Dana Schutz, "Building the Boat While Sailing," 2012. (Courtesy the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery)

If we ever send out another Voyager probe, and we need a new image that offers up the full range of human experience, with its chaotic complexity of outward expression, its discreet harmonies and its subtle inward pathos plastered directly onto absurdity, an image that can convey to alien eyes the existential truth that we make our own truths here, but don’t quite make them freely, we ought to use Building the Boat While Sailing, the centerpiece of painter Dana Schutz’s show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

Ms. Schutz has a sure hand. Expansive, expressionist gestures are meticulously prepared and impeccably organized, and if you always hit your marks, you don’t have to hit them hard—Building the Boat While Sailing shows about 20 busy, overlapping figures, painted in thin layers of oil, using the minimum necessary modeling or line, on a canvas 13 feet wide. This kind of minimalist maximalism does two things. It creates a deeply sympathetic feeling of good-humored professionalism, a sincere artificiality like Buster Keaton doing Max Beckmann. And it makes the work a seamlessly dynamic, insuperably elusive proof of its own necessity. The content seems like only a pretext for the form, but the form, in turn, is only enough to convey the content. And so, like the schoolboy’s perpetual motion machine—a sheet of paper that says “TURN, PLEASE,” on both sides—it will, given the benefit of the doubt, keep running forever.

Pasted onto an orange sky shading down through cyan foam to deep blue deeps is a ship-shaped wooden raft. (If the composition is Keaton, the perspective is all Busby Berkeley—most of the figures are mostly flat, but there’s just enough depth to keep everything in place and working hard. One tan semicircle serves as the ship’s deck and its side simultaneously.) On the upper left corner sits a Munch-like lizard-faced boy in shorts and flip-flops, his head tilted back, spouting out foamy white water. His spout doubles as a cloud, and two gray curves are both motion lines and a seagull.

Beneath him another face drawn on the deck spouts water, too, and a blond figure with a crossed-heart tattoo painted on her pillar-like arm reaches into the water after a fish who’s either also spouting water up into, or else dangling from a white fishing line hanging down from, the bottom of someone’s white sneaker. Sitting beside her is a modernist Madonna in a sharp white blouse, her face Picasso, her straight black hair doubling as a veil, holding two boards with nails in them. The boards, like a little pyramid of wood casting a long shadow elsewhere on deck, are modeled in three dimensions, but the Madonna is flat. (Our lives are like frames of film stacked in a pile instead of lined up, everything together with everything; but the objects we make and that unmake us are the opposite, without insides, nothing but surfaces.)

A redhead holds onto the raft’s edge and paddles in the water beside a round green pizza of a turtle dipping its flipper into a triangular hole next to the transcendently martyred ship’s architect, on his back and upside down, his legs bent in a fylfot, his arms bearing down against wooden boards that he himself assembled, one white Ked pressing a saw, its teeth reversed, deeply into the beak of a featherless, mirror-eyed albatross. (This bird would be a good update of the American eagle—it sees everything and knows nothing.) Above him a worker pounds nails with a cartoon-motion fist, and another planes the deck with his teeth, looking like some kind of prehistoric elephant, raising curls of wood like tusks. (As Willem Flusser said, the shoemaker doesn’t only make shoes: he also makes himself a shoemaker.) Behind them two young men raise a mast from which swings a line describing a shape like a Jesus fish, and an ominous jet of water behind them stands in for a beam of sunlight breaking through cloud.

It must be the mast-raiser in the popped collar who will reject his savior even unto death. On the sail behind the other one, overlapping his head, is a rangy blue W; next to the W, two short gray stripes either nod to the Twin Towers, or form an equals sign on its side—as on earth, so in heaven, and vice versa. There are also yellow flames, another saw, a gymnast, a thought balloon, wooden ribs and, maybe, a sea monster.

Salt is an appealing metaphor. Vital to life but poisonous in quantity, with a faint but ineradicable corona of biblical and mythological connotations, it is proverbially white but grainy, so that when you compress it into a lead frame, for example, as does Pier Paolo Calzolari, and stamp your question into it backwards—Quando il sognatore muore che ne è del sogno, or “When a dreamer dies what happens to his dream”—the salt casts a multitude of tiny shadows onto itself, so that what ought to be black and white looks gray. Knocking out the wall between Marianne Boesky’s gallery on 24th Street and Pace on 25th (the show is jointly presented by the two galleries) likewise creates the perfect context of slightly dreamy misalignment for Mr. Calzolari’s scorched metal landscapes and elaborate, blunt, theatrical, often electrically revolved or refrigerated conceptual devices. Constructing the question is exactly as difficult as finding the answer, because if the one requires the other, they must be the same thing. A rotating oyster shell in Tiara C calls to mind the “clock beetle” in Kobo Abe’s novel The Ark Sakura; in Baignoire (Dialogue entre l’eau e et l’oeuf), an egg hanging over a lead-covered tub, precariously but infinitely, reaches for the question’s question-and-answer. It is “yes, but,” but what follows the “but” is unspecified.

editorial@observer.com

TUESDAY, MAY 1

"Science on the Back End" at Hauser & Wirth
The artist Matthew Day Jackson selects five artists--Larry Bamburg, Marc Ganzglass, Rosy Keyser, Erin Shirreff and Nick van Woert--gives each of them their own room in Hauser & Wirth's Upper East Side location. As Mr. Jackson states in the press release: "I am not a curator. I merely selected the five artists for this exhibition and left to them the decision of which artworks to present. These artists inspire me." --Michael H. Miller
Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: “Lucian Freud Drawings,” at Acquavella
On May 1, Acquavella Galleries will present “Lucian Freud Drawings,” the most comprehensive exhibition of the late artist’s drawings ever to be shown in the U.S., including intimate portraits of family and friends as well as landscapes, many of which were selected from Freud’s sketchbooks and have never before been seen. —Rozalia Jovanovic
Aquavella, 18 East 79th Street, New York, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2

Opening: Noam Rappaport at James Fuentes
Mr. Rappaport makes relentless invention look easy. He makes each his (usually) spare paintings—hardly an adequate term here—with just a few components: perhaps a slab of wood, an unusually shaped swath of canvas, some touches of paint. Those elements become bewilderingly complete and handsome works that stretch strangely across walls or jut out magically into space. Fans of no-more-than-necessary artists, from Blinky Palermo to B. Wurtz, will swoon. —Andrew Russeth
James Fuentes, 55 Delancey Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Dana Schutz, "Piano in the Rain," at Petzel
For her first outing at Petzel, Ms. Schutz makes her characters "build a boat while sailing it, ignite themselves, pass on a contagious yawn, flash the audience with various craft-making tools and play a concerto in the rain," according to the gallery's (frankly tantalizing) news release. No doubt more of her inimitable pleasures await. Schutz fans can visit the Metropolitan Opera's Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery through May 12 to catch her "Götterdämmerung" show of watercolor monoprints informed by Wagner's opera of the same name. —A.R.
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Ryan McGinley, "Animals" and "Grids," at Team Gallery
Ryan McGinley has two new shows opening simultaneously at Team Gallery, "Animals" and "Grids."  For "Animals," Mr. McGinley took studio portraits of marmosets and parakeets. But as these are Ryan McGinley photos, the animals are posed with nude models. This coincides with "Grids," another opening of Mr. McGinley’s work at Team Gallery’s Wooster Street space, featuring three large grids composed of portraits of fans taken at concerts.—R.J.
83 Grand Street, and 47 Wooster Street, New York, 6 p.m.

Party: MoMA PS1 Opens Frieze
The party will include "a full concert by Martha Wainwright, including renditions as Edith Piaf, original songs, and a climactic tribute to Kraftwerk." Given how climactic those performances at the museum already were, this should, in so many words, be a good party. — Dan Duray.
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City

THURSDAY MAY 3

Opening: Courtney Love, "And She’s Not Even Pretty," at Fred Torres Collaborations
You know Courtney Love as a musician, actress and wife of Kurt Cobain. You may not know the Hole front-woman studied fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980’s. Apart from practicing celebrity as an art from, she’s also been drawing throughout her life and will be presenting her work for the first time. Whether or not David LaChapelle and Julian Schnabel are her mentors, which they are, Ms. Love’s foray into visual art is going to be a celebrity shit show. —R.J.
Fred Torres Collaborations, 527 West 29th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.


SATURDAY MAY 5

Opening: Tauba Auerbach, "Float," at Paula Cooper Gallery
Tauba Auerbach's much-anticipated first solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery will include words from the artist's "Weave" and "Fold" series, as well as new photographs and sculptural objects. --M.H.M.
Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Kehinde Wiley "An Economy of Grace" at Sean Kelly Gallery
Painter Kehinde Wiley branches out with his first ever portraits of women. For the clothes, he's collaborated with Riccardo Tisci, Creative Director of Givenchy, and of "Watch the Throne" cover fame. — D.D.
Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 West 29 Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.