ALEXANDER CALDER: GOUACHES 1942–1976
PaceWildenstein

Alexander Calder’s most compelling works — his mobiles, stabiles, and wire sculptures — suggest motion even when they’re not actually moving. This spacious installation at PaceWildenstein provides an intriguing overview of another facet of his work, the gouaches that he produced between 1942 and his death in 1976.

The earliest works impress the most. Two 1942 ink drawings (untitled, like almost every piece here) render ambiguous forms — a starfish-like shape, bulbous pinnacles — with stark, sturdy modeling. Several gouaches from 1947 recall Miró, with biomorphic forms cavorting on blended background hues. Their forms sometimes accumulate a bit mechanically, but in other cases deliciously unfold.One composition progresses from a dominating sun-like orb to hovering flowery shapes and a black squiggle snaking up the margin, and each impulse seems indispensable to the whole.

The artist’s technique becomes looser in works from the 1960s, as washes flood across sections of his designs, leaving ragged featherings of hue. Mr. Calder always relied on serendipitous, whimsical allusions to the real, but these washes assert instead their own raw materiality. More in keeping with Mr. Calder’s usual mock-savageness is a 1971 work with two primitively modeled figures, gesturing wildly before a setting sun; their boisterousness is more theatrical than threatening.

In gouaches from the 1970s, circles, spirals, and pyramids orbit each other in eye-popping colors. These designs have a spirited cartooniness, but not always a great deal of pictorial weight. Mr. Calder never paced elements with the discipline of Arp or Miró, and in terms of formal tensions some of these fall particularly short.

The biggest surprise here is a selection of several dozen ink sketches produced for a 1921 textbook on drawing. With spry brushstrokes, Mr. Calder sums up the gestures of goats, cats, monkeys, and other animals, capturing with particular skill the backward glance of chicken and a camel’s ruminative stare. These sketches, never before exhibited, remind us that a few well placed marks can say volumes.

— John Goodrich

Until October 21 (32 E. 57th St., between Park and Madison avenues, 212-421-3292).

JANE SOUTH
Spencer Brownstone Gallery

Jane South’s sculptures in hand-cut, folded, and painted paper and other materials are art’s exquisite revenge on the machine aesthetic. Mind-boggling in their craft intensity and yet irresistible eye candy, their nutty delight soothes as it unsettles.

“Untitled (Red Square)” (2006) is a typical assemblage. A 5-foot by 6-foot wall-mounted relief, around a foot deep, it brings together dozens of what look like cages, grilles, fans, vents, and cogs. The individual machines seem functional, but jumbled together they become meaningless, if not surreal. Their distinctly 19th-century look evokes mixed associations of sometime monotonous, back-breaking labor and nostalgia for the quaint technology of yesteryear.But then, don’t Satanic mills make great lofts?

The incredible delicacy with which metal industrial paraphernalia is rendered in Ms. South’s whimsical sculpture is an almost laugh-out-loud conceit.You look with trepidation, sensing that breath alone might disturb or scatter these exquisitely thin strips of paper or balsa wood.This appeal to Victoriana recalls reinvention of old patent designs and trade catalogue illustrations by Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Things hitherto utilitarian take on new life in their dotage.

The structures are minutely painted, each separate machine [deletion] in its own hues. Cranking up the absurdity a notch, the painting follows a localized gravity and single-point perspective, rather in the way of the Victorian illustrations from which they derived.An intimist scale and fanatical craft makes dollhouse fun of any sense of the massproduced and the mechanical as the seat of alienation.

— David Cohen

Until October 20 (39 Wooster St., between Grand and Canal streets, 212-334-3455).

JOSEPH KOSUTH: A LABYRINTH INTO WHICH I CAN VENTURE (A PLAY OF WORKS BY GUESTS AND FOREIGNERS)
Sean Kelly Gallery

Like so much 1960s iconoclasm, Joseph Kosuth’s best-known art has not aged well.

Early language-based Conceptual pieces like the “Art as Idea as Idea” series — blown-up photostats of dictionary definitions of words such as “abstract,” “idea,” and “define” that were meant to call attention to the tautological nature of aesthetic value — are the epitome of preposterous contemporary art.

Thankfully, Mr. Kosuth’s work has evolved over the years.While he has remained true to the linguistic investigations he inaugurated years ago, his art has moved away from cool reductive minimalism to become increasingly generous, humorous, and visually compelling. His most recent piece, an installation titled “a labyrinth into which I can venture,” after a Foucault quotation, is a rich, wildly ambitious self-curated quasi-retrospective that contains 30-odd pieces spanning his career.

The early tautologies are here.But intentionally farcical pieces are also present. “The Sublime II” (2006), for example, uses two sandblasted stone plaques evoking the 10 commandments to tease the idea of artistic sublime.

The true strength of “labyrinth,” however, is less the individual works than the installation as a whole. Temporary black walls are silkscreened with hundreds of aphorisms from the great thinkers of Western literature — Shakespeare, Freud, Kafka, Derrida, Milton, and Musil, to name a few — creating the impression of an overexcited curator gone mad. Extended quotations run along the top and bottom of every wall, a sort of Theseus’s thread for viewers lost in the tangle of thought and image. Three series of works by Mr. Kosuth — plinths juxtaposing excerpts of Voltaire and Locke, framed pages from a book, and “thought fragments” in neon — also recur throughout the space, helping to bind its disparate parts together.

Graduate students will discover untold wealth here, a dense structure of Borgesian self-reference and Talmudic complexity. But the true pleasure of the work is of a simpler sort. With its seemingly endless progression of temporary black surfaces laced with laconic language art and philosophical provocations, disorienting dead ends, and dark corners lit by buzzing neon, this installation is good old-fashioned visual experience. Over the years, Mr. Kosuth has not only mellowed; he’s also learned how to put on a pretty good show.

— David Grosz

Until October 28 (528 W. 29th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-239-1181).