Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff into the streets of New York, charged with reviewing the art they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here.)
Amy Cutler, “Brood” at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks, 535 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor, through March 9
Rather than her well-known mythical narratives, which feature mysterious female figures engaged in odd and esoteric tasks, here Cutler hones in on portraits of the female characters who will later populate her fantastic landscapes: exquisitely rendered gouache paintings, hung under dim lighting suggestive of a haunted manor's library, detailing line-drawn brows, sagging wattles, venous skin, and expressions ranging from contempt to arrogance to neurotic suspicion — each figure equally troubled by an enigmatic yet specific inward misery that, detached from narrative and context, makes her seem all the more disturbingly real. — Lori Fredrickson
Dan Flavin and Donald Judd at David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, through March 16
With all due respect to Donald Judd, Dan Flavin's eight-foot-tall squares of fluorescent lamps — which project diffuse purple and green light into the gallery’s entryway like stained-glass windows in a cathedral — steal the show even before you enter the main space. — Julia Halperin
Ragnar Kjartansson, “The Visitors” at Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th Street, through March 16
Stepping into the dark, curtained-off Luhring Augustine space currently hosting Ragnar Kjartansson’s immersive, nine-channel video installation puts you right in the middle of a melancholic folk concert simultaneously being performed by the individual musicians on each screen that quietly slows down time to the relaxed pace of the earnest, eerie music. — Ashton Cooper
Michael Riedel, “PowerPoint,” at David Zwirner Gallery, 533 West 19th Street, through March 23
This sentence could become a future work of art by Michael Riedel, who reduces digital content to raw information by lifting material from webpages that reference his work, arranging it into geometric forms via PowerPoint, and then setting the infographics loose across huge swaths of wallpaper and canvas. — Rachel Corbett
Frederico Solmi’s “Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth” at Postmasters Gallery, 459 West 19th Street, through March 16
Part videogame, part drawing, and part 3D animation, Federico Solmi's “one man film manifesto” takes viewers on a dizzying ride through a not-so-far-off world of war strategies and branding campaigns that dramatize the ridiculous nature of mankind's self-destructive ways, our addiction to commodities, and submission to power figures through satirical commentary and over-the-top caricatures. — Terri Ciccone
Despina Stokou, “bulletproof” at Derek Eller Gallery, 615 West 27th Street, through March 16
Evoking Basquiat in the chaos and verbosity of her scrawled, painted, and collaged text compositions on dark canvases (and one of the gallery's white walls), Greek artist Despina Stokou skewers the art world's practiced grandiloquence in paintings that mix humor — as in a transcribed conversation about Martin Creed — cynicism, and outright anger, and which remain legible even when the words overlap, have been worn away, or completely and furiously obliterated. — Benjamin Sutton