“MELODRAMA: Act 2”

The New York half of this two-city show in London and Gotham pairs single works by Urs Fischer and Richard Serra on the one hand, and Jeff Koons and 19th-century Italian sculptor Vincenzo Gemito on the other. The result creates a theatrical metaphor for artistic dialog, likening the artworks to actors on stage. Thus, Serra’s famed video of his hand trying to catch falling lead weights, squares off against Fischer’s sculpture of a pair of disembodied hands holding a chair, while Gemito’s wax portrait bust of composer Giuseppe Verdi similarly confronts Koons’s stainless-steel sculpture titled, Italian Woman.