Our pets and how we treat them are a sign of the times, and in Joseph Jones’s latest show, at Chapter NY, intimate portraits of cats (and one dog) appear cuter than ever, thriving under contemporary conditions of attention and care.

Henri Rousseau, an artist known for his dreamlike jungle scenes and uncanny portraits of identical mustachioed men, has long fascinated art historians. Yet his life and work remain, at heart, enigmatic. A Painter’s Secrets, now on view at the Barnes Foundation, resists the impulse to decode him.

Cohen’s paintings reflect a balance between the rigor of decision-making and allowing chance to guide the work, resulting in work whose layered marks, swaths of color, and subtle shifts in depth create a luminous complexity.

Ernest Caramelle is quiet in his gestures, which are expansive in their resonance. On the top floor of Ernst Caramelle: two dots one line at the Austrian Cultural Forum, his 2007 video work, horizontal split, distills this approach.

Before art is shaped by culture, it emerges from human development. This trajectory is especially pronounced among modernist artists. How else could they so dramatically depart from conventional representation if not for a deep understanding of the fundamentals first? By that logic, how can we, as viewers, understand these works without first understanding the artists themselves? Gottlieb/Rothko: The Realist Years, on view at 125 Newbury, Pace’s Tribeca gallery, offers that very opportunity, bringing together forty-five formative works that reveal the disciplined beginnings behind the artists’ later breakthroughs.

Engaging with centuries-old iconography and esoteric traditions, Elizabeth Colomba reconfigures these established visual languages not as acts of nostalgia but as critical interventions, transforming familiar tropes into potent, subversive forms. With roots in Paris and Martinique, formal academic training, and a cinematic sensibility shaped by years working in film, Colomba inserts Black women into the historical and mythical narratives from which they have long been excluded.

Lisa Yuskavage has long occupied a polarizing position in contemporary painting, her work dismissed at times as anti-feminist, crude, or even aggressively indifferent to the expectations of taste. Her hypersexualized figures—plucked from a space between Renaissance paintings, religious iconography, and pornography—provoke discomfort, their exaggerated forms neither easily objectified nor simply categorized.

What makes Robert Rauschenberg so special (and so worthy of frequent revisitation) is that each new move he made was a foil to the last. He continuously built, adding and forming new chains of reactions that were not only groundbreaking during his time but are still relevant and timely today.

Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon’s The Map, on view at the Irish Arts Center, cartographizes the institutionalization and incarceration of women throughout Irish history. The work literally maps landscapes of oppression and resistance that have shaped women’s lives.