Throughout her career, Renée Petropoulos has explored the contours of public space in immediate, human terms. Her installations actively question who the “public” is and subtly alter how its designated spaces are used. Collaging together fragments of shoppers’ conversations at a women’s clothing boutique in a sound work titled Nearly Ten Months, 2003, for example, she ingeniously demonstrates the social function of language, the way words form an imperfect surface that separates individuals. And in Is It Possible, 2005, she turns the floor of the San Leandro County Juvenile Court lobby into an

Belgian artist Peter Rogiers titled his first US solo exhibition “Slagroom,” using a word that, besides referring to the solidified impurities skimmed off molten metal during smelting, is also Dutch for “whipped cream.” Indeed, Rogiers’s recent sculpted figures are clotted-looking masses that seem barely to hold their shapes against the forces of gravity and motion, and while plastic was more prevalent than metal in this show, these curious forms suggest creatures that might have crawled from one of Vulcan’s crucibles.

Modeled in buttery clay, Rogiers’s figures take the rawness of Rodin to an

Renata Lucas works on an institutional scale and with unmistakable institutional ambition, but like that of certain other Brazilian artists whose work has gained both critical traction and market currency in the US over the past decade—Cildo Meireles and Hélio Oiticica, for example—some of Lucas’s most provocative work is, owing to its benignly threatening nature, completely untenable in the context of a major American museum. Her lighthearted but persuasive brand of institutional critique does not, therefore, operate from within the museum, but instead refuses to enter that economy; Falha (

Marco Breuer has never published a “Verb List” as Richard Serra has, but you get the feeling he has one secreted somewhere. His recent exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery, which presented fifteen years’ worth of his manipulations and mutilations of photographic materials, is a litany of infinitives: to cut, to sand, to scratch, to prick, to burn, to slice. Each action—frequently unnamed but hinted at in the exhibition checklist with phrases like “gelatin-silver paper, burned” or “chromogenic paper, scratched”—determines a work.

For Untitled (Cloth II/100% Cotton), 1998, Breuer placed cotton gauze