The playfulness of Nicole Wermers’s exhibition “Grundstück” belied a more serious project, one that engages the phenomenological implications of familiar forms. The German-born, UK-based artist highlights the peculiar coldness of modernism’s retail legacy by hijacking consumer objects and ludically subverting their intended uses. Here, Wermers presented three new bodies of work, each of which contrasts high and low and pits strict geometry against tendencies toward disorder.

The artist’s humorous approach was easily glimpsed in the five “Mood Boards,” 2016–17, hung along the gallery’s east wall.

From the outset, Toyin Ojih Odutola’s solo exhibition “A Matter of Fact” makes visitors complicit in its fabulist conceit. What we are about to see, an introductory wall panel announces, is the “private collection of rarely exhibited portraits depicting the UmuEze Amara family,” a fictional aristocratic Nigerian clan, the portrayals of whom purportedly span two hundred years. The eighteen pieces on view, all made with charcoal, pastel, and pencil, and most of them life-size portraits, provide clues to the family’s histories—its proclivities, its relationships, and, above all, its members’