Not many shows manage to make you laugh, snort, wince, giggle, and blush in the space of a few minutes, nor do they convince and compel both wittily and emphatically. But Sarah Lucas’s exhibition “SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble”—a crammed, busy, and riotous affair from start to finish—managed all this and more. The nascent anger of Lucas’s work, which picks away at the social, political, and economic fabric of lives lived in the dirty underbelly of Thatcher’s Britain, was in stark and startling evidence throughout. Lucas’s familiar references to postwar and contemporary British

Polish artist Jerzy “Jurry” Zieliński (1943–1980) is remembered today as a legendary maverick, brawler, and vagabond, yet this outsize legacy seems to have overshadowed the artistic contributions he made over the course of his career. A traveling retrospective in Poland in 2010–11—heralded as “The Return of Jurry”—has fueled a resurgence of interest in his work, however, and has since been followed by two international exhibitions: the first at New York’s Oko gallery earlier in 2013, and more recently this show, “Jerzy “Jurry” Zieliński: Paintings 1968–1977.”

From a village southeast

Derek Jarman’s best-known paintings are probably the “Evil Queen” series of 1993—the final group of angry, colorful, expressionistic works he made before his death the following year. Yet the “Black Paintings,” created between 1986 and 1993—some seventeen of which were neatly hung on the ground floor—offer a wider range of insights into his artistic practice. These small, squarish painted assemblages, made primarily with tar and black oil paint embedded with objects, have rarely been exhibited since his death. Their imagery includes wreaths, thorns, Christ, widows, smashed glass,