The largest and most spectacular art events of the season are over. The Whitney Biennial has closed, and Marina Abramovic has left her post in MoMA’s atrium. However, less-hyped pleasures remain, like a miniature Lee Bontecou retrospective at MoMA and a series of Miranda July sculptures in Union Square. It is a perfect time to branch out and visit the city’s galleries. (ARTINFO says this every week but really means it this time.) Openings this week is brimming with possibility, not least because a new show at Canada carries with it a requisite, sublime trip to the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory.

THURSDAY

Jim Hodges, “New Work,” at Dieu Donne, 315 West 36th Street, through July 31, opening Thursday, June 3, 6–8 p.m.

Work by this master of materials has been appearing all over New York recently. His stained and mirrored glass wonders were paired with Felix Gonzalez-Torres work at the Flag Foundation last year (which was perhaps the most beautiful show of the season), and a six-foot-wide rose made of tape and tar paper dominated the recent flower-themed show at CRG (his former gallery). These new works all use handmade paper, a medium he mastered during a 2002 residency at Dieu Donne. They continue a recent, sinister bend in his work: Pulp, for example, uses cast paper to mimic links of chain that wrap and imprison a delicate paper sheet.

Rudy Shepard, “Falling Together,” at Mixed Greens, 531 West 26th Street, through July 9, opening Thursday, June 3, 6–8 p.m.

Rudy Shepard could be the life-affirming version of Elizabeth Peyton. Like Peyton, Shepard paints portraits of intimates (his girlfriend, his son) and musicians (Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Sun Ra), but he replaces Peyton's cool, blasé gaze with wide-eyed love. Cobain’s hair is a series of buoyant blond streaks; a stubble goatee adorns his face.  He appears a jumbled, slightly crazed savant compared to Peyton’s withdrawn, androgynous rock star. Another welcome difference: Shepard paints with a sneaking humor. The man in My Soon to Be Ex-Father-in-Law (Roger), 2010, looks rather pleased with that title, and a portrait of Shepard's apparently jolly therapist Eugene just happens to be bigger (and more expensive) than the other page-sized works in the show.

Pia Dehne, “Eve of Destruction,” at Blackston Gallery, 29C Ludlow Street, through July 18, opening Thursday, June 3, 6–8 p.m.

Pia Dehne’s latest paintings venture deeper into her fascination with camouflage. The Düsseldorf Art Academy graduate’s Boar Hunter shows a camo-covered man pointing a fearsome bow and arrow straight out of the canvas, adding a violent touch to a tradition that has extended from Noland through Johns and Stella to Acconci. Other paintings are said to take military ships as their subject, another traditional painterly topic that Dehne seems likely to tackle with her typically fascinating hyper-real aplomb.

FRIDAY

Homunculi” at Canada Gallery, 55 Chrystie Street, through July 11, opening Friday, June 4, 6–8:30 p.m.

Writer and artist Trinie Dalton is at the helm of this show, which includes four artists who bring an expressionist verve to the human figure. Matt Greene is a former Deitch (and Dakis) favorite, whose paintings Roberta Smith once opined called “conservative, thin and calculated to appeal to young, straight, male hedge-fund managers with a yen for lap dances and a taste for magazine illustrations from the 1960s,” which is still an endorsement of sorts. Unless heavy impasto is your obsession, you’re unlikely to find Allison Schulniks mutant beings similarly sexy, but the colors of Ruby Neris sun-blasted sculptures may do the trick. Meanwhile, Matthew Ronays pieces live in the realm of the found-object assemblage. This one could get rowdy.

Brian Chippendale, “Fruiting Bodies,” at Cinders Gallery, 103 Havemeyer Street, Brooklyn, through July 3, opening Friday, June 4, 7–10 p.m.

Like the concerts of his notoriously raucous noise band Lightning Bolt, Chippendale’s drawings push up against the limits of their medium while never quite spilling over into anarchy. Swirling patches, patterns, and tiny blobs of color abut and compete for attention, but eventually cohere into recognizable spaces like ground and sky. He populates these cartoon worlds with children, animals, and aliens, though the figures often resemble mash-ups of all three, mixing body parts to create disturbing new forms. If Gert and Uwe Tobias abandoned their underlying German austerity for the rollicking psychedelia of American drug culture, their work might look a bit like Chippendale’s.