ORLY GENGER: MASSPEAK
Larissa Goldston Gallery

At the Larissa Goldston Gallery, Orly Genger has created a roomfilling installation that takes a dark turn from her previous work and explores gloomy emotional states. She is once again using nylon climbing rope, 250,000 feet of discards of varying thickness and weight. Ms. Genger hand-wove the strands into strips or mats, painted them different shades of black using a roller and spray paint, and piled them in two rooms. Specks of white, red, and blue, the original colors of the strands of rope, are visible within the piles.

Upon entering the gallery, viewers are forced to walk a thin path between two high, sloping mounds of piled rope. The lighting is dim in the gallery, and the smell of oil paint is noticeable. The overall effect is disorienting. Even the part of the floor that gallerygoers walk on is covered by layers of crocheted rope, which provides a spongy, tacky sensation.

The back room of the gallery is almost three-quarters full of ominous mounds of piled rope. The pile is highest at the back of the room. It slowly cascades downward in waves towards the doorway and spills out into the front room. If you are looking out the doorway from the back room at the arrangement of rope in the front room, the work becomes a landscape, an imaginary postdisaster scene or an oil spill. Overlapping layers of about 3 1/2 tons of rope press down on one another like prehistoric rock formations.

Ms. Genger’s new work is about the transmogrification of common materials through the use of her hands and generating nightmarish tactile sensations. The back room is the creepiest part of the installation, where the asymmetrical mound of black rope becomes animated and bloblike, a malignant sludge. We can’t make out surface details, only general contours and a terrifying sense of being subsumed into an unstoppable mass.

– Eric Gelber

Until May 5 (530 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-206-7887).

NANCY BROOKS BRODY: 2004–2007
Virgil de Voldère

In Nancy Brooks Brody’s current show, which covers the past three years of her work, she rehearses several craft-inspired riffs familiar to viewers of contemporary art. It seems practice has brought her a degree of mastery. First there are the obsessive, abstract drawings, which tend to be much more complex than they at first seem. In “Lucky Corners” (2004–06), for instance, a grid of double pencil lines — not on paper but on wood prepared with plaster — creates, through different tonalities, a hypnotic series of receding boxes or interlocking right angles. The grid continues in “What’s There” (2005), where white oil paint is applied to a wood panel to look like a stretched piece of gauze.

That gossamer note is picked up in a series of sewn works, drawings made by white stitching cotton thread through white paper. In “Sole and Crown” (2005–06), the threads describe a rectangle of swaying columns. In others, the short stitches combine to form fanning ripples or a wavy-edged rectangle. All play subtle tonal registers against the delicate tactile qualities of thread interacting with paper. Tonality and tactility also dominate the sculptural work here. As its title suggests, “Soap Stack #2” (2007) was made by stacking four worn soap bars of different sizes and colors: The top three range from cream to a whitegray, and they sit atop a small aquamarine slab. The other soap stacks explore variations on the theme. A baby blue bar capping a green bar rests atop two versions of white soap, for instance.

The one heavy sculpture sits, without a pedestal, on the floor. For “Notes on Travel #1,” the artist has split two gray rocks, slathered the insides with gesso, and reunited the broken halves. A white seam, like an ancient lava flow long hardened, defines the fissures. Like pop songs, these quiet, handcrafted performances seem vaguely familiar; yet like good pop songs, they are also catchy.

– Daniel Kunitz

Until April 28 (526 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, fourth floor).

TEA, WINE AND POETRY: Qing Dynasty Literati and Their Drinking Vessels
China Institute Gallery

The Chinese literati were an elite group of men dedicated to a refined, scholarly lifestyle based on a comprehensive appreciation of the aesthetic pursuits, such as poetry, calligraphy, painting, and ceramics. Because of their elevated social standing — and their unimpeachable opinions on all things cultural — they wielded a high level of influence over the development of artistic production.

During the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), the objects associated with the complex culture of drinking tea and wine caught the literati’s influential attention. As can be seen in the approximately 50 items on view at “Tea, Wine and Poetry,” this attention encouraged the major artists of the day to produce an array of delicate, highly crafted artworks including teapots, fans, hanging scrolls, seals, and wine ewers, all of which showcase a visually sublime — and distinctly Eastern — balance of materials, text, and drawing.

The artist-scholar Qu Yingshao was known as a master of bamboo, and his purple clay pots exude a serene calm. Laser-precise incisions representing bamboo and calligraphy puncture the surfaces, adding just a hint of needed tension. His handling of ink and brush on folded fans and scrolls produces a staccato ballet of overlapping hash marks.

Zsu Jian’s Qin-Zither shaped teapot is highly sophisticated — and shockingly modern for an artist who was active in the early 19th century. The body is a purple clay rectangle encased in handhammered pewter and inscribed with sinuous prunus branches, a poem, and the artist’s signature. A cobalt-blue ceramic spout gives an unexpected, but very pleasing, electric jolt as it breaks the surface, providing counterpoint to the dark, earthy mahogany handle looping through the opposite side.

While tea, once referred to as “the froth of the liquid jade” by Lao Tzu, has never achieved the same level of cultural infiltration here as in China — where it crossed aesthetic disciplines, promoted philosophical thought, and has even been used as currency — the objects on display do begin to provide some insight into the intricate, layered and socially complex culture of tea.

– Brice Brown

Until June 16 (125 E. 65th St., between Park and Lexington avenues, 212-744-8181).

TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ
Lehmann Maupin

The largest piece in Teresita Fernández’s new show of sculptural work (all from 2007) consists of a large pane of highly polished black fiberglass propped up by drifts of fake snow that have that cheesy, amusement-park feel. The snow establishes a cartoon lightness in “Ink Mirror (Landscape)” that seems largely at odds with the pretentious — and in this show, freefloating — reference to a Claude glass, a black-tinted convex mirror that supposedly helped artists in the 18th century paint like Claude Lorrain.

Such allusions no doubt helped Ms Fernández win approval from the committee that awarded her a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2005, but here the Claudeglass reference adds little substance or texture to what is an overly polished effort. A wall piece like “Mirror Canopy,” a dripping umbrella of droplet-like glass mirrors has a sparse, decorative appeal but ultimately does not lodge itself in the imagination. Similarly, “Longing (Double Portrait),” in which a square of the mirror droplets dispersing out into a sort of cloud is paired with an identically dispersing square of black onyx convex mirrors, longs to reflect something deeper. The all-too-neat opposition of silver and black feels thin.

Of the pieces on view, a tiered leaf-work lattice of precision-cut aluminum jutting from the wall is the most visually stimulating. Called “Vertigo (Sotto in su),” this white canopy has a mirrored surface, so that when you walk beneath it, you see your image reflected above. It has a cold beauty that is consistent with the emphasis on surface in this show. You can walk around and under these works. You can stand before them, as in “Projection Screen (Black Onyx),” a diffusing rectangle of the black glass-like mineral. But they don’t worm their way into you: They are inert, at times comely, though always lacking in depth and pulse. If one decides to manufacture pieces meant to embody some concept, the conceptual framework needs to be more solid than this and, to live, the embodied work requires blood.

– D.K.

Until April 28 (540 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-255-2923).