Inspired by art history and contemporary fashion, LA-based oil painter Jesse Mockrin offers glimpses of androgynous creatures with long necks, doll-like features and strangely bone-less fingers. (At Nathalie Karg Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 6th).
Polish painter Paulina Olowska’s series of female figures suggest strong personalities; this shadowy character is based on gardener Valerie Finnis, who confessed to having once put plants before people. (At Metro Pictures in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
Monks levitate in an intense ball game imagined by German artist Werner Buttner. Elsewhere, sausages fall from the sky and a dinosaur skeleton in a red hat bounds through a barren landscape in a series of paintings that combine the banal and the unusual to striking effect. (At Chelsea’s Marlborough Gallery through Dec 3rd).
Geometric steel beams and panels dangle a pair of organic shapes in Mark di Suvero’s 2015 sculpture ‘The Cave’ at Paula Cooper Gallery, suggesting a manmade structure designed to offer up a natural form for our consideration. (In Chelsea through Dec 10th).
An LED lighting strip turns Miguel Abreu Gallery an eerie green color, illuminating a puddle of synthetic liquid based on a pigment found in rainforest worms. Accompanied by a soundtrack of Amazon jungle noise played backwards, this installation by young Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz creates a surprisingly atmospheric faux-natural environment on the Lower East Side. (Through Dec 22nd).
