Around midnight on December 22, 1938, Afro-Brazilian artist Arthur Bispo do Rosario (1909–1989) was, he said, visited by seven angels who sent him on a mission. Days later, he appeared at the door of the São Bento Monastery in Rio de Janeiro, introducing himself as Jesus. In January 1939, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic; he would go on to spend time in numerous psychiatric facilities, including Rio’s Colônia Juliano Moreira, a notoriously brutal hospital where, starting in 1964, he lived out the rest of his days. Voices in his head commanded him to remake and organize the stuff of the world

As a child, Leonor Fini (1907–1996) was spirited away from Buenos Aires to Trieste, Italy, to escape a domineering father. To thwart his repeated kidnapping attempts, she dressed as a boy; her gender-bending costumes offered her a way to slip out from under a patriarchal thumb. After studying local cadavers as a teenager—the experience may have ignited her aesthetic predilection for the macabre—Fini relocated to Paris and fell in with the Surrealists. Though André Breton’s lamentable misogyny deterred her from identifying with the group, she participated in such landmark shows as the “International

For decades, the German Conceptual artist Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) lived with her mother in Hamburg’s Harburg district. It was there that she made Fin de siècle—Buch der Bilder (End of the Century—Book of Pictures), 1992–93, a sprawling piece that lent its title to a recent exhibition of the artist’s work at Petzel. The installation was inspired, in part, by a 1923 edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s volume of poems Das Buch der Bilder (1902), which is his least recognized text, perhaps owing to its ostensibly scattered selection of short lyrics, dialogues, and interior monologues. One wonders

Alex Prager commands ardent enthusiasm for her Technicolor photographic tableaux, frequently of urban crowds stage-managed for maximum visibility. A young blonde woman always seems to appear in these scenes. Her glances to the camera, or the way she’s theatrically lit, usually elevate her above the hurly-burly. Throughout, this character—variously anxious, distraught, claustrophobic—radiates an interior crisis that is never quite named. Prager’s work often resembles the beloved Twilight Zone dramatugy in that it too embodies the disruption of the anodyne and conventional by unexpected occult

It’s rare that the white cube does anything other than what it was intended to do: disappear. But “Precipitation,” Tania Pérez Córdova’s second solo show with Tina Kim Gallery, defamiliarized the space, turning it into an uncanny vacuum. No longer a neutral site for display, the gallery’s “blank” backdrop, thanks to Pérez Córdova, produced a lingering sensation—as though one were witness to fragments of events no longer fully visible.

Artificial plants, rendered with exacting realism, appeared to emerge from the walls in precise arcs. Combining the literal and the conceptual, the checklist

Julie Heffernan’s outing here, “The swamps are pink with June,” featured a selection of figurative paintings. All of them were rather large, but one—Self-Portrait as Throne, 2022, which is six feet tall and five feet wide—was quite grand, as befits its subject: a rendering of the artist as some kind of nature goddess. We often saw Heffernan’s women, many of whom function as her avatars, posed like queens amid hallucinogenic arrangements of greenery and flowers. (The exhibition’s title was taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, a fervent gardener who in her own otherworldly writing often discussed

If photographer Cora Pongracz (1943–2003) is remembered today, it is for her pictures documenting Vienna’s art scene of the 1960s and ’70s: snaps of dinner parties and happenings, shots of Franz West’s and Arnulf Rainer’s high jinks. Yet her legacy of being an eyewitness is an acutely ironic one, especially in view of the artist’s tenuous relationship to authorship and authority. In this exhibition of her conceptually driven work at Maxwell Graham/Essex Street—the first time Pongracz’s art been shown outside of Austria—we saw that the artist used her camera to create compellingly diffuse images

Bari Ziperstein’s ornately patterned ceramics are glossy meditations on ideology and visual culture inspired by Soviet architecture and textiles. Or maybe, with their concentrated, expressively handcrafted, and talismanic character, her alluring works are more like charms against the tragic quixotism embedded in the more totalitarian strains of modernist aesthetics. (The artist, a descendant of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish Jewish immigrants and refugees, has a familial connection to her fraught source material.)

The fascinations at the heart of “Set Patterns,” the artist’s exhibition here, were

“Sweat in spandex, hints of oak moss,” “a burning palo santo stick stuck in marzipan,” “opopanax, period blood”—such were the outré fragrances the Instagram hive mind ventured to guess were contained in Lila de Magalhaes’s bottles for imaginary perfumes. Teeming with perverse anthropomorphisms and gleeful conjugations of sex and kitsch, these oversize, exuberant clay vessels formed the centerpiece of “Involuntary Earthling,” the Brazilian-born, Los Angeles–based artist’s second solo outing at Deli Gallery. A voluptuous reclining nude was anointed with ambrosial goop on the surface of Miel de

On a Thursday afternoon at the beginning of February, I joined an unusual Zoom broadcast linking Cathouse Proper in Brooklyn with its director, David Dixon, who was in Iowa. The occasion was the installation of the first gallery exhibition of works by painter Alex Brown since his death almost exactly four years earlier. Dixon—who is also an artist and was at the time participating in a residency Brown’s family had initiated posthumously in his name—was sitting with the late painter’s mother at her home south of Des Moines, directing the proceedings back at Cathouse and talking with her about