Regardless of one’s expectations of transparency, glass can be a deceitful, paradoxical material given to both illusion and allusion. This became apparent with the twenty-eight-foot-wide wall of glass (with white, painted wood edges) that served as a support for a dozen paintings in Jutta Koether’s third solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter, “Sovereign Women in Painting.” Mounted on this wall, facing the entrance, were Koether’s ostensibly “black” paintings, including four small, nearly identical, monochrome triangles with smears of dried resin. On the other side of the glass partition hung

For just over a decade, John Williams has been cleverly employing sculpture as a useful conduit for time-based action. In 1998, the Los Angeles–based artist produced the first objects of his ongoing “Record Projection” series, a group of small, flashy assemblages crafted from colorful, mass-produced plastic forms—drinking straws, dish scrubbers, stick-on bows, hair rollers, and poker visors, for example—attached to vinyl records that, when set atop spinning turntables, become animated instruments in Williams’s expanded cinema–like performances. During these events, Williams randomly selects and

For half a century, artists have been negotiating the vexed relationship between abstraction and representation. Los Angeles–based artist Jennifer West’s sexy, whimsical, painting-scale DVD projections walk that elusive line between pictorial modes with deftness, wit, and airy originality.

While West’s work slyly nods to past heroic modernist gestures, her subjects are rarely, if ever, grand or heroic, and her engagement with canonical narratives of abstraction are often oblique and irreverent. Sophomoric urban myths, harmless shenanigans, and the free-love legacy of 1970s psychedelia provide