A nine-second sample from the Jamaican-born rock-steady singer Alton Ellis runs through Cyprien Gaillard’s entrancing new 3-D film Nightlife (all works 2015), which anchored the artist’s recent show “When Nature Runs Riot.” Blending the refrain of Ellis’s 1969 classic “Black Man’s Word”—“I was born a loser”—with that of the song’s 1971 re-working as “Black Man’s Pride”—“I was born a winner”—Gaillard subtly interwove the resulting acoustic fragment throughout this nearly fifteen-minute work. The artist’s repeated use of this conflicting refrain—chopped, distorted, falling away, and coming

A few years ago, Renata Lucas was asked what she thinks art is for. She replied, “Perhaps it’s one of the few things left that allows us to declare that we don’t fit the given standards.” Her own investigation of those given standards operates in the field of urbanism—more specifically that of metropolitan architecture. Studying the relationship between public squares and private spaces, the intricate workings of traffic hubs, or the ways in which sidewalks form trajectories of experience and social life, she deftly devises ways to break prevailing architectural and social molds, often with

Objects in this exhibition may have been more complicated than they appeared. Robin Bruch’s prosaically titled exhibition “Major Works on Paper (1972–1985) II” looked like yet another painting show, but it actually raised quite a few questions of ethical-curatorial concern. Bruch, born in the United States in 1948, was introduced to the Berlin art crowd by Mathew three years ago, after the Berlin-based American artist Megan Francis Sullivan stumbled on her work by chance and brought her to the attention of the gallery, which staged the first chapter of what can now be seen as a two-part

A strict presentational concept rules “Mary Heilmann & David Reed: Two by Two,” which presents the work of two late-career American artists. Udo Kittelmann and cocurator Sophie Mattheus have chosen to display about forty paintings, ranging in date from 1973 to 2015, along with an installation and a digital projection by each artist. Every painting by Heilmann hangs directly to one by Reed, with just over four inches between them. (Only the pair at the entrance are separated by a bit more space.) The result is, in most cases, a forceful and provocative confrontation between works.

This presentation