There is something about Ángela de la Cruz’s “Traspaso” [Transfer] that leaves one cold. The first impression is that of having arrived somewhere unexpected, when everything is already over. Strewn across the floor, canvases without stretchers and in different forms—two rolled against the wall (Roll (Navy/Turquoise) and Roll (Turquoise/Navy), both 2014), another extended across the middle of the room (Drop, (Navy/Turquoise), 2014) and one more in a corner rolled up into a ball like a crumpled piece of paper (Nothing (Pale yellow/Yellow), 2014)— look as if they’ve been abandoned in the semi-empty gallery space. Hanging on the walls are what look like two sculptures (Throw IV (Light Blue) and Throw V (Turquoise), both 2014) as well as three small paintings whose canvases barely cover their stretchers (Tight (Turquoise/Navy), Tight (Light Blue/Turquoise), and Tight (Violet/Navy), all 2014). All of the works in the exhibition defy categorization: neither the canvases on the floor nor the metal volumes on the wall behave as paintings and sculptures generally do. Each medium’s nature is transferred to the other, as the name of the exhibition suggests. This is not the first time that de la Cruz has titled an exhibition “Transfer.” She did so twice in …

Remember “Mr. B,” the supposed predator-collector living in the Nordic Pavilion during the 2009 Venice Biennale, whom we found dead in his house pool? His cadaver has now re-emerged—so to speak—in Elmgreen & Dragset’s latest antithesis: the sauna they have opened at Helga de Alvear Gallery in Madrid. But Mr. B’s pool is not the only familiar requisite here in this newly charged historical “construction” or “scenario.” From a replica of Barberini’s muscular Drunken Satyr to several pictures of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s ephebi with shorts and t-shirts, this gay Mecca is replete with accessories and details that coalesce with those we expect in a gallery or an art institution. In a sardonic yet elegiac way, Elmgreen & Dragset’s new exhibition both simplifies and expands upon the Venice installation. As openly queer men, Elmgreen & Dragset know rather well that the gay bathhouse is a place where love, like art, has lost its “aura.” Characterized by the perversity of social-sexual relations in commodity exchange and circulation, the contemporary gay sauna, before and after the AIDS crisis, is a territory that feeds the allure of commodity-spectacle—instead of romance or real engagement. Its empty and passing gaze of fetish-bodies-on-display nourishes erotic fashions and recyclable lifestyles, …