (formerly R 20th Century) expanded in 2018, taking a space on White Street for exhibitions and its considerable design archive. Its latest offering there is a pair of shows connected by saturated color. One is a magnetic group of eight exquisite handblown vessels dating from 1991 to 2011 by the American glass artist Richard Marquis. The other surveys the prolific Danish furniture and interior designer Verner Panton (1926-1998). Marquis was the first outsider to be taught the millefiori or murrine technique — carefully guarded for generations by the glassmaking families of Murano. Each piece is a breathtaking world of contrasting hues, translucencies and patterns, including scatterings of snowmen as well as stripes, checks, wood grains and even paint splatters.

Panton’s resonant colors and clean geometric shapes personify ’60s Pop. This large selection includes his well-known Cone Chair (in wire) and Split-Cone chair, bowllike Easy chair, bull’s-eye shag rugs and sundry textiles and light fixtures, most notably the bright orange “Flower Pot” chandelier. Today, Panton’s designs seem more institutional than radical, an effect perhaps of seeing them undiluted rather than as unforgettable high notes in mixed interiors. Exceptions include the 1965 S-chair, which is a curvaceous bentwood version of Gerrit Rietveld’s angular Zig-Zag chair (1934); a 1971 coat rack that is a mannequin-like cylinder of red wire painted with a pinched waist and a 1963 sofa in aluminum tubing that toggles between Paul McCobb and Wiener Werkstätte. ROBERTA SMITH

Jacqueline de Jong

Through Jan. 8. Ortuzar Projects, 9 White Street, Manhattan. 212-257-0033; ortuzarprojects.com.

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Jacqueline de Jong is the rare artist who engaged with radical politics in her youth and whose work, more than half a century later, still crackles with committed activism. De Jong, a Dutch artist, was associated with the Situationist International, which started in the late 1950s and combined elements of Dada, Surrealism and Marxism to confront postwar capitalism and the burgeoning “spectacle” of the mass media. “Border-Line” is her first solo show in New York in more than 50 years; an exhibition surveying her career is currently touring Europe.

At Ortuzar, de Jong’s bright paintings filled with jagged figures and forms depict migrants in refugee camps or trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Works like “Locked In and Out” (2021) and “Sous Terrain” (2021) suggest the horror and dread of migrants caught in deadly situations while the world observes them through the insulated lens of the mass media. (As a teenager, de Jong, who is Jewish, fled from the Nazis.) The “Border-Line” paintings are drawn with the crude, pre-punk energy of Art Brut, as well as the Belgian artist James Ensor or the Danish artist Asger Jorn (de Jong’s erstwhile partner).

In the 1960s, de Jong edited “The Situationist Times” and participated in a Parisian protest movement that nearly toppled the French government. If young radicals are characterized by their idealism, old ones like de Jong display resilience and longevity — as the American activist philosopher Donna J. Haraway reminds us, staying with the trouble rather than running away or retiring from it. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

TRIBECA

Milford Graves

Through Jan. 8. Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan. 212-226-3970; artistsspace.org.

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Milford Graves was a percussionist who treated drumming as something more expansive than merely establishing a rhythm or tempo. Graves, who died this year, was also a botanist and herbalist, a professor at Bennington College, a cardiac technician, a visual artist. Percussion connected with the human heartbeat and the energy flowing through plants, and made its way into art objects, as you can see in “Fundamental Frequency” at Artists Space, easily one of the best shows in town right now.

Graves’s sculptures, assemblages and diagrammatic drawings are the most visually captivating. His “Yara Training Bag,” from around 1990, incorporates painted boxing gloves, punching bags, a samurai sword and an acupuncture model — elements from Yara, Graves’s invented martial art form. Other sculptures include gongs, tribal sculptures, medical and astronomical diagrams, videos and printouts of electrocardiogram readings.

This show follows a survey at the ICA Philadelphia (and an excellent documentary, “Milford Graves Full Mantis,” from 2018). The gallery handout includes Graves’s “Herbal Chart,” detailing the effects of various herbs on the human body. All these elements combined offer an excellent introduction to Graves’s remarkable practice and worldview, in which art, medicine, plants, human perception, the nervous system and the cosmos are all connected. MARTHA SCHWENDENER