“Everythings” at Andrea Rosen Gallery, through August 14 (525 West 24th Street)The overblown press release for this show is a work of art in its own right (you’ve been warned, friends), but this three-person exhibition is a thrill, no matter what it purports to mean. Parker Ito hogs the lion’s share of attention with a sprawling, LED-lit installation incorporating ladders, video screens, hunks of pigmented concrete, flowers in orange Home Depot buckets, and photographs of the artist in various poses, mugging for example at the camera while clad in a sort of S&M nun’s outfit. Hayden Dunham’s sculptures — like all-white bathhouses that have turned into malleable goo — are awesome, but they suffer a bit in competition with Ito’s all-sirens-blaring assault. In the back room, Timur Si-Qin has two light-boxed photographs resembling advertisements, adorned only with the artist’s enigmatic logo, a cross between Pepsi-Cola’s and Obama’s branding.“Outta Town Sh*t” at Kravets | Wehby, through August 14 (521 West 21st Street)A concise little show, curated by Nina Chanel Abney (who also has a painting in it), which includes personal favorites Austin Eddy and Wendy White. Misaki Kawai — whose enormous teepee I enjoyed very much at last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach — has painted a hat (good) and a watch (very good) against a shimmering gold background. A small Erik Parker canvas renders tropical paradise as a Day-Glo fever dream of ecstatic flora. Austin Lee’s large-scale “Father” is equally bright, taking advantage of a particularly retina-punching fluorescent yellow to create a pared-down, absurdist portrait of a dad and his mustache.“E.1027” at Joe Sheftel Gallery, through August 5 (24A Orchard Street)Summer group shows tend toward the pointless (“Here are some of the artists we represent; see you in September”) or the hopelessly esoteric (see, um, “Everythings”). This one strikes a better balance: It’s organized around a building, namely E.1027, the French residence built in the 1920s by Eileen Gray in collaboration with her then-lover, Jean Badovici. As press materials note, only two of the artists included — Gary Stephan and Lily Stockman — have contributed pieces that consciously engage with the architecture. Stockman’s tiny abstract paintings conjure soft geometries and spaces; they’d look pretty terrific in conjunction with equally small works by Alain Biltereyst, I think. Other standouts: Graham Collins’s patchwork readymade composed of scraps of landscape paintings repurposed into a painterly quilt and Dennis Kupferschmidt’s diptych portraying — both as a barebones, black-and-white quasi-draft and as a fleshed-out final version in gray, brown, red, and blue — an imposing, faceless couple, possibly hewn from concrete, marching hand in hand.Ryan Steadman at Pablo’s Birthday, through August 9 (57 Orchard Street)Steadman, who also works as an art critic for the “Observer,” seems to want to be two painters at once, which is not a bad thing. One of those painters makes purely abstract, bite-sized canvases that often self-consciously refer to the orientation and heft of books; the other incorporates found photographic imagery (much of it seemingly sourced from the 1950s) within bold, Pong-simple fields, whistling in the direction of John Baldessari. Both are represented in “Pictorial Pastimes,” a nice title that conjures an image of the artist as a guy just hanging out, tweaking the visuals. Overall, Steadman flexes his talents in combining hard-edged, blunt geometries — computer-cold, technical — with loose brushwork that’s decidedly human. “Empty House Casa Vacia” at Luhring Augustine, through August 28 (531 West 24th Street)Give yourself ample time to explore this jam-packed survey focused on Brazilian artists “engaging the legacy of 1950s neo-Concretism.” And bring along that graphic-designer friend who typically is left numb by an afternoon in Chelsea; he or she will love Raymundo Colares’s stunning cut-paper artist’s books from the 1970s. The work here is cerebral but playful — oh, that overused and awful adjective, but still — a minimalism of puzzles, toys, the simplest cuts and folds. “Empty House” ranges from old to new school, from Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica to Erika Verzutti and Marcius Galan. Two massive works try to steal the show: Adriano Costa’s floor piece “Norwegian Cheese,” a comic riff on Carl Andre but one that you can walk on; and Amilcar de Castro’s untitled installation of small Corten-steel sculptures — mutated circles and rectangles — arranged on shelves like 140 variations on a theme. Paulo Monteiro transmutes oil and epoxy into stretched taffy or bubble gum; Fred Sandback’s whisper-thin yarn-in-space aesthetic is answered by Jac Leirner’s suspended line of straps, caribiners, and metallic hardware. Kudos to Luhring Augustine (and organizers Lucrecia Zappi and Donald Johnson Montenegro) for a summer show that’s anything but an afterthought.
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