From Leipzig -- The seven young artists here are all representational painters associated with the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, yet there is tremendous variety among the show's seven paintings, covering a wide palette of styles and subjects. Martin Kobe and David Schnell are fascinated with perspective: In Schnell's acrylic, "Stangen im Mai," a grid thickly populated with trees and other vertical objects extends beyond sight in every direction; Kobe's untitled acrylic resembles a surrealistic architectural design, in which the walls, floors, furniture, and blank space have been dipped in red and stretched to infinity. A surrealism more versed in the tradition of Magritte reigns in "Automat," Matthias Weischer's four-panel oil on canvas: Here, a peculiar object -- a cross between a bed and a pinball machine -- stands like a shrine inside a ruined open-air temple that no one ever visits. It's strange and compelling in its odd stillness. German political and industrial history is the subject of "Prozession," the oil-on-paper narrative-style painting by Neo Rauch, who at 44 is the oldest artist in the show. An atmosphere of decay pervades the unusual composition: Giant men in top hats hold small men in their hands like slaves, while others trudge into a factory that's billowing smoke into an already darkened sky; the impression is of a bleak labor sector in which the workers hold little power. With only one work from each artist and all displayed in a single gallery, From Leipzig whets the appetite for more from each. Through May 1 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd., 216-421-7340. -- Lewis
March of Crimes -- Dissident only in the vaguest of senses, this small exhibit feels like a rally whose participants have neither a cause nor a message -- let alone much aesthetic interest. Of the four featured artists, Bob Peck is one of two worthy of consideration. His dripped-acrylic and spray-painted pictures may be a touch gaudy and sloppy, but at least they present intelligible concepts. His best is a busy view of an urban skyline tited "The City Never Sleeps." Two of Grant Smrekar's paintings, as well, offer some cause for marching. In an apparent protest of the Iraq war, what appears to be the camouflaged face of a Middle Eastern man stands out against a background of splattered red; at the top is printed, in blunt Army-style type, "My War." Smrekar's untitled image of Michael Douglas's gun-toting character in the film Falling Down hauntingly recalls an instance of protest going too far. Elsewhere, Ali Calis contributes an incoherent set of curved wooden panels painted with cartoon-like characters à la Matt Groening, and Nick Zaremba offers a collage of pink paper, figurine drawings, and cutouts from a textbook -- the visual equivalent of babbling. Through April 9 at 1300 Gallery, 1300 W. 78th St., 216-939-1300, www.13hundred.com. -- Lewis
Masterworks From the Phillips Collection -- Touring this group of highlights from the renowned Phillips Collection is like taking an art-history survey course on Impressionism and Abstraction, and the list of artists reads like the textbook's index: Monet, Manet, Courbet, Morisot, Cézanne, Delacroix, Corot, Ingres, Van Gogh, Goya, Bonnard, Braque, Matisse, Renoir, Degas, Picasso, Kandinsky, and Klee. Duncan Phillips, founder of the collection and wealthy heir of a steel magnate, displayed amazingly prescient taste, buying works by artists whose true worth was not always recognized at the time. Organized by period and subject matter, the show consists of 59 paintings that originally hung in the Phillips home, now a major national museum in Washington, D.C., in addition to 18 comparable works owned by Cleveland. Renoir's magnificent "Luncheon of the Boating Party" may be the best-known piece, along with a handful of Degas' ballet paintings and Matisse's "Etruscan Vase," but the exhibition is not short on less familiar works and less familiar names. Cubism gets a weighty nod via still lifes by Braque and Picasso, but the show ends on a whole note of pure abstraction with Feininger's elegantly geometric "Village" and four exotic musings by Klee. This is not a class to cut. Through May 29 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Boulevard, 216-421-7350, www.clevelandart.org. -- Lewis
On a Pedestal -- Chicago sculptor and guest juror Richard Hunt presents a mixed bag of media, techniques, styles, and quality between these 32 pieces. Most of the best selections reveal a virtuoso ability to manipulate a chosen material, as in "Trap," Brent Kee Young's stringy, cylindrical web of glass; "Deep Blue," Leo Price and West Vayo's elegant, semi-abstract brass whale fin; and "Pitch and Roll," Robert Huff's fine, leaf-like etching in a pillar of sandstone. Other memorable pieces include Molly Flanigan's "Envelop," a ceramic arrangement that looks like cancer overtaking enlarged human sinews, and Pamela DeCoker's envelopes and pouches made of dried acrylic. Other, less fortunate works lack either a compulsion for being or the ability to evoke more than a brief smirk from the viewer. Under this category fall Andries Fourie's "House of Bondage," an aluminum structure silkscreened with pictures of irons and wheelbarrows, and a blunt piece of the emperor's conceptual new clothing by Chris Helman titled "Pedestal Support No. 1." Still, anyone with an appreciation for sculpture in its many forms will find much to enjoy on these pedestals. Through April 15 at the Sculpture Center, 1834 East 123rd St., 216-229-6527, www.sculpturecenter.org. -- Lewis
Pulse: Energy Forms/Jim Hodges -- In Pulse: Energy Forms, Icelandic artist Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson uses silk, a thin and delicate material, to convey wide-open spaces and nature's most violent physical processes. Stars explode, radiating waves of light, all within the confines of painstakingly stitched six-inch-square panels. Intricate black squiggles densely packed on vellum outline the movement of tectonic plates, perhaps mapping the progress of an earthquake. Applying fabric dye to larger panels of woven silk in the compositions called "Glacier Tongue" and "Floating Iceberg," Jónsson suggests the grandeur of a fog-enshrouded valley or the towering immensity of the arctic icepack with breathtaking likeness. These powerful images cannot soon be forgotten. Jim Hodges, featured in MOCA's other new exhibit, also uses nontraditional materials, but to different ends and with more mixed results. His drawings, mirror paintings, and other sculptures realize complex mathematical, scientific, and self-reflective psychological concepts in beautiful ways, yet his wacky, multicolored light-bulb constructions are frustratingly abstract. "On We Go," a silver-chain spiderweb hung across a corner, gets darker near its origin and looks as if it could replicate itself forever. In an untitled picture, Hodges deftly cuts out portions of a large photograph, causing the leaves of a sun-dappled tree to appear to undulate in the wind or fall softly to the ground. It is the artist's most recently completed work and also his most stunning. Through May 1 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 8501 Carnegie Ave., 216-421-8671. -- Lewis
Urban Passages -- Tucked into the second floor of the Tri-C West library, Urban Passages features two artists making intelligent visual points and counterpoints. William Chill offers views of factories and other urban landscapes that declaim Cleveland's waning status as an industrial city. He demonstrates great variety within his theme: The show opens with stunning semi-abstract charcoal drawings suggesting smokestacks and heavy industrial machinery. The wispy graininess of the charcoal creates an almost tactile effect of smoke and grime baked onto metal, while vast areas of white space contrast sharply with smaller but dense patches of bold black. Chill also offers photorealistic scenes of downtown showing the city's architecturally modern, well-organized -- even sleek -- side. Pam Gilliland, too, submits dynamic views of curvy highways and bridges. Unfortunately, the structural excitement of her designs is spoiled by a color palette that heavily favors pastels. In her paintings of intersecting telephone and electric lines as viewed from street level, some lines overlap to form pleasing geometric patterns, while others are less orderly. One or two of these might be called formally balanced compositions, but none presents a compelling subject, even in design terms. Through April 9 at Cuyahoga Community College West Library, 11000 Pleasant Valley Rd., Parma, 216-987-5322, www.tri-c.edu/art. -- Lewis
