Born in Baghdad in 1984, Sami was a teenager when he got a job painting propagandistic murals of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. After the United States–led invasion, Sami briefly worked for the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, helping recover looted artworks, before migrating to Sweden in 2007, and then to London, where he completed an MFA at Goldsmiths in 2018. Since showing at Luhring Augustine in New York and in the most recent Carnegie International, he has become known for his quietly haunting paintings. The small windows and skewed perspective of the domestic spaces in many of his works are a nod to his childhood interest in Islamic miniatures. Even in these intimate spaces, the presence of Saddam can be felt. In Infection II (2021), an image of Saddam hangs in a home. Once again, his face is cast in shadow; a spidery houseplant likewise imparts a creepy profile. It’s an unsettling image in which the prospect of violence seems to infiltrate the family home.

In Sami’s work, latent images tinted by time and trauma represent history. “The things I articulate in my artwork are memories hidden in the brain cells that are waiting for a trigger,” he told the Guardian this past March. Domestic scenes and roiling landscapes, which may nod subtly to war or sectarian strife, hover on the edge of abstraction. In A barricade against bombs … 23 Years of Night (2022), for instance, a crosshatching technique redolent of Jasper Johns materializes at a distance into two pieces of plywood protecting windows from a blast. Painted mostly on linen, these works often feel stained or rubbed raw.

The seamless transitions from abstraction to figuration in Sami’s paintings, along with various shifts in scale in their interiors, recall the unsettling and enduring imprints politics leave on everyday life. Over the painted plywood in 23 Years of Night, Sami rendered a gauzy curtain dotted with stars—the protected portal seen from inside. Bearing witness to totalitarianism and war, he seems to say, requires more than just courage. Trapped in darkness, he dreams of the sky.

The exhibition, which also includes totems cast from jackfruit and soursop, small fetishes fashioned from squash and bananas, and wall-mounted panels in bronze and aluminum that resemble slabs of cultured meat, approaches Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto” (1928) with deadpan literalism. That text, key to the development of twentieth century Brazilian art, argued that, drawing on the country’s history of ritualistic cannibalism, artists should metaphorically “cannibalize” other cultures, borrowing freely to metabolize something entirely new. Verzutti, in turn, cannibalizes the canon, transforming hallmark works of European and Brazilian art into tart feminist entrées.

Erika Verzutti, Carne Sintética [Cultured Meat], 2019, bronze and oil, 14 by 16 by 4 inches.

Verzutti’s acidic humor surfaces most clearly in “Tarsila” (2004–18), a series of small bronzes inspired by the modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral, whose work directly influenced de Andrade. In Tarsila com Novo (Tarsila with New, 2011), a phallic form inspired by Tarsila’s Sol Poente (Setting Sun, 1929) faces off with its near twin, cast from a zucchini. The later Tarsila with Koons (2015), meanwhile, places a single cast grapefruit, painted metallic blue to resemble one of Jeff Koons’s Gazing Balls, at the base of do Amaral’s flaccid column. It’s a symbolic orchiectomy of a male artist whose work fetches some of the most inflated prices on the market.

Erika Verzutti, Brasilia, 2010, bronze and acrylic, 11 13/16 by 7 by 7 inches.

Other works are similarly neutering: Batalha (Battle, 2010), for instance, piles ninety watermelons cast in concrete like impotent cannonballs. Nearby, for Cocar (Cockade, 2014), Verzutti has enlarged a rosette worn by eighteenth century military officers and fashioned it absurdly from bronze-cast bananas and paintbrushes. These works stand within view of a selection of Verzutti’s “Venuses” (2013–17), rotund stacks of concrete and bronze-cast slices of pumpkins and soursop. Resembling the Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 BCE), a paleolithic fertility fetish, they stare down stereotypes of women from the Tropics as voluptuous and fertile at a scale and density that overpowers such misogynistic tropes.

The exhibition’s title, “The Indiscipline of Sculpture,” seems like a misnomer: Verzutti is rigorous in her irreverence towards the art-historical canon. Take Achrome com biscoito (Achrome with Biscuit, 2019), her rendering of a Piero Manzoni “Achrome” (1957–62)—all-white, mixed-media relief paintings—as cookies scattered on a napkin. “Nausea is the inescapable destiny of the glutton,” Brenner wryly notes of Verzutti, though the likeliest result of the artist’s omnivorous references is something baser—and ultimately more satisfying. Manzoni famously canned his own shit, a rude metaphor for the metabolic process of artistic production. Verzutti, in turn, celebrates the shit that won’t conform to the disciplinary regime of modernism.

This show was occasioned by the launch of a two-volume book of the same title that the artist edited and published with art historian Rhea Anastas. Its pages reproduce black-and-white images of Noland’s work from her nearly forty-year career; an index of the corresponding exhibitions appears at the back of the volumes. Several brief essays by Noland, most written in the late 1980s and 1990s, grapple with some of America’s most paranoiac obsessions, from serial killers to suicide cults. Across these pages, bloodlust seems as American as apple pie. But the book contributes to an overall sense of Noland’s visual language rather than providing an index of her specific cultural referents. The artist has eschewed a lengthy press release or gallery didactics, so the exhibition, unaddressed in the book, is left open to interpretation.

Cady Noland, Untitled, 1991/1992, and cover, Cady Noland, “THE CLIP-ON METHOD,” edited by Cady Noland and Rhea Anastas, artist’s book, 2021.

The fencing at Buchholz recalls the walls that Michael Asher removed from Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974, denuding the space of its authority by exposing its inner workings. Noland has reversed the gesture, reinforcing—rather than breaking down—the perimeter, perhaps pointing to a certain carceral logic of the white cube, with its endless reproducibility and its dependence on enclosure to produce meaning. Access in a gallery is implicitly limited and largely predetermined; chain-link and Plasticade barriers are designed to physically impede movement, and their presence in an Upper East Side gallery calls to mind the art world’s penchant for exclusivity. Yet Noland’s persistent refusal to explain herself also suggests a latent exclusivity aligned with the tendencies she seems to critique. The quieter dimension of her conceptual gestures—seemingly addressed less to the state than the art institution—is accessible only to those already in the know.

More than a century after Marcel Duchamp declared a urinal a work of art, Noland’s sculptures prompt us to question whether the readymade can be successfully deployed to political ends. Without added context, her coldly manufactured objects still gesture to their origins, making it difficult to parse how she intends to alter their meaning. This approach contrasts markedly with those of a younger generation of artists, such as Park McArthur, Cameron Rowland, and Constantina Zavitsanos, whose readymades are generally accompanied by lengthy explanatory texts relating them to contemporary issues. Does such didacticism make an artwork more accessible or simply overdetermined? How might it change art’s affective power?

That balance between openness and fixity isn’t quite resolved here. Then again, balance may not be Noland’s aim. The book, which is available for sale directly from the artist, can also be read in the gallery, while one sits on a black leather couch. Turn its colorless pages under searing fluorescents and the exhibition becomes an oppressive waiting room. Every road Noland has left open for us leads to more anxious deferral, as if to say: the worst is yet to come.

In “What a Dump” at David Zwirner, curated by writer Jarrett Earnest, those friendships are represented quite literally in a series of silhouettes that Johnson completed between 1976 and 1989, which adorns the gallery’s back wall. A profile of his Black Mountain College classmate Ruth Asawa appears alongside those of Kenneth Anger, Scott Burton, Louise Nevelson, and many others. Elsewhere, silhouettes of figures such as William Burroughs are incorporated into densely layered collages that employ the cut-up technique Burroughs used in his own writing. Camp icons James Dean, Bette Midler, and Liza Minnelli crop up like the mementos of an obsessive fangirl in clippings from magazines and newspapers.

Anchoring the show is Johnson’s 1957 cover design for the New Directions paperback edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (1886). The design featured Étienne Carjat’s 1871 photograph of the enfant terrible, enlarged to reveal the grain of benday dots, which would later resurface as a paper mask in David Wojnarowicz’s 1978–79 series “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” excerpted here. In 1971, Johnson invited readers of an art magazine to modify a page printed with the poet’s mug and mail it back to him. A grid of their submissions shows Rimbaud painted in various stages of drag, his image dissolving into caricature and contradiction.

“Every image is a self image. Every image is a mirror,” wrote General Idea in the inaugural 1972 issue of FILE, the Toronto-based collective’s satirical art magazine. The line, a retooling of Rimbaud’s dictum “I is another,” could describe the art Johnson mailed them throughout the ’70s, which was often adorned with portraits of celebrities as identical cartoon bunnies. Exchanged among queer artists, the cartoons seem to claim both the predilection for dress-up and the camp appropriation of certain idols as coded markers for homosexuality. “Judy,” for Judy Garland, was once a popular shorthand for “gay man”; Johnson made every starlet into slang. Taking famous names and guises, he reminds us of the endless ways the self can be refashioned as another.

Ray Johnson, Untitled (The Poet The Poem), 1994, collage on cardboard panel, 10 by 8 inches.

The artist’s language is best read “ass first,” as the poet Kevin Killian suggested in 2014. In Untitled (The Poet The Poem), 1994, a portrait of a bare backside labeled “The Poet” floats above an abstract collage titled “The Poem.” Employing humor to shit on convention, Johnson godfathered an irreverent community of queers and—through the form, content, and circulation of his work—embodied what Frank O’Hara called “personism,” an art “evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity.” As Dada Daddy, Johnson loved to play corrupter and voyeur, taking General Idea member AA Bronson and photographer Jimmy DeSana to their very first New York leather bars. In an accompanying essay, Earnest notes that these tours were “equal parts pedagogy and pleasure.” A vitrine at Zwirner holds Johnson’s leather jacket, an emblem of macho gay culture he gleefully painted with pink Mickey Mouse heads. It sits alongside a rubber stamp the artist made that read “Collage by Sherrie Levine,” a puckish attempt to appropriate the arch-appropriator, and postage stamps by General Idea, branded “AIDS.” The grouping seems to suggest that conceptual art and masculinity are both forms of drag, while offering a macabre reminder of the deadly virus that circulated like mail art among gay male artists at the end of the twentieth century.

Earnest has taken the show’s title from an asinine joke he found in Johnson’s archive: “If you take the cha cha out of Duchamp you get what a dump.” “What a dump,” Bette Davis’s bitchy aside in the 1949 film Beyond the Forest, “became an acidic slogan for queers,” Earnest notes, “an indictment of the gender roles of a straight world in postwar America.” Like all camp references, it traveled as widely as Johnson’s favored medium. Painted on the walls of David Zwirner, it flings life-giving vulgarity at art history and dares us to have fun with it. High above the dump, Johnson is still mooning us in the sky.

Sarah Awad’s paintings are sluices barely holding back a flood of Fauvist color. An emerald canopy bursts through an indigo grate. Dark leafy smears clash with splashes of fluorescent lime. Warring daubs of crimson and cornflower capture the full flame of a desert sunset. 

Awad’s previous work played with odalisques and other motifs from classical painting. For the 12 medium-size paintings in “Gate Paintings,” her fourth solo show, she has turned her gaze to ornament. In each painting, she renders a metal gate with broad strokes of oil on a canvas coated in matte Cel-Vinyl. The airy garden glimpsed through the subtle suggestion of a grid pulls the viewer into the picture.  

When depicted shut, a gate is a formal device that encourages the eye to look beyond its bars. As a grid it makes the painting flat; as a portal it gives it dimension. Pied-à-terre (all works 2015) spans two canvases, a small square attached to a larger rectangle, and the gate seems to swing across the joint. One can imagine the posts painted in the work’s right side cresting a low brick wall enclosing the stoop of a Brooklyn brownstone. Exuberant gestural strokes accrue as the curlicues of ornamental ironwork. There’s a surprising amount of movement in Awad’s vision of a static object that is designed to limit movement. Each wrought-iron whorl rises from its rigid frame like a wiry hair stubbornly resisting a comb. Such unruliness peaks in Blue Hour, where latticework rendered in purple snarls like an errant kudzu vine, twisting in rusty tones at the painting’s lower lip.

In Studio @ 9, the door to Awad’s own studio is shown, split by shades of ocher and cobalt. The doorway contains the kind of steel-mesh screen ubiquitous among L.A.’s industrial art spaces. The surface of this type of screen catches the afternoon sun, turning opaque to passersby while remaining transparent to those inside. At night, interior light casts a glow on the sidewalk, the barrier becoming a translucent membrane for people on both sides of it. In Studio @ 9, this shifting transmission of light acquires a palpable presence, as day and night hues are juxtaposed in the single composition.

In The Poetics of Space, French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard said of the word “door” that “through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression it opens up.” The same could be said of Awad’s gates and their relationship to the history of painting. If Awad felt fenced in by the opposition of abstraction and figuration, the works in “Gate Paintings” manage to escape this constricting narrative by refusing to commit to either mode. As much as the paintings seduce with surface beauty, they invite us to break through the picture plane and enter a garden of possibility.