Rei Sato at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, through August 8
We start off at Lehmann Maupin, where Rei Sato, a young member of Takashi Murakami's Kaikai Kiki collective, is having her first U.S. solo exhibition. Sato photographs tranquil street or nature scenes, transfers them to canvas, and then paints in cartoonish kids and animals. She has turned Lehmann Maupin into a charmingly naïve place where children represent the existence of something quasi-magical in the everyday world. Particularly when Sato paints the kids out of proportion with their surroundings, or creates only an outline of them that hovers over the canvas — as in "The Day I Saw Snow for the First Time" (2008), at left — she effectively convinces us that another, more innocent world can be found somewhere within ours, if we only look closely enough.
