Musty. Stinky. Floral. Vegetal. The critic is impoverished when it comes to the language of smells. In a heroic effort to make up for the absence of the olfactory in our understanding of the world, Sissel Tolaas has worked with smell for more than thirty years. Her practice spans and merges the aesthetic and the scientific through, for instance, an archive of smell molecules, a lexicon of smell-specific terms, and a research lab in Berlin.

Rarely has a museum show felt so intense to me as did “RE,” Tolaas’s largest exhibition to date. (It will travel to the ICA Philadelphia in August.) Not only