Allan Graham’s deliberately dysfunctional doors metaphorically open onto the series of paradoxes that once grounded representational painting: before they migrated to formalist abstraction, then mutated into Minimalist installations, and finally disappeared into what is commonly thought of as everyday life. The artist’s meticulously unfinished and unenterable constructions neatly chart the architecture of an essential aspect of Modernism’s negative impulse—its desire to align the rarefied territory of esthetic experience with the mundane.

On the surface, Graham’s works are common, slightly altered

Mounted as a kind of mid-career retrospective, this exhibition surveyed the prolific Kim Abeles’ work from 1979 to the present. She tends to work in series, 12 of which were represented in this show of more than 80 works. Combining elements of assemblage, Dada, and the diction of instructional materials, Abeles creates shrines that are often armed with an insistent social message. Beautifully conceived, designed, and produced, the catalogue that accompanied the show successfully advanced Abeles’ primary goals: to captivate and educate. Presented as a faux–World Book encyclopedia volume, it comes