Tobias Madison at Francesca Pia

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Since at least 2010 Madison's derivations of other's - Genzken's florid plinths or Strau's illumination thrift - made acceptable by their visual suasion. Delivering what was desired by happily taking the mantels from the standard bearers to wrap itself made for an aberrant tension of when Madison would if ever finally take the step into characterless unoriginality seen here.

John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

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Baldessari's career spent on a dismantling mockery of art's formal givens, puppeteering its dumbified literal versions, removing the protective aura of seriousness so a skepticism could seep into it cracks, paving the way for today's boorish Pop conceptualism.
Here focused on dissonant image/text relations, including a PR that may or may not correspond the exhibition on view, leaves a viewer floundering to connect the basic formality of art: that the text relate. That we still find this Baldessarian gimmick relevant 800 exhibitions later, sometimes even comically worth it, even when unable to ascertain its intentionality, shows how strong this base impulse is ingrained.

See too : Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza , Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern , Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art

“Another Normal Love” at Barbara Gross

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In a weekend in which men's bodies exist at the fore of at least two religious holiday, it's nice a nice gesture for CAD to assert the female in its tertiary choice for religious practice.

Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner

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Tuymans performed life-support on what Richter had tortured, trying to reinject the lifeblood of photograph painting: pathos. That the corpse is only slightly warmer is part of its misery.

See too : Herbert Brandl at Barbel Grasslin

Herbert Brandl at Bärbel Grässlin

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The Germanic brushstroke. The fanned and smeared.  Brandt's earlier paintings joining Richter's always distinct two practices, abstraction and fan-brush, lead to mutual horror, revealing the lapse Richter himself couldn't even.  It's grotesque birthed from distinct characters never meant to breed has since given way to this exhibitions more normalized German-Austro-coldness, using style and deftness of brushwork as quotational and life-sucking means for its happy little waves and mountains, but no happy little trees unfortunately.

See too : Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles

Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

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The contemporary pervasiveness of gentle abstraction - the reanimation of modernism - leaves De Keyser awash in his own lineage's current genericscm, disentangled by his underdog aura, the underground, spotlight aversion "authentic": a "lifelong residence in the small East-Flanders town of Deinze."   Whereas today's re-visitation mines the signs of modernism as a conceptual rationale for its nicety, De Keyser's working from its origin instead presents its bent version, an awkwardness to its tropes, undermining its pleasantry with, when at its best, its own game, making it disobey its order, reminding us why we liked all those modernist paintings to begin with.

And see too : Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell , Ida Ekblad at Herald St. , Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx , Joanne Greenbaum at Crone , Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt

Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza

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It's important to note Zobernig's background coming from theater design. Objects which in their replicant mis-rememberance of archetypal painting instead limn its vague caricature, a consensual version, short-circuited to be art that already looks like art. Becoming stand-ins (theater sets) for the contemporary, or its "zombie" version.
In other words their extreme banality incites questioning, and exposes its stage to the skepticism wrought.
The inanity of such an operation might seem at the limits of humane interest, but Zobernig's magisterial ability to continually wrest insipid rabbits from contemporary hat irrupts a manic laughability at the depths of that hat.
The jewels in the rough here work because their showcasing of the exhibition around it proved that they were never needed to begin with.

Paul Cowan at Clifton Benevento , Margaret Lee at Team , Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori , Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM , Seven Reeds at Overduin and co.