Art for Sale in New York & San Francisco: Thomas Allen to Mark Esper

NEW YORK—For this week’s picks, we asked our correspondents in New York and San Francisco to select their favorite work currently for sale in the galleries (and at one online gallery). And our list ranges from emerging talent to well-established artists and from delicate works on paper to elaborate installations and witty photography and sculpture.

Perhaps the dead of winter is making us a bit contemplative because nostalgia figures prominently in many of our recommendations this week, but each artist forgoes sentimentality in favor of a more complicated approach to a real or imagined past.

In San Francisco, Jack Hanley Gallery is showing new work by Jon Pylypchuk that places his signature down-on-their-luck stuffed animals into scenarios that make them seem simultaneously adorable, revolting and heartbreaking.

Meanwhile, in New York, The Proposition is offering several of Allison Hawkins’ dream-like ink and watercolor paintings that evoke both childhood memories and fairytales.

The duo Martin and Munoz construct similarly atmospheric scenes inside of snow globes that they later photograph. (Our editors’ suggest acquiring one of their prints from the Aperture Foundation’s Web site.)

At Foley Gallery, photographer Thomas Allen mines the past with a less melancholy perspective. Proving that Richard Prince hasn’t cornered the market on work inspired by mid-20th-century, dime-store novels, he partially cuts figures from the covers of pulp novels and plays them against one another in clever still-lifes.

But not all of our favorite work looked into the past this week, there are also several conceptual sculpture and installation pieces available that caught our correspondents’ eyes. San Francisco’s Ratio 3 has an excellent show of Mitzi Pederson’s constructions that bend wood, cellophane, reflective paper and other materials into shapes that create unusual plays of perspective and throw off the viewer’s sense of space.

We also chose two impressive robotic installations by Mark Esper that count electromagnet coils and light-emitting diodes among their materials. Both are available from the Brooklyn gallery Dam, Stuhltrager.

Finally, Anthony McCall’s projector-based works carve up the space inside of Chelsea’s Sean Kelly Gallery. The show was on our list of exhibitions to look forward to at the beginning of the year, and the sculptural combinations of light and haze have not disappointed.