The desire to speak in a painting? Practicing the desire to paint, the “concreteness that has been depicted,” in a speaking painting? The man who wants all this is the Conceptual painter Peter Zimmermann, who, since 1987, has been depicting book covers as paintings. There’s nothing wrong here: he cleverly chooses the titles, which all come from books of the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s. These books include several atlases, An Introduction to Modern Linguistics, Abstraction and Empathy, Michelin and Baedeker guides, as well as how-to books like Think and Get Rich and Wallpapering Today. These titles

Karin Kneffel paints in ways that, seen superficially, seem like ironic and irksome internal measures aimed at pictorial deformations. Yet these canvases are anything but a painter’s Modernistic laments. In her depictions of animals, Kneffel takes energetic steps back into painting, toward painting. The very big- or very small-format works here show dogs, poultry, horses, rabbits, and wild boars. Bizarre, absurd, yet somehow appealing, these excellently painted animals, whether in masses or in isolation, consistently function as independent entities in regard to the overall composition. These