“Bulgogi,” as Jorge Pardo’s latest outing at Gagosian was cryptically titled, denotes a classic Korean dish of marinated barbecued meat. The name related most obviously to the show’s centerpiece, Untitled (Drawing Room) (all works 2010), an enclosed pagoda-like structure made of wood—a form by now as familiar to Pardo’s viewers as his signature lamps—that had been erected in the center of the gallery. As expected, the work’s interior was furnished with new lamps, here tightly clustered to form a chandelier with undulating contours echoed by the shape of the pagoda itself, giving visitors the

“The world is full of objects, more or less interesting,” Douglas Huebler famously observed in 1969, with this twist: “I do not wish to add any more.” While the late artist’s statement was certainly a personal manifesto—he had just turned away from blocky geometric sculpture toward slighter, slier modes incorporating text and photography—it was surely meant as a challenge to the whole artmaking enterprise, from the studio to the site of exhibition. In recent years, Los Angeles–based Aaron Wrinkle has operated close to the margins of visibility, if not viability, implied by Huebler’s statement.

For centuries, the law of the grid—as an invisible system of horizontal and vertical lines that partition a page into a visually consistent structure—has dominated modular graphic design. For decades, the group show has held sway over summer gallery schedules. Brian Kennon’s solo exhibition “Group Shows,” on view this past summer at Steve Turner Contemporary, employed the rules of the former to reformulate the latter, demonstrating that the layout of an exhibition can be as prefab as a page layout. Kennon’s nine new works on paper—single-edition ink-jet prints that feature found images swiped

As America slogs through its new recession-era corporate landscape, Chadwick Rantanen’s installation of sculpture and photographs perhaps most obviously evoked the semicustomized, sturdy-for-the-price furnishings of modest industrial-park start-up offices. With this show, the artist mined the aesthetics of efficiency—and perhaps therapy—using such mundane light-corporate materials as sandblasted glass in soothing hues, burnished metal, and abstract images that speak of low-risk investment in the future. In effect, the work communicated a catalogue of postmeltdown minimalist tropes, with an