Imagine a hollow tower of books in assorted shapes, sizes, and languages, stacked like bricks of knowledge from floor to ceiling. And when you peer inside, up and down, this latter-day Tower of Babel suddenly (thanks to two mirrors lining top and bottom) becomes an endless tunnel. Jorge Luis Borges could hardly have done better, but Idiom, 1991, is the creation of Slovak artist Matej Kren, a visual polyglot who works with drawing, painting, sculpture, silk screen, installation, photography, xerography, film, and, above all, his imagination.

Typically, Idiom is as simple and unpretentious in form

A man walks behind a woman in the street. The shadow of his head is projected onto her back, her fur collar momentarily giving him a crew cut. This double anti-portrait—one figure’s back, definitively anonymous, the other one indicated only by a kind of negative presence, a shadow—is not only a self-portrait, but a gift to those attuned to and interested in questions of sexual difference.

A comparable allegorical potential may be found in many of Lee Friedlander’s photographs, above all in the series of self-portraits, most dating from the ’60s, presented in this show. Seen together, these images