MOST SOLO EXHIBITIONS require little explanation of why or how they came to be. Their logic inevitably seems to fit some well-established category: There is the midcareer survey or the full-dress retrospective, or the show that concentrates on a single genre or theme. Why, then, does it seem less than easy to slip “Take your time: Olafur Eliasson” into a ready-made slot? There is no question that the show, billed as a survey and initially mounted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, provides the amplest US presentation to date of the work of the forty-one-year-old

The ten works on paper in Will Yackulic’s second solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery have a motif in common: one or two spheres that float in the composition’s upper center. In some of the pieces, these are positioned above undulating patterns that suggest landscapes or swelling seas. The spheres are geodesic, and are articulated with triangles of gouache, watercolor, and, in some cases, ink, occasionally taking on more gradated smoothness through the use of finer brushwork. The backgrounds are made from rows of letterforms tapped out on vintage manual typewriters (including an oversize bank-ledger

How much do we have to know about the backstory of a work of art in order to understand and appreciate it? Jordan Kantor’s enigmatic paintings seem to pose this question explicitly, by challenging viewers’ expectations about the mediation of images. At a moment when eye-candy art has been in the ascendancy for some time, the relative inscrutability of Kantor’s canvases is pleasurable, in a slightly masochistic way. His paintings demand our commitment but give us something in return by requiring us to be actively responsible for interpreting them.

The larger pictures in the show are based on