What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week

Raphaela Simon

Through Feb. 11. Tramps and Michael Werner Gallery, 75 East Broadway, second floor, Manhattan; michaelwerner.com.

“Karo,” the New York solo debut of the talented young German painter Raphaela Simon, is an energizing twofer of art and setting. It proves that the old — in this case striped abstraction — can be made new again and that necessity remains the mother of invention for young art dealers.

The Tramps gallery is a shoestring operation run by Parinaz Mogadassi (who founded the first Tramps in London) in collaboration with the Michael Werner Gallery (her day job). It occupies a series of about 10 tiny glass-walled shops on the second floor of a mall in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Their slat-wall paneling and often strong colors (purple, green and pink) are usually unchanged, and they work well with Ms. Simon’s midsize squarish paintings. On this occasion, she explores the territory between representation and pure abstraction with compositions that mostly center on blue and white vertical stripes with bits of black. She cherry-picks ideas about simple geometries (and stripes) from Peter Halley, Frank Stella and Agnes Martin, but filters them through her own notions of wit, scale, materials and abbreviation. It is of utmost importance that her oil surfaces are layered, which gives them solidity, and that the edges of her many stripes rarely seem ruled, which gives them life.

The multispace installation is marvelous. Each little shop isolates one or two paintings, as if in their own pavilion or vitrine, with others always visible through the glass walls. Especially emblematic of Ms. Simon’s sensibility is a work installed on a purple wall (the ocher yellow vinyl floor is one of Ms. Mogadassi’s few additions). The painting’s vertical blue-and-white stripes are interrupted midway by a wider horizontal band above which the verticals resume, bend toward one another and meet. This is “The Kiss,” a kind of corporate-seeming homage to Brancusi’s famous sculpture, but a sweet one, with matching pajamas. Ms. Simon’s other compositions justify, without being too reliant on, titles like “Elephant,” “Pharaoh,” “Mole” and “Carpet,” which features a morphing blue-and-white checkerboard. The paintings’ airy serenity seems unfazed by their setting. Does this mean they might never look so good again, or that they’re now seasoned, ready for any environment fate throws at them? Either way, Ms. Simon’s paintings, in Ms. Mogadassi’s variation on the white cube, are something to see.

ROBERTA SMITH

Colette Brunschwig

Through Feb. 9. OSMOS, 50 East First Street, Manhattan; 646-559-5347.

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One of the most abiding revelations at last month’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach wasn’t from any hot-to-trot youngster, but from the 90-year-old French painter Colette Brunschwig, whose small, inscrutable abstract grisailles were at the booth of the Parisian dealer Jocelyn Wolff. Now Ms. Brunschwig is receiving her first American exhibition at OSMOS, an East Village gallery that has grown reliable for its rediscoveries of underappreciated talents.

Ms. Brunschwig was born in Le Havre in 1927. Jewish, she escaped deportation thanks to the shelter of a Catholic friend in the south of France, and later in Paris she became friendly with Emmanuel Levinas, the great philosopher of ethics in the wake of the Holocaust. As early as the 1950s, when she overlaid a slate gray board with scumbles of white and black (all her paintings are untitled), Ms. Brunschwig forswore the strategies of both figuration and gestural abstraction in favor of speechless evocations of emptiness. Soon, influenced by Chinese painting, she began to work on paper with opaque India ink, covering the surfaces with saturated zones of black and leaving hazy-edged, abraded voids in the form of trapezoids, lozenges or stalactites. In one recent work here, painted in a leporello (that is, a book whose pages are folded into one another accordion-style), calligraphic black stripes grow denser and denser from page to page, and the resultant blackout has the weight of history.

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Slowly, in shows such as “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman,” at MoMA, and “Postwar,” at the Haus der Kunst, in Munich, curators are beginning to rewrite the history of European painting after 1945 as something more than a surrender to America’s avant-garde — and to place the devastation of the Holocaust at the very center of that story. Ms. Brunschwig’s resolute, comfortless art is a critical component of that history, and it is through the very absence of images that she bears witness to the unspeakable.

JASON FARAGO

Naeem Mohaiemen

Through March 11. MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens; 718-784-2084, momaps1.org.

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One of the standout artists in last summer’s “documenta 14” exhibition, held in Athens and Kassel, Germany, was Naeem Mohaiemen. In Kassel, Mr. Mohaiemen presented a terrific three-channel video, “Two Meetings and a Funeral” (2017), about Bangladesh’s shift from socialism to Islamism in the mid-1970s. In Athens, he showed “Tripoli Cancelled” (2017), which is currently on view in the exhibition “There Is No Last Man” at MoMA PS1. (Mr. Mohaiemen was also part of a group of artists who signed a petition to protect documenta from becoming an entirely “commercial enterprise.”)

“Tripoli Cancelled” was inspired by an actual story about Mr. Mohaiemen’s father, a Bangladeshi doctor who worked in Libya and in 1977 was stranded in Athens’s Ellinikon Airport (an abandoned structure designed by Eero Saarinen that was recently used to house refugees) for nine days after leaving his passport at a preceding checkpoint. Mr. Mohaiemen’s fictional version of the tale is magically existential — like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett mixed with Julio Cortázar, threaded through the needle of colonialism and 21st-century security states.

For “Volume Eleven (Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism)” (2016), Mr. Mohaiemen digs into another interesting episode in 20th-century history: his great-uncle, the Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Ali, who wrote in support of Hitler’s Germany in the late 1930s as a way of challenging the British Empire. Displayed as a series of diptych photographs of his uncle’s writing, in a darkened room at PS1, the work highlights our own culpabilities and the possibility of falling on the “wrong” side of history. This is obviously a concern for Mr. Mohaiemen as an artist-activist. And yet he aptly shows not just how the personal is always entwined with the political, but how history veers from neat linear narratives into circular, concentric and even fantastic and unimaginable patterns and designs.

MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Yasuo Ihara

Through Jan. 21. Ulterior Gallery, 172 Attorney Street, Manhattan; 917-472-7784, ulteriorgallery.com.

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Yasuo Ihara was born in Osaka, Japan, and started out as an abstract painter. But here in New York, where he arrived in 1963 and found work as a costume designer, his practice took a tilt toward the conceptual. In 1971, he began making latex casts of household objects and preserving the casts in carefully labeled Plexiglas boxes. Ihara died in 2010. Working from a 1973 photo and a typewritten list, with advice from the artist’s daughter Mia, the gallerist Takako Tanabe has reconstructed, for its first public showing, Ihara’s extraordinary “Explanation 1,” which comprises 68 of these stacked boxes.

On their own, the latex casts make any number of different points. The paper-white, easily identified “CARTON OF EGGS,” nearly a stand-in for its subject, is pop philosophy, while “DRAWING TABLE,” crumpled unrecognizably in the bottom half of its box, is a tart memento mori. A yellowed and drooping mask of Hermes, part of the separate six-box “Explanation,” could serve as an indictment of the insularity of white art history, and an intricately bumpy cantaloupe as a way of isolating a beautiful texture from distracting color.

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All together, though, the casts constitute a symphony of magical absurdity, demonstrating both the elasticity and the uselessness of our human faculty for picking out objects and naming them — in this case in block capitals. (Not for nothing did Ms. Tanabe hang Maryam Amiryani’s tiny black-and-white painting of Jorge Luis Borges in the gallery’s office.) But they’re also a soothing reminder of the world’s supple resistance to being picked apart that way, because as soon as those separate objects are juxtaposed, they knit themselves together again into some new living whole. In “Explanation 1,” it’s a winning, wistful portrait of a man who ate his fried EGGS with toasted ITALIAN BREAD and drank his COFFEE with MILK and his SCOTCH with COCA-COLA.

WILL HEINRICH