The title of Brad Spence’s fourth solo show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, “(figs.),” simultaneously bespeaks the open-endedness and closure of the fourteen immaculately airbrushed Photorealist paintings that were on view. When abbreviated and bracketed, the word typically indicates a particular kind of “figure,” a reference image or diagram tied to a text. Previously, Spence has organized bodies of work around themes straightforwardly declared in his exhibition titles—“The Afterlife,” “Art Therapy,” “As I Was Conceived”—so that even if individual pieces occasionally strayed into ambiguous

If the gray-scale chart were given a sculptural physicality, it might well take the form of the nearly twenty-foot-long seating unit that sliced down the center of Blum & Poe’s upstairs gallery, forming Endless Chair, 2010–11, the centerpiece of Julian Hoeber’s recent exhibition. Built from bony slats of bolted-together plywood, this modular bench provided a direct (if less than comfortable) vantage onto the seven large abstract geometric canvases that comprise the artist’s “Execution Changes” series, 2010–. Viewers were permitted to sit on this protracted piece of furniture, prompting one to

Several recurring visual tropes circulate through the schematic and disjunctive dreamscape of Jill Giegerich’s recent paintings, repeating and recombining in various guises like a shuffled and reshuffled deck. A circle of suggestive formal relationships emerges, and one could map a flowchart of such connections through the twenty-seven works from the past four years that were on view in this show: There are cartoonish, angular ears conjuring a chiseled Superman type, which identify a crucial state of heightened auditory (sensory) alertness that amplifies and ricochets off depictions elsewhere