Albert Oehlen at the New Museum, through September 13 (235 Bowery)“In front of Oehlen’s paintings, in fact, one has the impression of looking at the image of a painting rather than at the painting itself,” notes Massimiliano Gioni in an excellent catalog essay for the artist’s concise survey, “Home and Garden.” Like many other observations about Oehlen — the artist’s process as a form of “visual bulimia,” for instance — it’s a comment that sounds like a slight, but isn’t. The museum’s own wall labels are ripe with similarly conflicted verbiage: “bad taste,” “abominations,” the “limitations and failures of this technology,” “an attitude of insincerity or nonchalance.” Delve deep enough into the literature and it seems like a reading prevails of Oehlen as less of a painter at all than some performative prankster trying on different tactics: Fairly conventional abstraction in the ’80s; computer-generated designs; photo-collages printed or silkscreened onto canvas and then augmented with sweeps of pigment. Your enjoyment of this exhibition will depend on how you feel about the prevailing tone of everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, multi-layered imagery — attaining what Oehlen himself calls “a base note of hysteria” — and this German artist’s reliance on digital technology to create paintings in which silkscreen or inkjet prints are altered or effaced with pigment.A series of mostly black-and-white “computer paintings” — compositions generated using an outdated laptop and printed on paper that is then affixed to canvas — resemble music notation or decorative clip-art frills, all hopelessly jumbled. A number of huge canvases from the early ’00s (and one from 1997, featuring a deranged crab) push the boundaries of legibility. In other works on view, Oehlen pastes advertisements to his surfaces and then covers them in wild, gestural spurts. Two refreshingly different self-portraits from the early ’80s are quieter, and somehow stranger. “Home And Garden” is certainly worth seeing, though it may leave you hungry for the less constrained, multimedia experimentation of Oehlen’s former teacher, Sigmar Polke.Zoe Barcza at Shoot the Lobster, through June 21 (138 Eldridge Street) A row of paintings are hung end-to-end along the walls, cartoonishly (but sure-handedly) depicting surfaces that have been torn by the claws of some enraged beast, leaving trompe l’oeil gashes and exposed stretcher bars. In the center of the space, a sculptural figure, titled “International Loner” — and representing a “traveling art-viewing dandy,” according to the gallery — holds two video monitors, playing a soothing landscape scene from Alexander Sokurov’s “Mother and Son” and an absurdist clip from a French porn film, respectively. What’s the connection binding it all together? Don’t ask, just enjoy.Elijah Burgher at Zieher Smith & Horton, through June 20 (516 West 20th Street)I am no fan of the self-important caricature of artist-as-shaman (see: James Lee Byars), but Burgher pulls off the conceit with humor, verve, and no small dose of eroticism. The artist, a stand-out at the last Whitney Biennial, incorporates a hermetic language of sigils — both in the backgrounds of elegant, colored-pencil portraits of men, and painted on flag-like dropcloths. It all has to do, you see, with a cult called Bachelors of the Dawn, who profess “a refusal to marry and repeat the structures of the nuclear family and the patterns of personhood it perpetuates.” In other words, this is the perfect exhibition to bring your out-of-town Republican uncle to. Alice Mackler at Kerry Schuss, through June 21 (34 Orchard Street) This octogenarian artist, enjoying unexpected visibility late in her career, creates ceramic humanoids who are rumpled but resilient; glazed in primary colors, they often appear caught in Munch-like screams. (Don’t expect realism: In Mackler’s hands, a face can look like a piece of bread with a handle on top, and that’s just fine.) The gallery has a series of new, small-scale pieces arranged here in a sort of happily dismal crowd that greets you as soon as you pass through the door. Elsewhere, works on paper combine clippings from fashion magazines with bright smears of paint: Less a critique of the printed matter, I’d say, than a joyous attempt to meet beauty with beauty. Julie Wachtel at Elizabeth Dee, through June 27 (545 West 20th Street)The artist’s show of new multi-panel, acrylic-and-silkscreen works is called “Empowerment,” which is cheeky business considering it includes depictions of Hillary Clinton and Kim Jong-Un (the former mashed up with an image of a fertility statue; the latter with a wildly Gangnam Styling Psy). Everything is fair game for this omnivorously hungry painter — and I appreciate how free and intuitive she is with her juxtapositions, which can be comic, or disturbing, or a bit of both. “Why that with that?” she said, when I visited her a few months back in her Greenpoint studio, and inquired about a particularly odd pairing. “I can’t tell you.”ALSO WORTH SEEING: Brie Ruais, who has pushed her ceramic sculptures even further since I last spoke with her, and whose newest pieces chime in intriguing ways with rug-based works by Anna Betbeze, at the newly minted Mesler/Feuer through June 14; and a two-person show at Nicelle Beauchene, through June 28, combining John Gardner’s comically sexual paintings of underwear-flaunting tennis players, among other things, with abstract compositions and bodily-influenced sculpture by Vanessa Maltese.
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