Known for their canny juxtapositions of natural and industrial materials, the artists associated with Mono-ha (literally, the School of Things) have steadily gained recognition in Japan, Korea, and Europe since the group’s emergence in the late 1960s. Organized by Mika Yoshitake, assistant curator at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, “Requiem for the Sun,” the first substantial offering of Mono-ha works in the US, expanded upon that base. Installed in a manner best described as conscientious, the exhibition offered a well-chosen sampling of some of the group’s most

The paintings of Russian-born, LA-based artist Sanya Kantarovsky are almost irresistibly appealing, even adorable. Modestly scaled mergers of abstract and figurative—or, more to the point, painterly and illustrational—elements, they are executed with a confident ease, a lightness of touch that suggests not just rigor and control but a self-pleasuring frivolity, too. In these works, the paint is often thinly applied and, here and there, wiped or scraped away, leaving voids veiled with the barely there traces of facture, lines and layered color over which the artist has rendered a

It would be all too easy to describe Mitchell Syrop’s recent body of text-based works as the product of some loose stream of consciousness. But this show’s sole work, Bifurcated Life, 2011—comprising twenty-eight archival prints, each identically framed and hung in a single line across three walls—ultimately gives a more complicated portrait: The hastily generated, half-cocked thoughts scrawled by the artist in pencil suggest the hand of a Concrete poet crossed with a serial killer. Scanned from a lined notebook and enlarged to nearly twenty-three by sixteen inches, these “documents”