Entering Alicja Kwade’s New York debut, “The Heavy Weight of Light,” one encountered a sculpture called Matter of Opinion (all works 2012), exemplifying many of the questions that animate the Polish-born, Berlin-based artist’s work.

Born in rural Alabama in 1928, Thornton Dial worked as a machinist at the Pullman boxcar factory in Bessemer, Ala., for 30 years before he turned to making art full time in the 1980s.

A “peculiar blend of slapstick idiocy and gallantry” is a phrase that captures the spirit of Carroll Dunham’s new paintings. Tellingly, it was written by Dunham himself in a review of Picasso’s late “Mosqueteros” oils (Artforum, Sept. ’09). 

According to British poet and critic Edith Sitwell, English eccentricity may be “the Ordinary carried to a high degree of pictorial perfection.” Fellow Brit Jeremy Deller’s recent show in New York riffed on this concept with a screening of three video documentaries sentimentalizing Britain’s most Sitwellian characters. Complementing these videos were two galleries featuring the artist’s text-based wall pieces.

The 15 small clay sculptures in this exhilarating show were lined up on three platforms like contestants in a misfit beauty pageant, each entrant flaunting what might elsewhere be considered indignities: bulges, protrusions, pooling fluids.