Karla Black makes the kind of artwork that the janitor has to be instructed not to sweep up and discard. This drugstore expressionist deploys all kinds of cheap finery in rendering her delicate, perishable spillage. Powders and eye shadow and colored toilet paper are sprinkled, splattered, and smeared across surfaces often equally tenuous, unless they are simply the given floors or walls of the spaces where her work is exhibited.

Tattered instability is the appeal. Take a careless step and you just might destroy something. The tiny puffballs of Structure for Once (all works 2018), for instance:

The title of Philipp Fürhofer’s recent exhibition, “Walpurgisnacht,” was borrowed from a scene in Goethe’s Faust, so we can assume that the show’s recurrent concern with light was to be understood not only literally, but also in a symbolic way. The thirteen pieces on view could be called assemblages, light boxes, or paintings; in most cases, they were all three at once. Many of the works harked back to the tradition of Romantic landscape painting.

Using a transparent acrylic glass box as a base for most of the works, Fürhofer brought in incandescent lightbulbs and LED tubes, usually lots of them,

To make his paintings, Joachim Grommek combines trompe l’oeil techniques with abstraction. In his recent exhibition “High End,” Grommek presented new works on canvas alongside three slightly older paintings on chipboard (all Untitled and numbered). Although the new paintings were separated by fundamental formal differences from the earlier works, they were exemplary of his play with the illusionism of the concrete. The compact compositions in small square formats consisted of a large color field, set just a bit off center, in combination with stripes and bands in different hues grouped along