Her skin is creased, haggard. The wrinkles move in unnatural patterns, running laps around her face. That the real Cindy Sherman actually looks nothing like this—that she seems, in fact, to grow younger every day—is hardly the point, though it is certainly one of the more superficial observations about a show that takes as its subject the very terms of superficiality.

Digital manipulation has become something of a bugbear for artists of a certain age, obsolescing, as it does, some of the finer points art has made about truth over the past thirty years. How does a soothsaying postmodern master respond to the challenge of the image’s veracity in the age of the Clone Stamp tool? For David Salle, the simple, if unsubtle, answer was to take the question at face value, self-seriously subjecting his iconophilia to the centripetal distortions of the Twirl filter in Photoshop. Sherman approaches the subject rather differently, undermining and exposing the question’s windbag pretensions. Here, in her first show of new work in four years, the face that launched a thousand theses tackles mythemes of truth, beauty, and retouching in much the same way that she tackled filmic conventions in the late 1970s and early ’80s: by playfully exploiting our expectations.

Making herself up to hyperbolically resemble the type of wealthy, unnatural woman one presumes constitutes her principal client base, Sherman shoots herself in vainglorious, stilted poses. Indiscriminate usage of Gaussian blur and the Eraser tool abounds, but in all the wrong places. Retouching not her figures’ motley skin but the preposterous backgrounds onto which they’ve been pasted, Sherman hits the mark by missing it altogether.

— David Velasco

Broken, concealed, and reconfigured bodies take on many forms in the work of Jennifer Cohen and Vlatka Horvat. Cohen’s elegant, geometric constructions of cement, wood, and clay are flecked with metallic details of glitter and bronze, juxtaposed with the occasional battered jazz shoe. The implied movement of a dancer’s body is complicated by the works’ roughened and otherworldly presence, with disembodied feet and pointing fingers that punctuate empty space, interrupting an otherwise flawlessly minimal formalism. Anthropomorphic forms prevail; a distorted foot replicates the curve of a swan’s neck, impossibly curled into itself, and individual legs are positioned as if caught, mid-action, inching across the floor. Horvat’s “Hybrid,” 2006–2008, is a series of collages that fuses images of the artist’s own body with traffic signs, small appliances, and other domestic items, clearly recalling the cut-and-paste automatons of Hannah Höch. These figures float against blank backgrounds that leave their surroundings unspecified; they signal an interchangeability between the female form and the objects that warrant our daily interaction and utter disregard. Horvat’s photographs of herself hidden entirely in various boxes and bags skip this in-between state altogether and concentrate strictly on concealment, never betraying who or what fits perfectly inside; instead of creating a hybrid, she becomes one with her container. In both Cohen’s and Horvat’s work, identities may be withheld but anonymity is never conferred; these faceless, nameless bodies are able to exist entirely on their own, removed from temporal and spatial context, making their presence decisively felt.

— Lumi Tan

At ninety, the self-taught Italian artist Carol Rama is a beacon of change. This long-overdue miniretrospective makes a strong case for resistance—to a specific movement (such as Surrealism or arte povera), to any one medium, and to a particular iconography. As writer and poet Edoardo Sanguineti aptly noted in 1965, Rama’s art is “refined brut and cultured naïf,” and all of the thirty-six works in this exhibition, which date from 1943 through 2005 and range dramatically from hard-edge abstraction and drawings laced with erotic symbols to bricolage and mixed-media sculpture, showcase this curious combination. In one of Rama’s most notoriously explicit paintings, Dorina, 1943, a nude woman with a long, languid tongue and a Louise Brooks–style bob rests passively inert while a snake slivers out of her vagina. Installed nearby, the most recent offering here, Metamorfosi (Metamorphosis), 2005, depicts a pair of loosely rendered feminine legs sheathing a hairy red phallus. While the specters of Freud and French feminism linger strongly in the galleries, Rama takes a more humorous and, at times, absurd approach to sexuality and gender. In Feticci (Fetishes), 2003, a blue high-heeled shoe and slender toes (from an invisible foot) are rendered on a found piece of upside-down paper. Rama was a muse to Man Ray and Andy Warhol; she is one the artists celebrated in Le Tigre’s pop song “Hot Topic” and was the recipient of a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale. Although she’s well loved, she’s not well known—but in all likelihood, akin to her transformative practice, that is about to change.

— Lauren O'Neill-Butler

Nietzsche’s desire to throw his arms protectively around the neck of a brutalized horse being savagely whipped by its owner was his last act of sanity, seconds before he collapsed into dementia. By contrast, Sue Coe’s determination to draw attention to the inhumane treatment of animals has produced a broad twenty-year body of clear-sighted and powerful works that articulate a maddening frustration with mankind’s treatment of our fellow creatures. In “Elephants We Must Never Forget,” Coe presents a series of fourteen new expressionistic oil paintings, alongside more than a dozen lithographs, woodcut prints, and drawings that depict the stories of anonymous and historically specific elephants. Though many of her paintings contain text narrating the disheartening stories, her work is not merely illustrative. Instead, her canvases have the gory, grotesque, cartoonish quality of German Expressionism. As a passionate, politically invested, and persuasive artist, Coe puts brutality in context, describing the kinship between the elephants and disenfranchised, exploited people including African Americans, deformed circus performers, blind children, and women acrobats performing on the high wire without nets. Four large drawings and one etching depict the gut-wrenching story of Topsy, a domesticated circus elephant. (Topsy was electrocuted at Coney Island after she killed her severely abusive trainer; as entertainment, Thomas Edison released a film of her death.) However, Coe’s paintings are light-years away from opportunist sensationalism. Like Tod Browning's 1932 film Freaks, Coe’s haunting images show us who the real beasts in the circus are.

— Ana Finel Honigman

Vultures—sitting near carcasses, picking at trash, and gazing blankly from the trees where they perch—appear in several of Karen Heagle’s recent paintings. Although these avian subjects can be seen in light of the current economic climate, they also evidence the artist’s use of symbols, a practice that simultaneously invites and excludes the viewer. Heagle’s stylized paintings depict immediately recognizable objects and people and use generic titles that are equally intriguing and frustrating. Woman with Snake, 2008, for example, offers exactly what the title suggests, as a sensual yet aloof nude reclines, oblivious to the animal coiled next to her. While this subject matter bears art-historical currency—an allegory of sin or decadence—Heagle’s straightforward titles leave interpretation to the viewer’s discretion, and in the end, only the exhibition’s title, “She’ll Get Hers,” alludes to a deeper meaning. The esoteric content of her pictures is enhanced by their thick, painterly execution. Acrylic and ink are applied to roughly trimmed paper in blunt strokes, creating a sense of physicality enhanced by her improbable use of bright and iridescent hues. One senses in these works, as the show’s title suggests, physical unease and anticipation, as well as a realization of the fluidity of symbols and the deeper meanings they hold.

— Britany Salsbury

Spotting trends in contemporary art is a relatively easy task, yet there is greater difficulty in labeling a “movement” while it is still in the making. One attempt might look something like “Base:Object,” a small, articulate show of recent sculpture curated by Andrea Rosen Gallery’s Cory Nomura. Through the work of Sara Barker, Patrick Hill, Matthew Monahan, William J. O’Brien, and Sterling Ruby, Nomura complicates the conventional purpose and appearance of the pedestal (an idea that isn’t fresh but nevertheless comes across as original here). In these works, the pedestal—that once-reliable mediator between viewer and object—is consumed by the artwork in an act of erasure and supplementation. Ruby’s Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity/DB Deth, 2008, a rectangular urethane form that rests off-center on a scratched and dirtied Formica and wood cube, and Hill’s Unstable Composition #4, 2007, a dyed-canvas and glass assemblage supported by a rectangular concrete plinth, incorporate pedestal-like forms, yet the expressionistically worked surfaces of the bases muddy the distinction between practical support structure and aesthetic object. The slender, four-legged “base” of Barker’s abject posture, 2008, buttresses a clay, cement, and cardboard construction in what seems like a clever exploitation of post-Minimal tropes. Monahan and O’Brien, on the other hand, incorporate busy figurative elements into their raised sculptures in an activation of physical and pictorial space. Each of these objects is human-scale and approachable as furniture, but there is something unsettling about the installation as a whole. Invoking the abject, unstable, or contemptuous, these works embody a kind of material anxiety: a tension between modernist principles, display sensibilities, studio production, and determinants of value.

— Catherine Taft

Ukrainian-born, New York–based artist Shimon Okshteyn focuses on addiction, gluttony, carnal pleasures, and personal reckoning in “Dangerous Pleasures,” his second solo show at this gallery. The exhibition opens with Self Portrait, 2008, which positions a white life-size cast of the nude, pot-bellied, and masturbating artist in front of a large black-and-white painting, which appropriates a detail of the somber expression and craggy face of Rembrandt in his 1659 Self-Portrait. Five variously sized round vanity mirrors are arranged within the oversize depiction of Rembrandt, so as not only to reflect the former Soviet-bloc artist freely pleasuring himself but also to invite viewers to gaze at their own images. The majority of the eleven works in this obscenely funny and outrageously well-crafted exhibition are mirrors lovingly coated with primarily black and white oil paints. Signature magic-realist still lifes portray illegal drugs and paraphernalia, prescription drugs (including Cialis), and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts. The most caustic drug-related image is the painting Cocaine, 2008, an immaculate illusionist depiction of a razor that has ostensibly divided a white powdery substance into five lines on an actual mirror. Below the thick white trails, expressionist paint swirls accentuate the effort of cutting the forbidden substance. Many of Okshteyn’s works betray tongue-in-cheek mischievousness, but they are also poignant meditations on time, aging, and mortality.

— Francine Koslow Miller

Gimmickry and art are rarely a winning combination, but amid the twitter of November’s historic presidential election, Aleksandra Mir proves that timing is everything. In her latest exhibition, “White House Purple Heart Ivory Tower Redneck Blue Devils Yellow Submarine Agent Orange Black Power Green Thumb Pink Dollars Dumb Blond Golden Showers Silver Linings,” the Polish-born Swedish-national artist appropriates the grandest symbol of American executive power—the White House—and transforms it into a one-note joke with a rotating punch line of cultural clichés. Recalling her previous exhibitions “Newsroom 1986–2000” and “The World from Above,” the works here are rendered solely in black Sharpie on oversize sheets of white paper. This time, the words WHITE HOUSE are inscribed alongside other phrases. The one exception is White House Yellow Submarine, 2008, in which Mir eschews the latter text for Beatles-inspired psychedelic-pop imagery. Mir studied media, communications, and anthropology; each work in the exhibition betrays her background and effectively functions as a linguistic and aesthetic exercise in typography through kitschy cultural signifiers including a rainbow and the folksy stitch of needlepoint, which connote the LGBT agenda and the grassroots environmental movement, respectively. Yet it is Mir’s specificity that keeps her concept from wearing thin. One of the most arresting pieces, White House Silver Linings, 2008, is hidden behind a desk in the back office of the gallery. Layering delicate crosshatching with freewheeling scribbles, the work reminds viewers that despite America’s successes and follies, its titular platitude rings true, perhaps more so in the wake of an unprecedented and ecstasy-inducing Obama victory. Also tucked away in a side room is an impressively jam-packed installation of homemade black-and-white presidential buttons, whose slogans and pithy summations range from bona fide to fictional, grave to ridiculous. As I walked out of the exhibition, a fellow visitor was heartily laughing out loud—a testament if not to the jokes’ content then definitely to Mir’s well-timed delivery.

— Cameron Shaw

What pictorial genre seems to require less interpretive acumen than the painted still life? Accumulations of fruit and fish and fowl are all exquisite surfaces, and invite surface readings. But photographer Sharon Core, after making a reputation with images of her re-creations of Wayne Thiebaud’s dessert tableaux, proves once again with her exhibition “Early American” that profound questions of representation can reside within simple compositions. Core’s muse for this body of work, the early American painter Raphaelle Peale, is smartly chosen. In the past two decades, scholarship about the hundred-odd still lifes he created in Philadelphia between 1812 and 1824 has elucidated their strangeness, a fact that gives an added edge to the ten small-scale photographs presented here. As with her earlier series, Core’s pictures are approximations of a painted precedent once removed: Instead of working from Peale’s canvases, which, like Thiebaud’s, reside in museums scattered around the world, Core has re-created with uncanny accuracy color reproductions of his compositions found in books. In some works, she has left behind the strict mimesis of her Thiebaud series in an attempt to “inhabit” Peale’s prephotographic visual imagination. There is a palpable tension between the uncomplicated attractiveness of the luscious, softly lit, exacting images—of watermelons and day lilies, of bruised and rotting apples in a porcelain basket, of a dimpled ostrich egg and strawberries—and the elaborate means by which they were created. Not only did Core have to source the antique bowls, plates, and utensils that appear in the photographs, but she also needed to secure (and, one suspects, artificially age, prune, and otherwise prepare) the produce that takes center stage, as well as arrange her quarry and light it meticulously. The gracefulness of the resultant images masks—but only barely—her efforts, and the hall-of-mirrors instability they instigate.

— Brian Sholis

John Cage and Steve Reich opened new directions in music by foregrounding processes of composition and production. But their approaches were quite different: While the chance operations Cage used to compose are impossible to discern in the sounds that they yielded, Reich’s method of concatenating minimal phrases is explicit in his music’s pulsating physicality. “Looking at Music” features the composers in separate rooms, each in the company of works by artists with similar sensibilities. A 1966 Cage score—gridded sets of numbers pitted with pen marks—hangs near Otto Piene’s partially aleatoric Untitled (Smoke Drawing), 1959, a sheet of paper that captured the residue of burned pigment. In the next room, Bruce Conner’s Mandala April 1–9, 1965, where palpable detail manifests the artist’s method, makes an analogous pair for a recording of Reich’s Come Out (1966). In her video Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, 1972, Joan Jonas chants and wears masks with a mystical opacity reminiscent of Cage, while Lip Sync, 1969, shows Bruce Nauman repeating the words of the title as he hears himself in his headphones saying them, producing a shifty beat like the one in Come Out.

Those affinities provide one organizational principle of this exhibition, which is also designed to trace the loose network of acquaintances and affiliations of New York’s downtown scene in the 1960s and ’70s. A video documenting Lucinda Childs’s Vehicle at “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering”—the seminal series of performances held by Experiments in Art and Technology at the Armory in 1966—plays around the corner from a 1971 assemblage by Robert Whitman, another “9 Evenings” participant. There is a drawing on newsprint by Michael Snow, who played percussion at a 1969 performance of Reich’s Pendulum Music at the Whitney; the instructions for that piece are in a display case beside issues of Avalanche and Aspen, publications that these artists were probably reading. The list of connections could go on. With instances of resonant practices and reminders of real collaborations staggered throughout, “Looking at Music” outlines a model for understanding how currents of influence worked at a time when notions of disciplines, movements, and high and popular culture did little to restrict the flow of ideas.

— Brian Droitcour

In this group exhibition, guest curator Lydia Yee historicizes the street as subject and stage, a space onto which artists project their shifting visions of public life. It opens with politically charged photojournalistic candids, such as William Klein's antagonistic Gun No. 1, New York, 1954, which forces the viewer to stare down the blurry barrel of a pistol aimed by a sneering child. Although the show mostly consists of New York–based photography, with an emphasis on performance documentation, it nevertheless showcases a range of practices attempting to model urban experience.

Artists transform the street into a site of institutional and political critique, as visible in George Maciunas’s Fluxus posters. Tehching Hsieh, who refused to be indoors during his One Year Performance, 1981–82, takes such reverence for the street to its extreme. Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, 1969, and Sophie Calle’s The Shadow (Detective), 1981, both reproduce the anonymity and proximity of public life through works about being followed. More lighthearted performances include Daniel Guzmán's pick-me-up video of the artist dancing down the streets of Mexico City; in David Van Tieghem’s video Ear to the Ground, 1979, a percussionist creates catchy rhythms by banging two mallets on poles, doors, grates, and other surfaces.

Martha Rosler’s canonical The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974–75, challenges the capacity of text and image to characterize the street and its inhabitants. Such familiar work is a counterpoint to contemporary, internationally focused pieces such as Sze Tsung Leong’s photographs of staggering Chinese architecture. Activism informs much of this recent work, including the Blank Noise Project’s installation of two monitors facing each other as if in conversation: One presents the perspectives of men regarding street harassment in India, the other offers women’s views. Instead of a dialogue, Kimsooja’s video presents a woman silently standing in various world capitals. Her body functions as witness, at once disrupting and linking the global cities she inhabits.

— Lori Cole

During his long career, marked by a fascination with the melodramatically macabre, the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin created darkly mystical representations of sex, death, and the beyond that trumped even the eeriness pervading the work of his more iconic contemporaries such as James Ensor and Edvard Munch. This first major American exhibition of the artist’s work presents a concise yet exhaustive overview of the medium Kubin preferred for much of his life, illuminating a fantastically bizarre array of his drawings.

Heavily influenced by the occult beliefs of Symbolist circles, the highly prolific Kubin synthesized popular motifs of the time with his own disturbing autobiographical content. The artist’s life contained enough trauma to provide him with acutely dark iconography for much of his life: As a young boy, he witnessed his mother’s death and engaged in sexual activity with a much older pregnant woman; he remained obsessed with suicide for the rest of his years. Kubin’s work transparently reflects these neuroses: In an image evocative enough for those with even the slightest knowledge of his biography, Unser aller Mutter Erde (Earth: Mother of Us All), 1900, a pregnant woman stalks across a bleak landscape, hands raised and manelike hair flowing, as a trail of decapitated heads extends behind her.

The dimly lit exhibition contains Kubin’s drawings for his 1909 novel, The Other Side, which is a lengthy description of an imaginary land based on the themes continually raised in his work. The illustrated text draws comparisons to the work of Franz Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, and the melancholic chaos evoked by such references is reflected in Kubin’s sketchy illustrations. The completion date for the book—which gained relative popularity in its own time—marks the end of the artist’s productive twelve-year period on view. In addition to serving as a reference for the cultural currency of Vienna during these historically momentous years, this exhibition offers richly cathartic work by an artist who would otherwise likely have remained little known to American audiences.

— Britany Salsbury