John Baldessari @ Marian Goodman

We don't know who these fragment eyebrows belong to. In the few pieces that offer a partner image (a hand of cards, a tuxedo collar, etc.) we don't know the story either. What we do know is that these pieces are bold, strange, and abstract. Most of the work extends from the wall, is irregularly shaped, and employs photography and paint together. We know that Baldessari enjoys giving us limited information (like filling figures or faces with flat colors in a film still). We may assume that these pictures pose a question about identity. They also press the question of their own identity as hybrid art objects. As Baldessari travels deeper into his deceivingly simple art practice it becomes less obvious to glean all of what might be out there, but as promised (tongue in cheek) in 1971, he is decidedly not making boring art.

At Marian Goodman until 10 January.

Terry Winters @ Matthew Marks

Terry Winters makes sketchbook diagrams of topological knots on larger-than-life canvases. He builds them in negative space; he works directly and he buries them; they are both ordered and random. While Winters holds science as subject, he delivers paint as content. He does not simply describe his idea. He paints his engagement with how to describe.

At Matthew Marks until 24 January.

Stephen Westfall @ Lennon, Weinberg

Confining his efforts to within geometric abstract ideas, Westfall plays with color and optics in context of landscape/real-world ideas. The slightly mis-aligned boxes in a picture like Looking West are moves uniquely his own. Westfall teases the expectations one might have of this kind of minimalist work––work that is so restrained that there appears to be little room available for surprises––and he avoids tautology. In this way, his subtle decisions bring heightened charm within his deceivingly limited game. At Lennon, Weinberg until December 20.

Lari Pittman @ Gladstone Gallery

The paintings of Lari Pittman, on view now at Gladstone Gallery, are reflections on transience in a style unto his own; he may be enamored by a great many things in painting, but his graphically rendered work severs superficial or stylistic ties to the history of painting. Pittman refers to vanitas, a 17th century Dutch still-life genre as a significant influence, while visually he conjures associations with stained glass, textiles, batik, and glossy illustration. Arrangements of kettles, chickens, and humble people, float in his compositional grids. Pittman uses white paint both for re-grounding (to lay on new transparent layers) and also as a primary drawing color. He spills linear webs of paint over the pictures, unifying compositions with flattening single-colored strands, sometimes delaying the reading of the picture as still life. Some of the larger paintings hold out in their complexity for quite some time as his subjects emerge and the busy picture plane gives way into the shallow stage where tight tonal registers and busy mark making demand long (and splendid) untangling. Until November 30.

Tomma Abts @ David Zwirner

The self-contained world of Tomma Abts exists on 48x38cm canvases; each one is titled from a German dictionary of names. Considered and balanced, Abts’ resulting paintings are taught and consistent. Edges are clean but traces of her process are sometimes discernible. The pictures risk, if anything, being too complete or too resolved, but instead glory in their teeming possibilities and brilliant decisions, expanding and contracting in captivating ways. Up until December 23 at David Zwirner.

Elizabeth Peyton @ The New Museum

Kurt Cobain, Eminem, personal friends, on corner-of-your-bedroom sized canvases; the portraiture of Elizabeth Peyton smacks of clichéd adolescent indulgence. The more recent work in this Mid-career Survey at The New Museum feels a little less incense soaked and stylized and provides a few more painterly surprises. The surfaces tend towards slick and fast and transparent, and always there is a love for paint.

The text introduction at the New Museum claims that Peyton’s relevant value and challenge is in portraying her own time through contemporary cultural icons. This may be higher praise than to favor her for the irony of making clichéd or vacant portraits (which do become more present, less vacant, as she works from life in later work). It is refreshing to see someone so unfashionably respectful of her medium fashionable, although it remains ironic that, with so many mediocre paintings in this group, she is praised as much as she is.

Roberta Smith of the New York Times provides far more in depth background on Peyton and her show, than I, or the New Museum could. Also, please see the review by Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City.

Anton Henning @ Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL)

The paintings in this exhibit are housed in custom-made self-illuminated frames. The Zach Feuer Gallery, artificially broken up into two small rooms, functions almost domestically. The walls are painted a dark green and if furniture was included one might opt to sit and stay a while. (One does miss the splendid full installation of Henning’s decor.) Paintings in this less austere environment beg the consideration of them as private objects. Form fitting function as decoration, yes, but more. Henning chooses (as is typical) a selection of motifs that, while connected to a general modernist aesthetic, are diverse enough to indicate different bodies of work. In a group show the curator allows works to communicate with one another (in this case a 'group' show by one artist), so what is the intended communication? Well, it may not be an acute point, instead it may be that one just needs to settle in and live with the work to know. Makes one want to collect art. Radical.