Brilliant drafting shines in Grosz's smaller works

George Grosz, who satirized the excesses and debasements of Germany between the two world wars, was so cutting that it's easy to get caught up in his subjects and his bitter humor. But he was a brilliant technician, too, as "A World in Grosz Disarray: Works on Paper by George Grosz," at Pucker Gallery, demonstrates.

The exhibit follows Grosz from Germany, a country limping from its losses in World War I, plagued by out-of-control inflation, poverty, and all the social ills that accompany it, to New York, where he immigrated in 1932, just before Hitler's rise to power. His New York drawings and watercolors, while still often taut with irony, are not as scathing as the Berlin works.

Look at "Berlin Street Scene" (1928), in which a mother and daughter pass in front of a butcher shop. The details and textures, from the slop-slicked sidewalk on up, tell a vivid story. The mother appears gray and defeated; her toes turn inward, her mouth turns down. Her daughter, in a fur-edged coat, rouge, and lipstick, appears smug and unaware beside her defeated mother. She passes directly beneath a sign reading "Today's Fresh Pig."

Grosz excelled at caricaturing the self-involved. The ink drawing "Greenwich Village Tombstone" (1934) depicts a party in an artist's loft. Strong, fluid lines describe the debauched partiers. A woman sits at a man's knee, gazing up at him. Grosz has made her more caught up in playing her part than she is in listening. He, too, is more interested in declaiming than he is in connecting. They are drawn with economy and boldness, but the dancers behind them dissolve into shimmery lines, suggesting a haze of cigarette smoke and intoxication.

Grosz, a trained draftsman, taught himself to paint. His watercolors are a spectacle. "Couple in New York" (1933) captures an upper-crust pair, their chins in the air. The tiny details on their faces and hands are riveting, juxtaposed with the soft washes of their coats. "New York Types" (1933) looks as if Grosz wet his paper before he applied the watercolor; it's all bruising, vaporous washes in browns and blacks, out of which he creates, with a few soft lines, four people in a crowd.

Pieces like these are a joy. Grosz always pushed his limits to find new ways to capture his figures. And those people, from the fatuous to the forlorn, make the show all the more compelling.

Paul Chojnowski draws with a small torch. He uses water droppers to wet paper or wood, soaking it here or just moistening it there. Then he makes images with his torch. The least wet areas char to black; the soaked parts remain pale. His work is up at Kidder Smith Gallery.

Technically, they're impressive. Chojnowski can delineate buttons on a shirt with a torch; the detail work alone is smart. The haunting "After the Deluge," burned onto maple, shows a man at night, standing thigh-high in floodwaters behind a boat. He holds up lantern, eerily illuminating a road sign and the ripples of water, which dance with the wood's grain.

Pieces such as this, which feature a lone figure, read like brief short stories, filled with portent. Who is this man? What is he feeling? Several other works focus on weather and its exaggerations of darkness and light. "Escape" puts us behind the wheel, looking through the windshield at a slick road with ambulances coming our way. In the rearview mirror, we see the reflection of a tornado touching down. These weather works are well made, but they tell predictable tales.

"Image for Sale," a small group show at the Fort Point Arts Community Gallery curated by Jessica Hyatt and Kristen Mills, examines how images one sees in the media contribute to one's own identity.

The most interesting work in the exhibit is by Jeffrey P. Heyne, who digitally alters Polaroids of Barbie dolls and covers them in resin. Industrial O-rings float over the surface of each piece, making patterns that divert attention from whatever perky detail of Barbie lurks below. Heyne visually captures a kind of dream state in which Barbie looms godlike, always in the viewer's awareness but not always perceptible.

Painter and collage artist Kurt Cole Eidsvig riffs on female portraiture, and the woman as object of the gaze, by painting women observing themselves in the mirror. The images are hot-toned and have a trite and familiar glamour. Only the collage elements (ticket stubs, architectural diagrams) that hover under the paint's surface suggest hidden or deeper meanings -- but with so much glitz, even more substance is required.

Sylvie Agudelo's large, blue-toned photos of nudes standing on a dock are -- according to a press release -- supposed to suggest a "freedom from image consciousness, which in turn (ironically) becomes a commodity image of the body." The nude is too loaded a topic to ever suggest that kind of freedom, at least in visual art. These works are not as clever or as subversive as they set out to be.