Put together by long-standing gallerist Nicole Klagsbrun, whose project space in Chelsea perfectly holds the exhibition’s efforts, the show communicates a shared valuation of figurative art, as well as attempts to make it new. The artists involved—ranging from Giacometti, Matter (Giacometti's brilliant photographer), and more contemporary artists such as the late Jonathan Silver, and Matthew Monahan )based in Los Angeles, but educated here at Cooper Union)—work off of modernism but interpret in their own fashion.

If we regard the works individually, we are struck by the piece-by-piece autonomy of the art. Each of the works, which all receive the name Not Yet Titled, has its own reason for being, while their large scale invests them with an aura of self-reflexive importance.

Michael Eade is an American artist showing at Echo He’s Fou Gallery, located in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The artists shown at He’s gallery are mostly from Mainland China, reflecting her background, but the gallerist also shows non-Chinese artists, and Eade is one of them.

Postwar Women concentrates on the work of women who attended the Art Students League, emphasizing art made between 1945 and 1965 and including pieces created before and after those periods. The League has been particularly open to women, presenting them with the chance to study beginning in the middle of the 19th century (it opened in 1875).

Hearne Pardee maintains a double life: one in the suburbs of Davis, California, where he teaches in the university’s fine arts department and another in New York City, where he keeps a studio on the edge of Harlem and maintains contacts in the city’s art world.

Wang Yan Cheng offers a large show of paintings at Acquavella Galleries, where his Abstract Expressionist canvases appear very much like a slightly foreign version of an idiom originated and championed in New York.

As I write, the nonagenarian artist Alex Katz, long a mainstay of downtown painting, is involved into two major shows: the one he has curated at Peter Freeman’s gallery and the other is an extraordinary show of recent work at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem. The first exhibition establishes him, very quickly, as a curator of repute, while the second makes it clear that Katz is moving into a territory wholly his own, particularly in the wonderful scenic studies that pass on, completely successfully, his love of nature.

Youngerman's painting is characterized by hard edges and bright colors; the current painted collages on view are no exception. The art’s hard-edge geometry belongs to a tradition of working in the 1940s and ’50s, albeit a smaller one than the dominant abstract expressionism of the time.

This group show features the work of women indigenous artists who belong to the artistic collective Tjala Arts, located in south Australia in Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, the full name of the acronym “APY” used in the title of the exhibition.

Double Existence presents works on paper and sculpture that offers the "double" perspective of someone coming from a culture very different from the one he lives and works in now; it may also be true that "double existence" refers to the double life—internal and external—we experience during the course of our existence.

Vicky Colombet’s exhibition, Paintings from 2007 – 2018, is serving as a prelude to a major exhibition that will take place at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris in March 2020, for which Colombet will develop a visual dialogue with the great artist. Colombet, a painter of achieved subtlety, is offering a series of pure landscapes—a departure from her earlier work, which suggested stony outcrops and other mountainous depictions.

In these two shows gallery visitors have the opportunity to view two very different, but very gifted artists.

Miguel Trelles’s paintings are an amalgam of strikingly different cultures and traditions. Inevitably, the work concerns the borrowing of other painting histories. The subject matter is the Caribbean landscape and the indigenous culture of Trelles’ native Puerto Rico, as well as the Chinese landscape legacy of mountains, streams, and trees.

The fourteen works on view are paintings with small videos projected onto them. The paintings are of interiors, usually a bit dark and slightly melancholic in atmosphere, that are illuminated by bright windows with curtains.

Petah Coyne, now entering maturity as an artist, is anything but waning in her art. Her current show in Galerie Lelong & Co. is an outstanding compilation of pieces that incorporate taxidermied birds, which are pinned to or inserted into what are usually decorative elements or large masses of material—including waxed flowers and inchoate bodies of cloth fabric. Helped by a team of collaborators, Coyne continues to address the large, imaginative themes of her career.

Analia Segal is a New York-based artist, but before she arrived in the States nearly twenty years ago, her life in Argentina was under the cloud of the Argentinian dictator, Jorge Rafael Videla, who took power when Segal was only seven years old. It was a time of extraordinary violence, and although the artist suffered no direct harm herself, she was marked by the general sense of disorder and genuine mayhem taking place. This deep sense of unease surfaces in, Analia Segal: contra la pared, which in Spanish means “against the wall” or “cornered.&rdquo.

Clarence Schmidt, remarkable poet of homespun constructions, was raised in Astoria, Queens, but made his way to the Woodstock area in the late 1930s. Trained as a mason, he acquired land on which he would build a remarkable house, alive with scores of windows.

A consortium of five New York galleries have mostly reproduced a French museum show with the same name—The Surface of the East Coast—held in Nice in the summer of 2017. Some twenty-two of the twenty-four artists in its European version are offered on our side of the Atlantic; the purpose of the exhibition, curated by Marie Maertens, was to pair artists from the late 1960s in France, who belonged to the Supports/Surfaces movement active at the time—its participants wanted to meld Marxist and Freudian thought, along with contemporary American criticism—with abstraction.

Goodman, Vickerilla, and Tenaglia all demonstrate a thorough knowledge of modernism and its penchants for abstraction, but they are not constrained by the past. All three are excellent artists dedicated to visual change.

Conceptual artist Jesse Chun plays with the social attributes and political implications of the English language.

Nanette Carter’s first solo show at Skoto Gallery, An Act of Balance, comprises abstract paintings made with oil paints, oil sticks, and pencil on collaged mylar. Educated at Oberlin College and Pratt Institute (where she has been teaching for some time) Carter has developed a painting style that consists of abstract designs and effects superimposed on top of each other in ways that emphasize chance. The overall form of each work is deliberately eccentric; little regularity is found on the outside edges, which curve and veer and jut out, emphasizing idiosyncratic form over tightly considered composition.

James Castle was deaf artist who lived much of his life on subsistence farms in rural Idaho and neither pursued nor received recognition for his remarkable art during his lifetime. Now recognized as a master—the subject of major shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008 and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2011—Castle made small, intimate works of art composed of soot and spit, materials he turned into agents of prodigious, if deeply personal, achievement.

Certainly, the drawings construct a visual world of specificity and independence. As time goes on, they may possibly be understood as efforts to sustain a cultural heritage that was not easy to keep alive.

Lin Yan, an established sculptor who has been living in New York since 1993, comes from a well-known artist family based in Beijing.

Based in New York since 1971, Mel Kendrick is best known as a sculptor, though he has consistently worked on drawings. This practice goes back a long time—the six woodblock works on exhibit date from 1992 to 1993.

Kyoung eun Kang is a Korean-born artist who took her BFA (2003) and MFA (2005) at Hong-Ik University in Seoul before coming to New York, where she received her second MFA from Parsons in 2009.

Don Van Vliet—better known as the late, great rock singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Captain Beefheart, who collaborated with the equally gifted guitarist and composer Frank Zappa in the 1970s—made visual art even as he was establishing himself as one of the most experimental and inspired musicians in rock and roll.

The exhibition is proof that—as a nonagenarian—Pearlstein continues to paint remarkably well, reasserting his decades-long stature as a major American realist.

Vincenzo Agnetti (1926 – 1981) was a major figure during the post-war period of Italian avant-garde art. A member of the artist collective that ran the gallery and journal Azimut(h), Agnetti worked with such Italian luminaries as Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni.