Once again, our intrepid staff has set out from our Chelsea offices, charged with the task of reviewing what they found in a single (often run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews in illustrated slideshow format, click here.)
* Ahmed Alsoudani, Haunch of Venison, 550 West 21st Street, through November 3
Swarming with clouds of fused body parts, wires, machine parts, flying furniture, and scraps of clothing, the Iraq-born Ahmed Alsoudani’s paintings suggest the despairing nightmares of an expressionist like Otto Dix, but the whole thing is remarkable less for its hints of social critique than for the way it limns this bleak imagery with a frieze-like, classical aura, the miasmic human fragments looking scrubbed clean, brightly lit, and sharply defined, like a landscape after a storm. — Ben Davis
* Rackstraw Downes, at Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 West 25th Street, through November 24
Besides his much more vacant paintings of the Texas desert, Downes’s present-day panoramas of bridges, tunnels, and towers at Manhattan’s edges, whose cropping and lighting choices mimic photography, recall the affectionate manner of David Hockney, another British expatriate with an affinity for American cityscapes. — Reid Singer
* Louise Fishman, at Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, through October 27
As a technician, painter Louise Fishman is masterful — her gobs, sweeps, and scrapes of blue and green paint are muddy only if and when she wants them to be — but as an image-maker in a world where abstract expressionism feels conservative, she's less than memorable. — Julia Halperin
* Natalie Frank, “The Governed and the Governors,” at Fredericks & Freiser, 536 West 24th Street, through November 3
Like thrilling hybrids of Jenny Saville, Francis Bacon, and Neo Rauch, Frank’s bruised, disfigured, deconstructed, and generally female figures uneasily occupy thickly rendered Gothic spaces interrupted by sudden ruptures in figuration and ghostly, abstract apparitions. — Benjamin Sutton
* Rosemary Laing, "leak," Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, through October 20
Laing's large-format photos take an invented ruin as their subject matter, a skeletal wooden structure resembling an upside-down house that the artist constructed in the pastoral, alien Australian landscape, seen being overrun by the surrounding vegetation — and in one case visited by a herd of sheep, pictured scurrying away like frightened fish. — Alanna Martinez
* Walid Raad & David Diao, at Paula Cooper, 521 West 21st Street, through October 27
Raad's subtle geometric prints provide a gentle counterweight to his densely hung series of small, bold works inscribed with tiny, foreign, and faded texts, while Diao's layered paintings of Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov's studio dynamically complete the show's aesthetic triangulation. — Sara Roffino
* Lucas Samaras at Pace Gallery, 508 West 25th Street, through October 27
Samaras's softly surrealistic, digitally modulated mosaics of flea market bric-à-brac in the first room of Pace Gallery's new 25th street location do not prepare you for the quantum leap into a hyperchromatic computer-generated imaginary in the back room, where spooky humanoid characters materialize out of kaleidoscopic fractals and dance in arcane nowhere-lands. — Chloe Wyma
* Beth Cavener Stichter, “Come Undone,” at Claire Oliver, 513 West 26th Street, through October 20
Pacific Northwest sculptor Beth Cavener Stichter's stoneware beasts incorporate such memorable flourishes as a deer run through with arrows that is draped in a lace veil, and a crouched wolf that spits streams of pink ribbons, but they actually could stand alone without such baroque ornamentation — and those that do are the most stunning in their feral beauty. — Allison Meier
* Andro Wekua, “Dreaming Dreaming,” at Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, through November 3
Like a scrapbook, this mixed-media compilation of works gives body to Wekua’s memories — empty dollhouses whose insides have been forgotten, an unfinished mannequin frozen in limbo, inchoate paintings that reveal many layers of revisions, and a looping, phantasmagorical video — each a fragment of time that the artist has seized and bound to the page. — Rachel Corbett