The Jewish Museum is presenting a survey of Rachel Feinstein’s career.  It’s on until March 22 and you should see it.  It includes her work in sculpture, painting and video, as well as panoramic wallpaper, video and her maquettes for sculpture.  She’s fascinated by dualities, masculinity and femininity, good and evil, balance and precariousness or positive and negative space.  Some of Feinstein’s work I absolutely loved and some…not so much.

I love her painting on mirrors with enamel paint.  They’re all in black and white and remind you of old magazine photos.  They’re very moody. 

There’s one that looks like a haunted castle and others that look like portraits taken the characters in Alice in Wonderland.  They are marvelous.

I love her wrap-around wallpaper depicting Rome and I absolutely adore one three=dimensional wooden wall painted white and depicting what looks like a carriage, a mansion and a bridge. 

Sculpture is Feinstin’s primary medium.  I wasn’t enthralled with much of it although one piece I really loved.  Mr. Time evolved from a two-dimensional sketch translated into a small handmade maquette which then exploded to larger-than-life -size scale and fabricated in metal.  Mr. Time has a working grandfather clock.   I was fascinated by it.   Her sculpture is fabricated in wood, metal or ceramic.  Some of her sculpture is very striking and they’re painted in very bright hues.  I said I wasn’t enthralled with her sculpture and yet I am thinking back to so many of her pieces which had a profound impression on me which is what art is supposed to do.  See it for yourself and see what you think. Get the details.

The Metropolitan has a great exhibit focusing on the Early Modernist Paintings and Prints of Felix Vallotton, on until January 26.

His darkly suggestive paintings and graphically spare prints chronicled fin de siècle Paris like no other artist of his generation. He lampooned the bourgeoisie with acerbic wit and laid bare the urban turmoil of a society in flux.  Even though he lampooned it, he married into that society.  The exhibit is called “Painter of Disquiet” and in many of his works you can almost feel the tension.  This is especially true of one of his paintings of sitting at the dinner table with his wife and stepchildren (he married a widow).  There are some 80 works from the mysterious and unsettling scenes of the bourgeoisie to bold images of city street life.  I enjoyed it immensely and think you will, too. Get the details.

Miriam Silverberg is a freelance journalist and owner of Miriam Silverberg Associates, a boutique publicity agency in Manhattan. She may be reached at silverbergm@mindspring.com .