If the Leeson show at Bitforms is sparingly curated, the exhibition of German painter Neo Rauch at David Zwirner succeeds as an ambitious spectacle.  The canvases themselves are imposing – scaled like history painting from Europe before modernism, or abstraction in America at the height of modernism.  Yet their subject is neither romantic or abstract, but rather strictly surreal.  Each painting features a constellation of figures mostly unaware of each other's presence, lost in daydream and scatological fantasies, though connected by incidents of violence and vague drudgery.

Rauch's palette reinforces this sickly malaise.  His colors are bright, but somehow more anxious than festive.  The cavernous, final room of the exhibition appears to be unified by a scurvy yellow that dominates the narratives.