William Giles’s debut with the Allan Frumkin Gallery is surely one of the strongest shows of the New York winter season. In his offering of twenty-four canvases finished over the past year, Giles presents a particular kind of abstract invention that felicitously harmonizes two distinct approaches to pictorial formulation.

First, each of the paintings makes use of forms which are, or appear to be, capable of mathematical definition. These forms are on the whole relatively simple ones: broad stripes, segments of circular bands, wide spirals, triangles. They are overlaid and intertwined in careful

At the Park Place Gallery Mark Di Suvero and Edwin Ruda share the premises in a two-man show having the novel fillip of a couple of works done by the two men in collaboration. As has happened before in painter-sculptor two-man efforts where Di Suvero has been the sculptor, he completely dominates and steals the show. I have remarked upon this before, when another “wall artist” was the victim, pointing out that the sculptor always has the advantage in such a situation, but presumably the parties involved know what they’re doing.

Ruda’s work is modular, “systemic” if you like, in that each piece

At the Dwan Gallery, Edward Kienholz, under the touted description “Concept Tableaux” shows one of his macabre mock-ups, together with projects for a dozen additional ones. To back off from these latter for a moment, the main thing to see in the exhibition is the artist’s The State Hospital. This piece reproduces with grisly fidelity a room, or rather a cell, in the hopeless ward of a state mental institution. One peeks into the room through a small barred window in the padlocked door to discover a brown varnished figure of an elderly nude man. He reclines, facing the observer, on an iron cot

At the Royal Marks Gallery, Robert Howard shows six pieces of recent sculpture in polychrome welded steel. The show breaks down into three pairs each of which has a specific kind of composition. In one group (Landscape XXII, Landscape XVIII) lenticular pods are perched on tubular flexing arms to suggest a spare and enlarged fantastic botany. The polychromy in these pieces, respectively blue and violet, and shades of ochre, is very carefully modulated to dictate one’s sequential experience of the forms. All of Howard’s pieces are marked by a nice sense of balance, a balance which involves not

Grace Hartigan’s current show at the Martha Jackson Gallery is welcome testimony that the artist has herself well in hand after some mushiness of formal content and thoughtless coloristic forays in past seasons. Now there is again the brisk and jarring presentation of a well thought out composition given just the meanness of palette necessary to remind one of how difficult it is to rassle with a big canvas. The gist of Hartigan’s ideas in this show is that the free invention of abstract form, given a certain cast of mind, results in a bewildering slash of biomorphic and environmental suggestions.

The pastoral ideal has a field day at the exhibit of sketches for monumental structures at the Feigen Gallery. Everyone wants to humanize the landscape. The plans included here attack a wide range of sites: the countryside, the city, the ocean, the desert—even a crater of the moon, which becomes a nest for Willenbecher’s daisy shaped set of ten giant metal balls. The most romantic structures are those intended for deserts or other desolate areas: Ronald Bladen’s set of three giant slabs continually moving back and forth in parallel tracks and Tony Smith’s Tower of Winds, a pierced hollow zigurrat

The Elie Nadelman show at the Zabriskie Gallery is large, consisting of 40 drawings and 20 pieces of sculpture. Some of the sculpture was borrowed from museums and consequently was familiar, but other pieces, including two painted wood figures from the Hirshhorn Collection, have not been seen in public for a long time. New Yorkers whose idea of Nadelman comes chiefly from the twin giantesses at Lincoln Center will surely be struck by three small models from the ’30s. Like the original of the Lincoln Center figures, these were designed for mass production as decorative objects for the home, to

A young Californian, Robert Duran, in his first one-man exhibition (at Bykert) embraces the minimal style, but with reservations that imply a feeling for sculptural space. Each piece consists of a group of two, three or four closely related elements. Despite his flat painted surfaces and strictly axial relationships, Duran’s work is more plastic and active than is usual in this astringent mode. His forms are not flimsy or wholly banal. The small self-contained wall-piece, for all its strict complementarity, generates a lot of tension with its harsh diagonal. In several of the pieces, however,

Wolf Kahn’s show at Borgenicht gives us nature diluted by a temperament. His controlled understatement encourages intimacy; we are encouraged to imagine more than we see: brooding presences, dimly apprehended. A talented and deft painter, Kahn has always been interested in atmospheric effects and close-valued color. The new oils and pastels show him working toward a greater opacity and simplicity, especially explicit in the sailboat series. In these grey silhouettes, poised vertically against a grey sky and a little quiet grey water, poetic feeling is balanced by the weight of the color and the