Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz in 1982. (Photo by Marsha Burns)

The first broadcast of CNN was on June 1, 1980—a little over a year after Brian Lamb and John D. Evans started the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network—and it began with David Walker and his co-anchor (and wife) Lois Hart. It was a pretty slow news day. The lead story was President Jimmy Carter’s trip to Fort Wayne, Ind., for a “brief visit” with civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound. They also covered the launch of the CNN network, replaying footage from a press conference given by Ted Turner. He thanked the cable industry, “whose pioneering spirit caused this great step forward in communication.” From then on, America would be inundated by a constant flow of information, all presented by a stern, brow-furrowed newscaster as breaking and important.

It was then, during the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, that the husband-and-wife artist duo Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz—known collectively as Kienholz—created The Ozymandias Parade, which is currently making a rare appearance in New York at the Pace Gallery on West 25th Street. The exhibition was supposed to coincide with the week leading up to the election, but Hurricane Sandy set it back, and it didn’t open until the day after President Obama’s re-election, another event that fed copy to the cable news programs.

That the work didn’t go on view until after the dust was already settling on a $4 billion election year made it even more ominous. The Ozymandias Parade has traveled to galleries and museums around the world. Wherever it is displayed, a public poll is put out with the question, “Are you satisfied with your government?” The answer is almost invariably, “No,” and that word ends up pasted on the faces of the life-size plaster figures in the piece. One of them represents a president, saddled to the underbelly of a rearing horse, a sword in one hand, with a deflated globe draped on its point, and the Moscow-Washington hotline phone in the other. Behind him is a thin “overtax payer,” her face just an exposed skull, holding a cane in each hand and carrying the military general—who holds the button that launches a nuclear warhead—on her shoulders. Pulling up the rear is the vice president, wearing a necklace of broken radio speakers, his saddle on the belly of an overturned horse (which has ice skates on its front legs and roller skates on its hind legs). The work is rigged so that the flag of whatever country it is being exhibited in flies high above them all. The “parade” itself looks more like a mythological funeral procession, and it’s all the more frightening because everyone involved is frozen in place; by design, they perpetually fail to do anything at all.

“I don’t see how it’s changed any, really,” Ms. Kienholz said. She was comparing the political climate in 1985, when The Ozymandias Parade debuted at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, to the present. “I mean, it’s gotten worse. What we’ve just been through with the election has been ... horrific. It’s been going on for a year and a half. It’s awful. It’s worse now than when we made the piece. For foreign corporations to donate to candidates would have been unimaginable at that time. And we just accept that now. I guess everybody’s so busy just trying to survive.”

“Tough” is the first word that comes to mind in conversation with Ms. Kienholz. She has bright red hair and a sarcastic smile. Walking to a coffee shop across from the gallery last week, she put on a black cowboy hat and sucked down a cigarette in a gasp as she crossed 10th Avenue. She talked about the previous night’s election results like she had just dodged a bullet. “Like we’re gonna go back to the 1950s and Leave It to Beaver, and the women are all gonna stay at home and wear aprons and dresses? It ain’t gonna happen. That’s a different time, and you can’t go back. You can never go home again.”

Since her husband’s death from a heart attack in 1994, Ms. Kienholz, 68, has been steadily reintroducing America to their work, predominantly made up of life-size dioramas, with the help of the L.A. Louver gallery, their sole U.S. representative since 1981. After Edward’s 1966 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which was almost shut down after the County Board of Supervisors deemed it pornographic, much of the work was dispersed in Europe, where it traveled extensively. The couple started collaborating after that, and soon decamped for West Berlin, generally returning to the U.S. seasonally, to a farm in the bucolic town of Hope, Idaho, population 86. A number of their works, like the monumental Five Car Stud (1969-72), which depicts a violent racial encounter and had never been seen in America before last year, are known to New Yorkers only through stories or images. The works are too enormous and scattered in collections around the world to bring together in one place. The New York Times review of their 1996 retrospective at the Whitney, which included some 90 works, stated outright that a Kienholz show of that scale “will never happen again.”

Edward and Nancy met in 1972 at a party for the writers Jean and Irving Stone at Ms. Kienholz’s parents’ house in Los Angeles. Her father, Thomas Reddin, was the chief of the L.A. Police Department. She didn’t mind that, and she was a fan, in particular, of the family’s box at the Hollywood Bowl. By that time, Edward was already at the center of the L.A. art world. In 1957, he had co-founded, with Walter Hopps, the Ferus Gallery, which would go on to debut Warhol’s soup cans. The new business partners bought a space together on La Cienega. They went across the street to eat lunch one day at a Pink’s Dog hot dog restaurant and wrote down their plans on the paper that their chili dogs were served on and signed it. That was the contract. Kienholz showed his first major work at Ferus: Roxys (1960-61), a re-creation of a Nevada brothel he’d sneaked into as a kid. It’s a room-size installation, and the interior is all conservative parlor-room fare, but the figures inside are warped and mutated. (David Zwirner Gallery presented that work in New York two years ago.)

In 1959, Virginia Dwan, the sole heir to the 3M fortune, opened the Dwan Gallery nearby. The two galleries were basically the only show in town. Dennis Hopper was around a lot, as were the artists Sam Francis and Wallace Berman. Richard Cohan, who began working with Kienholz as his assistant at the age of 15 (his first task was sweeping the brush out of Kienholz’s yard so it wouldn’t catch fire), remembers days when he’d unload the art at Ferus with his friend Johnny Romain, then run over to Dwan to change into black pants and a black vest and serve Ritz crackers with cheese at an opening. In 1964, Ms. Dwan gave Mr. Kienholz his largest exposure up to that point, presenting a work called Back Seat Dodge ’38 (1964). The titular car has a truncated chassis, and inside is a couple—a plaster cast of a woman and the silhouette of a man constructed from chicken wire—clumsily having intercourse.

“There were three people who kept coming back to look at this piece,” said Mr. Cohan last week on the phone from California. He had helped cut the Dodge in half and was working the desk at Dwan a lot in those days. “Steve McQueen, James Garner and Paul Newman. They were all car nuts. Steve McQueen hadn’t made it yet, so he couldn’t afford it. James Garner didn’t have a place to put it. Joanne Woodward wouldn’t let Paul Newman buy it.” It was Back Seat Dodge that caused all the controversy at the 1966 LACMA show. It was an election year, so local politicians turned it into an issue of family values. Famously, it was displayed with the door shut, and it would only be opened at the request of a museum visitor who was at least 18—and even then, there couldn’t be any children in the room. People lined up.

The Ozymandias Parade at Pace Gallery. (Courtesy Pace Gallery)

WITHIN A YEAR OF MEETING, Edward and Ms. Kienholz had moved their children from different marriages in together and left for West Berlin.

“Back when East and West really meant something,” Ms. Kienholz said. “Like when the KGB was the KGB. And there we were.”

Edward had just finished the notorious Five Car Stud, one of the last works he’d make before beginning his collaboration with his wife. The piece is a life-size installation, exhibited on a dirt floor, of five men wearing Halloween masks. They’re carrying guns and knives, pinning down and castrating a black man while his white girlfriend vomits in a nearby corner. It is illuminated only by the headlamps of the five cars that encircle the scene. It was shown inside an inflatable dome at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany in 1972, and twice right after that, but until an exhibition at LACMA last year, had not been seen since 1973. For years, much of what the public knew of the piece was gleaned from a few blurry black-and-white photos taken from a distance by Mr. Hopps. The work was purchased by the Kawamura Museum in Sakura, Japan, but as it went through customs, the officials took chainsaws to it, removing the guns. It languished in storage for 40 years until Peter Boris, the executive vice president at Pace, working with L.A. Louver, sold it to the Prada Foundation in Italy, after a months-long restoration by Ms. Kienholz.

“It has a mojo to it,” she said. “Ed bought all the masks at the Hollywood Magic Store. And he was buying a whole bunch, and the owner left the room and called the police, because he thought, ‘This guy’s up to something.’ And the police came in and looked at him and said, ‘It’s just Ed. He’s okay.’ So instead of wearing hoods like they were KKK, they wore these masks.”

It’s an eerily domestic detail, a kind of everyman’s racism that also buffers the palpable terror of the scene with a more campy, drive-in horror movie vibe. Mr. Cohan helped pull the engines out of the cars, and was also asked to model for the plaster cast of the man doing the cutting, but declined.

“But I asked Ed, ‘What are you gonna make the cock out of?’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘I’m gonna use the hardest steel I can find. If someone wanted to cut this thing off, they’d have to take a sledgehammer and a chisel, and then they’d probably have to burn it off, because I’m gonna cover it in fiberglass.’”

When Edward began working with Ms. Kienholz, the pieces became more self-assured, stronger in a physical sense. He was known for being a highly skilled craftsman, and his wife matched his abilities. (He also had a reputation as a staunch perfectionist. A bent nail would cost you your job.) They were building houses and making art together and churning out work like The Art Show (1964-77)—a caustic re-creation of an art gallery in which everyone inside has a face made of different kinds of hot air vents—and Sollie 17 (1979-80), maybe the only Kienholz work that feels sentimental. It features a group of men living in the squalor of a single room occupancy hotel, their glum faces cast in literal frames as they go about their business casually.

Their whole operation became a family affair. When they finished building the large triangular base on which the figures rest in The Ozymandias Parade, the Kienholzes invited their friends to their home in Hope and used it as a table for a dinner party. The general is a cast of Ms. Kienholz’s father, their friend and collector Monte Factor posed for the president, Bill Chatham, Edward’s son-in-law, is the vice president, and the overtax payer is a cast of Edward’s mother (who insisted the figure be labeled “overtax” and not just “tax”). The work is currently for sale, if you could imagine a place to put it, for a price that sources believe to be in the $5 million range.

The Kienholzes’ work became such a major part of their lives that when Edward died at the age of 66, Ms. Kienholz buried him, embalmed and sitting upright in a Packard coupe, which she drove into a big hole dug near their home in Idaho. Edward’s gambling buddies came and threw dollar bills into the grave. When they were starting to dig, one of her assistants said he had to run home and get a transom because the hole needed to line up perfectly with the house; “Ed would never forgive me if it was crooked,” he said. Ms. Kienholz had promised her husband she would do all this and made good on her word. “But I put him in the passenger seat,” she said. “I just couldn’t imagine going through eternity with him driving.”

mmiller@observer.com

After substantial refurbishment, that monumental, ethereal work is now set to be installed at the San Diego Federal Courthouse at the end of this year. One can imagine it becoming a must-see work for contemporary art fans visiting Southern California. For now, though, New Yorkers looking to experience the Irwin touch are lucky enough to be able to head over to the Pace Gallery at 510 West 25th Street, where three columns by Mr. Irwin, each about 16 feet tall, are on view through Oct. 20 in a show called "Dotting the i's, Cross in the t's: Part II." (Another Irwin show, "Part I," is on view at Pace's 57th Street branch.)

When I met with Robert Irwin at the gallery earlier this month to profile him for The New York Observer, he was experimenting with different lighting arrangements. "These things sit on a delicate edge,” Mr. Irwin said at the time, as he figured out how he wanted them to look. Under certain lighting, they looked a bit yellow. At other moments, they almost completely vanished.

Each time I've visited the show since then, the columns have looked different, depending on the time of day and the weather conditions outside. They can elude the eye, but they can also be gloriously present, streaking light along the floors and walls, brightening up the space in unusual ways. It is a show worth seeing a few times, perhaps at both the start and end of a Chelsea visit, a barometer of sorts for observing just how much has changed in the air around us over a few hours without us ever even noticing it.

Installation view of "doting the i's and crossing the t's: part I," at Pace's 57th Street gallery through Oct. 20.

On a gray morning early last week, the artist Robert Irwin sat at one end of the cavernous Pace gallery in Chelsea and gazed out at his latest exhibition. The only things in it are three thin, 16-foot-tall transparent acrylic columns that, under certain lighting conditions, disappear. The opening reception was set for the following evening, and he was trying to figure out how the room would look when it was dark out. Every few minutes, his iPhone rang—a Pace employee on the roof, blacking out skylights.

“These things sit on a delicate edge,” Mr. Irwin said. “When it was bright in here, it was pretty yellow, and they get blown out. These things hardly existed at all. Is that good, or is it bad?” Pause. “I don’t know.” He sounded intrigued, rather than worried.

Irwin. (Courtesy Philipp Scholz Rittermann/Pace)

Though you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from his uniform of jeans, running shoes and a baseball cap (with a Coca-Cola logo that day), the San Diego–based Mr. Irwin, who turns 84 this month, is one of the America’s great aesthetic radicals: a MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner and a standout among the 1960s Light and Space artists (who are seeing renewed interest at the moment), he is arguably the most influential artist that California has ever produced.

He started out as an Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s, but made increasingly minimal work—paintings with only lines, then only dots, then simply discs that hover in space, their edges indistinguishable from the wall. He banished painterly marks, then the frame, then the painting itself. (“I painted myself right out of it,” he told me.) By the 1970s, he was producing installations composed only of light and subtle alterations to spaces. He also began venturing outdoors. For a show at the Whitney in 1977, he repainted the intersection of 44th Street and Fifth Avenue and strung a wire between the two World Trade Center buildings—artworks that few probably noticed.

“I was always asking myself, what is the actual goal of art, the actual subject of art? What justifies its high standing?” he said. “We’re building these cathedrals to art today, really almost to the level of absurdity, so you ask yourself, what does it contribute?” During his pauses, the muffled sound of a buzzsaw could be heard next door, where Pace is at work on a new cathedral, its fourth New York space. “I’m of the opinion that we are constantly discovering the world and that the point of art is that act.”

'Untitled (Acrylic Column),' 1969–2011.

Given this focus on discovery—“I’m a question addict,” he said—it seems odd that he’s taken a retrospective look at his career in his recent shows. In April, he opened “dotting the i’s & crossing the t’s: part I” at Pace’s 57th Street headquarters, which includes versions of works he’s presented over the past few years. His show in Chelsea is “part II,” and those acrylic sculptures are new versions of pieces that he first made in 1971.

Back in April, I met with Mr. Irwin at the 57th Street space, and asked him if “dotting the i’s” marked an end point. Was he retiring? “The shows are kind of summarizing some stuff, yeah,” he said offhandedly, then  launched into a breathless description of his new fluorescent light pieces, which he layers with gels used on theater lights to create unusual colors. One was on view in the show, and he said he’d been working on new ones that are even more complex. “I’m not actually closing up shop.”

In fact, he was just back from London, where, at the request of Pace founder Arne Glimcher, he had taken a look at a space at the Royal Academy that the gallery was considering turning into its London branch. (Pace has since signed a lease there.) Though he has no formal training in the field, he’s done his fair share of architectural projects over the past few decades, designing one of Pace’s Chelsea galleries, as well as the Dia Art Foundation’s museum in Beacon, N.Y., one of contemporary art’s most impressive cathedrals.

“Being an artist is really about a sensibility,” he explained in Chelsea. “It’s an awareness about the nature of things, on a base level. A sensibility is applicable to anything and everything. It’s a way of going. So I tested that by doing a garden.” He was talking about his garden at the Getty Center, which he made in the early 1990s. “I’m not a gardener. I had never planted a plant before in my life. Can an artist do that? Can I take my sensibility and make things with it?”

The Getty garden is a fairly baroque piece of landscape architecture, but in general Mr. Irwin’s sensibility tends toward subtle, unexpected touches. At the 57th Street show, he cut rectangles out of two windows. Few people appeared to notice them at the opening; the street noise was a bit louder than normal, and the light streaming in was different, but if you weren’t looking for the work, it was easy to miss. “I think its one of the better things I’ve ever done,” he told me, “in the sense that it’s so much what it is, and it’s kind of authorless. You don’t think about whether it’s art or not art. It’s just about what you’re seeing or not seeing.”

Detail view of '1° 2° 3° 4°' at Pace's 57th Street gallery.

And that—seeing—is the root of his art. When people walk into a room, he said, they “do an instant check, you know—you just want to make sure there’s no hole you’re going to fall into, there’s nothing you’re going to bump into, so you do that very quickly, we’re not even aware of it—it’s instant.”

At their best, Mr. Irwin’s artworks disrupt that reflex with an absolute economy of means. His acrylic columns just barely distort the view of the room; you may not notice them until a person vanishes while walking behind one. “You’re forced to stop for a second, to recheck, because something’s not right,” he said. “So you freeze, and in that moment of freezing, in a way, you become a first-time perceiver.”

All of this can sound a bit precious. The late critic Hilton Kramer said as much in the 1970s in The New York Times, writing, “Mr. Irwin casts himself in the role of an esthetic saint, who, having renounced the world of material art objects, has found salvation in a higher realm of pure perception.”

That would be a more convincing argument if Mr. Irwin’s art were not so immediately pleasing and accessible (once you notice it), and if he weren’t such an obsessive devotee of materials.

For a series of monochromatic paintings at 57th Street, he and his technical collaborator of 45 years, Jack Brogan, used honeycombed aluminum panel developed for airplanes. “You know, there’s flat and there’s flat,” Mr. Irwin said. “The wall’s flat, but those panels are absolutely flat, they don’t have any warp or weave in them.” He added, “They look very clean and simple, but they have probably 40 to 50 coats of paint on them, and they have been hand sanded probably 20, 25 times.”

When he and Mr. Brogan first made the acrylic columns 40 years ago, the largest available acrylic blocks were four feet in length, so building tall columns took some effort. They developed special compounds to polish the ends, and then carefully joined them together. Still, the seams were (just barely) visible from certain angles. “Even if you couldn’t see them, they were there,” Mr. Irwin said.

Installation view of "doting the i's and crossing the t's: part I."

But technology has improved. Today’s acrylic has a crisper, bluer color and is harder, which allows for smoother polishing, and blocks come in lengths of eight feet. The 16-footers in Chelsea have just one seam, and it’s impossible to see it. “It’s perfect,” he said. This innovation presents another conundrum, he happily admitted: is it better for a collector to acquire an earlier, more art historically important column, or a new, technologically advanced one? It’s the sort of question one asks more frequently of, say, cars than art.

“If I can make them more beautiful, you know, why not?” Mr. Irwin said by way of explanation. “I’m in the beauty business. I have never made anything in my life that was not as beautiful as I can make it.”

arusseth@observer.com

(All images of artworks © 2012 Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy of the artist and the Pace Gallery, New York)

6 Burlington Gardens. (Wikipedia)

The Pace Gallery confirmed today that it has secured a two-floor, 9,000-square-foot space in London at the Royal Academy's 6 Burlington Gardens building, ending years of speculation about its plans in the capital city, which is becoming an increasingly crowded art hub. Architect Sir David Chipperfield, who is handling a major renovation of the entire Academy that is set to be completed by 2018, will design the space. The new Pace branch will open in October, right before the Frieze Art Fair, with a two-person show of painter Mark Rothko and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.

"When we found out that the Royal Academy could become available, there was no doubt that this was the space," Pace's director of communications, Andrea Glimcher, told The Observer by phone today. "We did everything possible to lobby for it." The gallery will lease the west wing of 6 Burlington Gardens. Until late last year, New York and London gallery Haunch of Venison was a tenant at 6 Burlington Gardens as its location in Haunch of Venison Yard underwent renovations.

Farran Tozer Brown, chief of staff at the Royal Academy, said that the decision to select Pace for the location was a "long and deeply considered process." Ms. Glimcher said that Marc Glimcher, Pace's president and her husband, gave several in-person pitches to the Academy in order to secure a space (Mr. Glimcher was unavailable for comment). She also emphasized the two bodies' independence. "Our exhibition schedule is independent from theirs and vice versa," she said.

Pace has had a foothold in London for some time, and opened to the public a modestly sized space on Lexington Street, in London's Soho area, last fall. However, it was known to have been looking for a larger space in the city. At the end of 2010, it hired onetime Gagosian director Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst as London director. Ms. Dent-Brocklehurst has deep connections to many of the world's wealthiest collectors, having also served as chief international coordinator and curator of exhibitions at Moscow's Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, which was founded by Dasha Zhukova, the girlfriend of Russian billionaire collector Roman Abramovich, who has a home in London.

Pace's move comes just as a number of New Yorker dealers have announced plans to build sizable galleries in London. Michael Werner Gallery and David Zwirner both recently declared their intentions to open there. They too will be in the Mayfair neighborhood, where leading contemporary galleries, like Hauser & Wirth, Stephen Friedman, and Gagosian maintain presences. Larry Gagosian, in fact, has two spaces in the city, where he has operated since 2000.

"Europeans and now Russians and people from the Middle East are coming through London," Ms. Glimcher said. "It's critical for us." Indeed, in recent years, the city has become center for art commerce, located far closer to emerging markets than New York. Sotheby's recently announced that it sells five times as many lots to collectors from "new" markets in London than in New York. "The artists we represent would like to have a presence there," Ms. Glimcher added, "and the collectors that we already work with would like to have us there."

Designed by James Pennethorne, 6 Burlington Gardens was completed in 1870 on the grounds of Burlington House, a 17th-century home that is located just to the south. Pennethorne's structure housed the University of London for about three decades before having a variety of different tenants. Burlington House itself was bought by the British government in the mid-19th century. In 1867, the Royal Academy, which had been founded in 1768, moved in, on a 999-year lease. More recently, the Academy served as venue for the now-defunct Zoo contemporary art fair, a satellite event of London’s annual Frieze Fair.

Exhibitions at the new Pace London kick off on Oct. 4 with "Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes," which will pair some of the former's late work with the latter's iconic photographs of the sea meeting the horizon. "Rothko hasn't been in a gallery show since 1963 [in London]," Ms. Glimcher said. "We just started doing that research a while back, and some of the things we learned were stunning."

In addition to its London space, Pace currently maintains a gallery in Beijing and three in New York; a fourth New York gallery is under construction beneath the High Line on West 25th Street.

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

"Water of the Flowery Mill" (1944) by Arshile Gorky. (Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Is Pace Gallery moving in on Gagosian's longstanding representation of mid-century painter Arshile Gorky's work? In the news release for its upcoming "Mythology" show, which includes the artist's work, Pace says that it "is honored to work with the Arshile Gorky family on this exhibition."

The Gorky Foundation, whose board is populated with many descendents of the late artist, has long worked with Gagosian, who has hosted five solo shows of the artist's work over the past 15 or so years. (An aside: Gorky was Armenian, as are Mr. Gagosian's forebears.)

A Pace representative told us that the gallery plans to work with the Gorky family on a few upcoming projects, including a three-person show in the fall, which will feature work by Gorky, Picasso and de Kooning, whose estate previously worked with Gagosian and now works with the Glimchers, who own Pace.

The "Mythology" catalogue includes an interview between Pace president Marc Glimcher and Matthew Spender, a member of the Gorky Foundation board, who has penned essays for Gorky catalogues published by Gagosian.

Gagosian representatives were not immediately available for comment.

Interestingly, Pace also shows the work of the late Roberto Matta, the painter who infamously had an affair with Gorky's wife.

Tour: ArtWalk Chelsea: David Zwirner, Gagosian and Gladstone
The American Federation for the Arts takes visitors on a tour of three exhibitions of three very different artists in Chelsea--Doug Wheeler, Damien Hirst and Shirin Neshat. --Michael H. Miller
Meet at David Zwirner, 519 West 19th Street, New York, 4–6 p.m., $25 for AFA members, $35 for non-members.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9

Opening: "Happenings" at the Pace Gallery
Over 300 photographs document performance pieces from the movement, featuring work by Jim Dine, Simone Forti, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman. Sounds like a stellar tribute to a too-short movement, and you never know, someone may stage a be-in right at the opening. --Dan Duray
The Pace Gallery, 534 West 25th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Xaviera Simmons: "When You're Looking at Me, You're Looking at Country" at Guild Galleries
The multi-media artist will debut and talk about her latest project, which involved giving free photographic portraits to community members at Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses, at two simultaneous locations (she'll be making appearances at both). --M.H.M.
Guild Gallery II, 119 9th Avenue, New York, 5-6:30 p.m., and Hudson Guild Gallery, 441 West 26th Street, New York, 6-7:30 p.m.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10

Opening: Per-Oskar Leu, "Crisis and Critique," at Triple Canopy
Norwegian artist Per-Oskar Leu makes his U.S. debut with this hybrid video-sculpture installation, which includes a film that splices together iconic trial scenes from films like Fritz Lang's M (1931) and Hangmen Also Die! (1943). A clue to the goings-on here is provided in a poster that has been printed for the 10-day exhibition: an English translation of Otto Freundlich's 1931 essay "The Artist and the Economic Crisis."
Triple Canopy, 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, 7–9 p.m.

Opening: Juergen Teller at Lehmann Maupin
The photographer shows photos from three series, seductive pictures of Kristen McMenamy and Vivienne Westwood, then "Keys to the House," which features his home in Suffolk, and then another series of portraits featuring Vivienne Westwood, William Eggleston and Teller's own son. --D.D.
Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, New York 6-8 p.m.

Screening and Talk: Beatrix Ruf on Rosemarie Trockel at The Artist's Institute
Kunsthalle Zurich director Beatrix Ruf, who organized a Trockel show back in 2010, will screen and discuss the artist's Wollfilm (1992)—that's Wool Film—in which the a female torso is slowly exposed as the thread of a sweater is pulled. Space is limited, so arrive early to guarantee a seat. --A.R.
The Artist's Institute, 163 Eldridge Street, New York, 7 p.m.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 11

Opening: André Saraiva, "Love Letters" at Half Gallery
The baron of Le Baron and graffiti artist extraordinaire offers his first solo New York show, featuring love notes and French letter boxes that he used to paint in Paris. Not to be missed. --D.D.
Half Gallery, 208 Forsyth Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Performance: Gerald Ferguson, "Choral Reading," at Canada
The late Canadian conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson's Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged By Word Length (1972) will be presented by a chorus of 26 performers, one for each letter of the alphabet. This is also a last chance to see Canada's show of the artist's paintings—his first in 40 years in New York—before it closes on Sunday. --A.R.
Canada, 55 Chrystie Street, New York, 7 p.m.

Performance: Clifford Owens: Anthology Performance at MoMA PS1
As part of the artist's first major museum retrospective, Mr. Owens will perform scores by Rico Gatson, Lyle Ashton Harris, Lorraine O'Grady and Kara Walker. --M.H.M.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, 3 p.m.

Roberto Matta's 1982 "Architecture du temps (un point sait tout)."

“This is a man who never stopped laughing, who always spoke in riddles, who identified with the joker, and is always actively engaging us with that perplexity, the idea of paradox in paintings,” biographer Justin Spring proclaimed of artist Roberto Matta at Pace Gallery’s West 25th Street branch last week. He added, “This is a starting point, rather than a definitive moment for Matta.”

This starting point was a panel discussion tied to the exhibition “Matta: A Centennial Celebration,” which runs through Saturday, and Mr. Spring was sitting under the artist's gigantic black and white painting Architecture du temps (un point sait tout), which resembles a wavy, Abstract Expressionist take on outward-moving cartoon machinery. (Pace just sent over a video that they recorded of the event, if you would like to see it all.)

Mr. Spring, who penned an essay for the show's catalogue, was joined by an impressive roster of experts: Federica Matta, the artist’s eldest daughter; Elizabeth Smith, the former curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and critics Donald Kuspit and critic Martica Sawin. The crowd was a mix of middle-aged, elderly professionals, arty New England types, interspersed with what appeared to be Wall Street denizens--a nice haul.

Though Matta was voted one of the 10 greatest living painters by a jury of 100 art-world luminaries back in the 1970s, panelists complained that his star has since dimmed in comparison to many of his contemporaries. The boyish-faced, silver-haired Mr. Spring touted him as “the last great Surrealist--he brings Surrealism all the way through Abstract Expressionism and out the other end.”

Mr. Kuspit (who authored the timely essay "The Greatness of Matta") credited the man with “revolutioniz[ing] perspective” and defended Surrealist ringleader Andre Breton’s assertion that “non-figurative line placed [Matta] in advance of other painters.” In Mr. Kuspit’s estimation, Matta’s lack of recognition is due to a “narrow-minded” view of contemporary art perpetrated by the late critic--and dependable whipping boy--Clement Greenberg.  Both scholars won applause.

Could Matta, the man, be partially to blame for the descent of his legacy? Panelists described Matta as something of a charming little rascal, though some may recall that, in the 1940s, he had an affair with the wife of his friend Arshile Gorky, who soon after committed suicide. (New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl once described Matta as a “Surrealist, womanizer, and not to put too fine a point on it, jerk.”)

Mr. Spring and Ms. Sawin provided a bit of biography for the uninitiated: born in Chile in 1911 and trained as an architect, Matta met Salvador Dali and Breton in the 1930s and officially aligned himself with Surrealism. In Paris, he befriended Marcel Duchamp and Yves Tanguy. In the United States in the 1940s, he had a significant influence on Abstract Expressionists Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock; at one point, Matta was so close to Gorky that their drawings were nearly indistinguishable. Though his work had expressionist qualities, Matta stuck with Surrealist representation until the end. Remembered for his ferocious libido, he had four wives and six children. He died in 2002.

Federica Matta, a youthful-looking, black-velvet-attired woman, shared that her father--to whom she referred simply as “Matta”--sought to serve as a common cypher for the collective unconscious. “[Matta felt that] the human condition is unbearable,” she said, recalling his desire to "communicate torture."

“I remember him speaking and putting himself in that state, to represent the unbearable,” she said. “[He felt that] whatever reality is unbearable, [you] can transform by saying it and showing it.”  Which is perhaps part of the reason Matta never aligned completely with Abstract Expressionism, many panelists agreed: he felt that representational forms were essential to that kind of communication.

“The big thing of Matta is that we are all human,” said Ms. Matta later, adding a bit defiantly: “Matta didn’t care about art history.” That aside, if Pace and its panelists have their way, art history will soon care a great deal more about Matta.

Mr. Ruby. (Patrick McMullan)

Los Angeles artist Sterling Ruby, who first showed with Pace Gallery about two years ago and had been positioned in some press coverage as something of a cornerstone of its contemporary program, is no longer with the gallery.

"Sterling Ruby is their new base on which to build," art adviser Allan Schwartzman told the WSJ magazine back in August.

Industry newsletter The Baer Faxt broke the news today, and Pace Gallery's Andrea Glimcher confirmed that the two parties have "parted company."