"If you didn't get to Austin to see the Texas Biennial" The show's title pretty much says it all: It's a group exhibition of Darke Gallery artists who were included in the 2011 Texas Biennial. There's some nice work here, and unlike most group shows, every artist deserves a mention. Hillerbrand and Magsamen's humorous and unsettling 2010 video Accumulation, based around a massive pile of household crap, is on view. Kathryn Kelley has a fabulous installation in a narrow side gallery, left over from her recent show. Her trademark black rubber inner tubes are clustered over the ceiling, dangling down like flaccid stalactites, filling the space and overwhelming the viewer with the smell of rubber. Working in a decidedly smaller scale, Kia Neill offers up delicate clusters of beautifully fake and sparkly shells and coral. There's a lot of strong painting as well. Catherine Colangelo's flat, matte and graphic gouaches of houses and ships always have great color and pattern. Marcelyn McNeill's paintings blend flat color and hard-edged form with brushy bits in a pretty interesting way. And while shaped canvases can sometimes be gimmicky, Richard Martinez's Gulf (2007) is an elegantly elongated silver ellipse. Matthew Bourbon's paintings are on view as well, with scenes in which figures appear to be digitally interrupted with bars or pixel-like clusters of vivid color. It's definitely worth a trip, and it's much closer than Austin. Through November 19. Darke Gallery, 320 Detering St., 713-542-3802. — KK
"Insperity Golf Experience" Putt-putt golf isn't the leisure activity it used to be. What killed it? We have no idea, but if upscale makeovers are bringing people back to the bowling lanes, we think contemporary art might do the same for putt-putt. The nine-hole Insperity Golf Experience explores what happens when you ask artists to design putt-putt holes. You get your standard, avoid-the-obstacles holes like Emily Sloan's Sloan Winding Landscape, a yellow-turf area split by a little winding fence, as well as trick-shot challenges like Elaine Bradford's Hole in the Sidereal, complete with a replica of the artist's signature sweater-clothed deer. We wanted to play Anthony Thompson Shumate's Galactic Forfeit Cowboy Lounge, which launches the golf ball through a custom-made pinball machine, but it was temporarily out of service. And the Art Guys naturally contribute a hole you can't even play; it's meant only as sculpture. (Score yourself a hole-in-one and enjoy.) Through November 27. Discovery Green, 1500 McKinney, 713-400-7336. — TS
"Katja Loher: Multiverse" Not unlike Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, Swiss-born Katja Loher creates brightly surreal video worlds. The artist crafts kaleidoscopic visuals, setting unitard-clad female dancers against strange flora. The videos are hypnotic and riveting; the only problems are in the presentation. In an extremely successful installation in the back of the gallery, Loher amassed a cluster of huge white weather balloons and projected circles of video over their rounded forms. The artist's imagery and the balloon forms work incredibly well together. But in other pieces, Loher sets video screens behind circular openings in wall-hung panels. She then attaches thick glass spheres over them. The glass has nodules that distort the video in an interesting way but as an object, it's too much. The same goes for the circular screens set into a table like place mats and underneath a glass pitcher and goblets. These pieces are extremely slick and well-executed, but just because Loher can pull off these complicated objects/presentations doesn't mean she should. The video is strongest in its simplest presentation. Through November 23. Anya Tisch Gallery, 4411 Montrose, 713-524-2299 – KK
"Matt Magee" Tape is de rigueur for painters seeking crisp, graphic abstraction. Matt Magee makes those kinds of paintings, but he works without a net — i.e., no tape. Filled with patterns and rows of shapes, some of the works get a bit of an optical hum going through color placements and the occasional op-art-y pattern. There are also heavy doses of Latin American avant-garde abstraction. Overall, however, much of this is work that could be sterile or facile if it weren't for its hard-won hand-painted surfaces. Conduit (2011) is a white panel filled with rows of neat blue scallops. It's only when you get close to them that you see the slight wonkiness and the dense brush strokes, a visual record of the artist's failed struggle for perfection. There is something wonderfully engaging and charming about Magee's paintings. Through November 26. Hiram Butler Gallery, 4520 Blossom St., 713-863-7097. — KK
"New Formations: Czech Avant-Garde Art and Modern Glass from the Roy and Mary Cullen Collection" Avant-garde Czech erotica, anyone? "New Formations," an assemblage of early 20th-century Czech work collected by Mary and Roy Cullen, presents some pretty wonderful things: everything from glassware to periodicals to the aforementioned erotica. And like most shows of private collections, you should visit it for the objects and glimpses of the period it contains rather than to receive a comprehensive overview. Jindrich Štyrský's 1933 text and photomontage, Emile Comes to Me in a Dream, was only distributed through the mail. One of his collages, on view in the show, illustrates why. A photo of a half-naked woman clutching a feathered fan is paired with a photo of a skeleton with its boot still on. Štyrský stuck an image of an erect penis over its pelvis. It captures the decadence bookended by the carnage of WWI and WWII. Tamer but equally impressive offerings in the show include amazing art glass from the '20s and '30s, in which Bohemian glassblowers turned their considerable skills to dramatic modern forms. Through February 5, 2012. The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 5601 Main, 713-639-7300. — KK
"Oil Sketches by Kim Dingle" There used to be a lot of "house galleries" in Houston, Montrose bungalows turned into exhibition spaces. But the real estate boom and townhome craze of the late '90s and early 2000s took care of most of them. Hopefully, artist Sharon Engelstein is leading a revival. Engelstein and her husband, painter Aaron Parazette, have turned the front parlor of their 1920 bungalow into a great gallery space. The Front Gallery's inaugural show features L.A. artist Kim Dingle's oil sketches — brushy, gestural images of chubby-legged little girls in puffy-sleeved white dresses, white socks and black Mary Janes. Neither saccharine vintage children's illustrations nor creepy Henry Darger characters, Dingle's girls are decidedly self-possessed. Pouting, clowning or angry, they wear frilly clothes symbolic of the stereotypical "girlishness" they choose to ignore. Through November 26. Front Gallery, 1412 Bonnie Brae, 713-298-4750. — KK
"Working in the Abstract: Rethinking the Literal" This show acts as a kind of teaching tool, so it's appropriate that it's on display at the Glassell School of Art. It's a primer on different styles of abstract painting, and it features some local heavy hitters of abstraction. The styles range from the liquid and organic compositions of Michael Kennaugh and Terrell James to the structured and geometrically inspired works of Pat Colville and Susie Rosmarin. The show's good for cleansing your mood palate; it's a way to exorcise those analytical demons and distill your surroundings down to color, shape and pattern. Rosmarin's meditative grids are consistently sweet eye candy, illuminated and flickering in an op-art-ish way. And Brooke Masterson Stroud's mysterious black paintings mix hard lines with hazy, unknowable open space. The exhibit succeeds in displaying the potential for emotion in abstraction. Through November 28. The Glassell School of Art, 5101 Montrose, 713-639-7300. — TS
