In his second exhibition at Ace, Joel Morrison enlarges on the promise suggested in his first show, presenting a series of oddball objects based on heads and torsos that dive into the seemingly tired history of formalist sculpture and painting and dredge up refreshing and quirky treasures.

In both process and product, Morrison pits rapid-fire and rough against meticulously slow and refined. His latest sculptures, which combine fluid and jerky contours in organic/machine, anthropomorphic/technomorphic forms, give the impression of skins stretched over moving parts pushing from the inside out; they

I’ve had reservations in the past about works by Daniel Joseph Martinez; they felt like exercises in self-gratification and self-promotion ostensibly designed to push social buttons. (Think of his reputation-catapulting I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE buttons at the 1993 Whitney Biennial.) Martinez has seemed at times to be a kind of political pyromaniac, less interested inputting out fires or harnessing their energy than in fanning the flames and basking in their glow. His work in this recent show, however, an animatronic sculpture that had the gallery to itself, came as a surprise I