Leon Golub: Live and Die Like a Lion, at the Drawing Center, through July 23

Storms of tiny lines and colored boxes remain powerful statements on their own, even if they were to be completely disconnected from the music they ultimately represent.

There is a subtext running through much of Morton’s works that laments the death of the soul in the things of the world around her.

When Mullican asserts in writing that the “preoccupation with materials and processes seems to clutter up the phenomenon of what interests me,” he is making it clear to us that no individual person or thing can contain the entirety of that which engages him. Thus the artist reworks appearances as a means of describing the gestalt that both energizes and evades his hand.

There is a limited range of drawing styles, which tends to be competent enough but generally stilted, illustrative, and a bit nerdish. One wonders whether the difference in treatment that does come across is purely a matter of the individual draftsman’s hand or whether different speeds of movement in the scenes depicted — orderly placid drudging through dreary East European streets versus violent clashes with riot-geared police in some steamy tropical town — account for these differences.

Physical gesture means the artist’s hand is present yet transcended: there is no question that the arcs or circles are handmade, but an unforced, lyrical all-overness creates a cosmic, suprapersonal sense of order and well-being.

Gilbert and George at Lehmann Maupin and at Sonnabend, Jesper Jest at Perry Rubenstein, Richard Tuttle at the Drawing Centre and Sarah McEneaney at Gallery Schlesinger