Many of the near-identical subjects of William Brickel’s Was It Ever Fair. at Michael Kohn Gallery are looking down or away, as though they’ve just heard something that made them blush; their robust cheekbones are sometimes touched by a little red.

William Brickel’s elongated, sometimes contorted, often intense figures, possess an ambiguous beauty that are bluntly modern, nod to 16th-century mannerist styling, and offer a whiff of Paul Cadmus, Lucian Freud or even Egon Schiele. Mostly though they hold your eye with their strong and distinctive presence, crackling with feeling, pulling you in with their mysterious sets and clothes in colors fit for a Prada moodboard.

Freud believed that human instinctive impulses come from subconscious desires, and that art and dreams are the products of transferred desires. In "Green Snake" (1993) directed by Tsui Hark, the use of color and scenery adds a avant-garde aesthetic to this erotic story: the lotus pond transformed by the white snake is often shrouded in mist; when the green snake appears in the pond, When he revealed his true form, all the lotus flowers in the pond flashed with faint will-o'-the-wisps.

In “Oscillating Womb,” Li Hei Di’s new solo show at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, limbs, torsos, and fauna intermingle, fizzing and crackling in swirls of deep color and luminescent light. In a style that is neither figurative nor abstract, the Chinese, London-based artist captures the ephemerality of desire, encounter, and connection through painting.

There is a certain feeling of catharsis present in the works of Ilana Savdie.  As I walked into her show, Radical Contractions, at the Whitney Museum of Art, and the ten-foot paintings towered colossally over me, it felt like my only option was to surrender to their fluorescent pools.

The Puerto Rican painter and computer engineer allows his two spheres of practice to inform one another, yielding intricately gridded canvases that both reveal and shed a soft light on the entanglements between man and machine.

Featuring works by: Martha Alf, who has a gift for giving life, beauty, and often personality to mundane objects with her use of light, colour and space, Sharon Ellis, whose works demonstrate an evocative approach to landscape painting, by touching upon the sublimity of the wild with rich hues, dramatic light sources and marked proportions.