Welling on Wyeth

James Welling is well-known for creating photographic abstractions that blend arcane techniques with extreme innovation. Now the artist is pushing the boundaries of his photographic compositions toward the idea of painting, with the help of the late American painter Andrew Wyeth. His latest body of photographs, "Overflow," at David Zwirner through Oct. 27, includes documentation, image-manipulation and digital abstraction. The photographs show straightforward images of Wyeth's studio, figurative renderings meant to conjure the feeling of an environment, and water-and-graphite abstractions that evoke painting at its most primeval.
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Get a Room: Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman at Marlborough Chelsea

In the three years since the artist team of Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman have shown in New York, a lot has changed-not the least of which being the shuttering, by New York City officials, of all government-run Off Track Betting (OTB) parlors in 2010. The artists, whose 2009 show at Deitch Projects, "Black Acid Co-Op," featured an exploded crystal meth lab, have tapped OTBs—state-run facilities that allowed glassy-eyed gamblers to bet on horse races in the middle of New York City—for a comeback of sorts. The gambling parlors play a starring role in the artist's latest multi-roomed installation, titled "Stray Light Grey," which opens Sept. 13 at Marlborough Chelsea.
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More Than Lace: Mark Flood at Luxembourg & Dayan

Texas artist Mark Flood may be best known for his lace paintings from the early 2000s, the large, multi-hued acrylic pieces that use torn fabric to illusionistic ends. But his expansive retrospective, "The Hateful Years," at Luxembourg and Dayan through Sept. 19, presents those delicately rendered lace works as a fairly profound deviation.

The show includes some 120 pieces of collage, sculpture, music and ephemera, displayed in reverse chronological order (the newest works are the first one encounters, on the first floor). "I didn't want to be ‘the lace painter'," said Flood, 56, who spoke to A.i.A. on the day of the exhibition's opening. "It was an emotional struggle for me to accept that. Lace has a lot of connotations that I was never interested and that I'm still not interested in."
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Matthew Higgs's Economics of Art

Currently on view at James Cohan gallery, "Everyday Abstract-Abstract Everyday" features 37 works that New York-based curator Matthew Higgs chose with an agenda based, in part, on changes brought about by the economic downturn. "I'd been noticing that the high production values very much associated with the boom in the art world in the mid-2000s were in decline," says Higgs. "An awful lot of artists are now working with much more modest materials-perhaps due to the economy."
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