The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won't Want to Miss

With an ever-growing number of galleries scattered around New York, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. Where to begin? Here at A.i.A., we are always on the hunt for thought-provoking, clever and memorable shows that stand out in a crowded field. Below is a selection of current shows our team of editors can't stop talking about.

This week we check out Martha Colburn's acerbic animations and related props at Horton Gallery, Richard Hawkins's new paintings and collages at Greene Naftali and Lucas Samaras's latest digital photos at Pace's 25th Street gallery.

View Slideshow Eric Doeringer at Mulherin + Pollard.; Lucas Samaras at Pace.;

Eric Doeringer at Mulherin+Pollard, through Nov. 10
Move over Sturtevant, Sherrie Levine, Mike Bidlo et al. Brooklyn-based Eric Doeringer has entered the game of replicating well-known artworks with ironic effect. The artists thus honored-if that's the word-include Damien Hirst, John Baldessari, On Kawara, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Sol LeWitt. Perhaps most intriguing: Marlboro cowboy images à la Richard Prince-an appropriationist now appropriated. Will he sue?

Martha Colburn at Horton Gallery, through Nov. 4
Martha Colburn's first show with Horton Gallery, at its new Lower East Side venue, greets visitors with a wall thickly hung with the paper dolls she uses to create her frenetic, noisy stop-motion animations. On the opposite wall, an extensive selection of those videos plays, including Meth Labs, which includes indelible imagery of the first settlers of our great nation cooking up drugs in log cabins. A back room includes giant collages used to make Dolls vs. Dictators, in which Pee-Wee Herman and other dolls engage in mortal combat with the likes of Kim Jong-Il.

Richard Hawkins at Greene Naftali, through Nov. 24
There's a lot to take in here, so make sure you allow yourself plenty of time to carefully peruse the gallery's encyclopedic installation. The front room includes a dozen or so large paintings; each is dominated by trompe-l'oeil interlocking metal panels with a colorful scene implanted in the center. But the best stuff in the show is Hawkins's collages inspired by scrapbooks belonging to the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata: each piece is peppered with images of Picasso, Bacon, Schiele or de Kooning paintings, scrawled text and drawings; folders chock full of the artist's research material are also on view in an adjacent room.

Andro Wekua at Gladstone, through Nov. 3
The title of Andro Wekua's show "Dreaming Dreamin" refers most directly to his latest sculptures depicting buildings half-remembered from his Georgian hometown, which has since been destroyed by civil war. (A model of Wekua's childhood home in Sukhumi appears in two pieces.) Despite their cheery colors, a series of new, mostly abstract paintings carry an undercurrent of the macabre.

Lucas Samaras at Pace (508 West 25th Street), through Oct. 27
Reality is pale stuff compared to these 20 new works by the 76-year-old maestro of the intense gaze, who here offers computer-aided images of fantastical shapes and glaring, unearthly colors. Some of the pigment prints feature purely abstract patterning; others, overlaid and manipulated flea-market photos; the rest, invented humanoid figures in a stark cyber environment.

"The Lookout" is compiled by A.i.A. associate editor Leigh Anne Miller.