As an environmental activist, Xiong has created a process-oriented art whose dimensions are quite literally heavenly as well as humanist.

Like the Impressionists, Friedman transfigures the contemporary world. What more could we ask of any artist?

The motifs of her seven paintings and four drawings are diverse to the point of perversity, suggesting the kind of mind drawn less to things than problems. What is consistent across these images is the sense of a fanatical empiricist picking quarrels with the perceived world.

Vacillation between equilibrium, a consistently busy surface that can be read as a singular gestalt, and the disequilibrium caused by the dark and sometimes opaque asymmetrical highlights that disrupt these linear networks, creates unpredictable rhythms within the iterations of abstract shapes.

Dawn Mellor's handling of paint is often at its most subtle and tender when her politicizing is at its most blatant and brutal.

This is Jess in a nutshell: sincere literalism colliding with arch semiotics and giving off rare alchemical heat.

Wonder World is built of hard steel rods, bars and sheet steel that interact with somewhat more malleable slabs and blocks of concrete and rock board. The whole is tough, hard, aggressive and muscular—yet also slender, graceful, sensitive and wise.

There is a weird sense of a form searing its way through the canvas, from left to right, an accumulation of atomic energy boiling up the space it penetrates, making it a Monet for the nuclear age. It almost becomes tempting to read the image in cartoon-like graphic terms, or like a Futurist depiction of movement

They are made by spray painting black loopy lines that drip along the bottom edge. The lines are then partly rubbed off with a cloth soaked in paint thinner. As can be noted from the direction of the drips, the canvas is then turned upside down or sideways and the process is repeated, but not too many times; the painting is kept fresh and spontaneous.

A show by fourteen artists in fiber and fabric spanning more than half a century

The forms in Noland’s paintings are usually dismissed as mere devices to enable him to explore color, but the lines and shapes of these paintings have a basis in the natural world as well. They add to the feelings of harmony and serenity that these paintings project, while titles like "Via Light" and "Via Shimmer" suggest Roman roads and air mail stickers, thus ideas of travel and motion and speed.

Much of the imagery seems star-struck; viewers have the feeling that they are looking at a kind of intimate astronomy, in which planets and galaxies move about as they build centers of energy. Scratches on the paper add the slightest sense of relief, giving the picture its hard-to-recognize yet palpable sense of depth.

The author celebrates the audacious, austere, muscular canvases by the 90 year old veteran of Abstract Expressionism

Neo Rauch is a prodigious talent. His canvases are lush with painterly dexterity, compelling characterization, and compositional intrigue. But, as with Walton Ford’s animal portraits, there is more about these costume dramas that transports viewers back to the amalgamated past they never knew — the very definition of nostalgia — than truly puts them in touch with a sense of being here and now.

Hilary Harkness shares with Sade not just the pathology to which the Marquis lent his name but also an essential element of style — endless variation, at once exhilerating and enervating, upon an obsessive theme.

Heinemann’s intensity, always apparent in his incisive, schematized shapes and hues, now describe with awkward purposefulness the trappings of rustic life: still lifes of dry good scales, vases, and lawn ornaments, and outdoor scenes populated by bird feeders and flower gardens – and, most notably, by the cats which by turns resemble inert, furry spheres or rocketing pillows with lethal teeth. 

The waterfalls promise to be impressive and quite the sensation, but they will also reveal Eliasson’s main strength – the skill to turn a generous gesture into a subjective experience, which even in a city of millions can be as personal as it will be communal.   

Uncovering a sense of presence through an implied absence, these drawings and paintings explore a peculiar, discontinuous narrative.

The pervading sense in Ms. Dodd, both in the nature of marks and the quality of her perception, is of honesty. The quintessential Americanness of her vision has to do with what fellow painter Robert Berlind has compared to the Shaker notion of the “gift to be simple,” making for images that are homely and plainspoken. Mr. Berthot, on the contrary, conjures a visual wizardry. There is a metaphysical quality to his work, as if his trees are stand-ins for a quasi-religious vision of nature, of a higher order.

Information in the computer age is often described as accruing in bits and several painters in the show seem to use separate brushstrokes as metaphors for bytes

Squirmy, steadfast, and biologic in their surging rhythmic climax,  Bluhm's forms bulge and push up against the edges of his support, creating an explosive pressure. His use of bilateral symmetry heightens this effect. 

Murakami does not have to be self-conscious about his eclecticism and can quite happily superimpose characters cloned from Mickey Mouse, with the iconography of Buddhism, the stylistic devices of anime and the aesthetics of Muromachi screen painting. The burning question is what all of this adds up to apart from an exercise in fusion.