The recent retrospective exhibition of Llyn Foulkes’ work, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” demonstrated that though the form and subject matter of his work have varied widely over the years—from semiabstract assemblages, to the rocky landscapes of the ’60s, to the bloodied self-portraits of the ’70s, to the satirical paintings of the last two decades—the complexity and passion of Foulkes’ vision has scarcely faltered. Occupying a territory somewhere between the horrific, hallucinatory world of Philip K. Dick and the cartoons of Walt Disney, his art constantly grapples with what has infected

Seemingly fixated on the ’60s, artists have lately resuscitated the idioms of Pop, scatter art, identity-based performance and activism, various modes of Conceptualism, not to mention the serial syntax of Minimalism; even earth art and the early manifestations of institutional critique live on in contemporary explorations of site. Scholarship has also turned to that decade, as graduate art-history students rush to write dissertations historicizing the practices their professors once addressed freshly as critics. “Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975” is a key episode in the ’90s assimilation

Michael Zwack’s paintings, which originate in photographs, render the familiar uncanny. Zwack sometimes projects a slide onto canvas then rubs, wipes away, and builds up layers of paint to blur the outlines of the image and alter the colors so that the whole seems to have been culled from the depths of the imagination. Though the landscapes and buildings he depicts look as if they ought to be identifiable, they have a timeless, almost universal quality about them.

Part of a generation of artists in the early ’80s who appropriated mass media imagery, Zwack reconsiders the impact of the photographic