To represent concurrent and complementary group exhibitions from curator William Corwin, here is a work by an artist in neither. Perverse, I know, but bear with me.

Cyborg, now in its closing week at Zürcher Gallery, does indeed include three photo/text pieces by Juliana Huxtable, the model of Frank Benson’s 3-D printed sculpture pictured here. (In the course of writing this article, Benson’s Juliana emerged as the final ARTCRITICAL PICK for 2015.) Benson’s work, voluptuous and ethereal in equal measure, was the presiding presence over the 2015 Triennial at the New Museum and feels a fitting cover image in the dwindling days of a year joyfully marked by increased transgender visibility. But that isn’t the theme of either of Corwin’s exhibitions.

Cyborg unites disparate contemporary visions of man/machine hybrids, going well beyond cinema’s Vitruvian conception (Metropolis to Ex Machina) of the robot. The show encompasses everything from Michel Huelin’s visually overbearing computer renderings of post-nature environments to Cordy Ryman’s stark yet engrossing walk-in representation of the digital binary in relief panels of alternating and repeating bars of color; and from Tamar Ettun’s disconcertingly “other” casts of the artist’s isolated body parts to Corwin’s own sculptures eerily evocative of the phantasmagoric-vehicular vision of Ezekiel that, as he recounts in an essay, he found himself discussing with Huxtable in her studio during the planning stage of his show.

While Cyborg deals with the future of embodiment, with the literal conquest of death, Devotion, at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, concerns itself with visual contemplations of afterlife in a traditional if uber-ecumenical religious way. It is a glorious jumble of contemporary works, ranging from Roxy Paine hyperrealist sculptures of mushrooms and Elizabeth Kley ceramic lanterns and Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels’s rood screen dividing and cramping the gallery’s commercial premises into an approximation of a sacred space to Mike Ballou friezes of birds and a psychedelic throne by Rico Gatson, among others, with Russian and Romanian icons from the Tabacaru family collection thrown in for good measure. Some of the works are overtly spiritual, but many are joyously press-ganged into ritualistic duties in a curatorial installation that is itself a hybrid, to extend the metaphor of Cyborg, of chapel and wunderkammer. Taking a cue from Corwin’s curatorial energies, therefore, the Benson-Huxtable hermaphrodite thus presents itself as a connective tissue between the two shows, a vision of harmony of human will and biological grace.

Cyborg at Zurcher Gallery, December 1 to 29, 2015. William Corwin, Anthony Gormley, Katie Holten, Tamar Ettun, Juliana Huxtable, Michel Huelin, Mike Cloud, Cordy Ryman. 33 Bleecker St, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, New York City, (212) 777-0790

Devotion at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, November 21, 2015 to January 17, 2016. Mike Ballou, Joe Brittain, William Corwin, Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Elizabeth Ferry, Rico Gatson Elisabeth Kley, Rachel Monosov, Roxy Paine, Joyce Pensato, Katie Bond Pretti, Carin Riley, Paul Anthony Smith, Justin Orvis Steimer, Gail Stoicheff, Sophia Wallace. 250 Broome St, between Orchard and Ludlow streets, New York City, (212) 260-2481

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September 17 to September 20, 2015

Four years into its latest iteration under the management of Tony Karman, what is there to say about Chicago Expo?

Let’s start with the art, which was wide ranging and of consistent high quality. Naturally, Chicago galleries were present in force and brought along some of the more pleasant surprises. For instance, at Richard Norton, two paintings by the hermetic Chicago painter Gertrude Abercrombie, notably Broken Limb (c. 1940). Corbett vs Dempsey, a gallery whose programming grows more interesting with each passing year, shared a booth with New York’s David Nolan Gallery, which allowed them to pair two Jim Nutt drawings across from Karl Wirsum’s painting Count Fasco’s Mouse Piece Whitey Jr. #2 (1983). In the Exposure section for smaller galleries, the one-year old Regards Gallery featured work by Megan Greene.

With the high cost of participation, there can be an understandable tendency in art fairs for galleries to spread their risk with overly wide selections of materials. This can easily lead to a kind of visual overload, where you see so much that you wind up remembering very little. Happily, to make a more forceful presentation perhaps, quite a number of booths at Chicago Expo showcased a single artist’s work. Flowers Gallery (London and New York), for instance, featured a notable mini-retrospective of Richard Smith, highlighting works from his “Kite” series, and created an invitation-sized catalog with essay especially for it. Galerie Zürcher, with venues in Paris and New York, featured a solo show of Cordy Ryman’s funky painted 2×4 sculptures and wall pieces that stood out for being so raw in a sea of polish. On Stellar Rays, out of New York’s Lower Eastside, focused on J.J. Peet, whose paintings, drawings, and a sculpture are so diverse they could be mistaken for a group installation. One of his paintings went on to be selected for the Northern Trust Arts Club of Chicago Purchase Prize. And Garth Greenen Gallery out of New York devoted his entire space to only three jewel-like paintings, each not much bigger than a sheet of notebook paper, by Victoria Gitman.

The professionalism, range, and quality of the galleries no doubt owed something to the selection committee, which included not only some of the heavy weight gallerists that one might expect – Marianne Boesky, David Zwirner, David Nolan, Rhona Hoffman, Isabella Bortolozzi – but also younger visionaries such as Jessica Silverman, Suzanne Vielmetter, John Corbett (Corbett vs Dempsey), and Candice Madey (On Stellar Rays). The result was a happy mix of blue chip, mid-range, and emerging dealers from 16 countries.

The art was good, then, and so too the venue. The large hall at the end of Navy Pier provided a friendly and vastly superior art viewing space than the slightly claustrophobic Merchandise Mart space that hosted previous fairs. The layout of the booths was generous and intelligent with wide, easy-to-navigate aisles. And Jason Pickelman’s JNL Graphics, the design team that gave the distinctive look to Chicago Art Expo during its heyday in the ‘90s, was once again in charge of the Expo’s image where a clean, professional atmosphere prevailed.

This is all welcome news for an art fair that has gone through as many incarnations as Dr. Who. It’s hard to remember now, but for a long time in the 80s, the fair started by John Wilson to mirror Art Basel was the most important art fair in the Western Hemisphere. Reformulated by Thomas Blackman (who had been the director of the fair under Wilson) its dominance continued into the late ‘90s even as competitors emerged. But it stumbled as it entered the 21st Century, at one point with three competing fairs fighting for dominance, this at the same time that New York, and then Miami, began to become major venues. Moreover, when the first Chicago art fair opened in 1980, it was at the geographic center, literally, for American collectors who were also the major buyers. This is no longer the case; art collecting is international, with major collectors in London, Moscow, Dubai, and other world financial capitals flying from continent to continent to attend the 200 art fairs currently hosted annually. It is a long way to Chicago from Shanghai, or Abu Dhabi.

Chicago very much wants to host a world-class art fair. Tony Karman and his team, along with the selection committee, have worked very hard to give them one. The galleries came and brought the art. But it is yet to be decided if collectors can once again think of Chicago Expo as a must-see destination.

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The Working Title, Organized by Progress Report, at the Bronx River Art Center

March 25 to April 29, 2011
305 East 140th Street #1A
Bronx, NY.
Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 3:00 to 6:30 pm
Saturday, 12:00 to 5:00 pm.
Subway: #6 train to 3rd Avenue/138th Street.

Devise a cohesive fiction, or report the scattershot facts? The nature and purpose of curation is an issue in “The Working Title,” a lively but unfocused exhibition of 32 abstract artists, mostly painters, on view at the Bronx River Art Center through April 29. The show is assembled by Progress Report, the online and curatorial project of Vince Contarino and Kris Chatterson, who opt for fidelity to abstraction’s currently schizophrenic condition rather than identify and analyze a dominant personality. According to the show’s press release, the curators eschew artists who adhere to “the doctrine of romantic sentimentality” — an oxymoron if ever there was one. Otherwise, the connective tissue is stretched thin.

The show is engaging nevertheless, as it includes fine work by both recognized and undersung talents. An inventive and resourceful colorist, Pamela Jorden contributes the shadowy but buoyant Echo Music (2010) in which brushy patches and smears of lugubrious near-blacks and rumbling, pungent blues underscore a dazzling range of scraped, glazed, silver-tinted grays. Jordan does not conceal her pleasure in finding her way forward toward the painting’s resolution, guided by impulse, taste and faith in her pictorial proclivities. If her sensibility isn’t romantic, then it’s very close.

Matthew Deleget’s work resides toward the other end of abstraction’s spectrum as the realization, on a painted surface, of a preconceived procedural idea. The colors in Shuffle (for Grandmaster Flash) (2011) are selected at random—yellow, pink, fluorescent orange and copper predominate—and arranged by means of a predetermined system of recombination within a four-by-four unit grid. Abstraction as perceptual research, Shuffle is an extreme instance of the empirical attitude that underlies much of the work in the show, which is alert to pictorial strategies rather than intent on fetishizing subjectivities.

A sense of architectonic scale arises from interpenetrating rectangles and triangles in black, red, and two variants of yellow in Untitled (very tizdayle) (2009) by Tisch Abelow. Abelow’s handling is flat and graphic but the painting’s space craftily shakes itself loose from rigid geometry to suggest a modernist façade, a cantilevered balcony, a sun-washed portico, or an edifice in the middle distance. Nearby is Joy Curtis’s towering, chalk-white St. Virga (2010), a work in hydrocal, fiberglas, wood and metal in which cast fragments of fluted pilasters dangle like an ungrounded pillar, contacting neither ceiling nor floor and implying havoc and destruction—or at best, impermanence. The piece recalls the work of Lynda Benglis in its precise equivalence of process and image.

In fact, all the three-dimensional works in “The Working Title” relate at least as strongly to pictorial space as they do to physical space. Resolutely planar, Inna Babaeva’s More Than You Think (2011) consists of a half-dozen painting stretchers of various dimensions, hinged together in a free-standing accordion fold and strapped with translucent colored plastic. Letha Wilson weighs in with the peculiar but compelling Double Dip (2009), two thin strips of plywood bent into teardrop shapes, pinned to the wall by their pointy ends, and lined on their inner surfaces with photographs of verdant woodland. A punch line among colors gets a little respect in Stacy Fisher’s Fuchsia Sculpture With Wood (2010) in which a squarish blob roughly brushed with the flamboyant hue is lodged between blocks of lumber stained a plain-Jane brown. Pushing and pulling space even as it hugs the wall, the piece functions like a painting.

That undercurrent of humor is sustained throughout the show. E. J. Hauser’s spaceman (2010) inscribes a discombobulated argyle pattern in red-orange and white on a blue-black shape that reads instantly as the helmeted head of a spaceman—or motorcycle daredevil, or linebacker. Echo Helmet (2010) by Britton Tolliver reprises the domed shape, inverted and approximately mirroring itself, via juicy slabs of waxy-looking paint in quietly radiant tones. While the motif of protective headgear is completely appropriate to such a cerebral exhibition, the presence of all this recognizable imagery prompts the question of how the curators define abstraction. They dodge that task, as (from the press release again) these artists may merely “use abstraction as a starting point.” Ah.

What is clear is Progress Report’s skepticism of the high seriousness with which abstract painters of fifty years ago regarded the existential confrontation with the void of the blank canvas—as nothing less than a search for the self. Oh, well. Now that the self is swept up and bounced around in a proliferating matrix of provisional, contingent relationships, it has no fixity and the effort to locate it is a fool’s errand.

Among the show’s other standouts are Keltie Ferris’s Black Power (2010) with its jazzy, nested chevrons and fizzy spots festooning a meandering rectilinear polygon the color of dirt; Cordy Ryman’s Vector (2010), a studiously clunky low relief of two-by-fours painted serene green-blues (half-hidden, hot orange flare-ups provide chromatic sizzle) gouged with six intersecting grooves that radiate like the spokes of a wheel and allude to the face of a clock; and Dennis Hollingsworth’s maniacally overwrought Todo es Igual (2011) in which—and on which—paint is coaxed into bloom as in a hothouse. Rather than advancing an argument regarding the thrust of contemporary abstraction, “The Working Title” replicates its variety. But with friends like these, who needs curators?

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