This week in Newly Reviewed, Andrew Russeth covers Jeff Koons’s big-budget baubles, Park Hyunki’s artificial boulder, Joseph Geagan’s demimonde and a group show of photos on fridges.

CHELSEA

Jeff Koons

Through Feb. 28. Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street; 212-741-1111, gagosian.com.

Just in time for the holidays, here comes Jeff Koons with a fresh set of big-budget baubles that are at least as shiny, and almost as intensely satisfying, as his most polished balloon animals.

A gleaming eight-foot-tall “Aphrodite” (2016-21) emerges nude from sea foam, looking light as air, though she is metal. Two “Kissing Lovers” (2016-25), dressed for a Fragonard painting, are really going at it. Yes, Koons’s signature obsessions — desire, perfection, control — are in full bloom.

The seven unsettling, comical sculptures on view began as porcelain figurines from the 1700s to the early 1900s, which Koons and wizardly fabricators transmogrified into larger stainless-steel forms whose undulating mirrored surfaces warp you as you gawk. Details on the tchotchkes were abstracted by the scale shift, giving a sense of unreality intensified by ingeniously layered transparent paint. Disorienting, hard to make out, the sculptures read almost as digital apparitions.

Alas, the old axiom that Koons’s magic falters in two dimensions holds, in overloaded new paintings with photorealistic backgrounds, aluminum-leaf renderings of lively prints by old masters (that satyr’s whipping a nymph!) and messy abstract passages by Koons (a genuine curveball). They at least succeed in delivering additional perversity, an essential fuel of his art.

The most potent sculpture in Koons’s unhinged, irrepressible rococo wonderland is the smallest, “Fox With Bird” (2016-23), which sounds a discordant note, interrupting pervasive pleasure with violence. The predator is triumphant, teeth deep in its prey, but the eyes of both are wide open, staring into the distance, reckoning with the same trauma. ANDREW RUSSETH

CHELSEA

Park Hyunki

Through Feb. 14. Gallery Hyundai, 529 West 20th Street; galleryhyundai.com

In 2011, it was national news when a 340-ton megalith was hauled from a quarry in Riverside, Calif., to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to become a grand Michael Heizer sculpture. Thirty years earlier, with somewhat less fanfare, the video artist Park Hyunki (1942-2000) plopped an artificial boulder on the back of a flatbed truck that then slowly cruised around the city of Daegu, South Korea. Artists, critics and curators joined him, helping to shoot footage and photos included in this invigorating show, “Pass Through the City,” his project’s title.

Park’s boulder, fashioned from resin, had a sizable mirror embedded on one side that reflected billboards and buses as it moved. After about 40 minutes, it was deposited on a sidewalk near a bank, where a camera transmitted a live feed of passers-by stopping for a closer look into a local gallery. Was it a commentary on media spectacles? A sendup of state surveillance?

It was certainly strangely beautiful. Rocks recur in Park’s work, often as doltap — stone stacks traditionally situated to keep evil spirits away. Here, a giant rock becomes a catalyst for a communal endeavor, doing what all worthwhile art does: interrupting and intensifying life, if only for a limited time, carving out a space of freedom. ANDREW RUSSETH

CHINATOWN

Joseph Geagan

Through Jan. 17. Lomex, 89 Walker Street; 917-667-8541, lomex.gallery.

No one would accuse Joseph Geagan of being Manet — his brushwork is workmanlike — but he has a way with color and a zest for painting odd, compelling portraits and social scenes that lionize the demimonde. The 12 in this show, “Pageantry,” include one of an alfresco wedding banquet that is populated by scores of downtown New York revelers in outré attire and another of a dance party in Washington Square Park, a banner of the doomed socialite Edie Sedgwick overhead.

Everyone looks glamorous and ambitious in these faintly surreal pictures, not least Geagan, who sports an enormous flowery hat in a winning self-portrait. In one especially dense tableau, each individual oozes charisma, including Patia Borja, a nightlife and meme legend, but traces of ennui linger on some faces, and throughout these works. In the sky behind that matrimonial party, the sun is setting.

Riffing loosely on greats from Ensor to Bruegel, he is building an idiosyncratic language, a bit like Florine Stettheimer, who portrayed the art set of early 20th-century New York in a fantastical, witty style. In front of Geagan’s best paintings, you may identify with the critic Henry McBride when he encountered a Stettheimer picture of a glittering birthday bash and reported feeling “miffed” that he had not been invited. ANDREW RUSSETH

CHINATOWN

‘Photos on Fridges’

Through Jan. 4, 2026. Harkawik, 88 Walker Street; 212-970-3284, harkawik.com.

Marshaling more than 550 photographs by some 280 artists, celebrated and obscure, young, old and no more, this is the most exhilarating group show in town.

Portraiture, in all its manifold, radical forms, is its focus. People are in various stages of undress, resplendent, in images by Ryan McGinley, Ren Hang, Helmut Newton and many more. They seem to be sleeping, or dead, in photos by Liz Magor (of a supine Civil War re-enactor), Peter Hujar (Paul Thek’s effigy of himself) and Yurie Nagashima (who dozes).

True to the exhibition’s name, many photos are displayed on 15 refrigerators, affixed with magnets, and Marina Pinsky has completely wrapped one of them with a tender shot of a young child. Tokuko Ushioda and Gavin Brown (the art dealer), for their part, captured the interiors of well-stocked fridges: portraits of culinary taste.

This tautly orchestrated blowout is about how artists represent people and themselves (Man Ray in an amusing beret, Ana Mendieta splattered with blood), but also about how meaningful it can be to collect images of others. It would take hours to process everything here — a real commitment, I lamented, before remembering how much time I spend scrolling dross on my phone. ANDREW RUSSETH

More to See

Lower East Side

Meredith James

Through Dec. 13. Marinaro, 1 Rivington Street; 212-989-7700, marinaro.biz.

Meredith James’s show at Marinaro, “The Exit,” showcases a monument of contemporary architecture — or anti-architecture, really: the contemporary office, lined with cubicles and made famous in comic television shows like “The Office.”

Working spaces reflect contemporary life, like the empty offices during the pandemic that inspired James’s photographs and sculptures, but they also are descended from modernist aesthetics. The white cube gallery for displaying groundbreaking modern art became the white cubicle, the place where your laboring spirit goes to die.

Rather than heap scorn on the white-cubicle office, however, James took a larger mirror with her to shoot inside an empty office in New York. The mirror created fun-house reflections — literally, new angles to the office. From these crisp, kaleidoscopic photographs, James then created wall-relief dioramas filled with exquisite handmade details, including water-stained drop ceilings and exit signs.

As remote work threatens to turn many cubicle workplaces into empty offices, James’s project feels like a document memorializing the phenomenon: Last exit, the office. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Soho

Franz Gertsch

Through Jan. 31. Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster Street; 212-542-5662, hauserwirth.com.

A 2018 survey at the Swiss Institute introduced many to Franz Gertsch, a Swiss photorealist painter who created large, spectacular canvases. The current exhibit at Hauser & Wirth focuses on a series by Gertsch featuring the singer, poet and artist Patti Smith.

Included here are “Patti Smith III” (1979) and “Patti Smith IV” (1979), made from photographs Gertsch took at a Smith performance in Cologne, Germany. It may be hard, however, to pull yourself away from the video in which the charismatic Smith visits Gertsch’s studio and drops a few ideas on being an artist, as well as a muse.

The scale of Gertsch’s paintings along with their edgy contemporary subject are what make this show. Three giant woodcuts — one portrait and two landscapes — reveal Gertsch’s classic virtuosity as an artist. And Gertsch’s impulse to spend two years painting Smith was dead-on accurate: Icons in our media-saturated era tend to be rock stars, not rocks and plants. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Tribeca

Ragnar Kjartansson

Through Dec. 20. Luhring Augustine Tribeca, 17 White Street; 646-960-7540, luhringaugustine.com.

The power of postcards may be waning in the age of the internet, but their historical significance is indisputable. The photographer Walker Evans collected 9,000 postcards and often rephotographed their locations.

In “Sunday Without Love” at Luhring Augustine, the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson has recreated in video, complete with a tune adapted from a German comedic song, a postcard attached to his refrigerator featuring a kitschy pastoral scene.

Absurd but absorbing, “Sunday Without Love” reprises an approach Kjartansson used in an earlier video of the band the National playing their song “Sorrow” repeatedly for six hours. Here, the video lasts 19 minutes, but it gives you ample time to contemplate the wry futility of life and perhaps the decline of Europe — or admire the commitment of the artist and the young actors who remain perfectly frozen in their poses for the duration of the video. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Lower East Side

Analivia Cordeiro

Through Jan. 6. Bitforms Gallery, 131 Allen Street; 212-366-6939, bitforms.com.

At this mini survey by the pioneering Brazilian computer dance artist Analivia Cordeiro, you can see her stunning “0=45 version VIII” (1974/2025). In it, the performers’ movements were determined by using algorithms coded in Fortran, a computer programming language developed for scientific applications. The results are like watching an abstract composition come to life, with human bodies and abstract art merging.

Another video in the show features Cordeiro describing how her father, Waldemar Cordeiro, the renowned Concrete painter (and later digital artist), hung an Alexander Calder mobile above her crib when she was an infant. Because of this, she argues, modern art, and particularly Concrete geometric art, were “inside my neuro-system.”

Now that everything from paid labor to biological functions are linked to digital devices, Cordeiro’s vision, with modern dance and human movement connected to algorithms, is particularly prescient. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Chelsea

Guanyu Xu

Through Dec. 20. Yancey Richardson, 525 West 22nd Street; 646-230-9610, yanceyrichardson.com.

To make the photographs in “Resident Aliens,” his current show at Yancey Richardson, the Beijing-born Guanyu Xu went to people’s houses and, using photographs from their own albums, set up a staged narrative of their lives. The visual trick is that it looks like Photoshop, with images seemingly hovering in space.

The people collaborating with Xu for these photographs are all migrants with varying immigration statuses. Xu doesn’t name the individuals whose homes or stories we’re witnessing. Instead, the titles consist of long bureaucratic-sounding numbers and the cities in which the works were made: New York, Chicago, Shanghai.

Caught in the maelstrom of immigration, these are the real people, histories and places behind the political battle. The images that Xu and his subjects create are more complex, and possibly even more accurate, than what a single image could convey. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

See the November gallery shows here.