In his current exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in New York, the Belgian artist Michaël Borremans is showing films that unfold at a radically slow pace. Their tableau-vivant images could be mistaken for stills but for a flickering light or a figure’s discreet breathing. Borremans, born in 1963, is best known for paintings that engage past masters like Manet and Goya—but the haunted characters who inhabit them display a distinctly contemporary unease, as if they were prey to an uncertain fate.

It is an ugly body of work. Snot green and biohazard orange are its flagship colors, feces and dick its main forms. The work is intentionally cheap-looking, dominated by lacquered plaster and inexpensive consumer plastics. Through its base materiality and lurid subject matter—characterized by a kind of dystopian science-fiction kitsch it aims at repulsion. Inside a small hemispherical terrarium work from 1970, for example, is a lemony swampland of lacquered acrylic mucus and spongy lime colored growth. Circuitry diagrams are visible beneath the effluent, from which sprout small straight transistors, cylinder—topped like cattails. Picturesque in a fashion, the landscape is punctuated with outcroppings-not of rock, but of fat, discolored, plaster noses, their nostrils dark caves of black bristly fur. A nappy toy mouse is stuck in the muck, and a penis crawls through it, slow as the plumpest slug.

A gargantuan exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings opened in November at Mass MoCA in North Adams: 105 large works dating from 1969 to 2007.  

Art-world denizens, political figures, and  rock ’n’ roll idols inspire Elizabeth Peyton’s portraiture. Her first retrospective is traveling internationally.

The filmmaker Peter Greenaway likes to ruffle feathers-if not, indeed, to pluck the whole bird naked. He had ample opportunity to do both in the run-up to his "dialogue" with Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper in Milan last year. Leonardo's Last Supper (2008) is the second work (after Nightwatching, 2007, based on Rembrandt's Night Watch) in a Greenaway series aimed at revitalizing great paintings that have become so broadly familiar we have lost the knack of really seeing them.