Amid the lush, tipped-in plates and eye-popping grids of pinks and oranges, yellows and greens in the masterly text of his 1961 classic The Art of Color, Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten strikes an unexpectedly melancholic note: “When the individual dies, he blanches. His face and body lose color as the light of life is extinguished. The dead soulless matter of the corpse is devoid of chromatic emanation.” In his second solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, in which Itten plays a leading role, Mark Flores negotiated the complex territory between formal color theory and the form of the human

In Purge (all works 2008), a new work by Megan Williams that was the centerpiece of the artist’s third solo show at Carl Berg Gallery, several dozen cartoon drawings of the laugh-till-you-cringe ilk are pinned all over a soft mannequin slumped in a chair. Collectively, the sketches form a suit of armor created by the artist spilling her guts, taking the idea of wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve to an absurd extreme. The work also suggests that, like the invisible man we see only by way of bandages wrapped around him, the figure’s form is really all surface.

This kind of thought stew also informs

If the photographs that illustrate Artforum’s reviews were still in black and white, readers could be forgiven for confusing Christopher Michlig’s recent solo debut at Jail with an exhibition of early-twentieth-century Russian Constructivism. The flat collages, with their starkly graphic compositions, were presented in four groups of five, either hung at eye level or dropped to the floor and leaning against the wall. They included, for example, a sequence of near-empty monochromes, and another set densely packed with black rectangles. Additionally, five freestanding sculptures were scattered