A simple tire perched on the wall of Thomas Bayrle’s recent show “Gerano/Pavesi” (Geraniums/Pavesi) recalled the elementary forms of Kazimir Malevich’s most austere Suprematist canvases: black circle, white field, end of story. But just as Malevich’s pared-down images are, in fact, richly differentiated material constructions in which, the artist claimed, one can see “the face of God,” so Bayrle’s tire—or more precisely, his Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori, adesso e nell’ora della nostra morte, 2009—is much more than a dumb, tacked-up rubber disk. It isn’t rubber,

Underpinning Daniel Keller’s recent exhibition “Kai ❤ Dalston Bushwick” was a convoluted story of a love triangle unfolding in the near future. Finger-width tubes looping along the floor and sporting cubic-zirconia engagement rings were laced through holes in the walls. These tubes connected transparent glass cubes in different shades of green—aquaria filled with water and pumped full of air to foster the reproduction of spirulina, an edible algae that has been touted as a so-called superfood. This assemblage conveyed a fascination was with romantic relationships, specifically their logistics.

Tino Sehgal calls his works, which have been devised primarily for presentations in art museums rather than theaters, “constructed situations.” Others have taken to describing them as “living sculptures.” But as I encountered the pieces in the London-born artist’s first major exhibition in the city where he now lives, it was hard to resist the feeling that they are more like theater and less like sculpture than they are meant to be. What makes the difference, after all, does not entirely reside in the work itself (whatever itself is taken to mean here) but in the relation that the work establishes