DALE CHIHULY: NEW WORK
Marlborough Gallery

At a certain point in his career, Dale Chihuly was a pioneer. He approached the medium of glass as a sculptor and painter, rather than as a craftsperson, creating exciting works of art that followed the trail previously blazed by American art-glass maestro Louis Comfort Tiffany. But that was then, this is now, and his current exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, “Dale Chihuly: New Work,” makes it clear he has stumbled off the trail. He long ago settled into a comfort zone, satisfied to produce the same pieces over and over with slight variations. Now, he is just knocking himself off.

And the 32 new pieces in this exhibition are just more of the same. What is different this time around is Mr. Chihuly’s newfound obsession with the color black, which he uses as the base for almost every piece in the show. Unfortunately, this abundance of black serves more to heighten a morguelike atmosphere than it does to offset Mr. Chihuly’s often-electric palette.

Included in the exhibition at Marlborough are his trademark stacked baskets, which now feel slack and too unconsidered. His textile-inspired cylinders — created by drawing a warp and weft across the surface with hot, thread-like glass — were handsome 20 years ago and are still handsome here. There is the obligatory cone-shaped tower of snaky glass arms, a form Mr. Chihuly repeatedly uses to create those ubiquitous chandeliers found in many museum entrances. Most problematic are the Fiori groupings, truncated generic rods of curving glass that fail to reference nature as Mr. Chihuly seems to have desired.

One nice surprise was Mr. Chihuly’s “Lime Green Polyvitro Tower” (2006), a large cast-plastic sculpture related to his intriguing earlier experiments with neon and ice. It was displayed outside in the sculpture court, rising like a column of rock crystal, glowing with a beautiful, eerie self-confidence.

— Brice Brown

Until October 14th (40 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-541-4900).

SARAH MORRIS: ROBERT TOWNE
Lever House

In the history of abstract painting, few artists have ever been given a larger canvas than Sarah Morris, who has just laid siege to the lobby and courtyard of Lever House, that quintessential icon of Midtown modernism. Completed by Gordon Bunshaft, of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, in 1952, its firstfloor ceiling has been entirely covered in relentlessly angular and parti-colored geometric patterns that recall Islamic tile work.

Made possible by the Public Art Fund, this sprawling effort bears the improbable title, “Robert Towne,” after the screenwriter of such 1970s classics as “Chinatown” and “Shampoo.” According to the brochure that accompanies the work, Ms. Morris sees him as “an elliptical figure,” whose films are marked by moral ambivalence. That, as I need hardly tell you, is considered a good thing.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Ms. Morris’s lobby. Strange to say, her intervention does not seem at all out of place in this setting, recalling as it does the sort of drab, second-tier art — necessarily abstract — that midcentury corporations favored for their lobbies. That and the work’s indeterminate status between fine art and ornament produce in the viewer a powerful feeling of tedium.

It is not helped, indeed, it is aggravated, by the almost cynical attempt to inject interest and contemporaneity into her weak forms through a heavy dollop of what used to be called relevance. Thus, to quote once more from the brochure, Mr. Morris’s “engagement with architecture transcends physical characteristics to focus on the ways in which buildings and urban development reflect and shape human interaction and the global flow of power.”

Thank God for that clarification. Otherwise we would have no way of knowing what Ms. Morris was up to. For all the world, it looked as if she were serving the corporate culture, rather than “interrogating” it, like the good postmodernist she is.

— James Gardner

Until December 3 (Park Avenue between 53rd and 54th streets).

TELLING TALES: CONTEMPORARY WOMEN CARTOONISTS
Adam Baumgold Gallery

The aesthetic of cartoons — and their more technological offspring, video games — has now infiltrated the work of at least three generations of artists. Even though the line demarcating high and low art has long ago been thrown out the window, and most contemporary galleries now regularly display cartoon-influenced work, rarely do we see shows devoted exclusively to cartoons. Thankfully, Adam Baumgold Gallery, in “Telling Tales: Contemporary Women Cartoonists,” dedicates an entire exhibition to this eye-popping medium.

By focusing only on female cartoonists, curator Dan Nadel demonstrates how these artists have flourished within a notoriously male-dominated genre, and have probably been making better cartoons all along. Women are the protagonists here, and what unfolds in the gallery are works that feel built around a distinctly female — but not necessarily feminine — point of view. The exhibit also functions as a counterpoint to the heavily male “Masters of American Comics,” a two-part exhibit on view at the Jewish Museum and the Newark Museum.

Narrative structures are not conveyed through straightforward linearity so much as they are embedded in the abstraction of their design. Julie Doucet induces claustrophobia by cramming dense, richly textured scenes into tiny squares, amplifying her manic narratives of life in New York City. Similarly, Debbie Dreschler reinforces the awe of a starry night by bombarding the senses with vivid color and pattern. And Jessica Ciocci’s cartoons are virtually wordless, relying on clunky clusters of psychedelic creatures to relay their bizarre humor.

Because the work in “Telling Tales” extends across four decades — and counts 17 different artists — influences and stylistic evolutions can be traced. The jangly, nervous work of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, wife of underground comics superstar Robert Crumb, is echoed in Dori Seda’s scratchy line. Interestingly, some of the younger cartoonists seem to be looking beyond the genre for influences, signaling a growth within the medium. Anke Feuchtenberger, Reneé French, and Jenni Rope make work drawn without using the standard image-in-a-box format; their figures are blurred and spread across the page like formally composed paintings.

— Brice Brown

Until October 14 (74 E. 79th St., between Park and Madison avenues, 212-861-7338).

ALICE DALTON BROWN: BARNS 1965–1976
Fischbach Gallery

The barns in these 19 works on paper by Alice Dalton Brown are not notable for their chipped wood, peeling paint, or clods of dirt. Light does not gleam off windowpanes; there are no metal bars with alternating strips of sheen and rust. This is an art of archetypes, not particularities, and only the most fundamental forms are described. In this simplified world, the sturdy red-roofed barn and its trusty sidekick, the slender, white silo, have many faces — walls, slanted roofs, the curves of the silo — but all are mild abstractions, blocks of solid color interrupted only by the play of sunlight and shadow.

One reason for this lack of detail is that, with three exceptions (not coincidentally the least impressive pieces on display), these works were made after Ms. Dalton Brown left the rural upstate farmland depicted in her art to settle in New York City. With their small format and simple compositions, the pieces have a plein-air feel, but each was rendered in the studio using photographic collages and the filters of artistic sensibility and memory.

Overall the work has a warm intimate feel, while simultaneously imparting to its subject a quiet iconic aura. From image to image, the subject never changes, though the artist employs several mediums — watercolor, craypas, oil pastel, gouache, ink, and conté crayon — and constantly shifts perspective. “Mary’s Sunlit Barn” (1974) presents a seemingly improbable two-toned barn, in which a thick auburn band runs from the ground to the peak of the roof, separating two sections of sun-baked yellow. The mystery of the stripe is solved when the viewer spots the barely perceptible white sliver hemming the left-hand side of the painting; it is the edge of an adjacent silo, which casts a shadow.

While this exhibition testifies to the way a skillful artist can mine a single subject for an endless variety of effects and possibilities, Ms. Dalton Brown is at her best in the images that approach the barns straight on with impassioned clarity. Standouts include the lyrical watercolors “Open Silo Group” (1976) and “Façade” (1973) and the sharper-edged gouache “Independence” (1974). In the latter work, two imposing silos dominate a dense cluster of farm structures. In this congested composition, the only open space is the small vertical pillar between the towers, a patch of pale blue sky that, hard-earned and hopeful, illuminates the suggestion of the painting’s title.

— David Grosz

Until October 8 (210 Eleventh Ave., between 24th and 25th streets, 212-759-2345).

ANDY WARHOL: MAO
L&M Arts

Mao Zedong’s visage marked a fusion of Andy Warhol’s three iconographic obsessions: celebrity, ubiquity, and disaster.

L&M’s presentation of 19 Mao paintings, relatively small variants compared to the often gargantuan, billboard-scaled works in this series often found in museums, is drawn from private collections, and is the first display in New York to focus exclusively on the motif since they were first unveiled in the early 1970s. An early show in Paris displayed the original, giant versions of the image jammed together and placed on specially designed Mao wallpaper. Still in production, the paper serves as the endpapers of L&M’s catalogue, designed in pastiche of Mao’s little red book. The uptown gallery acts with the spirit of Warhol by making a slick joke out of the cultural revolution. But we now know a lot more about Mao’s legacy than Warhol did, making artistic entertainment based on mass slaughter, cultural genocide, and societal stultification a sick joke indeed.

In his Mao series, Warhol introduced an overt painterliness that had been absent in his classic 1960s stenciled Pop art, where flat paint in emulation of cheap mass production printing was his trademark. The Mao paintings combine a stencil of the same official image of the dictator — the one placed at Tiananmen Square and throughout China during the Cultural Revolution — with variant gestural brushstrokes and impastoed paint. Exploiting popular fascination with China after Nixon’s historic visit in 1972, they prompted renewed attention to Warhol’s studio practice after a decade of filmmaking and commissioned portraits.

The newfound painterliness, however, was no more a submission to abstract expressionism than his factory-line production of Chairman Mao images was to Marxist-Leninism. It was, in fact, a cynical gesture of ideological aloofness. Each painting in this show is unique, but the lexicon of gestures and types of color coordination are so obvious that the supposed individualistic background are as banal as the stenciled visage. Variants — in degrees of washiness, thickness, where the colors register or don’t register in relation to the stencil, the temperatures of the colors, and whether they clash or harmonize — are vehemently gratuitous.

Warhol’s mock-expressiveness in garish color pokes fun at any notion of paint as a vehicle for individual emotion, as surely as Roy Lichtenstein’s deconstruction of a de Kooning brushstroke. The Mao paintings can be read as his way of saying that our individualism results in standardization as surely as Communism’s collective ideals.

— David Cohen

Until October 7 (45 E. 78th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-861-0020).