TWO SILK-SCREEN PAINTINGS, which recently hung together in a corner at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, could stand as an emblem for the painting practice of New York–based artist R. H. Quaytman. Both show the same archival photograph of a 1966 ICA exhibition, “Art for U.S. Embassies.” Across the upper half of each, another photograph is overlaid, of a white wall on whose left side hangs an Op-art chevron painting, Terri Priest’s Organic Interaction #107, 1965, which was on view in the original exhibition. So an image of an abstract painting sits on a monochromatic picture plane that sits

From Gustave Courbet’s stone breakers to task-based dance, artists have variously attempted to depict the laboring body. Chilean-born, New York–based Cristóbal Lehyt’s latest solo endeavor also references industry, effort, and production: The show consists of a series of 260 paintings (the number of weekdays in a year) and a large plywood box containing dozens of tangled and woven string sculptures that obliquely refer to textile manufacturing and its obsolescence. Though the exhibition is the culmination of the artist’s 2008–2009 residency at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for