Johannes VanDerBeek at Zach Feuer Gallery, through October 4 (548 West 22nd Street)
Foregoing canvas for gouged-and-painted slabs of Aqua-Resin, VanDerBeek creates funky, upbeat swarms of form and color that recall Mark Grotjahn’s wilder side. Faces and foliage are sometimes apparent; in other instances the artist seems to be capturing mere spasms of energy or movement. Many of the works are hung on a metal fence that winds through the gallery, complicating sightlines and providing access to the paintings’ strange, lumpy backsides. A series of giant-sized figurative sculptures — like humanoid scribbles composed in wire — are less impressive, but add an additional whimsical kick to the overall installation.
Michael Dotson and Irena Jurek at Zurcher Gallery, through September 28 (33 Bleecker Street)
A showdown between two styles of painting, with Doston’s crisply-lined and illustrative aesthetic facing off against Jurek’s color-drenched, thickly applied material hedonism. The former takes stills from Disney films like “Cinderella” and “Peter Pan,” altering colors and patterns for psychedelically charged riffs on the original animated moments. (He’s not the only contemporary artist fascinated by Uncle Walt’s legacy — over at Gagosian, Dan Colen has a suite of massive paintings based on “Fantasia” stills). Meanwhile, Jurek presents two delightful sculptures — both of cats — as well as a range of paintings rendered in lush gobs, splats, and smears. She’s also got a collection of drawings that imagine a libidinally charged alternate universe — one in which cat-women and horny wolfmen engage in their weirdest fantasies.
Adam Helms at Boesky East, through October 5 (20 Clinton Street)
The playlist Helms put together for ARTINFO had its fair share of intense doom-and-gloom, but his solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky’s new LES digs has plenty of light, color, and humor (albeit of the slightly unnerving, skin-crawling variety). Gouache-on-paper works adapt images from films like “Apocalypse Now” and Soderbergh’s “Che,” adding bulbous nose appendages — elephantine, semi-phallic — to the actors’ faces. The marshal bent of some of the source material brings Helms back full circle to his earliest drawings, in which fictional militia-men hid behind bizarre, wooly masks.
Monika Sosnowska at Hauser & Wirth, through October 25 (511 West 18th Street)
At more than 260 feet long, this Polish artist’s new sculpture — modeled in part on Mies van der Rohe’s Lakeside Drive Apartments in Chicago — could be seen as yet another take-a-#selfie-with-it spectacle. But this crumpled steel behemoth provides more than a simple opportunity to marvel at the labor and cost required to produce it; the looming form has a dejected poetry, its architectural origins bent into a beached whale or an industrial rib cage.
Andy Coolquitt at Lisa Cooley Gallery, through October 19 (107 Norfolk Street)
“somebody place” is plush, and hard, and faux-fur, and light bulbs; it’s a ton of deodorant-bottle-shaped sculptures set within a Judd-like shelf contraption; it’s sticks, rods, painted poles, fuzz, fluff, and shamanic-looking symbols. Coolquitt continues to prove himself a light-hearted, sure-handed mad scientist, conjuring weirdly lovable assemblages out of all this stuff.
ALSO WORTH SEEING: Helene Appel’s trompe-l’oeil paintings on linen of fabrics, spilled water, and other everyday things, at James Cohan Gallery through October 4; the legendary anthropologist-turned-sculptor Richard Nonas at Fergus McCaffrey, through October 25; and two very different takes on text: Despina Stokou at Derek Eller, through October 4, and Samuel Jablon at Freight+Volume, through September 20.
Click here to see previews from all five of these shows.
