Victor Moscoso at Andrew Edlin Gallery, through April 25 (134 Tenth Avenue)Co-curated by Norman Hathaway and Dan Nadel, “Psychedelic Drawings, 1967-1982” is an inspiring survey of the California-based artist’s perverse draftsmanship. Original versions of comics that first appeared in Zap are paired with hippy-era concert posters (both the finished products and the original sketches). There’s also the totally bonkers original artwork for Jerry Garcia’s 1982 album “Run For The Roses,” which depicts a bunch of jockeys riding tiger-striped T-Rexes. As a cartoonist, Moscoso’s style is revelatory, exploring a sort of anti-narrative in which plotlines are enigmatic and speech bubbles are often confoundingly empty. One series converts the typical cartoon-strip template into a skeleton for a compositional architecture, inventing buildings that Moscoso’s loopy characters poke around in. Another might best be described as depicting an anti-gravity orgy, loose-limbed and interspecies-friendly. “I’ll be fucked!” hollers one ample-thighed participant, “& frogged,” warns a frog, casually sauntering into the room. Beyond the absurdist eroticism, Moscoso proves himself a sure-handed master of elegant lines, stippling, and hand-drawn typography.“In The Studio: Paintings” at Gagosian Gallery, through April 18 (522 West 21st Street)The painting portion of a two-part survey of art-about-the-studio (a photo-based component is on view at 980 Madison Avenue), this sprawling show skips between generations and never strains against its narrow focus. These are works about the romance and cluttered energy of one’s private workspace, a conceit that can include James Ensor’s skeleton-painter; Jasper Johns’s three-dimensional assemblage replicating a studio wall; Picasso’s 1920s Cubist deconstructions; and a Jim Dine diptych depicting two paint-smeared palettes, out of which curves an actual stovepipe, a bit of New York studio architecture intruding in the white cube. There are a number of stellar Rauschenbergs, and two Gustons that provide a different glimpse of the creative life: In one, a man tucked away in bed next to a small table holding a book, a sandwich, a watch, and some brushes. In another, “Reverse,” 1978-9, Guston paints a cartoonish version of the backside of a painting baring its stretcher bars — yet the grey palette, plus a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, gives the impression of a locked door in an interrogation room (artist’s block as a prison cell). Carve out a nice chunk of time to explore the rest of what’s on view, from Diego Rivera to Lucian Freud, Matisse, Giacometti, and more. As you may have noticed, the roster here skews decidedly male (with some outliers, like Lygia Clark and Helen Frankenthaler). Consider this a view of the studio from a particular perspective: The self-mythologizing male genius, alone with his thoughts and his tools.“The Painter Of Modern Life” at Anton Kern Gallery, through April 11 (532 West 20th Street)The alternatives to MoMA’s “Forever Now” keep popping up — first Gavin Brown’s massive “Call and Response,” and now this 21-artist-strong, Bob Nickas-curated survey in Chelsea. There’s a wealth of good stuff here: Mathew Cerletty’s finely rendered oddities (a J. Crew shirt, a telephone book floating in the water); Lisa Beck’s enamel-on-mirror compositions; Daniel Hesidence’s abstractions, one of which hangs suspended from the ceiling, its surface so thick that it’s almost furred; Sadie Benning’s mixed-media geometric constructions framing vintage photographs; Chip Hughes’s meandering lines and translucent layers. While most of the painting here is recognizable as such in a traditional way, there is a marked interest in offbeat materials and processes: caulk, wax, aqua resin, laser-etched book covers, and modeling paste on PVC.Tamar Halpern at On Stellar Rays, through March 29 (1 Rivington Street)O.K., I’m a real sucker for cats, but I’m including this inventive exhibition here for reasons other than the welcome presence of felines in two of the works. Halpern slices and collages UltraChrome ink prints into vivid, often abstracted compositions. Every now and then we get a slice of legibility — a stockinged leg, a kitty’s butt in retreat. These works — let’s just call them paintings — have a certain affinity with Christopher Wool, especially when Halpern mashes up images of wallpaper and other found patterns. But unlike Wool, this artist isn’t afraid of color, jazzing up the off-register or Xerox vibe with pink triangles, washes of blue, or wildly Constructivist rectangles in black and green. Most of the paintings are large-scale, but Halpern is versatile: A triptych of small, layered-and-taped-together photographic prints, “Drawings by the Black Mascara Snake,” are terrific. And before you leave, don’t forget to don a pair of white gloves and peruse the collection of individual collage-drawings. Originally intended to be collected into publication form, they’re instead arranged on a rack at the gallery — a series of handmade booklets, each of which hides a different exercise in cut-and-paste geometries.“Work Hard” at Swiss Institute, through May 24 (18 Wooster Street)Valentin Carron curates a show that is almost comically diverse. The gallery space is divided into four rooms, sort of like a barebones house, and all the walls are spraypainted a metallic silver. There’s sculptural furniture: a neon-and-fur chair by Trix and Robert Haussmann from 1967, a bronze table with bird-legs by Meret Oppenheim. There’s clothing: a pile of shoes in Latifa Echakhch’s “Skin,” or a dangling line of baseball caps in Simon Paccaud’s “Crocodile.” Architecture gets a nod, too, with Fabrice Gygi’s “Tente-Bar,” a tarp-based structure that resembles a sadly empty little booth that you might find selling food and booze at a country fair. Interspersed throughout there’s some meh abstraction and minimalist painting (like Sylvain Croci-Torti’s “Lost in Confusion,” 2014, a mostly-monochrome canvas interrupted by a trickly vertical slit, sort of an exhausted version of Barnett Newman’s zip). But the lackluster notes are tempered by cool weirdness: A Mai-Thu Perret rattan sculpture of a donkey; a suite of early-20th-century drawings by Marguerite Burnat-Provins in which cats or swans play with disembodied human heads; and funky, small sculptures by David Hominal which place discrete objects — one of which looks a whole lot like a used crack pipe — atop painted metal cans.ALSO WORTH SEEING: The anonymous collective Claire Fontaine’s show at Metro Pictures, through April 4, which includes gooey monochrome paintings made with anti-climb paint that will never, ever dry, which doubtlessly is a real thrill for art-handlers and conservators alike; and Suzanne McClelland at Team Gallery on Wooster Street through March 22 — her new paintings and mixed-media collages use the history of domestic terrorism as a springboard for scrappy, expressive work.
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