Lee Stoetzel in New York

Chuck Close Claes Oldenburg Coosje van Bruggen Rube Goldberg Acquisitions at the Whitney, Nelson-Atkins, High Living Well is the Best Design The Best of Intentions The $150,000 Question

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The exhibition, on view through May 23, includes three sculptural works, each made of wood, and each apparently referencing a contemporary artwork.

Big Bike (2008–09), the most striking of the bunch, is, as the title suggests, a bicycle measuring 90 inches high. Meticulously crafted in a sort of midcentury modern aesthetic and entirely of mesquite wood — right down to the chain, delicately constructed without nails or screws of any kind — the work recalls a time when everyday objects were handmade, with quality materials, to last. When possessions bore the markers of human labor — a carefully carved contour or smoothed finish — and were cherished and repaired. With its size, it also recalls Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Bicyclette Ensevelie (Buried Bicycle) (1990), an even more overblown creation depicting what appears to be a gargantuan bike half-buried in the ground.

Oldenburg is directly referenced in Hard Fries (After Oldenburg) (2009), an answer to the Dutch artist’s “soft sculpture” French Fries and Ketchup (1963). Whereas Oldenburg presented a pile of fabric fries on an oversized plate, Stoetzel offers a distinctly American-born interpretation: a coffee-table-sized rendering of a McDonald’s-style carton of fries, the fries themselves constructed from rough-hewn wood and the package bearing on the inside the chain's trademark stripes, created using alternating veneers.

A third sculpture, Big Fall (2008–09), re-creates in smooth wood a system of gutters and downspouts, minus a house. Comprising several levels of perpendicular pipes and spouting cartoonish leaves, also made of wood, the work recalls Rube Goldberg’s cockamamie, madcap machines.

Rounding out the show is Big Burn Out (Chuck Close) (2009) a pyrographic rendering in wood of Close’s Big Self-Portrait (1967–68), which shows him shirtless, smoking, and looking unkempt, an effect Stoetzel furthers with a basement-tinkerer sort of approach. Sporting scruff, unruly hair, and thick-framed glasses (and, in the original, a trucker cap), Close could easily be a Williamburg hipster circa now. But still, there’s a sense that for Stoetzel, he represents a better, somehow more authentic, time.

Here, Stoetzel offers four other exhibitions to check out in Chelsea this weekend.

1. Alice Attie: Again and Again and Again at Foley Gallery, through May 23

“This readable (and sometimes abstract) language can take the overall simple form of a precise circle in one work and in another look as if every letter in the dictionary has been placed in a fractal diagram and printed out on an Epson. The thing I admire most is the fact that Attie did in fact draw all of this (by hand) and can dazzle us with something that we are used to looking at — our own language. The term ‘precision’ would be an insult to this artist.”

2. Andre Ethier: Heading South at Derek Eller Gallery, through May 16

“I thought I was seeing re-creations of Archimbaldo’s works when I looked through the door of Derek Eller Gallery. To redo those amazing renaissance constructions would make a lot of sense now, given all the constructed photography that is going on, but Ethier’s paintings actually only begin with history, crashing through surreal imagery and ending up very contemporary. The results unite landscape, still life, and cigarette butts, with the draftsmanship convincing us of each image and each genre all at once. To achieve these kinds of juxtapositions and have the paintings also remain energetic shows that this guy can paint really well. In other words, he doesn’t freeze up and get into photorealism: You can really enjoy brushstrokes and subliminal imagery all at once.”

3. Andrew Bush: Vector Portraits at Julie Saul Gallery, through May 22