The current exhibition of works by Monica Bonvicini and Tom Burr is an odd coupling, estranged yet intimate, and feral at a studious remove. If the similarities in the two artists' bodies of work are obvious—sculpture that infuses minimalist forms with an eros both feminist and homoerotic; a blunt insistence that familiar objects (power tools, S&M-type equestrian items, men's shoes) act as objective correlatives; a nervy awareness of institutional critique and the fetishism of the built environment—the way curator Nikola Dietrich paired the work is less explicit.

The mysteriously private street artist known as Banksy has enjoyed some very public and widespread acclaim for his work in recent years. Thought to have been born in 1974 and raised in the Bristol area, Banksy (who does not reveal his full identity due to ongoing legal complications) has stated that he first got into spray painting around the age of 10, thanks to a kid called 3D (who went on to form the band Massive Attack).

André Butzer once remarked in an interview that the profession of art critic should be eradicated, and his work appropriately defies interpretation with a furious apocalyptic energy. Painting can be image, motif, referent and narrative, but it is also always a flat surface on which dumb material has accreted. Butzer takes painting as a manual application of viscous oil paint to an extreme, but his work contradicts any categorical position. This is no Rymanesque exploration of process: it is always animated by the idea of the portrait.

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