Lombard-Freid Fine Arts
531 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through May 28

The New York artist Michael Rakowitz is best known for Conceptual work conceived to exist outside a gallery context. Soon after he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied with Krzysztof Wodiczko, he introduced his paraSITE project, a line of inflatable plastic shelters for the homeless. Most recently, the artist, who is of Iraqi Jewish descent, set up a series of receiving stations and mail drops for sending packages of donated food and clothing to Baghdad.

In his first New York gallery solo, he turns his eyes to the past. The centerpiece is a large, balloonlike model of one of the buildings from the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, built in St. Louis in the 1950's as a utopian exercise in racially integrated living. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the project was a failure. In 1972, the buildings were demolished, though Mr. Rakowitz's air-filled model, constantly inflating and deflating, suggests that impulses that led to both their creation and destruction live on.

The dark side of Modernist optimism is also probed in smaller pieces that refer to the lives and deaths of some of its chief formulators. There is interesting information here, and Mr. Rakowitz has a sharp eye for the resonant, epigrammatic image. But the problem of Conceptual art, once objectified, being reduced to a series of one-liners remains. Mr. Rakowitz handles this well because he is visually inventive. Still, the focus on objects in a gallery seems to cramp his natural style. I look forward to seeing him at work again, back out in the world.