In the decade since his star turn in Yilmaz Dziewior’s “Formalismus: Moderne Kunst, heute” (Formalism: Modern Art, Today) at the Kunstverein Hamburg in 2004, Sergej Jensen has only consolidated his claim on post-Conceptual painting. The “paintings without paint” that first garnered attention—compositions found and nominated as much as made (from fabrics dyed, stitched, or repurposed)—are asubjective, if startlingly aesthetic, pictorial manifestations that embrace all manner of supports as incidental images and substrates. With these works, Jensen has occupied various spaces within the

Art history has had a difficult time knowing what to do with the work of Alexis Smith. Her thingly object collages have long been awkwardly characterized as belonging to a strain of witty, narrative Conceptualism associated with the work of fellow LA artists Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Allen Ruppersberg. Ruppersberg may be the most apt comparison, but if his works tend to employ a novelistic structure, Smith’s have the allusive impact of short-form poetry. On the other hand, Smith’s deep commitment to collage and assemblage—not to mention the esoteric mood of her works as well as their

Daniel Knorr’s Los Angeles debut was so conceptually tidy and neatly packaged as to seem pat, yet it opened onto divergent readings. The show’s fourteen brightly colored, polyurethane wall reliefs, titled “Depression Elevations,” 2013–, were cast from potholes in the streets of LA (with one piece molded from the cobblestones of Berlin, where Knorr is based). In addition, the artist roamed the city’s famously carcentric urban sprawl to collect all kinds of litter—from disposable floss toothpicks to license plates to snack bags—which he then had pressed between the pages of two hundred

Joyce Pensato’s alliances with her cartoon subjects—icons such as Mickey, Batman, Felix the Cat, and Homer Simpson—recall the different stages we experience in our real-life relations with friends and romantic partners. Early on, there can be the awkwardness of becoming acquainted, or the obsession that accompanies a new crush. Then, as familiarity sets in, one learns every variation of the other person’s moods and expressions. In the best cases, we never grow bored with our closest companions, and they somehow continue to surprise us.

In “I KILLED KENNY,” Pensato’s one-person show at