What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in March

Jul 25, 2023

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Want to see new art in the city? Check out Miyoko Ito's singular abstractions and Martin Kippenberger's brutal self-portraits.

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By Max Lakin, Jillian Steinhauer, Travis Diehl, John Vincler, Martha Schwendener, Blake Gopnik, Will Heinrich, Dawn Chan and Jason Farago

Chelsea

Through April 15. Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22 Street, Manhattan; 212-243-0200, matthewmarks.com

In 2018, the nonprofit Artists Space reacquainted New Yorkers with the Chicago painter Miyoko Ito (1918-1983), whose singular abstractions had mostly been held in Midwestern confidence. Five years after that rediscovery, her paintings are back in New York, at Matthew Marks, where 16 beautiful exercises of restrained carnality call for a silent pilgrimage.

Born in Berkeley, Calif., Ito had to abandon her education in 1942, when she was interned with other Japanese Americans at the Tanforan Assembly Center. She recommenced her studies after her release, but health troubles and family obligations prevented her from painting full-time until the 1970s. What she then made were structured abstractions of gently curved solids, pinstriped bands and rectangles rounded off at the top like gravestones.

Each painting is built up, layer by contrasting layer, and most suggest receding spaces, even classical landscapes, wholly unlike the flat forms of postwar American abstraction. Irregularly, Ito stopped short when hammering some canvases to the stretcher bars, letting the nails protrude like a marquee. Also irregular is her palette, a twilit, sublimely weird range whose best description might be adult. Muffled green. Muted magenta. Amber, but a little softer. Apricot, but a little darker.

Ito's colors are erotic, but also modest; they draw from Giorgio Morandi's dampened tones, they prefigure the ugly-chic palette of Miuccia Prada; but what on earth are their proper names? The green-gray of goose droppings. The fuchsia of the sky 10 minutes before sunset …. Ito's art has that speechless beauty that emerges only when, as Friedrich Schiller had it, "sensuality and reason, duty and inclination, are harmonized." JASON FARAGO

Upper East Side

Through April 22. Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, Manhattan; 212-794-4970, hauserwirth.com.

Born in rural Georgia and raised by a great-aunt, Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) suffered some of the cruelest traumas of the Jim Crow South. His childhood and years on a chain gang were spent picking cotton, which imprinted itself into his consciousness. At 21 years old, he survived a near-lynching, a horrific event that haunted him and echoed throughout his life's work.

The dyed and carved leather paintings, on view in his career survey "All of Me" at Hauser & Wirth, range from stories of injustice and violence to fond domestic scenes. In the first category are works like "Georgia Justice" (2015) or "Almost Me" (1997), which shows a Black man hanged by the neck from a tree. "Soda Shop" (2007) and "Jeff's Pool Room" (2003) show leisure and social scenes, and "Winfred Rembert Going North" (1997) depicts a car packed with luggage, and perhaps dreams.

One consistent motif in Rembert's work is the white dots that appear in many paintings. These culminate on the third floor in a series of paintings with swirling, rhythmic, seemingly abstract compositions. The works here seem joyful and celebratory — until you lean in to examine one like "Mixed Rows (A Chain Gang)" (2013), and a darker tale emerges, of laboring men forced to pick cotton. Throughout the show, Rembert's story functions like that tiny white dot in a field of cotton: individual but part of a vast history of racialized violence and injustice in America. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Upper East Side

Through April 22. Skarstedt, 20 East 79th Street, Manhattan; 212-737-2060, skarstedt.com.

In the 1980s, a dashing young Martin Kippenberger filled his peers with envy; in the 1990s, bloated and tiresome, he attracted pity. The hard-living German painter died of liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 44. The rangy oeuvre he left behind jostles with his bad-boy legend — as a man who (at least outwardly) dared to fail in public, his canvases unpredictable, often underwhelming, but sometimes unsettlingly fierce.

The eight paintings (1984-96) on view at Skarstedt on the occasion of what would have been the artist's 70th birthday have the ratio just about right. Half are brutal self-portraits, flirting with Picasso's or Schiele's idioms (or the tortured male form in general) in fits of painterly grandstanding and virtual self-abuse. The most idiosyncratic, "Nieder mit der Inflation" ("Down With Inflation"), from 1984, is a bisected composition based on photographs: On the left, Kippenberger pictured himself from the belly down, his pants (as they reportedly often were) around his ankles; on the right, an obscure and protean piece of orange exercise equipment seems mocking. It's the oldest piece here.

The only one to beat the show's fantastic blend of lust and resignation is the latest: "Dinosaurierei" ("Dinosaur Egg"), from 1996, centers a curled, infant longneck in the middle of an oblong shell, its vegetation-hued skin and bulbous eye garnished by hot, petal-like splotches of paint — the image is womblike and gravelike at once; the membrane alive with veins yet split open, perhaps premature and failed, perhaps ready to deliver a miracle. TRAVIS DIEHL

Lower East Side

Through April 15. Betty Cuningham Gallery, 15 Rivington Street, Manhattan; 212-242-2772; bettycuninghamgallery.com.

A New York City painter famed for his cerebral abstractions moves to the country and starts painting trees, which everyone considers an unforgivable betrayal. It's a funny cliché about the rigid boundaries of pictorial content, a reversal of the supposed progression of the artist, who's expected to get over sunsets and do something serious, like Cubism. Maybe Jake Berthot wasn't aware of the wisdom, or didn't care. His emotive, nearly monochromatic paintings of the 1970s both resisted Minimalism's incursions and softened them, remaining loyal to the modernist ideas of gesture and feeling, until he abandoned them for the landscapes of the Catskill Mountains.

Except Berthot's landscapes weren't really of the Catskills, or anywhere else. Where his early paintings, accounting for half of the 20 on view here, employed notched edges or central columns to shift their focus, inviting the eye to linger over a naturalistic palette of oxidized greens and rusted zinc, his late work (the other half, from 1996-2014) redoubled that strategy through multiple vanishing points, violating the concrete parameters of real space. These pictures wear nature like a feint — loosely rendered fields whose loamy browns and ochers contain only the hint of a spectral birch or sunlight leaking over a ridge, their organizing grids left faintly visible, like a ghost — a pastoral of the mind.

Berthot was a restive artist, and it's tempting to view the paintings he made toward the end of his life, as he dealt with illness, as vibrating between serenity and dread. But that would do his vision a disservice. He was grappling with the void from the start. MAX LAKIN

TriBeCa

Through April 10, Sapar Contemporary, 9 North Moore Street, Manhattan; saparcontemporary.com.

In 1972 Bilgé Friedlaender went deep sea diving as a figurative painter. When she emerged it was with the clarity of a new vision, to make "paintings that were not paintings … depicting the spacelessness of space." What she arrived upon — serene planar paper works and book-like objects — speaks with an elegantly reductive vocabulary: tear, line, square. But within its spareness resides an endless cosmology and a belief in the transformational potential of abstraction.

Friedlaender, who died in 2000, emigrated in 1958 from Turkey to the United States, where her work connects with American Minimalist and Post-Minimalist modes. Works like "Androsia" (1975), a watercolor of a floating square on a ground of gossamer azure, shares Agnes Martin's spiritual inquiries; "Homage to Emily Dickinson" (1977), four muslin squares laid with string and caked in beeswax so that their free ends dangle neatly down the wall, evokes Eva Hesse's systematic repetitions and attraction to gloppy, organic forms. It conjures Dickinson's "I felt a cleaving in my mind / As if my brain had split."

Where Friedlaender's art departs is in its transcendentalism. Her paper works evoke Sufi mysticism's teachings of veiled truths, barriers not to god but nature. Tears in the paper make visible the invisible world, not only the strata of layered sheets but also the fibers of the paper itself, which, like life, are exposed in random, uncontrollable ways. The tears’ irregular contours are mirrored in pencil lines, reorienting visual space and its boundaries. This is about as poetic as geometry gets: the recognition of unlimited ways of perceiving the imperceptible. MAX LAKIN

Chelsea

Through April 15. Garth Greenan Gallery, 545 West 20th Street, Manhattan; 212-929-1351, garthgreenan.com

Thinking back on the postwar era when he emerged as a sculptor, Robert Morris said that the "great anxiety" was "to fall into the decorative, the feminine, the beautiful, in short, the minor." What he didn't mention: that almost all art by women was bound to be described by those adjectives, and dismissed.

That leaves me all the more astounded by the early work of Rosalyn Drexler, still working today at 96. Created in the years around 1960, the art in this show fearlessly trumpets its femaleness.

A wacky little sculpture called "Pink Winged Victory," not quite nine inches tall, seems to be a biomorphic, almost abstract riff on the figure of Nike from the Louvre, with the addition of a prominent vulva. "Fat Lady," a sculpture that's barely bigger, depicts its subject as a pair of spindly green-and-black striped legs with a big pink blob proudly sitting on top — this, at a moment when plus-size women were hardly celebrated and when pinks and pastels were considered taboo in women's art, as the critic Lucy Lippard once recalled.

At Garth Greenan, a dozen tiny drawings done in brightly colored markers could almost pass as the work of an ebullient child, except that their subjects are frankly pornographic. In the sex acts depicted, Drexler seems to dwell on the woman's pleasure.

And yet, given that most of the objects here would barely crowd a night stand, it feels as though Drexler could not yet imagine her vision of empowered womanhood as something for full-scale public consumption. BLAKE GOPNIK

Chelsea

Through April 15. Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 212-243-0200, matthewmarks.com.

True to form, Paul Sietsema's latest paintings are impeccable — new entries into ongoing series depicting painted phones, close-ups of paper money, and ads for a Picasso exhibition come packed with so much precision you could fall in. Where would you land? Circa 1990, when a major Picasso exhibition at the Grand Palais occasioned a portfolio of collectible posters of his masterpieces. Where these vintage reproductions of Picassos flattened out the brushwork of the originals, Sietsema's copies of copies return the artist's hand to the art. The effect is illusionistic and layered: uncanny paintings of squashed, faded images of paintings. The intensely muted colors speak to three decades at once.

Sietsema's fascination with media, representation, art history and the mechanics of genius feels a bit retro itself. The currency works, zoomed-in collages of torn and folded pounds and dollars, all titled "Carriage painting," come in rich pinks and jades, reveling in the curlicues and watermarks meant to frustrate counterfeiters. The series coyly acknowledges the investment value of painting. Ah, what a quaint notion of money — and of critique. The phones say all this and more, and more elegantly. The series of square, monochromatic enamel paintings ("Yellow phone painting," "Green phone painting," and so on) depict rotary phones covered in the titular shade of glossy paint. The saturated canvases dazzle with their accuracy, the bristle-thin renderings of hairs stuck in paint, the glint on corkscrewing cords. When the ’90s call to debate the death of painting, Sietsema's paintings answer. TRAVIS DIEHL

Lower East Side

Through April 15. Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street, Manhattan; 212-227-2783, bureau-inc.com.

The pairing of Biraaj Dodiya's paintings and Heidi Lau's sculptures makes their show "Shadow Speak" seem more like a single immersive installation than a collection of works by two distinct artists. Lau's sculptures of glazed ceramic and cast glass feel at once ancient and futuristic, as if they render a new world emerging from some still-boiling primordial goo that's busy consuming an old one. Recognizable elements like faces, hands and what appears to be a wolf can be discerned within the forms. This New York-based sculptor's works rest on the floor or on table tops or are mounted to the wall, as in two column works made by stacking segments of ceramic reliefs. Many feature cast glass resembling sea anemones or Buddha's hand citron, a fruit that looks like a lemon crossed with a human hand.

If Lau's work manifests the otherworldly with fragments of the familiar, Dodiya's ethereal abstractions fill out the mood with both atmosphere and structure. This Mumbai-based painter's large oil-on-linen works recall aspects of Clyfford Still, as in the dominant green and purples of "Split Caves" (2023) that play against blue, cream and washy tones of black. Her most interesting works incorporate painted wooden planks flanked on one or both sides by smaller paintings on linen, sometimes with painted steel boxes anchoring the column- or cross-like assemblages to the floor. Dodiya's architectural rigor contrasts nicely with Lau's more organic pieces. In combination, these artists’ strengths magnify one another, creating a dreamy, fantastical world. JOHN VINCLER

Chelsea

Through April 8. Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20th Street, Manhattan; 212-645-1701, jackshainman.com.

Rose B. Simpson makes bold, otherworldly clay figures in New Mexico's Santa Clara Pueblo, adapting and updating ceramic techniques passed down from her mother, her grandmother and a long line of potters before them.

Some of the pieces in "Road Less Traveled," her first solo exhibition in New York, comprise only heads and torsos, like Egyptian funerary jars; in "Conjure II," a head alone looks up through a cloud of rings. But several of Simpson's people are fully formed, with precise legs and torsos, impossibly long necks, and narrow, empty eye sockets. Instead of arms, "Release" has a long necklace of clay beads hanging down from loops on its shoulders. Lengths of twine are wrapped around its breast, and it's speckled with fingerprint-shaped white and gray daubs, as if it had climbed out of some ancient riverbed and sculpted itself. In all of them, Simpson achieves a surprising depth and sense of range with her agile use of a small number of visual elements — Xs that become crosses, pairs of short dashes that look like quotation marks or equals signs, three or four natural shades of red and yellow.

Wandering around the show looking at Simpson's handsome, solemn faces, you may wonder what they’re doing here. ‌ Are they spirits? Gods? Self-portraits? The dead? But when you notice that most of the pieces, though they evoke water jars, have no openings but their eyes, you’ll understand — they’re witnesses. WILL HEINRICH

Upper East Side

Through April 8. Galerie Buchholz, 17 East 82nd Street, Manhattan; 212-328-7885, galeriebuchholz.de.

More than a century has passed since the German Art Nouveau artist Marcus Behmer (1879-1958) had a solo show in New York, at the Berlin Photographic Company in 1912. The current exhibition at Buchholz makes up for lost time, cramming a remarkable range of his prints, drawings and illustrated books into its Upper East Side space.

Behmer spent his early years moving between Weimar, Munich, Paris and Florence before settling in Berlin. He drew inspiration from the English Art Nouveau forerunner Aubrey Beardsley, as well as from Japanese woodcuts and Persian miniatures, and he illustrated editions of books by Balzac, Voltaire, Goethe and Oscar Wilde. A richly detailed etching from 1924, made for Behmer's publisher, pays tribute to the literary community, past and present, while a 1908 etching skewers the art world: Text written under an expertly drawn, engorged insect depicts "the common art historian" who "draws its food" from Southern Europe. "A proper means of extermination has not yet been found," the faux-scientific text concludes.

Later, Behmer himself would come under fire. Openly gay and working closely with a Jewish publisher for whom he designed a modern Hebrew typeface, he was imprisoned by the Nazis in the 1930s. A self-portrait drawn while he was incarcerated shows him sailing a boat called the "Invincible" and protected by dolphins. Behmer's work obviously resonates with our current political climate. The revelation is that Art Nouveau, often seen as florid and retrogressive, served for him as a potent vehicle, with visionary fables, allegories and virtuosic satire harnessed to fight for progressive causes. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Chelsea

Through April 15. Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26th Street, Manhattan, 212-399-2636, alexandergray.com.

Melvin Edwards is best known for his wall sculptures "Lynch Fragments," a series made of welded metal scraps that he began in the early 1960s in response to racial violence in the United States. Recently, however, another side of Edwards has emerged: an artist engaged with installation — and a skillful painter. "Lines for the Poet" at Alexander Gray unveils some of these overlooked aspects of his career.

Sculpture in the 20th century wasn't a bastion of color, but Edwards shows himself to be a buoyant colorist in a series of watercolors made around 1974. Moreover, for Black artists, there was the dilemma of whether to engage with abstraction, the dominant avant-garde mode, or figurative and representational art, historically championed for pursuing social justice. The watercolors deftly engage both: There are exuberant drips and splatters but also the shadowy imprint of hooks and chains, suggesting imprisonment and repression.

"Lines for the Poet," a post-Minimalist installation made with barbed wire attached to a steel beam, was conceived in 1970 and completed this year. (Similar works by Edwards are on long-term view at Dia Beacon.) The sculpture is reminiscent of the spatial installations made with yarn by Fred Sandback, but it also paves the way for artists like Mona Hatoum, who harnessed the stark Minimalist vocabulary and used it for social critique. Modernist abstraction, after all, was supposed to signal freedom and utopia; it took artists like Edwards to remind us that, for many, liberation was still out of reach. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Tribeca

Through April 1. James Cohan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, Manhattan; 212-714-9500, jamescohan.com.

Intricate, lavishly ornamented, fiendish and strange, Shinichi Sawada's wood-fired ceramic creatures alternately project the impishness of garden gnomes and the solemnity of shrine statues. This Japanese artist's figurines first came to global prominence in the 2013 Venice Biennale, where the curator Massimiliano Gioni featured scores of so-called outsider artists, seeking to celebrate "exceptions and eccentricities."

That context has seemingly given critics permission to double down on the artist's outsider status. Reviews of his gallery shows frequently mention that Sawada, diagnosed with autism, is largely nonverbal. But more than building toward a human-interest story, this biographical detail represents an attempt to convey how compelling the sculptures are, even while their maker remains quite literally silent — unlike the many artworks that need artists’ statements or wall texts to take flight. Sawada's pieces recall things we see when we aren't thinking with words. "Untitled (153)" features the knotty faces someone might imagine in a tree trunk's ridges. "Untitled (151)" resembles a wormy half-hallucination crouching in a bedroom corner at night.

While the work certainly brings to mind yokai, supernatural sprites of Japanese lore, they also evoke farther-flung traditions. You might spot similarities to wood carvings of American folk art, or eerie parallels to Ivory Coast masks. It would feel off, however, to call this cultural appropriation. The show seems to exemplify how global myths that we encounter — whether in anime releases or old National Geographics, museum exhibitions or fairy tales — might enter the churn of our subconscious, to emerge, reborn, into a full-blown personal cosmology. DAWN CHAN

Tribeca

Through April 1. Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, 52 Walker Street, Manhattan; jacquelinesullivangallery.com

Beatrice Bonino is an Italian based in Paris, but in this show she could be The Artist Who Fell to Earth.

It's as though she has landed in Sullivan's classic loft space quite naïve to the aesthetics that normally rule on this planet.

Needing a tablecloth for her new home, Bonino goes shopping in nearby streets and decides that skeins of steel wool would do just fine, basket-woven into a textile.

Wanting a curtain to divide her space, she finds a huge sheet of translucent latex to do the job — not aware that for earthlings, that material, however soothing to the eye, evokes condoms and the rubber gloves of a recent pandemic. The black rubber she covers a stool in looks utterly funereal to us, but to her it no doubt recalls the soothing light-years of outer space she passed through to get here.

Bonino's crudely crafted clay teapots could be sketches of the fine ones that earthly potters make, the way a botanist might make a quick drawing of a new plant she's seen, to help her understand how it's put together and what all of its parts do.

The objects in Bonino's show get our domestic aesthetics just wrong enough to wake us up to how hidebound our tastes normally are, without ever straying into the melted-clock clichés of a latter-day Salvador Dalí. There's "normal" beauty here, rather than frenetic novelty — it just happens to be a normal that no one has seen before. BLAKE GOPNIK

Tribeca

Through April 1. 52 Walker, 52 Walker Street, Manhattan; 212-727-1961, 52walker.com.

A cartoonish cacophony governs the inspired pairing of Gordon Matta-Clark and Pope.L in the show "Impossible Failures" at Zwirner's revamped downtown space. Matta-Clark, of course — who died in 1978 at just 35 — famously, elegantly sliced and severed condemned buildings, including in the South Bronx. He was also among the artists who homesteaded SoHo in the 1970s, and his work's presence in 52 Walker feels pointed. Three videos (transferred from films) depicting cuts in progress are projected onto three walls; where Matta-Clark and crew bore through Parisian flats in documentation of "Conical Intersect," it's almost like they’re sawing into the gallery.

Pope.L actually has: The first work visitors see is a one-foot-diameter circle hacked through the wall of the building's foyer, comically puncturing one of the Matta-Clark projections on the other side and deflating the solemn white cube. Known for abject performances, especially a series of epic "crawls" around New York dressed as a businessman (or Superman), Pope.L brings a sardonic sense of urbanism to Matta-Clark's poetic one. A new installation by Pope.L, "Vigilance a.k.a. Dust Room," sits at the gallery's center: A white box of two-by-fours and plywood, rigged with shop fans on timers, sounds like a choir of leaf blowers. Two small windows on one side reveal its dim interior thick with whirling foam pellets, light and dark. It's powerful and unhinged and overbuilt — a monument to the entropy of the postindustrial city, and the tenuous dance of its inhabitants. TRAVIS DIEHL

TriBeCa

Through March 25. James Cohan, 48 Walker Street, Manhattan; 212-714-9500, jamescohan.com.

The two video works at James Cohan by Bill Viola, a pioneer of the medium, feel contemporary despite their nearly 50-year vintage. In the first work, "He Weeps for You" (1976), Viola manages to squeeze drama out of a drop of water. The camera's extreme close-up focuses on the bottom of a length of copper pipe where drops, one by one, in slow succession, form and then fall onto a drumhead below, creating a deep amplified boom. Each successive, suspended drop also acts as its own lens so that, before its release, the viewer standing in front of the pipe and camera appears inverted and contained within the drop itself in the camera's live-feed video projection — much like observing your own topsy-turvy reflection in the concave surface of a spoon. The interactive uncanny effect recalls Yayoi Kusama's "Infinity Mirror Room" (1965) from a decade earlier.

In the second work, "The Reflecting Pool" (1977-9/1997), the seven-minute video centers on a rectangular pool in the foreground with an expanse of woods behind it. The artist emerges from the trees and steps to the pool's edge and then leaps. In a gravity-defying surreal break, his body pauses mid-jump, frozen in the air, while the water continues gently undulating below.

Though they anticipate our contemporary moment of selfies, TikTok stunts, and video cameras in nearly every pocket, the works aren't cheap spectacle. Viola juxtaposes nature with technology to create unsettling, fraught pairings that imbue his art with a subtle ecological consciousness. JOHN VINCLER

Flatiron District

Through March 25. Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street, third floor, Manhattan; 212-481-0295, centerforbookarts.org.

The nonprofit Center for Book Arts has been operating for almost half a century in New York. Its history forms part of the story of "Craft & Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books," a dense and delightful exhibition curated by the writer Megan N. Liberty. The show starts with a timeline and archival ephemera tracing the development of artists’ books in the United States between 1962 and 1996.

Spanning the same period, the books and multiples on view convey the force and range of the medium's flourishing. Fluxus, feminist and conceptual artists are represented, as well as many others whose practices don't align with specific movements, and resonances arise between them. The accented, hand-sewn stitches of Sas Colby's autobiographical "Lifebook: 1939–76" (1976–78) become sculptural threads anchoring books by Keith Smith and Cecilia Vicuña. With its rubber stamps and ancient lettering, Reginald Walker's "Haqazzuzza" (1985) is as suggestively cryptic as Mirtha Dermisache's "Diario No. 1. Año 1" (1975), an abstracted, unreadable newspaper.

Liberty's premise is that when it comes to books, conceptual art, which privileges ideas over materials, is actually not so far removed from craft, which privileges materials over ideas. Her argument is convincing, especially when a single work seems to borrow from both, like Ed Ruscha's mischievous "Stains" (1969), a portfolio of pages he stained with things like sperm and cabbage. The lingering question, then, is why the art world tends to value one genre much more highly than the other. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Upper East Side

Through March 25. Sprüth Magers, 22 East 80th Street, Manhattan; 917-722-2370, spruethmagers.com.

Karen Kilimnik is a master of the deliberately glib. Her paintings, equally wistful and willfully naïve, their imagery scavenged from art history, fashion magazines and other pop culture artifacts, evoke the affections of a teenage girl with the studied aloofness of the slacker, each pose inhabited with self-possessed camp.

Curated with good humor by Mireille Mosler, "The Kingdom of the Renaissance" places the artist's horses and hounds alongside old master works of similar interest, so that Kilimnik's kitschy-sweet "cats playing in the snow, Siberia" (2020) joins Henriëtte Ronner-Knip's similarly powdery "An odd-eyed cat" (1894), and the majestic stag in Edwin Landseer's "The Highland Nurses" (1854) dribbles into the crayon lines of Kilimnik's coloring book reindeer. These pairings can appear funny, like someone doing a bad impression, but Kilimnik's pictures are deceptively sophisticated. The looseness of her brushstrokes suggest someone whose attention has already moved on.

This is less a study of Kilimnik's fealty to her source material (basically zero) than a canny dissection of the way she excavates its tropes and romantic obsessions, which in their echo prove pretty campy themselves. (The only direct relationship here is Kilimnik's "dinner in the alley" (2010), an efficient distillation of Jan Baptist Weenix's anxious pooch guarding its meal, from 1650, which Kilimnik spotted in an auction catalog; like most of us, she saw it in person for the first time at this show.) If she's devotional, it's to a theory of consumption, the way the hypercirculation of images mashes everything into a muddy pulp. In Kilimnik's revisionism, the pulp is endlessly elastic. MAX LAKIN

TriBeCa

Through March 18. Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan; 212-226-3970, artistsspace.org.

The composer Yasunao Tone was born in Tokyo in 1935 and joined the improvisational music ensemble Group Ongaku (or "group music") in 1958. Writing statements for the defense of a fellow artist, Gempei Akasegawa, arrested in 1963 for counterfeiting 1,000-yen notes that he incorporated in his artworks, convinced Tone to add criticism to his portfolio, and he quickly became a regular contributor to the influential magazine Bijutsu Techo. In 1973, he moved to New York, where he would go on to collaborate with artists like Merce Cunningham, George Maciunas and Senga Nengudi, and to help pioneer the use of "glitch" in art by altering CDs and other such media.

It isn't easy to mount a retrospective for an artist like Tone, whose work is so context-dependent and ephemeral. But the curator Danielle A. Jackson of Artists Space manages it ingeniously. She gathers such physical objects and artworks as there are — a kanji-like character painted over a photograph of a baby; a prepared piano; a photograph of Tone playing an electric organ with a block of ice; a tiny handmade box for "used sandpaper" — and leans heavily on historical ephemera, like letters, scores, posters and a stack of Akasegawa's notes. But she arranges it all in a lucid but nonlinear way, and by letting the soundtracks of several concert videos overlap, she adeptly recreates the feeling of being at a jokey but serious, delicate but discreetly profound performance. WILL HEINRICH

Nolita

Through March 18. Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-206-9723, edlingallery.com.

Ray Materson's embroideries are astonishing for their size and intricacy: detailed images rendered in rectangles that never measure more than 5 ¼ inches on either side. One of the smallest pieces in his current exhibition is titled "Sunrise Sunset" (1999) and depicts a room bifurcated by a doorway leading to a balcony and beach beyond. A red bra hangs on the railing, and the sun setting over the water outside complements a framed image inside of a couple watching a colorful sunrise. Materson fits all this and more into an area that's only 2 by 2 ¾ inches.

The artist got his start in prison, where he was serving time for robberies committed while addicted to drugs. Thinking of his grandmother, who sewed, he fashioned a makeshift embroidery hoop out of a plastic bowl lid and unraveled a pair of socks for thread; a guard gave him a needle. That was in 1988. Materson has since gotten clean and left prison, and he has continued embroidering. He's shown his work in galleries and museums, some of which have collected it, too (like the American Folk Art Museum). Sock threads are still his preferred material.

The works here cover the three-plus decades of his career. They range from personal pieces, like a depiction of his father, to sentimental portraits of cultural icons, and from charged political statements to campier or more surreal images like "Invasion" (2022), a sci-fi scene with aliens. Whatever the subject, the embroideries are evocative. Materson's deft compositions and meticulous stitching give his works a richness that lingers after the novelty of their making has faded away. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Noho

Through March 18. Eric Firestone Gallery. 40 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 646-998-3727, ericfirestonegallery.com

Martha Edelheit's paintings caused a minor furor in 1974, perhaps because people object to looking at flesh with more than 18 percent body fat, or, more likely, because she was a woman painting phalluses. Edelheit's nudes are tame by today's standards (and, really, 1974's), not as explicitly sexual as Joan Semmel's or as literally sourced from pornography as Betty Tompkins’. Mostly they simply hang out around town, splayed across rooftops, their pallid skin melting into the white brick skyline, or lazing in Sheep Meadow, like a more equitable "Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe." If Edelheit's protagonists are confrontational it's because they retain the personality of their sitters, their faces slack with boredom, as though showing up in the buff to the Central Park Zoo were as blasé as picking up bagels.

Edelheit's vision occasionally drifted from New York, imagining bodies stretched across the astral expanse of the Southwest. But her figures achieve true transcendence in the real space of the city. (It's easy to feel unencumbered in the endless vacancy of red sand mesas; try doing it in view of the George Washington Bridge.) The frisson of a rippling deltoid foregrounding the unloveliness of crumbling infrastructure, as in "Major Deegan Expressway With Fruit" (1972-73), both sends up Western traditions and refreshes them.

For Edelheit, the city's built environment is as spiritually revelatory as any desert. Bodies rendered in creamy pastels merge into a single mass before the seal enclosure, or dissolve into Central Park's lake, becoming the landscape itself, a poetic depiction of art's fundamental indispensability from life. MAX LAKIN

SOHO

Through March 18. Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan; 212-226-3970, artistsspace.org.

Like the poet-painter Etel Adnan or the Canadian novelist-turned-artist Douglas Coupland, Renee Gladman enters the art world from a rarely used side door from the world of literature. Through poems, novels and essays, Gladman has established herself as one of the most original writers of her generation. Her series of philosophical speculative novels centering on an imaginary city named Ravicka catalyzed the founding of the taste-making indie publisher, Dorothy Project. Then Gladman wrote her way into drawing.

In "Narratives of Magnitude," Gladman's New York solo debut, you will find her distinctive cursive-like lines that resemble writing but remain illegible. In her early published drawings these lines clustered and stretched elegantly to suggest architectural forms. But the more recent (2019-22), two dozen or so, drawings at Artists Space seem less assured and more tentative as Gladman pushes her work closer to painting by both upping the scale and incorporating color. The large black sheet of "Untitled (moon math)" (2022) features a dense block of white writing at left interrupted by several drawn circles, and a chalky explosion at right that conjures both mathematical theorems and medieval marginal glosses. Throughout, the works recall the graphic compositions of the Russian artist El Lissitzky, who influenced the Bauhaus a century ago. In her writing, Gladman often dramatizes thinking by weaving doubt or awareness of the body into her sentences so as to push her prose into revelatory and unexpected places. In these drawings, we find her still searching on the cusp of her next revelation. JOHN VINCLER

Lower East Side

Through March 22. Tramps, 39 ½ Washington Square South, Manhattan; trampsltd.com.

You’re asked to remove or cover your shoes — because the cherry red floors are freshly lacquered — but also, I suspect, for the small comedy of each visitor crouching to slip off their pumps two feet from a chandelier bristling with steak knives. The artist Lizzi Bougatsos is a sharp performer, after all: The Queens native has fronted the rhythmical psych-noise band Gang Gang Dance since the early 2000s. The sculptures in her Tramps exhibition, "Idolize the Burn, an Ode to Performance," refer to her recovery after she self-immolated during a 2001 show. On the back wall, a series of frames hold remnants of foam leggings and burn gel pads dramatically composed on metallic paper. In another corner, two eloquent collages of beige bandages and brown tape achieve patchy balance and skinlike depth, even before you notice that these are the artist's old dressings.

Trailing assemblages of chains and undergarments and burn suits set a romantic, gothic mood. There's been violence, but the aftermath is poised, inert, a little nostalgic. The flowers and perfume bottles under tents of cellophane seem dried out; the Polaroid leaning on an electrical outlet and the snapshot tacked to the wall depict the artist as a budding dancer or violinist, a performer even then. Most of all, as you pad around the gallery in your socks, there are the shoes — piles of ceramic high heels glazed coal or beetle black; a rebar candelabra ringed with pointe shoes, waxy, as if they could catch on fire. TRAVIS DIEHL

An earlier version of a review in this roundup described incorrectly the artist Marcus Behmer. He worked closely with a Jewish publisher; he was not Jewish.

How we handle corrections

Jillian Steinhauer is a critic and reporter who covers the politics of art and comics. She won a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant and was previously a senior editor at Hyperallergic.

Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer. @willvheinrich

Jason Farago, critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad. In 2022 he was awarded one of the inaugural Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism. @jsf

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