Ken Price at Matthew Marks, through June 25 (523 West 24th Street)The grand master of funkily biomorphic, vaguely psychedelic sculpture is arguably more interesting as a draftsman. This survey of works on paper — many of which will be collected in a book of drawings due out this September — captures a range of oddball fantasies. Horrific car crashes hang alongside rolling mountain landscapes and oceans agitating under tie-dyed skies; a bevy of naked female revelers enacts some ecstatic ritual around a monster resembling an enormous pink tongue. Among the best pieces are Price’s domestic interior scenes: superficially sterile, chic, and depopulated rooms, in which inanimate furniture is humanized.“Colliding Alien Cargo” at Marlborough Chelsea, through June 18 (545 West 25th Street)An anarchic, messily figurative German spirit hovers over this show, which tingles with thick paint, absurdity, and various obscenities. BENDIX HARMS contributes two simple but vital canvases, one of them — the pigment smeared, scraped, and abused — depicting an enormous ship at sea. Werner Buttner (who obliquely birthed the exhibition title) imagines an alleyway scene in which a fat bulldog guiltily embraces a cat. Nicole Eisenman has a tiny, gloppy still life of a pear and a cigarette. Tala Madani raises the overall discomfort level considerably with a painting, titled “Son Down,” of a young boy with a horribly distended penis (the head of said penis being lassoed by some kind of, you know, penis wrangler) and a smaller, quietly horrifying piece depicting four Santa Clauses exposing themselves to a child in a crib.“CLOSER: Lenz Geerk / Jordan Kasey / Anthony Miler” at Thierry Goldberg, through July 1 (103 Norfolk Street)Speaking of figurative painting, this show features three very different exercises within its boundaries. Kasey — who has a concurrent show up at SIGNAL, in Brooklyn — presents humanoids engaged in ordinary activities, their skin oddly digital and unfleshy. (It’d be interesting to see her hanging between, say, Austin Lee and Mernet Larsen.) Miler scrawls graphite on raw canvases, as if using his weaker hand to replicate Willem de Kooning’s women from memory. Geerk’s pieces are the least imposing, and perhaps the most stirring: weathered, worked surfaces in which common scenarios (a man swimming, someone tying his shoe, someone else taking a nude selfie in the mirror) fade in and out of legibility.Bobo and Julie Benjamin at 247365, through June 26 (57 Stanton Street)Upstairs, Bobo — Spanish slang for, roughly, “dumbass,” though I’m not sure if the meaning is intentional here — has an array of handcrafted sculptures augmented with Purell dispensers, political buttons, video screens, and satirical printed matter. The work reminds me of Ashley Bickerton’s in its eager embrace of kitsch and its ability to push corniness toward something cool. One piece promotes the Velveteen Rabbit as a presidential candidate; others craft strange narratives from coffee culture, fashion, and Salvador Dalí. In “Contemporary Azteca Hootchee Kootchee” we get an array of posters advertising fictional cuddling parties as well as a consciousness-raising event: “Ri-viv,” touting “piercings by Xiuhpilli (“FYI: We will roast an iguana and play deathball”).Downstairs, things are considerably more subdued. Julia Benjamin, who is also part of a three-person show up at Jack Hanley Gallery, seems to be painting her way through the same self-imposed abstract exercise, tracking its variations across several canvases — sometimes in gray scale, sometimes in muddy color. The canvases are paired, mounted flush against each another, or, in one case, jutting out into space because the sliver of wall on which it is hung is too slim to hold it.Hanna Liden and Jimmy DeSana at Salon 94, through June 25 (243 Bowery)A perfect match-up. The late DeSana’s saturated, hypersexual, surreal photographs from the 1970s and ’80s are full of humor and, sometimes, dread. Two women balance a coat hanger between their ass cheeks; a man finds himself trapped between sheets of cardboard; gender is gleefully bent and confused. Liden’s still-life compositions, all from 2016, exhibit the same DIY resourcefulness and physical humor but without any human actors. She builds “legs” out of Styrofoam cups, a wine bottle, and a pair of Converse sneakers; a full body, of a sort, arises from some bodega flowers, a plastic bag, and four half-full Gatorade bottles. The whimsy has an edge. In “Thistle,” for example, sparse flowers surmount a pyramid of orange prescription bottles, their labels turned so that they’re almost, but not quite, readable, rebuffing the viewer’s nosy curiosity. ALSO WORTH SEEING: Nicole Eisenman at the New Museum; Martin Creed at the Park Avenue Armory.
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