Dane Patterson at the Proposition

While Fyfe has worked with combining more traditional methods of painting with textile collages for years, it is through the overt focus on counterparts in this exhibition, contrasting the more serious with the playful and the reserved with the whimsical, that Fyfe reveals both the diversity of his artistic interests and the extent of expressive versatility he has reached in his work.

“Rebus,” conceived and spearheaded by an artist, Brazilian conceptual trickster, Vik Muniz, made me re-think the current trend of curator-as-artist and made me see MoMA’s amazing collection in new ways (yes, that old cliché). Plus, it even made me laugh out loud.

Alex Bag at the Whitney, David Diao at Postmasters, Mona Hatoum at Alexander and Bonin, Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins

Life on Mars shares a number of artists with Unmonumental, including Mark Bradford, Cao Fei, Thomas Hirschhorn, Matthew Monahan, Manfred Pernice, and Susan Philipsz. For a show of only 39 artists, that makes nearly a sixth. This is perhaps unsurprising considering the New Museum’s Eungie Joo served on the advisory committee for the 2008 International, but is rather suspect for a show that purports to be global in its representation. Suspect as well is that all but seven of the artists are from the US or Europe and only twelve are women.

Leon Kossoff at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

For decades, Diao has injected deeply personal, even confessional content onto the placid surfaces and into the untroubled spaces of Modernism by way of a formal vocabulary grounded in the conventions of presentation diagrams, plans, text. The new work retains its erstwhile formal elegance and restraint, but rueful humor is replaced by a seething emotional undertow stemming from the artist’s inherited memories of his family’s displacement and fragmentation at the hands of the Chinese government.

Lin has managed, through wit and a visionary interpretation of speech, to create a low-relief sculpture that refers simultaneously to American political and artistic history.

Pinocchio’s nose grew when he lied, and so he is a perfect role model for this artist whose magnificently chaotic installation presents the truthful lies of art

Carol Salmanson at Mixed Greens Gallery