Kristen Schiele at Lu Magnus Gallery, through October 12 (55 Hester Street)
“It feels as modular and free as I can make it — lots of details, color, and textures,” says Kristen Schiele of the paintings, collages, and wall sculptures in her latest exhibition, “Spirit Girls.” Schiele — who recently gave birth to a baby girl — has created these works as a thought experiment, projecting the sort of environments her daughter might inhabit and encounter as she becomes a young adult. Overall, it’s a massive development of what the artist terms her “lo-fi punk vernacular,” with layered elements (silkscreen, airbrush, acrylic, oil, stamped pigment) combining to create vibrantly intricate vignettes. Certain paintings consist of several canvases and appear as oddly shaped conglomerates; others are done on Baltic plywood panels with holes and gaps excised into them. The works are loaded with cultural touchstones, from graffiti that Schiele has spotted in Bushwick to the first, John Cassavetes-directed season of “Colombo” and a favorite German graphic novel whose title roughly translates as “Chicken, Porno, & Fisticuffs.” (Schiele describes the resulting, collage-style aesthetic as a type of “quilt.”) Many of the paintings have an embedded reference to the act of drawing or painting itself, as in “Doodle Chalet,” in which Schiele’s daughter sketches a view of a mountain. Motherhood has clearly invigorated the young artist. “I’m so happy right now,” she effused. “Everything’s about making stuff.” Her optimism is refreshing. If this is what the future looks like — shot through with a nervous, neon energy; alive with kinetic patterns — I’ll take it.
Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks Gallery, through October 25 (523 West 24th Street)
These painted-bronze sculptures elicit a strange mix of emotions, their phallic, distended Giacometti forms plumped with unexpected breasts and ornamented with pompoms. They’re both silly and noble, as are the hulking bronze rocks — lumpy and pattern-adorned — sitting on wheeled dollies. Warren mixes things up with a few more Minimalist pieces, like “You Are Quiet, I Will Be Too,” a steel, paper, and pompom wall sculpture that’s like an indecipherable sentence spelled out as a shelf.
Jason Rhoades at Zwirner Gallery, through October 18 (537 West 20th Street)
It seems like just yesterday that the Zwirner mini-empire invited a certain 20-something market darling to build a factory in one of their galleries, cranking out sugary candies along with a pervasive bad attitude. (But hey, who’s bitter?) The late Rhoades’s “PeaRoeFoam” is another factory of sorts, albeit a gonzo one. Thus speaketh the press release: “PeaRoeFoam was Rhoades’s self-made recipe for a ‘brand new product and revolutionary new material’ created from whole green peas, fish-bait style salmon eggs, and white virgin-beaded foam. When combined with non-toxic glue, they transform into a versatile, fast-drying, and ultimately hard material that Rhoades intended for both utilitarian as well as artistic use.” The re-booted installation, which was first seen in 2002, is bursting at the seams — with PeaRoeFoam pellets, blaring lights, found images, a tiny motorcycle, and a row of industrial shelves whose mellow orange hue make it look like a very disheveled Home Depot has been plopped down in the white cube. Forget a certain someone’s ill-fated candy factory — it’s Rhoades that hits the real sweet spot.
Fred Wilson at Pace Gallery, through October 18 (534 West 25th Street)
This array of conceptual work from 2004 through 2014 is punchy and pared-down, juggling a limited visual iconography (the design elements of African nations’ flags; bulbous blown-glass tear drops that appear to rain down the wall) and an almost entirely black-and-white tonal palette. “The Mete of the Muse,” 2006, pairs an “African” statue with a “European” one, mixing two very different visions of femininity, sexuality, and grace.
Philippe Weisbecker at Zieher Smith & Horton, through October 4 (516 West 20th Street)
This show of intimate drawings, paintings, and sculptures at the newly rebranded gallery is full of tiny revelations. Scott Zieher, who met the French artist about a decade ago, describes Weisbecher’s complex appeal: He’s “deeply aware of Minimalism,” yet the work also has “the naivete of the opposite end of the emotional and conceptual spectrum in its vernacular, outsider feel.” The drawings — of buildings, or trucks, among other things — exhibit that paradoxical nature, delivered with a sort of mildly drunken, architectural imprecision. (I wouldn’t trust Weisbecher’s structures to stand up in the real world, but on paper, they're a delight.) “About a year and a half ago we visited Philippe’s Paris studio and realized we were prepared to mount the kind of show that could do justice to a survey of 15 years of his hard work,” Zieher explained. “He became like a beacon of purity — a perfect choice for the first show of our new collaborative endeavor.”
ALSO WORTH SEEING: Allora & Calzadilla’s “Fault Lines” at Gladstone Gallery, through October 11, which features hourly performances from adolescent members of the American Boychoir School and Transfiguration Boychoir. They sing and recline on stone sculptures, operatically delivering lines like “You must be the reason for contraception.” (Fun fact: Over at Luhring Augustine’s Roger Hiorns show there’s also a performer who sits on a rock. But he’s naked, and of age. And he doesn’t sing.)
