Frances Scholz’s recent show consisted of six large, nonobjective paintings in acrylic on canvas. The paintings were coloristically suggestive, with muted greens placed against luminous pinks and yellows, and their expansive surfaces contained narrow stripes running horizontally and vertically. Some of the larger areas of color were applied in translucent layers, creating where they overlap new shades, as well as an illusion of depth that is disrupted by the more opaque areas.

At the beginning of her artistic career Scholz was fascinated by cinema—in fact, she had aspired to become a filmmaker—and

For his recent show “Der Letzte Spaziergang Durch die Elysischen Felder” (The last walk through the elysian fields) 36-year-old Russian artist Vadim Zakharov transformed Cologne’s Kunstverein into an indoor park. Amid newly planted “meadows” of grass he laid down gravel paths and set out small trees to give the space an outdoor ambiance. Yet any assumption that this was meant as a serious simulation of nature, or even of a landscaped garden, was quickly dispelled by various surreal elements within the installation. A file folder with a jet of water spurting out of it, for example, might well