“Cooking,” he calls it, but there are other words that come to mind when describing Frank Bowling’s restless, wildly inventive painting practice: spilling, smearing, dripping, brushing, raking, flicking, sticking, foaming, cutting, stitching, and pasting, to name a few. And waiting. Bowling often works on the floor, flooding canvases with vivid washes of acrylic and oil, letting the paints pool, settle, and dry before staining them again. He applies thick, gestural curls of impasto that sometimes take weeks to harden into crunchy corrugated surfaces. He embeds tiny objects and pigment into thick

One encountered “Recollections of Underdevelopment,” an arresting exhibition of new photo-based works by Mustafa Hulusi, before even setting foot in the gallery. Eye-catching photographs of bloodred pomegranates on newsprint lined the insides of the space’s windowpanes, making a colorful wall of images visible from the sidewalk. The fruits in the British artist’s “Pomegranate” series, 2014–, are depicted in various states of ripeness and decay. In some pictures, pomegranates appear on parched patches of dirt amid desiccated leaves. In others, images of the fruit are twice removed: These photographs

An observatory for barely unpacked product and its packaging, this complex, interweaving installation of Chadwick Rantanen’s machines and Bill Jenkins’s illuminations begged for extended description; the exhibition’s subtle mechanical weirdness and play of light created a viewing situation that demanded methodical observation. Like much Conceptual assemblage, the show tugged at language while skirting easy characterization. Attempts to translate the installation into words create labored, angular poetry.

Hanging above a table sloping inward and split down its middle, a contraption made of black