The head of a nurse, an Arab woman in Niqab, and a cicatrized, monocled Daddy Warbucks—like man stare at the viewer blankly, not even asking, in the manner of De Niro’s Travis Bickle, You lookin’ at me? The problems inherent to representing in sculpture both the act of looking and the information provided by a specific face account only partially for the strange power of Michael Minelli’s second solo show. Where previously he proffered totemic, gleefully gaudy Bruce Conneresque assemblages or combined the bodies of various televisual and cinematic stars to make small, meticulous figurative fetish

Julie Mehretu’s intertwined compositions in ink and acrylic on canvas, which range from easel size to monumental, are, to use a word that is particularly charged at the moment, explosive. Though shape and color punctuate her paintings, line dominates, defining swirls and sprays that seem to result from a sudden, massive force. Mehretu builds the paintings from misty transparent and translucent layers, each with its own set of marks and imagery—something like handpainted versions of the collapsed strata utilized in graphics and imaging software. They suggest both an endless void and a tangle of

First Mike Kelley, then Jim Shaw and Raymond Pettibon have each taken a turn carrying the torch of the “Pop Informel” school, and each has seen his star rise accordingly. Only Tony Oursler—the fourth member of a loose-knit crew that once collaborated on the art bands Destroy All Monsters (the original lineup of which featured Kelley, Shaw, Carey Loren, and Niagara) and the Poetics (comprising just Oursler and Kelley) and that continue to make occasional guest appearances in one another’s projects—seemed to lag behind, achieving less success than he deserved with his early videos of puppet plays