In early May, Jablonka took the opportunity of Gallery Weekend Berlin, a three-day marathon of openings, to unveil a group of large-scale paintings by Eric Fischl. Titled “Corrida Paintings” (2009), the series was inspired by photographs the artist took on visits to the southern Spanish village of Ronda, the birthplace of modern bullfighting. Like Goya, Picasso, Hemingway, Bacon and Bataille before him, the New York artist is fascinated by the Spanish blood sport, which for decades has caused animal rights activists to take to the barricades.

Lucy Skaer’s exhibition “A Boat Used as a Vessel” consisted of three new installations (2009), a fourth from 2008 and a scattering of earlier works, all characterized by an austere beauty and a sense of meaning being withheld. Like the other installations, Fabrication, located in the first room, combined objects and works on paper—here a series of large-scale monotypes hung around an antique wooden table with removable leaves. The prints, pulled from the surface of the inked table, consist of varying, serial-like arrangements of black rectangles. Here and there one can just discern a comma beneath the black, suggesting the repression of language. In the same room an untitled work presented two large-scale watercolors with aluminum leaf, and a half dozen wooden triangles seemingly tossed on the floor before them, like runes. Similar triangles appear in the paintings, along with a group of figures never explained and difficult to read, given the brightness of the white paper

Borrowed from the London subway directive, “Mind the Gap,” the title of Javier Téllez’s exhibition, was too simple a warning for his complicated videos. His latest, Caligari and the Sleepwalker (2008), takes its cue from Robert Wiene’s classic silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). In place of the murderous designs Wiene’s doctor has on his patient, Cesare, Téllez’s Caligari engages his client—a space alien—in psychiatric sessions that verge on the poetic. Inter-titles written in chalk on a handheld blackboard relay the dialogue and narrate the proceedings when Caligari presents Cesare as a freakish spectacle to a crowd of inquisitive spectators. As he often has done, Téllez recruited the actors, with whom he workshopped the script, from among patients in a mental health facility, in this case a clinic in Berlin.

Like many exhibitions lately, Mircea Cantor’s felt like a rebus, and a test. Called “White Sugar for Black Days,” it was eclectic in medium, message and emotional pitch. Scattered throughout the gallery’s two rooms was the show’s trademark work, 7 Future Gifts (2008)—a series of concrete ribbons tied around nothing. The invisible gifts ranged from a forlorn little thing placed in a far corner to a towering absence more than 12 feet high. Along with the show’s title, these ribbons, all topped with schematic bows, suggested a warning, perhaps to beware of empty promises. Or, to relinquish the hope that refined sweeteners can brighten our dark times, relieve our real and spiritual hunger.

With “Flatland,” the British artist Elizabeth McAlpine took film to its core elements: stock, light and projector. The show borrowed its title from the novella by Edwin A. Abbott that chronicles the story of “a square” discovering the three-dimensional world. In McAlpine’s exhibition, though, the narration was minimal. There was no distracting imagery in the works shown; viewers were confronted instead by the sheer materiality of the medium. In Tilt (in 6 Parts), 2009, six Super 8 projectors are stacked on top of each other and linked by a single loop of film. A column of six pale rectangles—the projection of white film frames—flickers onto the wall. Intermittently, a single red frame appears, descending from one position to the next. This jolly little color field brings to mind the dancing abstract shapes of an Oskar Fischinger animation; it’s a quick pulsation of warmth disrupting the mechanical procession of whiteness. The red square also function