http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/design/what-to-see-in-new-york-galleries-this-week.html 2016-10-13 23:24:29 What to See in New York Galleries This Week Charles LeDray, Lillian Schwartz, Hans-Peter Feldmann and a group of artists whose works are based on Fritz Lang’s film “Scarlet Street” are among the new exhibitions. === Craig F. Starr Gallery Charles LeDray’s sculptures are unusually small-scaled, but they are also weighty with hard-to-pin-down emotions and meanings. For a labor-intensive installation called “Throwing Shadows,” he made 1,400 hand-thrown, inch-or-so-high ceramic pots over a period of eight years. The result, Mortality and the passage of personal and historical time are all preoccupations of Mr. LeDray’s art. From 1991 comes a handmade, doll-size Victorian mourning coat right down to its minute black buttons. On view nearby is a selection of detached, normal-size buttons, all of which are carved from human bone, as are the delicate linked florets in a sculpture called The title of that piece is not innocently poetic; it’s also a slang term for a type of group sex. And confusions over sexual identity, first stirred up in childhood, along with adult-imposed gender branding meant to suppress such feelings, are recurrent themes in Mr. LeDray’s art. A tiny tweed suit carries an emphatic embroidered label: “Mister Man.” A rugged-looking mini-overcoat bursts open to reveal, like a kind of sartorial subconscious, a cornucopia of high-color dresses and ties. For children, toys can give a sense of control over reality, a way to order it and play with it, have it make sense. Art, particularly the art of the miniature, can do the same for adults. It’s nice that the Craig F. Starr show coincides with the HOLLAND COTTER Magenta Plains That Lillian Schwartz is having her first New York solo gallery show at the age of 89 and that one of her works is on the cover of Artforum magazine this month says more about the art world than it does about Ms. Schwartz. A member of the group Experiments in Art and Technology and an artist embedded for three decades at Bell Labs, Ms. Schwartz has long been known as a digital innovator. This show, with works made from 1968 to 2013, expands that to the gallery realm. Despite her use of image-editing software, microfilm plotters and light pens, Ms. Schwartz’s work is grounded in traditional techniques. The drawings on graph paper here echo other artists’ longstanding application of the grid as a structuring device, but Ms. Schwartz’s drawings were used as actual schematics for computer programming. A terrific, roughly hourlong reel of 12 films and videos shows Ms. Schwartz’s debt to abstract painting, and a book written with her son, Laurens, “The Computer Artist’s Handbook” (1992), makes references to van Gogh, Vermeer and Picasso. The works here have distinctly 20th-century hallmarks. Films and videos are filled with flashes and explosions that resemble warfare — and, of course, video games. Ms. Schwartz, who spent time in Japan after MARTHA SCHWENDENER Lucien Terras Fritz Lang’s movie “Scarlet Street” (1945) is about a naïve Sunday painter’s murderous encounter with a mercenary streetwalker. It also works as an art-world allegory, an almost comically melodramatic indictment of everyone involved — deluded artist, reptilian dealer and callous public alike. For a small group show at Lucien Terras, 10 artists were asked to make new work inspired by this vortex of recrimination. Some fended off the ensuing self-consciousness and existential dread with humor. Emily Mae Smith’s exuberantly strange oil painting But Ander Mikalson chose the cheerfully futile psychoanalytic route, numbering and labeling her varieties of discomfort as 50 gouache and pastel drawings of the movie’s passing shadows, as if for some study of emptiness endlessly deferred. WILL HEINRICH 303 Gallery Last month, I got to see one of the wonders of the art world: Lina Bo Bardi’s exhibition design for the old master collection at the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil. In the display of works by Bo Bardi (1914-1992), the paintings are mounted on glass panes fixed to concrete bases rather than hung on the walls, creating a democratic field of pictures rather than a showcase of masterpieces. Bo Bardi’s exhibition design, developed from 1957 to 1968, served as a primary inspiration for Here, Mr. Feldmann has brought together several genres of painting — seascapes, portraits and female nudes — either bought at auction or, in the case of an Ingres bather, newly commissioned as a copy, and suspended the canvases by wires from the ceiling. The pleasure is in seeing paintings in gilded frames floating in space, like an analogue version of a Google search, with its multiple images and erratic results, as well as copies of famous paintings nestled alongside lesser-known works. On the walls are a series of landscape paintings hung together so that their horizons create an unbroken line; a copy of Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” (1538) repainted with bikini suntan lines; and old-master-type portraits of children with red clown noses. Some of the jokes are rimshot one-liners that don’t carry much weight. But over all, the show is sympathetic with Bo Bardi’s radical design, which suggested that pictures are made and remade in the process of displaying them — sometimes with the help of artists who are simultaneously respectful and irreverent of art history. MARTHA SCHWENDENER