Unlike the complex marionette dramaturgies of his renowned 2010–15 “Cabaret Crusades” video trilogy, Wael Shawky’s new film, Isles of the Blessed (Oops! . . . I forgot Europe) (all works 2022), the centerpiece of his exhibition at Lisson Gallery, is condensed to a single moving image: Seated at a hearth, a lone puppet of an elderly woman recounts one of Europe’s foundational myths in Arabic, Shawky’s native tongue. She tells us a tale about Europa, a beautiful Phoenician princess who is abducted and raped by Zeus on the island of Crete. Europa’s brother Cadmus, endeavoring to find his missing

“It has never been pretty,” wrote Lucy Lippard in a 1974 catalogue essay on the art of Marjorie Strider (1931–2014). “In fact,” the esteemed critic noted, the work is “usually awkward, funny, grotesque, or heavy-handed.” Too true: Strider’s paintings, especially those of svelte, bikini-clad women with bulky, three-dimensional breasts (such as Come Hither and Triptych II [Beach Girl], both 1963) or gaping mouths with bulging, cherry-red lips (such as Welcome, 1963, and Tunnel of Love, 2013) are gauche. Tacky, even. But Strider never wanted to create “tasteful” art: With her appropriations of

In 1956, Elsa Gramcko (1925–1994) was invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). The show’s curator, José Gómez-Sicre, was so taken with the young Venezuelan’s paintings that he organized her first solo presentation at the Pan American Union in Washington, DC, three years later. This was swiftly followed by multiple solo outings at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, inclusion in the 1964 Venice Biennale, and receipt of Venezuela’s National Art Prize in Sculpture in 1968. However, Gramcko retreated from the art world in the late 1970s, thus becoming

“Why is this unicorn so sad?,” a viewer might have wondered upon visiting Ariana Papademetropoulos’s show of new paintings here. Blue in both cast and mood, the forlorn ungulate appeared across three pictures and in various stages of maturity, awash in ennui. Perhaps the poor beast was dismayed to find it had yet again been saddled with a kind of meaning it never wanted in the first place (historically it has functioned as a symbol of Christ, but also of virginal purity, which can get confusing). The medieval Europeans were simply daffy about unicorns and churned out countless tapestries depicting

On one hand, this show of six big untitled paintings could be described as something of a comeback for Ryan Sullivan, an inventive abstractionist occasionally if unduly associated with the vacuous pastiche of zombie formalism. It was good timing: The six years since Sullivan’s last solo outing in New York had witnessed not only the overwhelming renascence of figurative painting, but also its own, much larger strain of market-driven zombification. The moment feels ripe for a new consideration of what beginnings can be made from abstraction’s presumed dead end.

On the other hand, these paintings

A longtime environmental activist and artist, Mary Frank underscored her impulse toward creative reuse in her latest solo show at DC Moore Gallery. Even the show’s title, “What Color Courage?,” which hearkened back to an older work—her multipanel painting What Color Lament?, 1991–93, owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York—functioned as a kind of optimistic refrain. That piece was included in Frank’s 2022 retrospective at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York in New Paltz. Yet her one-woman exhibition here rivaled the scope of a formal institutional

The process of falling asleep has been described by scientist Nathaniel Kleitman as dormiveglia—a succession of intermediate states, “part wakefulness and part sleep in varying proportions.”

While this transition manifests differently in each individual, here’s how I experience it: With my eyes closed, I wait for an image to appear. It’s nothing I will into existence, but rather something that materializes gradually on its own terms—a faint, glimmering outline of another person, a distant landscape, an undulating abstract form—charged by the shimmering phosphenes generated by my retinas. As I “

In 1704, Sir Isaac Newton invented the color wheel, which featured red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. When rotated, the hues fade to white, collapsing the spectrum into pure lumen. This diagrammatic rainbow has had a long if eccentric life, as Robert Delaunay’s “Circular Form,” or “Disc,” pictures of 1913 indicate. In Delaunay’s hands, the thing becomes a solar emblem; more mystical in import than scientifically precise.

In 1971, California artist Laddie John Dill exhibited the first works from his “Light Sentences,” 1969–, an ongoing series of straight and illuminated glass

Genevieve Goffman’s “Before It All Went Wrong,” a show of half a dozen small intricate sculptures, suggested a nostalgia for some lost dreamworld. But, with their focus on setting rather than story, they left the cause of the fall uncertain. Using modeling software, Goffman concocted her deliriously artificial paradises and stately pleasure domes with heady amalgams of Baroque style, chinoiserie, and Disneyesque whimsy, peppering them with stray bits of Brutalism culled from Yugoslavian war monuments. She realized her seductive yet unsettling visions with a 3D printer, mostly in transparent

As one walked into this inaugural exhibition at the New York Print Center’s new location on West Twenty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, one heard ambient murmurs ricocheting throughout the gallery. To the east one picked up something like the echoes of faint brushing sounds interjected with exhalations, while to the north one felt the muted vibrations of what could have been clay or wooden pipes. These hushed sonorities made it seem as though one was standing inside a vast cavern, deep underground. The effect made perfect sense for “Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print,” a show built