SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS @ 3 Museums and Galleries : 
(WestSide Manhattan & the BklynMuseum, easy via #2-3 subway)

‘Projects 99: Meiro Koizumi’ (through May 1)
‘Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store’ and ‘Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum, Ray Gun Wing’ (through to Aug. 5)
‘Performing Histories (1)’ (through Aug. 5)
‘Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light’ (through Aug. 12)

Museum of Modern Art: 11 W 53rd St,
(212) 708-9400 / moma.org.

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Galleries: Chelsea

Yael Bartana: ‘And Europe Will Be Stunned’ (through May 4) A hit at the last “Venice Biennale, this video trilogy now forms an impressive New York gallery for its Israel creator. Superbly carried out, it presents a strangely perfect, perfectly disturbing, yet ineffably wry confusion of ideology, geography, propaganda and history. Its narrative concerns a kind of reverse Zionism intended to return Jews to Poland, includes a young leader, his funeral and a 1930s-style kibbutz, built by wholesome-looking youths on ground where the Warsaw ghetto once stood.” (Smith, NYT)

Petzel Gallery, 456 West 18th Street, Chelsea , (212) 608-9467, petzel.com.

Joshua Marsh: ‘As If’ and Johannes DeYoung: ‘Ego Loser’ (through May 4) “Mr. Marsh makes uncommonly beautiful paintings of ordinary objects. With an exquisitely sensuous touch and using luminous colors, he isolates, simplifies and flattens things like pitchers, brooms and dustpans to the brink of pure yet sumptuous abstraction. Mr. DeYoung’s “Ego Loser” is a darkly comical, claymation-style video projection in which a hideous man utters self-help and mantras from low-end sources.” (Johnson, NYT)

Jeff Bailey Gallery, 625 West 27th Street, (212) 989-0156, baileygallery.com.

‘Scott Olson’ (through May 4) Scott Olson’s abstract paintings look fragile and ethereal, even though they can be traced back to vigorous physical processes. Mr. Olson, who is based in Ohio, builds his own frames from local trees, and works in a combination of oil, wax and marble dust on wood. He strips down his surfaces as often as he builds them up, painting in brightly colored, irregular shapes and then sanding into near oblivion. This split personality adds intrigue to what would otherwise be modest little throwbacks to early modernism.” (Rosenberg, NYT)

Wallspace, 619 West 27th Street, Chelsea, (212) 594-9478, wallspacegallery.com.

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‘John Singer Sargent Watercolors’  (through July 28) [see review below]
‘Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui’ (through Aug. 4)
‘LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital’ (through Aug. 11)

Brooklyn Museum: 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park,
(718) 638-5000 / brooklynmuseum.org

John Singer Sargent Watercolors
“The exhibition brings together 93 of his watercolors and 9 oil paintings from the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Both institutions acquired significant quantities of his work early on, the Brooklyn Museum from Sargent’s career debut show in New York in 1909 and the Boston museum from a solo show there in 1912. The beauty of Sargent’s watercolors is in how seemingly effortlessly yet exactly he captured outdoor light and complicated man-made and natural forms. In landscapes, close studies of fruit and flowers and portraits of women you see at once the supremely deft action of the brush and the illusions of a sun-drenched halcyon world that it conjures. Prepare for bedazzlement.”- (KEN JOHNSON, NYT)