Pamela Rosenkranz and Nikolas Gambaroff: ‘This Is Not My Color/The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’

Swiss Institute Contemporary Art

18 Wooster Street, SoHo

Through Oct. 30

The Swiss Institute has a new, ground-level home, the former Deitch Projects gallery on Wooster Street, and is settling in nicely. Its inaugural exhibition, a double-solo by Pamela Rosenkranz and Nikolas Gambaroff, exploits the space’s snazziness and history of spectacle to implicate art as just another form of consumption.

Works by both artists mingle in the lofty main gallery, where the walls and floor have been painted a glossy white. Ms. Rosenkranz’s contributions poke fun at various strains of postwar painting, including the monochrome and gestural abstraction, while maintaining a close relationship to the body.

Painterly blobs on brightly colored backgrounds, for instance, turn out to be monotype prints on spandex (you can see the stretched fabric puckering at the corners). And swipes of acrylic gel turn hanging plexiglass panels into something less pristine, though still transparent. Oddest of all are the Evian bottles Ms. Rosenkranz has filled with flesh-toned silicone pigments, creating the illusion of potable skin.

Mr. Gambaroff, for his part, makes and assembles art objects that might serve as aspirational home décor. Human-size lampshades of white linen rest on small area rugs; cheap-looking furniture is propped up by self-help books. Coffee mugs, newspapers and paintings share a motif of italicized loops, though whether this elevates the banal items or downgrades the artistic ones is hard to say.

The overall message is that artistic innovation has been supplanted by commercial calculation, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had.