The fourteen new paintings in Richard Artschwager’s recent exhibition at Gagosian Gallery hardly comprise a series or even suggest a cohesive totality. Rather, a number of overlapping connections held the show together as Artschwager recycled from his archival treasure trove, often redeploying materials and motifs as sly sight gags and perceptual bluffs. In several works, for example, the artist borrows objects from his 1974 “Door Window Table Basket Mirror Rug” series, relocating the drawings’ woven basket into a distorted and slightly creepy dungeonlike interior in Walking Man, and isolating

Chris Martin, an American, and Michael Krebber, a German, were both born in 1954. Krebber has suggested that he might be a failed actor who is seen by others as a Conceptual artist, one who finds ways to paint, because it’s a good idea, often by various kinds of not-painting (using stretched gingham or horse blankets instead of oil on canvas). Martin is quite different, and not only because he lacks Krebber’s notoriety. Rather than not-painting or overpainting, Martin paints by painting-over, sometimes spending years on single works (two of his most recent are dated 1983–2005 and 1973–2005).

In her second solo show at Newspace, Misty Burruel persisted in her attempt to engineer a decorative Pop-psychedelic Art of the Uncanny, here focusing on how representations of nature may become emblems of confusion, desire, aspiration, and tweaked Romanticism.

Rim of the World, 2006, shared the title of Burruel’s show and formed the sculptural centerpiece of the main gallery. Modeled after a topographical map of three sites near Highway 18 in the San Bernardino Mountains, it is made from layered sheets of contoured birch plywood. Irregularly shaped but roughly the size of a boardroom table, it