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The art world tends to see Eva Hesse as an Athena-like figure, an adult from birth. Hesse was just 34 when she died of a brain tumor, leaving behind a prodigious body of work that continues to inform contemporary sculpture. Yet as the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition ''Eva Hesse Spectres 1960'' makes clear, Hesse wasn't always so self-possessed. The show's 19 paintings of shadowy figures predate her signature works, the arrangements of cloth and latex and wire that scrambled and softened the standard Minimalist vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At 71 the indefatigable sculptor Richard Serra is making some of the most intensely visceral work of his career. His latest sculptures in weatherproof steel are big enough to test the boundaries of the immense Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street in Chelsea, though their power has less to do with their sheer magnitude than with the way they carve up the space. The show is Mr. Serra's 12th sculpture exhibition at Gagosian, and his best in New York since a 2007 retrospective at MoMA. A touring survey of his drawings, organized by the Menil Collection and seen at the Metropolitan Museum this past summer, opens next month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Museum of Modern Art's annual ''New Photography'' exhibitions have tended to resemble a reality-show competition. Usually one artist stands out from a group of three or four (last year it was Tanyth Berkeley, whose portraits of unconventionally beautiful albino and transgendered women easily trumped earnest but dull projects by Scott McFarland and Berni Searle). This time around there are only two photographers, and they come from opposite ends of the discipline, making it difficult to judge them by the same scale. Josephine Meckseper, a German-born, CalArts-trained artist in her 40s, makes sleek-looking installations that mix photography and film -- often scenes of political protest -- with consumer objects. The South African Mikhael Subotzky, who at 26 is the youngest photographer to have been invited to join the Magnum Group, explores his country's prison system in vivid color and unflinching detail. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]