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.

View Slideshow Daniel Buren: Optical Fiber, White and Blue Arch, Situated Work, 2012, fiberoptics, 99 1/4 inches square.; View of Drew Conrad’s exhibition “Ain’t Dead Yet,” 2013. Courtesy Fitzroy Gallery.;

This week we check out a two-gallery show of Daniel Buren's stripe paintings from the past 40+ years at Bortolami and Petzel, Natasza Niedziolka's free-form embroideries at Horton and Stephen Pusey's latest abstract paintings at Guided by Invoices.


Daniel Buren at Petzel and Bortolami, both through Feb. 16
Daniel Buren's colorful stripes almost singlehandedly kept painting relevant within the highest echelon of the high-brow Conceptualist movement of the 1960s and '70s. Some viewers might see these works simply as expensive wallpaper. Admirably changing with the times, Buren has introduced at Bortolami an arresting series of blue-and-white-striped compositions lined with fiber-optic strands.

Natasza Niedziolka at Horton, through Feb. 3
Berlin-based Natasza Niedziolka's textile drawings made of thread on canvas are mostly abstract, though after lingering in Horton's front room, many of the stacked half-circles start to look like large ships teetering on the surface of a calm sea. Some of the more subtle embroideries on stretched cotton are "framed" with a colorful zigzag border.

Stephen Pusey at Guided by Invoices, through Feb. 9
The London-born, St. Martins-educated artist was once a painter of socially conscious murals in working-class neighborhoods. But after his move to the U.S. in 1986, he became increasingly involved with both digital media and acrylic-on-canvas gestural abstraction. All his concerns come together, dynamically, in these recent paintings whose swirling, squiggling multicolor lines evoke—in perspectival depth—genetics, cosmology, information networks and personal signature.


Drew Conrad at Fitzroy, through Feb. 22
"Looks like Detroit!" read a snarky but accurate comment in the gallery's guest book. Drew Conrad's sculptures of domestic spaces appear to be salvaged from burned-out abandoned homes, but the South Carolina-born artist's materials—wood, vinyl records, architectural elements, taxidermy gazelle, old timey light bulbs-are both found and new.


"How To Tell the Future from the Past" at Haunch of Venison, through Mar. 2
This tightly orchestrated group show features five artists preoccupied with the forever mutable relationships among the forces of nature, humanity and technology. The video by Eve Sussman (the source of show's title), paintings by Justin Mortimer and Yang Jiechang and sculptures by Patricia Piccinini and Joana Vasconcelos (who will represent Portugal at this year's forthcoming Venice Biennale) cumulatively examine the often disturbing histrionics of history.


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