Jo Baer can be provocative, but the effect is never for the sake of mere provocation—without fear or apology, the artist says what she thinks. For example, in a 1967 letter to the editor of this magazine, she faults Donald Judd and Robert Morris for their high-stakes rejection of her preferred medium—painting—which the duo called “antique” for its implicit illusionism. In the final line of her communiqué, she writes, “An ‘inescapable’ delusion moves the above critics. It is objectionable,” her last word a cutting pun on Judd’s 1965 essay “Specific Objects.” Baer’s 2010 book, Broadsides & Belles

Among the millions of lives changed upon seeing astronaut William Anders’s 1968 Earthrise image was that of a young Italian land surveyor. “It was a picture of the world, and it contained all the pictures in the world at the same time,” Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992) later recalled of the photograph, taken on Christmas Eve from Apollo 8. Ghirri began his career as a photographer and photography critic shortly after this moment, alongside (though apart from) a cohort of Americans in the 1970s—William Eggleston, Richard Misrach, and Stephen Shore among them—who squired the unseemly, commercially tainted

“It’s Yours,” José Parlá’s solo exhibition of recent paintings here, took its name from Bronx rapper T La Rock’s 1984 formative hip-hop single, a self-reflexive anthem that sets out the genre’s parameters and its promise of democratic permissiveness. It was a good analogue for Parlá’s practice, a style of Abstract Expressionism informed by both the energy of street life and the built environment of the street itself. Parlá, a tagger at heart (a selection of his early blackbooks are featured), works in what is sometimes called a postgraffiti mode but is probably better understood as gestural

Across nine exquisite and meticulously executed paintings—made with media such as oil, acrylic, colored pencil, and pastel—at Peter Blum Gallery, Luisa Rabbia offered up an original vision of the human body rapturously transfigured. Her works give off an “oceanic feeling,” as French writer Romain Rolland characterized the effect, or, as Sigmund Freud called it in response to Rolland, a “primitive ego-feeling,” a sensation preserved from infancy, when the ego has not yet come into its own and is only beginning to emerge from the id. The imagery in Rabbia’s show, according to the press release,

A German-born Brazilian who developed her signature aesthetic while living in London for two decades, Eleonore Koch (1926–2018) is a vibrant outlier in the global history of postwar painting. Her enigmatically spare, jewel-toned canvases conjure a cosmopolitan network of artistic kinship, a way of thinking about objects in space that owes something to the depopulated metaphysical vistas of Giorgio de Chirico and the lambent stillness of Giorgio Morandi—but also to a certain strain of British Pop art that wends its way from Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney to Michael Craig-Martin—all set

“Geometric acrobatics characterize our lines of thought,” writes Jean Katambayi Mukendi. “In order to get to the end of a process of thought or emotion, one could resort to revolution, translation, dilation, parabolas, hyperbolas, ellipses, straight lines, parallels, points, sequences, static, dynamic, recurrence, accumulation, and traces.” The Congolese artist’s solo show at Ramiken—his first in the United States—followed a similarly meandering path. Mukendi was set to begin a summer residency at the gallery’s warehouse space in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he was to construct

The sumptuous Park Avenue duplex of coller des bijoux czar Kenneth Jay Lane; Dawnridge, the byzantine Beverly Hills stronghold built by designer and artist Tony Duquette and his wife, Elizabeth Johnstone; Neuschwanstein Castle, King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s fairy-tale palace: These haute abodes are examples of the most exquisite and extreme queer taste. Profane notions regarding old-school faggery, including theatricality, opulence, and camp are in fact among the most sacred, vaporizing all pretenses to normativity in favor of perversity, ostentation, and rabid originality. Joseph Holtzman—founder

An increasingly common trope in big-budget science-fiction films has been mankind’s departure from an overcrowded or ecologically devastated Earth. Such films include WALL-E (2008), Elysium (2013), Interstellar (2014), Passengers (2016), and The Midnight Sky (2020). An early example of this premise is Silent Running (1972), directed by Douglas Trumbull and starring Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell, a botanist on board a space freighter transporting bio-domes filled with specimens of otherwise extinct flora and fauna. When the freighter receives orders to destroy the samples, Lowell attempts to save

What distinguishes the work of an artist from the mere production of a work of art? Process, in part. And that of sixty-year-old Austrian artist Leopold Strobl—whose drawings were featured in “One,” his second solo show in New York—seems closer to meditation or prayer. He begins his day in the early hours, leafing through newspapers, looking for photographs of interest—not an easy task, by his lights. When he lands on one, he cuts it out, glues it to another piece of paper, and embellishes it with graphite and colored pencils. The result looks as though it could have been ripped out of the hands

At Fierman, the photo-based paintings in Dietmar Busse’s solo exhibition “Today I wanted to die again” evoked the dolorous colors and darksome moods of Romantic-era imagery by artists such as William Blake or Eugène Delacroix. Busse portrays the rural, melancholy environs of his West German upbringing as settings rife with murderous, sinister events. Of the five large pieces in the show (all works 2020) presented in this tiny space, two depicted gory battles between wild, cartoonish combatants, while the other three featured portraits of more mythical-looking entities.

Busse creates his work by