Writing about Thomas Scheibitz nearly a decade ago, my thought was that he was quintessentially a painter. His recent exhibition in London, “About 90 Elements/TOD IM DSCHUNGEL (Death in the Jungle),” a version of which was originally staged at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, seems to suggest I was wrong: Along with a dozen works on canvas and nine paintings on paper, it contained nine sculptures (including a tabletop grouping titled 20 Models, 2007) and a suite of color photographs, as well as a silk-screen print—making it clear that this tightly woven oeuvre is nonetheless the product

Taken when the American photographer Jimmy De Sana (1950–1990) was between the ages of just twenty and twenty-two, the small, black-and-white images in 101 Nudes, 1972, seem to document simultaneously this talented artist’s fumbling discoveries in both sex and photography. The subjects’ often embarrassing suburban posturing—a fleshy young woman walking gracelessly in the backyard; a skinny boy posing stupidly on a dining-room table, performing some sort of arabesque—captures the awkward, mischievous curiosity of early encounters with sex or art, the moments when our parents mercifully left us