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By Andrew Russeth 5/28 4:02pm

On View

Installation view of 'Steh Pirce.' (Courtesy Reena Spaulings)

‘Seth Price: Steh Pirce’ at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

Last fall, Seth Price inaugurated Friedrich Petzel’s impressive new Chelsea space with a jam-packed show of luscious new vacuum-shaped plastic paintings, as well as huge fabric pieces resembling envelopes, fabricated by garment manufacturers. It was his fourth show with Petzel, and it confirmed Mr. Price, who is 40 this year, as one of today’s leading artists—a purveyor not only of sly conceptual gambits and ingenious theoretical writing but also appealing objects, a producer aiming for the fences. Read More

By Sarah Douglas 5/28 3:47pm

On View

'Gold with Orange Reliefs 2013.' (© Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery)

Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks, MoMA and Mnuchin

The best way to experience the array of exhibitions celebrating Ellsworth Kelly’s 90th birthday is to start downtown and work your way uptown, which is to say: begin with his most recent pieces and work backwards in time, allowing the present to foreshadow the past, playing the day like Jeopardy!, matching questions to the answers you already have. The newest pieces are at all three venues of Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea. The largest space, on West 22nd Street, has relief-like paintings and aluminum, wall-bound sculptures with slick, reflective surfaces. More exciting is a single piece displayed at the tiny, sky-lit Marks venue next door. Gold with Orange Reliefs (2013) could be a metaphor for Mr. Kelly’s career: it at once displays his continued propensity for experimentation (it’s the first time he’s worked with metallic paint) and his perpetual revisiting of previous experiments (with its two orange shapes like inverted commas, the arms of swimmers doing the crawl, on a gold ground, it is the large-scale version of the small 1962 collage displayed across from it). Read More

By Andrew Russeth 5/28 3:36pm

On View

Gideon Mendel, 'Chinta and Samundri Davi, Salempur village near Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India, August 2007,' 2007. (Courtesy the artist)

‘A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial’ at the International Center of Photography

If you have even a passing interest in photography or just contemporary visual culture generally, you must see the International Center of Photography’s fourth triennial. In the course of just 40 years, photography has gone from being a virtual nonentity in the art world to its richest medium, the subject of thrilling technological shifts and experimentation. Organized by ICP curators Joanna Lehan, Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips and Carol Squiers, the Triennial, “A Different Kind of Order,” tracks these innovations up to the present moment, offering a tightly edited selection of work by 28 artists. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 5/22 5:30pm

On View

Installation view with 'Beloved (Cairo)' (2013) by Mehretu. (Courtesy the artist Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris)

‘Julie Mehretu: Liminal Squared’ at Marian Goodman Gallery

Julie Mehretu’s new paintings feel looser, more intricate and riskier than any she has done before. Influenced by the events of the Arab Spring, the artist, who was born in 1970 in Addis-Ababa and works in New York, has again filled huge canvases with skeins upon skeins of architectural plans, city maps, darting lines and free-flowing, undulating attacks of ink that are more powerful than ever, abstractly suggesting wild rivers, treacherous mountains and bombed-out landscapes. Marks sprawl across these 13 canvases in unexpected ways, stopping far from the edge, or spilling over into unseen territory. Critics could once accuse her masterful works of looking mannered or overthought; here they’re just masterful. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 5/21 6:19pm

On View

'Siegfrid’s' (2013) by Alex Hubbard. (Courtesy the artist and Maccarone)

‘Alex Hubbard: Magical Ramón and The Five Bar Blues’ at Maccarone

The hints of melancholia and breezy bathos that have long made Alex Hubbard’s work so interesting are strongly present in his newest pieces, called “one-person portable drinking bars.” These five Kienholz-worthy stalls are each about the size of two phone booths and stocked with alcohol, complete with a working beer tap. You can saddle up to the bar with its lone chair, pour a drink and enjoy it while staring at yourself in a mirror. It’s playful and humorous—until it gets lonely. Whatever Mr. Hubbard means to get at with these boîtes—the inherently solitary nature of looking at art?—this show, his sophomore outing at Maccarone, has him bringing his typically inventive, light touch to a variety of mediums, and continuing to eschew a signature style, a refreshing stance in a city that all but demands its artists adopt a recognizable brand. Read More

By Will Heinrich 5/21 5:23pm

On View

Still from Maria Petschnig's 'Petschsniggle' (2013). (Courtesy the artist and On Stellar Rays)

‘Maria Petschnig: Petschnigs’ at On Stellar Rays

Everything in our virtual life is clean, transparent, and meaningless. But there’s a nagging disconnect between a body image that’s been catastrophically challenged and dissolved and the body itself, which hasn’t gone anywhere. We’re like children playing hide-and-seek in a house we no longer believe in. So before projecting her videos Vasistas and Petschsniggle onto the walls of On Stellar Rays, Austrian-born, New York-based artist Maria Petschnig covered those walls with hastily slapped up wood paneling and installed a drop ceiling of acoustic tiles. Read More

By Maika Pollack 5/21 4:41pm

On View

Installation view. (Courtesy Bradley Robotham/The Jewish Museum)

‘Jack Goldstein x 10,000′ at the Jewish Museum

If you’re turned off by the bombast of infinitely escalating auction prices and big-tent contemporary fairs, take refuge in the elegant first American retrospective of Jack Goldstein. Organized by Orange County Museum of Art guest curator Philipp Kaiser, and in New York by Jewish Museum Assistant curator Joanna Montoya, the show is the gloomy B-side to the relentless pop staccato of blockbuster contemporary art. Yet artists today owe much to this cult figure. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 5/14 6:08pm

On View

'Metallic Venus,' 2010–12. (© Jeff Koons/Gagosian Gallery)

‘Jeff Koons: New Paintings and Sculpture’ at Gagosian Gallery and ‘Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball’ at David Zwirner

Jeff Koons’s two-gallery blowout, his first large-scale appearance in commercial galleries in the city in 10 years and the unrivaled event of the spring art season (barring, perhaps, the Frieze Art Fair), is a roaring success, filled with feats of engineering and artistic choices that are as gleefully peculiar and perverse as any he has ever made. Mr. Koons strives to please, and he delivers. Read More