Empty Sparkle

Karen Kilimnik is usually starstruck. Now she has her head in the clouds.

For an artist who habitually creates elaborate installations featuring an eclectic mix of romantic history paintings and lovingly fey depictions of movie stars and pop singers, all delivered in a knowingly pathetic, illustrative hand, her show of paintings from between 2001 and 2007 is uncharacteristically austere. There is a series of cloud studies from 2001, mostly tondi; some mountain peaks, the most finely wrought of the paintings, from 2005 and 2007; three cloudscape photographs, and four paintings from 2004 that read as the sky viewed under tropical waters. The show represents a shift from history to geography, though still at a perennially puerile elementary grade.

In lieu of what have increasingly become ambitious, though never convincing or integrated, theatrical stage sets in recent exhibitions, the only props that recall her interest in installation are a chandelier, which is a trademark for this artist, and — an obscure intervention — smudges of "diamond dust," the glitter made from ground glass, stuck to the wall in selected spots.

Ms. Kilimnik is no stranger to pretentiousness, but this exhibition plumbs new depths of hubris. There is neither painterly relish nor observational acuity in these forlorn and perfunctory daubs — although, typically of this artist, there is a range of surface treatment and scale of brushstroke even within a generally deadpan paint handling. The sloppy nonchalance of Ms. Kilimnik's superstar portraits — though they lack the mystery and gravitas of those of her peer, Elizabeth Peyton — can impart a sense of adolescent infatuation. These vacuous nature studies, on the other hand, are merely dull without any iconoclasm or poignancy deriving from their ineptitude.

Until February 23 (525 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212 255 1121)