When the Cologne-based artist Dieter Teusch last exhibited here he showed sculptures—perfidiously beautiful, hideously bizarre images in space: death as a pile of dishes, Venus as a geometrical form on a platform decorated with feathers. The kinds of objects Teusch used then appear in subliminal form in these new paintings. Some of the directness has been reined in; the painted field knows other potentials and limits than the dialogue among objects in space. However, as with the sculptures, the big, banal allusions pervading Teusch’s work coax out strange, obscure disjunctions. Also as in the

In My Father’s Studio in Paris 1937, a large color photograph by Braco Dimitrijević, a majestic lion stands guard over a painting by Vojo Dimitrijević, Braco’s father. Across from it the father’s palette lies on a white-draped pedestal. The relationship between culture and nature is a theme here, along with the question of “art about art”; juxtaposing ceremonial elegance and bizarre irony, Dimitrijević disrupts the mindless idolatry everywhere directed toward art. Taking off from works of classical Modernism that have been raised to the level of cult objects, he quotes Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de