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Verdict: Delectable and resonant abstractions. If you have an appetite for sensuous experiences, head to Marcia Wood Gallery. Rainer Gross' paintings are scrumptious.

With a master surgeon’s touch, Fowler knifes out all the negative space around the thin, swooping arcs of his abstract pencil drawings and then combines three or more layers to achieve a fractured surface crisscrossed with the shadows cast by the tiny webs of paper. The silvery energy of these works echoes Pollock’s airy vitality, but their laborious construction results in a quieter, more mediated beauty.

Brice Brown has blown apart the rigid scheme of the sestina, the elaborate and tricky verse form invented by the 12th-century French troubadour Arnaut Daniel, to juggle vestiges of symbols (a bird, a heart, a crown, a figure eight and such) so that they produce quirky visual rhythms. Hard-edge lines and shapes inflect softer, squigglier lines and free-form structures behind them, perceived at varying depths.

Even at their most relaxed, Park's pictures at Toomey Tourell look brittle with immobility, thanks to the laborious process of their making. Beginning with a photograph, Park translates it roughly into flat shapes of which she then makes contact-paper stencils. Using the stencils, she transfers the shapes to a panel of PVCX, which resembles extra-firm foam core.

The Hunterdon Art Museum is located in a 19th Century stone building that began life as a grist mill. MoMa it’s not—but then MoMA doesn’t have a river and waterfall outside its front door, either. About an hour west of Manhattan in Clinton, New Jersey, this solid, four-story building provides an unlikely but lovely environment for contemporary art, specifically Material Color, the subject of this post. The thick walls and shuttered windows remind you of its former life, as do the wooden floors, massive beams and solid staircases. Looking up you see the remains of what was once a chute that sent materials from one floor to another. Looking out, you see the Raritan river.

The Hunterdon Art Museum is located in a 19th Century stone building that began life as a grist mill. MoMa it’s not—but then MoMA doesn’t have a river and waterfall outside its front door, either. About an hour west of Manhattan in Clinton, New Jersey, this solid, four-story building provides an unlikely but lovely environment for contemporary art, specifically Material Color, the subject of this post. The thick walls and shuttered windows remind you of its former life, as do the wooden floors, massive beams and solid staircases. Looking up you see the remains of what was once a chute that sent materials from one floor to another. Looking out, you see the Raritan river.

As usual with the Drawing Center's twice-a-year exhibitions for emerging artists, this one stretches drawing almost beyond recognition. It includes traditional works like finely rendered, close views of woven fabric by Stefanie Victor and smooth, much enlarged drawings of human navels by Susan D'Amato. But a large cocoonlike structure by Monika Grzymala made of four miles of paper tape wrapped around three columns in the gallery could be taken by an innocent viewer for sculpture.

NEW YORK—Within the past year, paintings by Teo Gonzalez have entered the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C....Read Full Story

Ever wondered how many strokes it takes to make a painting? Ask Robert Sagerman Applying dollops of paint with a palette knife, he keeps track of every color and stroke of each of his dense, multicolored, abstract paintings.

By reducing landscape to simplified forms, New York-based William Steiger creates stark, cool paintings of often-archetypal subject matter. The 11 works (all 2004) in this show depict cable cars, grain elevators, a mill an aerial landscape or the Coney Island Wonder Wheel...