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.

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.

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

Using few footnotes, this collection of Boris Groys’s essays offers a compulsively original account of contemporary art and the political systems that support it. Educated in the former USSR, now a professor in Germany who also teaches at NYU, he brings to contemporary art theory a highly original perspective. Groys discusses fundamental topics: the nature … Continued

Norman Bluhm at James Graham & Sons

Even an astute connoisseur would be hard pressed to locate specific Nozkowskian tropes. There are some recurring motifs, but internal scale, texture, and mood present themselves in different coordinates. This is the more remarkable because Mr. Nozkowski’s modus operandi is so prescribed in terms of scale, medium, taste, and authentic touch.

The experience in this richly diverse exhibition is not of transition so much as consolidation: the new works, whether big loopy abstractions in fat confident brushstrokes or weirdo figuration, seem legitimate outgrowths of the precious, tight, miniaturist Siena of old.

Franz West at Gagosian Gallery

Karen Bookatz on Andy Warhol and Dan Flavin

Regardless of the medium he works in, Johns’s busy, agile yet weirdly reticent hand presents an oxymoronic mix of attributes, being at once tentative and emphatic.