Berlinde De Bruyckere
Hauser & Wirth
1 March – 23 April 2011
www.hauserwirth.com

Entering the gallery for the current exhibition of sculptures and works on paper by De Bruyckere is a bit like a visit to Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum, where medical curiosities are on austere, 19th-century style display. Her twisted and lovely wax bodies dominate, but the deliberately aged pencil and watercolor drawings are exquisite depictions of muscles and their memories. The sexuality of the way the entrails and headless body parts pose for us is instantly evident and even briefly shocking. That the entire exhibition was conceived homage to Pasolini adds a layer to the human tale of suffering.

Mark Morrisroe: From This Moment On
9 March – 1 May 2011
Artists Space
www.artistsspace.org

Although many of us would have liked to have seen Morrisroe’s first major retrospective take place at a large museum, Artist’s Space deserves praise for undertaking this exhibition. Morrisroe, who died of AIDS in 1989, epitomized the late 20th-century vestiges of what was once called Bohemian and later morphed into Post-punk. The artist left behind an influential and desperately glamorous body of work. His nude self-portraits and use of the Polaroid are shown here in a comprehensive installation. Reading Morrisroe’s writings, displayed in vitrines along with other noteworthy ephemera, is a bittersweet experience. One can’t help but wonder what this prolific and unabashed artist might have gone on to create.

Jonathan Monk
24 March – 30 April 2011
Casey Kaplan Gallery
www.caseykaplangallery.com

Prankster and appropriationist’s appropriationist Monk has created a darkly humorous exhibition entitled YOUR NAME HERE. The artist channels Ed Ruscha by way of Richard Prince and poet John Ashbery. His car hoods are airbrushed with images of Los Angeles gasoline stations from the famous book by Ruscha and hung like memorial tablets or tombstones for our conceptual artist forefathers. Actual headstones in marble are carved with “YOUR NAME HERE” to underline the witty point.

Duke Riley
26 February – 9 April 2011
Magnan Metz Gallery
www.Magnanmetz.com

For this quirky and compelling exhibition entitled Two Riparian Tales of Undoing, artist and tattooist Riley creates an overstuffed history of his own kind of hobo antihero. The installation boasts humor as well as a complex socio-political theme, as the artist, we’re told, investigates among other things, a “prehistoric stream now buried beneath the streets of Cleveland [where] Itinerant workers made their home along the run from the 1870s until the 1930s when they were targeted in a series of gruesome murders and ultimately displaced by the police.” Riley uses Buffalo nickels and dark cigarettes in his collages, hanging character clothing and much falsified, found evidence. The vintage flavor of his many drawings completes the picture. The opening at this former Williamsburg, Brooklyn-based gallery, was like a post-modern hoedown for a fierce but often overlooked art world subset.

Josephine Meckseper and Gerhard Richter
23 February – 26 April 2011
Two shows at The FLAG Art Foundation
www.flagartfoundation.org

One of the most consistently intriguing exhibition spaces in New York, The FLAG Art Foundation impresses again with these two shows. Meckseper’s mirrored sculptural interventions reference discount retail and high modernist architecture in equal measure. Richter’s series of abstracts is entitled “Sinbad,” and consists of 49 diptych pairs of smeared color behind glass. These exhibitions are an essential stop for New York gallery visits this month.

Alvin Baltrop
Third Streaming, LLC
16 March – 14 May 2011
www.thirdstreaming.com
www.baltrop.org

Baltrop’s gelatin-silver prints document gay activity—longing, loneliness and living—during the romanticized era of cruising on the West Side piers. Just a few friends knew the photographer’s shadowy, poetic aesthetic during his lifetime, and this retrospective aims to present Baltrop in a broader artistic context. The images are poignant not just for the evocations of lost time and friendships, but also for their obvious belief in the immortalizing power of photography itself.

Marilyn Minter
31 March – 30 April 2011
TEAM
www.teamgal.com

Minter is well known to art worlders as a kindly teacher and whip smart social commentator who became a “star” after she had turned 50. Her warts-and-all depictions of high fashion are equal parts homage and critique. TEAM gallery has collaborated with Minter’s gallery, Salon 94, for this month’s exhibition of “Paintings from the 80s.” Minter’s enamel on aluminum porn paintings are precursors to similar works by Thomas Ruff and show her early obsessions with lips and all things girly.

Rachel Whiteread
26 March – 30 April 2011
Luhring Augustine
www.luhringaugustine.com

A Whiteread sculpture is like an appealing whiff of that which has long since disappeared but still resonates. There are those who rightly point out that her entire body of work is based on one piece (The Space Under My Chair, 1965-68) by Bruce Nauman, but Whiteread’s focus on domesticity and memory makes minimalism somehow tender. The ghostly sculptures in the current exhibition—doors and windows cast in translucent resin– are ordinary objects made imaginary.

Joseph Kosuth
30 march – 30 April 2011
Sean Kelly Gallery
www.skny.com

Conceptual master Kosuth is at it again with his text-based search for meaning and its elusive essence. We’re told that this time, the artist will be sampling Samuel Beckett and James Joyce—in white neon. This installation, Texts (Waiting for-) for Nothing’ Samuel Beckett, in play, is likely to confound Beckett scholars and provoke linguists everywhere.

Joy Curtis
4 March – 10 April 2011
Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery
www.klausgallery.com

Curtis’s columns and fragmented architectural elements appear at first to be made of marble but in fact are created from hydrocal and paper. Their fragility adds to the magic of the installation, a black and white collection of once noble flotsam from our collective past. She shows us the elegance of decay.