The title of this exhibition was blunt: “Pattern Recognition.” Selected by the gallery together with the curator Tenzing Barshee, the paintings on view sported abstract patterns in the narrow and almost banal sense of the word: stripes, chessboards, rectangles. Dating from the first half of the too-brief career of the Berlin-based painter Susanne Paesler, who died in 2006 at the age of forty-three, these works were made between 1991 and 1998—an interregnum between painting’s comeback of the 1980s and its revival of the 2000s.

Perhaps that interval of diminishing stakes and fading significance