Mr. Alsoudani’s three large untitled paintings are of jumbles of cartoon-like objects and figures made with charcoal and bright acrylic on unprimed canvas. A purple glass bottle, piles of clothes and a garbage can are scattered about in one; metal pipes sprout from malformed heads in others. It’s strange to say, given their content, but there is not the faintest emotional or intellectual tug in any of these barely distinguishable works. There’s not even a hint of movement. The richly colored tangles hover in blank space, waiting for something to happen, for some sort of form to cohere or narrative to develop. Sadly, they’re just stuck there.

Two Bacons from the last decade of his career each offer a twisting nude male body—one headless, one with face turned away, at a water basin—set against stark backgrounds, which have clearly had an influence on Mr. Alsoudani’s own compositions. However slight these paintings may be, their fleshy, bruised-looking bodies at least evince some drama. The Guston painting, Lower Level (1975), from his late-career move into fraught, faux-naïve figuration, outshines all of the above. All reds, pinks and blacks, it shows two legs that have come upon what may be a mass grave.

Ms. Rego’s two pieces crackle with caricatural humor. The largely black-and-white triptych drawing Human Cargo (2007-08)—it addresses human trafficking in Britain, according to the gallery’s news release—has various frightful characters pawing, beseeching and generally eyeing one another, while Interrogator’s Garden (2000) is a goofy pastel on paper of a soldier, his earnest expression undercut by the fact that he is sans pants.

Many superb artists today imbue figurative painting with rich personal, historical and allegorical meanings—Natalie Frank and Rita Ackermann come to mind. By throwing the spotlight on some of their forebears, this show manages to feel timely.

(Through March 30)

What happened? Just a few months ago, the Whitney Biennial argued that the past decade’s excesses had passed. It celebrated modestly scaled art, exemplified by Andrew Masullo’s compact abstract paintings, K8 Hardy’s fashion photos and Vincent Fecteau’s cement and clay confections. That, as it turned out, was wishful thinking. The new season has delivered a bumper-crop of full-on, intensely immersive, gallery-filling installations.

Perhaps more pressing than the why (there’s space and money to burn, as usual), is the how, as in, how do you critically evaluate such all-consuming works, ones that replace galleries with fully packaged, 360-degree environments? If the key measure of quality is craftsmanship (the degree to which, like a haunted house, it disorients and convinces), Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s “Stray Light Grey” at Marlborough Chelsea—a retro-futuristic funhouse imagined by meticulous stoners—is the clear winner.

Marlborough’s floor-to-ceiling front windows are blacked out. You enter a tiny white-walled gallery that gives way to a cramped art-handlers’ office hung with posters from Marlborough’s glory days—Bacon in Zürich, Kitaj at FIAC in Paris. On a desk rests an untouched half of an everything bagel. As in Messrs. Freeman and Lowe’s 2009 show at Deitch Projects, whose centerpiece was a blown-out meth lab, a series of disparate, desolate rooms follow, one after another, often accessible through holes in walls. There’s a run-down bathroom with wallpaper in a funky, Bridget Riley-esque pattern, a dusty off-track-betting office, a store hawking improbable cakes with neon airbrushed icing, a wood-paneled library.

The duo’s zeal for detail is impressive—strawberry shampoo and mango and cocoa butter lotion in the shower, anonymous packaged products with brand names like Baudelaire and Picasso in a fluorescent-lit mall space. But ultimately it feels like the inverse of an IKEA product: as fun as it may have been to design and assemble, it doesn’t add up to much.

The surreal novelty of wandering through may provide a mild buzz, but it’s guaranteed to vanish on a second visit, especially if you’re an adept of the Freeman/Lowe experience. Though the installation is for sale, it feels like elaborate window dressing for the (more saleable) discrete artworks—gaudy sculptures (taxidermy, crystal), large generic abstract paintings (splatters of what look like minerals or Kool-Aid mix), those spray-painted cakes. Surely there has to be an easier way to move merchandise.

The problem with these nothing-left-to-chance installations is that they all end up looking vaguely similar. While Freeman/Lowe do have signature interests (drugs, sci-fi, the 1970s), one could be forgiven for mistaking “Stray Light Grey” for a piece by British artist Mike Nelson, who, five years ago, converted the Essex Street market into a maze of rooms, or Brooklyn artist Andrew Ohanesian, who has constructed bars and run-down row houses in art environments.

Mr. Ohanesian is responsible for that suburban house at the Boiler, in Williamsburg, which is just as meticulously constructed as the Lowe/Freeman playland, but a great deal more interesting. The details are pitch-perfect. There are cheap wood cabinets, a white stove and microwave unit, Dean Koontz and The Cider House Rules on the bookshelf, sliding doors in back and a palette rich in tans, beiges and browns. For anyone who grew up in a suburban setting, the piece evokes a bittersweet nostalgia bordering on déjà vu.

The home is a bit of a fixer-upper—some damage, and graffiti, is left over from a kegger that Mr. Ohanesian hosted to christen the show, which is called “The House Party.” (The gallery ended that bash after someone tried to light a couch on fire.) Like so many of the homes that now sit empty across the U.S., this one’s on the market, and can be yours for the median value of an American home at the time of purchase (around $217,000 at the moment).

Using a house to address the mortgage meltdown has the potential to be prosaic, but in Mr. Ohanesian’s hands it’s poignant. Economic troubles still linger, and we’re all a long way from taking responsibility for the havoc that was wreaked by invisible forces on these very real homes.

A financial crisis is also at the heart of Brooklyn artist Matthew Lusk’s show at ZieherSmith, “More Broken Glass Than There Was Window,” though it’s the Great Depression’s banking collapse. Using as a guide Arthur Rothstein’s 1936 photograph Bank That Failed—it shows a small-town bank against a barren landscape—he’s built a series of airy interiors that are impressionistic, rather than naturalistic. In other words, since it’s lacking an obsessive surfeit of ready-made details, one couldn’t really mistake Mr. Lusk’s artwork for an actual bank.

Canvas bags with dollar signs are strewn about, columns are overturned, and the vault door—a white ziggurat sculpture—has fallen from its frame. A fan labeled “Katrina” pushes a soda-bottle wind chime. A series of rooms house empty mailboxes, tables bearing blocks of sand and a black painting with a white grid. Mr. Lusk’s work charts post-minimalist art’s uncomfortable connection to architectural, even societal, decay. Though he comes dangerously close to fetishizing such ruins, moments of David Lynchian surrealism (a stuffed turkey, a secret room, a creepy Kienholz-worthy janitor closet) stanch any whiff of easy poeticizing. These are potent signifiers: it is a very American disaster that looms.

There’s no question Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn is fetishizing disaster in his epic exhibition at Gladstone. He’s recreated in loving detail the ostentatious casino of the Concordia ship that ran aground off Tuscany in January and tilted over on its side, killing 32. Chairs, orange life vests and streams of brown packing tape (his trademark) are everywhere. It’d be a joy to climb through, though Mr. Hirschhorn—who’s known for his winding caves—has made the rare decision to forbid us that pleasure. He’s taken an image of capitalist mayhem, magnified it a hundredfold and set it down right in front of us. It’s horrible, and beautiful.

Like Hollywood summer blockbusters, these massive spectacles can grate. How many monster-budget movies can you watch in a row? Thankfully one more room-filling piece is a perfect palate cleanser. At Murray Guy, New Yorker Zoe Leonard has effected a thoroughly captivating installation simply by placing a cylindrical lens into a wall, thereby converting a pitch-black room into a camera obscura. Light streams in from the street, and as your eyes adjust you see cars skimming across the wooden ceiling planks, and a towering new condominium splayed across the floor. She’s made an empty room feel completely, effortlessly full, and shown just how much can be accomplished with very little.

arusseth@observer.com

Neykov. (Courtesy Linlee Allen)

Marlborough Chelsea announced today that it has hired Vera Neykov as its associate director under Director Pascal Spengemann, who came to the gallery in January.

Ms. Neykov co-curated the popular "Blind Cut" show at the gallery this past winter. Full release from Marlborough's PR firm, Nadine Johnson, follows:

August 27, 2012 ─ Marlborough Chelsea announces the appointment of new Associate Director Vera Neykov. In January 2012, Neykov co-curated the highly regarded exhibition Blind Cut with Jonah Freeman at Marlborough Chelsea which included work by Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Anne Collier, Mark Flood, Claire Fontaine, Lothar Hempel and Adam McEwen.

Most recently, Neykov worked at L&M Arts, Los Angeles since their launch in 2010.

Neykov has previously worked at MC Los Angeles, Christian Haye and Michele Maccarone's project space, 2007-2009 and Rivington Arms, New York, 2006-2007. She has written for publications such as Art in America, ArtSlant and Interview.

Neykov proudly joins Gallery Principal Max Levai, Pascal Spengemann, Director and James Cope, Director of Sales at Marlborough Chelsea in building the artist roster, developing the program and curating upcoming exhibitions. This fall Marlborough Chelsea kicks off the season with the highly anticipated exhibition of Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, Stray Light Grey, opening September 13 from 6 PM – 10 PM, followed by an exhibition of artist Robert Lazzarini, November 2012.

333 Broome Street.

It’s hardly been a year since Marlborough Gallery's top director, Pierre Levai, appointed his then-23-year-old son, Max, to revive the institution’s blue-chip, but stodgy, reputation. As the new director of Marlborough Chelsea, the younger Mr. Levai has already rebranded the gallery into a youthful enterprise totally distinct from its Midtown forebear, introducing names like Robert Lazzarini, Rashaad Newsome and duo Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe to a roster once devoted to Fernando Botero, Dale Chihuly and other established market-makers.

Now, Marlborough Chelsea is digging even deeper into the downtown scene with plans to sublet a project space that measures close to 2,000 feet at the soon-to-be new home of Lower East Side gallery Canada.

Until its lease expired this summer, Canada, which represents indie stars Devendra Banhart, Joe Bradley, Xylor Jane and Joanna Malinowska, operated in a small space off a shared hallway at 55 Chrystie Street, just above Canal. So when co-founder and director Phil Grauer discovered that the former printing shop at 333 Broome Street (between Chrystie and Bowery) was for rent, it seemed like the ideal upgrade: roughly 4,200 square feet, industrial architecture and direct street access.

But it was too expensive for Canada alone. “We needed to find a tenant, and we thought it would be nice to find someone who wasn’t doing retail and wasn’t a Chinatown bus station,” Mr. Grauer said. Canada considered approaching neighboring galleries, but ultimately decided against it. “We wouldn’t want to be governing over local friends in the Lower East Side," he said. "Plus, given the square footage, it’s still out of reach for the small, independent spaces we would’ve liked to support.”

Chelsea heavyweights like Lehmann Maupin had opened annex galleries in the neighborhood before, so Mr. Grauer thought of his old friend Pascal Spengemann, who joined Marlborough Chelsea as a director earlier this year, after the gallery he founded with Kelly Taxter back in 2003, Taxter & Spengemann, closed.

Indeed, Mr. Spengemann was interested. “Not every artist is ready to show at a 7,000-square-foot gallery on 25th Street,” he said. Canada signed a 10-year lease, while Marlborough Chelsea agreed to a year-by-year sublet for the adjacent gallery at 331 Broome Street. “This space will be for artists who have less experience showing their work and are less well known,” he said.

Speaking from the NADA Hudson fair this past weekend, Mr. Spengemann added that the artist on view at the gallery’s booth there, Amy Brener, was a good example of a candidate for the Broome Street gallery. Her resin and plexiglass sculpture, a kind of rainbow-colored stalagmite on sale for $10,000, had garnered attention at the gallery’s recent group show “More and Different Flags,” but, at 30 years old, she doesn’t exactly have a sprawling CV.

Details about opening exhibitions and any changes to the galleries' programs are still up in the air, but both parties said they hope to open in November. Except, "realistically," Mr. Spengemann added, it will probably be closer to January.

July 30, 12 p.m.: Updated the size of the spaces.

Joe Deutch, still from 'Gun Piece,' 2005. (Photo: Rozalia Jovanovic)

“I’m not really like a gun person,” artist Joe Deutch told Gallerist at Marlborough Chelsea last night. He was standing in front of an open metal briefcase that displayed a gun. “But there was no way for us to legally get it here and show it.”

The gun in the briefcase was fake, part of Mr. Deutch's new exhibition, which opened last night. (He pronounces his name “deech.”) It presents video documentation, photographs, sculpture and ephemera from the performance work that Mr. Deutch has engaged in over the last eight years, the lynchpin of which was a notorious performance that he did in 2004 while a graduate student at UCLA. For that work he went before his classmates dressed in a suit and tie, removed a gun from a paper bag and held it in one hand, while with the other he held up a bullet and showed it to the class (and the camera: he was recording it). Then he loaded the bullet into the chamber with the flick of his hand and placed the gun up to his head. Then he pulled the trigger, which clicked, and lowered the gun, unhurt. He then walked into an adjacent hall, out of sight and set off a fire-cracker, which made the sound of a shot.

The performance left the students confused and angered. Though Ron Athey was the instructor of that class, it was professor Chris Burden who resigned, along with Nancy Rubins, to protest the school's decision not  to suspend Mr. Deutch. He and Ms. Rubins called Mr. Deutch’s performance an act of “domestic terrorism.”

“John Baldessari once said to me, ‘You hate the art world, don’t you?’” said Mr. Deutch, looking at a large poster affixed to the wall advertising the upcoming opening of the Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles. Mr. Deutch, who in his black T-shirt and black jacket looked like Vincent Gallo, had stolen the poster. “I didn’t think that was true. And I still don’t. But there’s definitely something, I’m definitely not being nice to it a lot of times. I’m being sort of reactionary.”

The school investigated whether or not Mr. Deutch had violated school rules prohibiting firearms on campus and posed a threat to students. Mr. Deutch made the fake gun in an attempt to defend himself. He claimed that he had used this fake gun in the performance, which he told Gallerist was not true: the gun had been real.

“I wanted to ask the question, 'Does our ability to make a statement exist anymore?'” he said.

What if he had died? Would that have been the statement he wanted? “No,” he said. “That would have been a weird, icky, awful tragedy. I never wanted that to happen, and I didn’t believe that that actually would happen.”

While it’s been eight years since that performance, and Mr. Deutch has since exhibited work, the show at Marlborough Chelsea is the first time that he has presented documentation from that incident in a gallery setting. And for Mr. Deutch, the debate about what the piece is, whether or not it is art, is still very much alive. He views his current exhibition as an opportunity to place it back within the context of art, even though whether or not he saw it there in the first place is unclear ("I don’t think I really make art about art. It’s more like art about my brain or something").

“What I learned after the fact is that not everything is or can be art,” said Mr. Deutch. “Regardless of the context you put it in. Which doesn’t really bother me now, because I don’t care. If someone were to say, ‘You’re not an artist,’ that’s fine. Just tell me what we should call it. Is it theater? Is it real theater?”

We walked into the next room, which had a black couch in the middle and in which three of Mr. Deutch’s videos played on a loop. One of the videos was a one-and-a-half minute excerpt of the original Russian roulette performance at UCLA. A man in a red jacket was seated on the one black leather couch at the center of the room watching intently. Around him there was a crowd of about 30 people. Behind us, a woman was holding the arm of a man.

“I was a little worried,” she said when the video ended. She considered it art, because it was Mr. Deutch’s “expression” and it made her think. Her friend felt differently.

“Not really,’ he said and shrugged. “It should cause a reaction.”

Another video showed Mr. Deutch taunting a rattlesnake and getting bitten.

“Have you seen this?” one young man nearby said to his friend about the video. They were both in shorts, baseball hats and wearing gold chains. “It’s terrible.”

“Dude,” the other said. “It’s the scariest shit.”

Asked if it was art, one of them said, “Yes—more or less. I think it’s like Jackass.”

Mr. Cope. (Courtesy Papercitymag.com)

The Baer Faxt newsletter reported this morning that Marlborough Chelsea has hired former Marc Strauss director James Cope as its new director of sales.

Mr. Cope said he met gallery owner Max Levai at Art Basel Miami Beach last year and received a call about a job interview shortly after he left the Strauss gallery, which he'd joined this year after leaving the Dallas-based Goss-Michael Foundation, home to the art of singer George Michael and his partner Kenny Goss. At Marlborough, he joins an ever-growing roster of artists and staff (the gallery nabbed former Taxter and Spengemann partner Pascal Spengemann as its new director in January).

"My title is director of sales but it's still going to be the three of us, myself, Max and Pascal, working very hands-on," Mr. Cope said on the phone, "setting up shows and meeting with writers and curators, just all the usual kind of duties that one has to undertake when you're getting a program going. I'm really excited."

Mr. Freeman and Mr. Lowe (Photo courtesy of forgetmidwest.com)

Marlborough Chelsea, the ever-expanding gallery that just nabbed a new director in Pascal Spengemann, formerly of Taxter and Spengemann, will mount shows with new artists Robert Lazzarini, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe in 2012. The additions were announced rather subtly, in an Artforum ad, which also noted the representation of Rashaad Newsome, who had his first solo show with the gallery this past October.

Both Mr. Lazzarini and Mr. Freeman and Mr. Lowe, an artist duo, previously showed with Jeffrey Deitch, the downtown dealer who now directs the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. "We feel that these additions to our roster provide a strong base as Pascal and I further develop the gallery program with an eye towards 2013," gallery owner Max Levai wrote in an email. He added:

"Robert, Rashaad and Freeman/Lowe have in common a dedication to their rigorous practices. Robert's sculptures are deeply rooted in tracing their lineage back to Minimalism of the 1960s and the idea of phenomenology as a part of the viewing experience. Freeman/Lowe's ambitious fictional universes explore alchemy in modern context while examining American counter culture. Rashaad's encompassing practice explores the evolution of language through pop culture."

The additions further distingush the gallery's Chelsea branch from its uptown counterpart on 57th Street. The two galleries will have separate booths at the Armory fair next month.

Mr. Spengemann.

Yesterday news broke that Pascal Spengemann, whose Taxter & Spengemann gallery closed this fall, will be the new director at Marlborough Chelsea. Reached for comment today, Mr. Spengemann said he's eager to start, and busy meeting artists.

The hiring is new enough that Mr. Spengemann said his plans for the gallery are still in the air, but had kind words for the space's 24-year-old owner Max Levai.

"For someone so young he's very bright," Mr. Spengemann said. "He's grown up in the biz, and I feel like he has a really great handle on it. I feel really excited about working together."

Mr. Spengemann said he wasn't sure if he was going to be bringing in any new artists into the program, let alone ones from Taxter & Spengemann, adding that he's entered "a very different kind of scenario from T and S."

Recently Marlborough Chelsea began a campaign to differentiate itself from its 57th Street location, which has served as its headquarters since 1963 (the two will have separate booths at the Armory Show this year). The downtown iteration has been host to a number of high-profile shows lately, including the group show "Blind Cut," which opened with a madhouse reception last week.

"I think that kind of show points out that there's a real opportunity there to have a broad appeal and I think that's already started happening," Mr. Spengemann said. "I think that's something that's really intriguing about working for the gallery."