For several decades now, the work of Raymond Hains has been an exercise in patience, offering a means of slowly deciphering the world. Since his travels with the New Realists in the ’60s, Hains has shifted the focus of his art to language and its metaphors; his practice is now more “conceptual” or poetic than formal. All of Hains’s works consist of operations on the real and represent a collection of gestures and actions (cutting out, tearing up, displacing). His is an art of digression and wordplay that exposes the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning.

Hains’s recent show follows his