http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/arts/design/animal-mineral-vegetable.html 2014-12-12 02:12:50 ‘Animal Mineral Vegetable’ This group show explores the gap between painting and sculpture. === A familiar 1970s aura hangs over this show of six artists, without dampening its liveliness. Unidentifiable objects — as the title implies — seem to be a goal, along with further adventures in the densely populated gap between painting and sculpture. Dianna Molzan wittily elucidates painting, alternately surrounding traditional abstraction with a pillowy frame or winnowing it down to a thin rectangle of copper embellished with oxidized fingerprints. For “Five Long Milliseconds,,” Nina Canell dips five thick wood posts in the drippy pink “paint” of mastic gum, creating an eerie sense of something small enlarged. Giuseppe Gabellone’s small bronze tablets creased with vertical lines are appealing, but might almost date from the 1950s. His expanse of rumpled greenish velvet on the floor leans heavily on its title, “Verde Acido,” to evoke a flood of noxious liquid. Leonor Antunes’s “Anni #13,” a delicate hanging grid of brass wire and tubes, reads as a beautiful, if tame, update on Anni Albers’s Bauhaus tapestries. And Navid Nuur displays two evocative sculptures: seven neon tubes dangling from the ceiling by electrical cords form a makeshift geometry that has the air of a discarded string puppet, while a sculpted clay shape on an old ironing board conjures the mysterious land formation that haunts Richard Dreyfuss’s character in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Erika Verzutti, who made a wan impression in the last Carnegie International, shines here with two bronze wall reliefs that use actual natural forms (ostrich eggs) or suggest them (a melonlike ovoid that may also be a painting). For the delightful “Lapis,” Ms. Verzutti assembles bronze casts of jackfruit dabbed with blue paint into a Brancusi-like column.