Anne Neukamp and Zachary Leener at Lisa Cooley Gallery, through October 18 (107 Norfolk Street)Simple shapes, done well. Neukamp’s large paintings in oil, tempera, and acrylic float mundane objects (keys, lengths of rope, a landline telephone, what might be a butter knife) through expanses of abstraction; the way her surfaces are worked prevent them from being just another handmade depiction of so many icons in digital space. Leener, whose ceramic works normally traipse through a glossy, pastel-tinted candyland, turns here to lumpy concrete-grey and S&M black. “Phalluses and nipples!” a fellow critic remarked when I bumped into him on the street and asked about the show, and that’s a pretty succinct summation of these sculptures’ bulbous, suggestive curves, even if little attention is paid to anatomical correctness. For the first time, Leener has also added light fixtures to the works. Their thick green cords weave haphazardly through the gallery in search of sockets; the attendant bulbs throb an alluring bordello-red. Wayne Ngan and John Riepenhoff at Nathalie Karg, through October 11 (291 Grand Street)Ngan is a Chinese ceramicist born in 1937 who spent a good portion of his life in Canada; Riepenhoff is a long-haired, laid-back Milwaukeean who runs the critically acclaimed Green Gallery. They come together in interesting ways here, with Ngan’s glazed pieces — which can resemble elegant thermoses, squat UFOs, or squashed banana peels, among other things — occupying a central table, and Riepenhoff’s gauzy nighttime landscapes on the wall. (They were painted during a trip Riepenhoff took to an island in British Columbia, where Ngan lives.)In the corner of the gallery is a white ladder leading up to a strange box with a hole in it (it might look familiar if you’ve seen the cover of Roger White’s recent book, “The Contemporaries,” which dedicates a chapter to Riepenhoff and the Milwaukee scene). Climb the rungs and pop your head in to encounter a diorama-like installation with works hung on four tiny walls — despite the seemingly boastful title of this piece (“The John Riepenhoff Experience”), the drawings on view are actually by Canadian artist Gordon Payne.Samara Golden at CANADA, through October 25 (333 Broome Street)Building on her gravity-defying installation for MoMA PS1, the Los Angeles artist creates a room-filling mega-sculpture, “A Fall Of Corners,” that’s accessed by a central, carpeted walkway. Architectural space unfolds onto the walls and ceiling, all sense of perspective hopelessly lost. (Just try taking a single picture inside the gallery that makes any sense.) The domestic mashes up against the public — one wall holds a bedroom scene while another depicts a dining room with an unappetizing buffet, all of it frozen in time. A pile of stuffed humanoid figures confronts the viewer at the end of the walkway, their cotton innards spewing from holes, their bodies covered in cheap textiles depicting images of hot dogs or generic “Navajo” imagery. A video of endlessly rolling clouds, and an accompanying soundtrack, add a melancholic edge. This could all degenerate into cheap, gee-whiz funhouse spectacle, but Golden’s vision is weird and singular enough to prevent that. Martin Roth at Louis B. James, through October 18 (143b Orchard Street)Roth, an Austrian artist living in New York, often works with strange, living media, like snails or mice. For his latest solo, only a handful of visitors are allowed inside the gallery at a time, for reasons that swiftly become apparent once you enter the space, whose floor is covered in a deep layer of crushed rock, rebar, and industrial junk. Roth sourced much of this material from the border zone between Turkey and Syria, literally smuggling it out of the country in suitcases. (The foundational layers are composed of more local detritus.) More than a dozen parakeets — some yellow, some blue-grey — twitter around the room, all of them rescued from homes that couldn’t keep them. The politics are necessarily fraught — something Roth is very much aware of — as is the presence of live animals, however well-tended; when I posted images on ARTINFO’s Instagram account, a vocal contingent of commenters called for an end to “zoo art.” Those naysayers wouldn’t be too pleased to descend to the gallery’s basement space, which has been flooded with water to make a habitat for some very fat frogs, all of them purchased from a New York restaurant that had planned to plate them for upscale diners. Chris Hood and Magalie Guerin at Lyles & King, through October 4 (106 Forsyth Street)Hood’s paintings look a bit faded, prematurely weathered — the result of his habit of painting on the backside of the canvas and letting the pigments seep through. The suite of works here, under the title “A Slow Drag In Margaritaville,” find figurative cartoon elements warring with maelstroms of rich, chaotic color. In some cases, as in the appropriately named “Dissipate Wildly,” it looks like Hood has chopped up and effaced his own original composition, leaving a disjointed muddle of snippets. Elsewhere, the viewer can grasp recognizable forms buried in the noise: Here’s a little yellow heart-dude puffing a cigarette; there’s a freaked-out storm cloud, pierced by jagged lightning. In an adjoining side gallery, Guerin’s small and sensuous canvases remind me of Lesley Vance with a dash of Thomas Nozkowski. They’re abstracted still-lifes, mostly, whose subjects — things like hammers and periscopes — might remain unknowable, if not for hints embedded in her titles. ALSO WORTH SEEING: Dana Schutz, hitting it out of the park at Petzel with new, gorgeously uninhibited paintings, on view through October 24; and “Picasso Sculpture,” at MoMA, which spans from 1902 to 1964, covers a wild range of materials — sheet metal, plaster, found objects, bronze, wood, cardboard, torn paper — and will likely leave contemporary practitioners of the medium daunted, if not completely cowed.
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