WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13

Discussion: "When Cancellations Become Form," at the Center for Book Arts
As part of her exhibition at CBA, "Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures," curator Lauren van Haaften-Schick joins with artist-lawyer Sérgio Muñoz Sarmiento, who attended law school as an artwork, to discuss recent collisions of art and law, like Mass MoCA v. Büchel and Steinkamp v. Rhona Hoffman. (Fans of Dan Duray's recent article on Prince v. Cariou, which featured Mr. Muñoz Sarmiento, may be especially interested.) —Andrew Russeth
Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, 6:30 p.m., $10 suggested donation

Lecture: Eleonora Luciano, "Antico in Mantua: Friends and Foes," at the Frick Collection
Eleonora Luciano, co-curator of the Frick's current Antico exhibition, will talk about the sculptor's artistic circle, notably the presence of Andrea Mantegna. --Michael H. Miller
The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York, 6–7 p.m.

THURSDAY, JUNE 14

Opening: "Musique Plastique," at Agnès B. Gallery Boutique
Jean François Sanz curates a group show of artists and musicians that sounds like a Fort Thunder redux for the high-fashion crowd. The artists include David Shrigley, Hisham Bharoocha, Thurston Moore, Daniel Johnston, Alan Vega, Ben Vida, Brian DeGraw, Etienne Charry, Jonas Mekas, Liz Wendelbo and Tobias Bernstrup. —Rozalia Jovanovic
Agnes b. Gallery New York, 50 Howard Street, New York, 6-9 p.m.

FRIDAY, JUNE 15

Opening: Luther Price at Callicoon
The experimental filmmmaker, fresh from the Whitney Biennial, offers "projections of handmade slides and a selection of ink on wax paper paintings, some of the materials associated with Price’s practice, ongoing since the 1980s, as an artist and filmmaker." Great gallery, cool artist. Go already! —Dan Duray
Callicoon Fine Arts, 124 Forsyth Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Screening: Santiago Sierra, "No, Global Tour," at Team Gallery
Beginning on June 15, No, Global Tour, the feature-length film by artist Santiago Sierra, will have a special evening screening each Friday. Mr. Sierra commissioned the sculptural construction of the word “NO” and then took the 6-foot-tall, 14-foot wide work on a worldwide tour across Western Europe, the U.S. and Japan. This kind of reminds us of when Horst Wackerbath photographed his red couch as it toured the U.S. and the world, getting very personal portraits of the people and locations visited. Or, more recently, like Michael Heizer’s traveling boulder—Mr. Sierra’s “NO” becomes a film star as its journey is chronicled. While this exhibition opened June 7 with screenings at 10:15 a.m., 1 p.m., and 4 p.m., Friday is the only day for that special 7 p.m. slot. —R.J.
Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, New York, 7 p.m.

SATURDAY, JUNE 16

Performance: Josiah McElheny at Andrea Rosen Gallery
As part of Mr. McElheny's third exhibition at Andrea Rosen, "Some thoughts about the abstract body," the artist will perform using his sculptural assemblages as props. The work explores the relation between clothing and abstraction through the use of historical examples of fashion and costume design. --M.H.M.
Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street, New York, 2 p.m., 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.

SUNDAY, JUNE 17

Lecture: Jorg Heiser at MoMA PS1
The Berlin-based Frieze magazine co-editor heads to MoMA PS1 to discuss his book All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art, part of the museum's "A Short Course on Resistance" lecture series. —D.D.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 3–4 p.m.

Opening: Gina Beavers at James Fuentes
Ms. Beavers will present her "Body Works"—painted nude bodies that she has culled from Internet images and rendered in luscious, disturbing, meaty relief. For instance, a lithe woman covered in a faux-Mondrian design and—why not?—posed in front of a red curtain with a gold frame slung around her body. Breasts, bellies protrude; any standard notion of taste is pretty much defenestrated. Daring stuff. —A.R.
James Fuentes, 55 Delancey Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Andrea Rosen. (Courtesy PMC)

In September of this year Andrea Rosen will open a second, 1,350 square-foot space at 544 West 24th Street, just down the block from her current space at 525, as first reported by Art in America yesterday.

Over the phone today, Ms. Rosen said that the space will allow her to continue creative curation in the vein of the project space at the gallery's current location, which is also called Gallery 2. The new space was partially taken on to show her new artists like Josephine Meckseper and Ryan Trecartin, she said, but  also allows her "to evolve in all the ways that I think are all of my responsibility as a gallerist."

When thinking about her evolution as a gallerist, she says she often returns to one of her artists, Félix González-Torres, whose estate she still represents.

"When you inspire people to have a point of view," she said, "you also create a responsibility for people to have a point of view and that sort of Félix González-Torres-ism is really at the root of what I'm interested in, and that cuts across every part of the art world."

And with Gallery 2, she said, she hopes to allow for experimentation and exhibitions at a remove from other elements of the art business.

"In one way, I don't care whether Gallery 2 shows are profitable," she said. "On the other hand, if I were to ever separate the idea of inspiration from the idea of the market," which, in the vein of Félix González-Torres, she would never do normally, "I believe that collectors, along with the public, are making a true consensus on what's significant.

"We want to be immortalized by art, and those generalizations about us, what we're leaving behind to represent us and our time, have a relationship to money in that we value them. How do we value those things that are going to historicize us? So there has to be a sense of value, but that's different from the market."

The first show for the gallery is not yet set in stone, but Ms. Rosen said it will most likely be an artist who has not yet had a solo show in New York City. The exterior of the second space, like the flagship gallery, will be green.

Mr. Trecartin. (Courtesy PMC)

Ryan Trecartin will be joining the roster at Andrea Rosen Gallery, according to several sources close to the artist. Mr. Trecartin, whose work was last seen in New York at "Any Ever," his solo show last summer at MoMA PS1, left his former gallery, Elizabeth Dee, last October.

Where Mr. Trecartin would end up has been a topic of debate in the art world since he parted ways with Ms. Dee. Rumors circulated that he had been fielding interest from several galleries, including Gladstone. Other artists represented by Andrea Rosen include Felix Gonzales-Torres, Josephine Meckseper and Mika Rottenberg.

Calls to Mr. Trecartin's studio have not yet been returned. As of this writing, Ms. Rosen could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Trecartin will curate, along with Lauren Cornell, the New Museum Triennial in 2015.

A still from Ms. Rottenberg's "Squeeze" video, 2010. (Klagsbrun/Boone)

Andrea Rosen Gallery just sent over a press release announcing that it is going to be working with German artist Josephine Meckseper and Argentinian video-installation mistress Mika Rottenberg.

Ms. Meckseper, who was tapped for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, had been showing with Elizabeth Dee in New York, while Ms. Rottenberg, a 2008 Whitney Biennial alumna, had been with Nicole Klagsbrun, who will now co-represent her.

Update, 12:45 p.m.: Half Gallery just suggested on Twitter that Sterling Ruby, who parted ways with Pace Gallery last week, could be next to join Ms. Rosen's roster. It seems possible (he had a two-person show there with work by Lucio Fontana last year and a three-person meet-up with Carol Bove and Dana Schutz in 2010). We'll see what happens.

Ms. Rottenberg's 2010 show at Mary Boone Gallery, in collaboration with Klagsbrun, was, in our humble opinion, easily one of the highlights of that season--it featured a compact theater that showed a video documenting the production of a strange cube made of cabbage and detritus. (Here's a photograph of a good-sported Ms. Boone holding it.)

Gallerist's Michael H. Miller wrote about the work that Ms. Rottenberg made for Performa 11, in collaboration with sculptor Jon Kessler, late last year.

"Untitled" (2011) by Jim Hodges. (Courtesy the artist and Barbara Gladstone Gallery)

Jim Hodges landed heavily in Gladstone’s two Chelsea galleries last week with five improbably delicate investigations of the overlapping space between ancient Eastern divination and aleatoric art, carried out with outside fabricators, a jackhammer and heavy moving equipment.

When you walk into the gallery on 21st Street, the first things you see are three gray boulders all leaning, like modern dancers, to the right. The knife-peaked central stone is parenthesized between two deftly split halves, one with a heart of copper, the other with a heart of gold. But when you begin to circle, you find that the piece actually comprises four boulders in a cross, each one sheathed, where it faces in, with molded stainless steel painted in lacquer. The blue and lavender sheaths point up, and the yellow and copper sheaths point down, and the shiny surfaces are broken up as the steel follows the dimpled stone, so that the reflection of your face, if you can find it, appears to have a wavelike motion.

Upstairs are five scratched and incised seven-foot-by-five-foot color photos of cloudy skies, two ruddy in sunset, the rest more or less shadowed shades of metallic blue. The scratches are at once hastily drawn and carefully placed: there’s little sense of the artist’s controlling hand in any one white line, but the total effect—a net, an oracle bone, a shape like a diving fish—is, if anything, too considered.

The wall pieces at Gladstone Gallery’s 24th Street branch are stronger: five separately hung segments of a 12-foot circle, covered in tesseras of black mirror, inscribed with stars and crescent moons. In the back of the space, a disco ball hangs from a thick steel wire over a large hole raggedly jackhammered into the concrete floor. The hole is filled with water, and the water dyed with ink; the disco ball sinks down into this pool, submerges completely, and rises up again during a nearly hour-long cycle. Four computer-controlled lights in the room’s upper corners follow the ball as it rises and falls, slowly spinning, so that it casts bright snowflakes of light across the ceiling, floor and walls. At one point, when the ball is low, four white ovals with black centers of shadow spread out from the water like flower petals; and then they rise up the walls, in concert with the ball, like eclipses. The water is flush with the floor when the ball is submerged; when it rises, a few drops cling to its glass; and when these drops fall back down into the pool, it’s hard to see the shimmering in the black surface of the water, but you can see it reflected in the bottom of the globe.

Delicacy of conception would seem unlikely to hold its ground here against showiness of execution; but this particular delicacy is surprisingly robust. Polished surfaces consistently throw off conventional attempts to connect, whether intellectual—analyzing the disco ball’s meaning—or emotional—trying to feel what the stones feel, rather than what they make you feel. But over time, your eyes adjust, so that if you’re patient, you can see through the mirrored surfaces to the depths.

Where Mr. Hodges’s boulders are silent—mysterious dinosaur heads on inscrutable business of their own—for the stubbornly figurative Los Angeles painter Llyn Foulkes, rocks serve as a powerful compromise between the tension-generating constraints of figuration and the symbolic potentials of abstraction. In advance of a major retrospective of the painter’s work planned for UCLA’s Hammer Museum in early 2013, Andrea Rosen Gallery has mounted a small, tightly focused study of his paintings of rocks.

Lost Horizon (1991) shows the head and shoulders of an anxious older man in a thick sweater climbing over a ridge. A “For Sale” sign, a small American flag and a crushed beer or soda can rest at the foot of a tall, straight tree trunk. Behind the man, a series of surreal mountain ridges, the closest shaped into a grim, Lincoln-like face, recede into a flat blue sky; a cruciform seagull, carefully cut from another painting, is blown weirdly backward. It’s important to note that the mountains’ paint has a sticky tactility, while the white clouds look like the first, lethargic strokes of a housepainter; that the can is a real can; and that the tree trunk and the man’s head, built up with modeling paste, project out from the canvas. Eagle Rock (1984), showing the outline of an eagle above a broad gray peak, also plays with the distinction between foreground and background, earth and heaven, night and day, spattering the mountain with drops of sky-blue paint. Shadow and color are blended in a disconcerting way that makes the mountain look like a photogram of blue jeans.

Happy Rock (1969) is a monochrome green painting of a strangely shaped rock, something like a little girl’s dress, with a perfectly circular cutout or superimposed disc. It begins with the way we project our own psychologies onto the world around us, the uneasy give-and-take between found and made beauty, and the close but fundamentally alienated relationship between texture and shape—and it goes on from there.

editorial@observer.com