Top five shows: Oct 3–9, 2013

“Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910-1925”
Neue Galerie New York, Thu 3–Feb 10
The Neue Galerie focuses on the critical phase of Kandinsky’s career, when he pioneered the development of abstract painting. His pieces are joined here by contributions from his contemporaries, including Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Franz Marc and László Moholy-Nagy.

Brian Doan, hôme hôme hôme
Vilcek Foundation Gallery, through Nov 9
This Vietnamese-American artist’s installation delves into memories of his former homeland, which his family left in 1991. Most notably, the piece evokes Vietnam’s successive wars against the U.S., Cambodia and China between 1959 and 1989, and the impact those conflicts had on the Vietnamese diaspora.

Claudia Wieser, “The Mirror”
Marianne Boesky Gallery, through Oct 19
Wieser cites Kandinsky and Klee as influences, and it certainly shows in this dreamlike installation of photography and sculpture, which—while mostly abstract—also makes visual allusions to Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Joanna Malinowska, “A Hawk from a Handsaw”
Canada, through Oct 20
Malinowska’s peculiar brand of processy art with a Paleolithic vibe is given its third showcase with Canada. The artist inaugurates the gallery’s new space with such oddities as a giant Smokey the Bear–like figure made of wood and papier-mâché.

Tony Feher
Bronx Museum of the Arts, Sun 6–Feb 16
For much of this century, Feher has pursued a millennial update on the offhanded sculptural aesthetic associated with Italian Arte Povera and American Postminimalism in the late 1960s and 1970s—the sort of practice in which detritus served as source material for scattershot, abstract installations. Feher’s work brings vivid color to the table, as well as a palette of found materials ranging from plastic bottles filed with dyed water and soft-drink crates to polystyrene insulation and Mylar thermal blankets. This show is the final stop of a touring retrospective organized by the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.