Liliane Tomasko’s art is abstract and yet isn’t. In her exhibition “We Sleep Where We Fall,” the manner in which things attain presence in her paintings became even more forceful than in the past. Some viewers might not even have noticed the referential character of her pictures, and, compared to earlier pieces, much of Tomasko’s new work looks utterly nonrepresentational. Despite their considerable atmospheric compression, her paintings from the early 2000s are clearly legible as interiors or still lifes, showing pillows, sheets, blankets, apparel, and fabric stacked up in wardrobes. The empty

Imagine earnestness in a painting. It’s not pretty. Or maybe it is, actually, and that’s the problem: It’s kitsch. With the group of new, modestly sized works on view in the exhibition “So kalt kann es nicht sein/It can’t be that cold,” David Ostrowski appeared to have miraculously circumvented this impasse. The battered objects were gray, heavily layered and textured—some with collage elements barely discernible through the paint—and each titled with the artist’s customary “F” (which stands for what you think it does) followed by the name, in parentheses, of a prominent pop-music act (Toni