It’s not a pairing that automatically comes to mind – a prints of Picasso and a seat of Wendell Castle – though a cofounder of cubism and a art-furniture primogenitor demeanour as if they were done for any other in Wexler Gallery’s stream exhibition, “The Abstract Forms of Pablo Picasso and Wendell Castle.” Picasso’s winding and seductive lines on paper relate in Castle’s three-dimensional forms, and clamp versa. That a 13 Picasso works are primarily black- or brown-on-white and a 6 Castles are monochromatic emphasizes a relations between forms.

Picasso’s sketch in these etchings, linocuts, and lithographs is a consistent sign of his luminosity as a draftsman; it also fast and crisply illustrates his meanings in his images. In a imitation Muse montrant à Marie-Thérese thinking son Portrait sculpté (1933), from a copper picture heavily worked in artwork and drypoint, Picasso depicts a bare womanlike troubadour display Picasso’s immature partner and indication Marie-Therese Walter a sculpture of her possess head, about that she seems to be puzzled. It’s a rather demeaning thesis that Picasso explored in several works from that duration – that Walter was not worldly or attuned to epitome art and never saw her correspondence in his work – and in this imitation it creates a meant indicate immediately.

In Picasso’s hands, a face can be as seductive as a nude. Two lithographs from 1947, mounted side by side, both substantially early portraits of Françoise Gilot, his join for scarcely a decade and mom of his children Claude and Paloma, denote a energy of clever lines and of an picture that is all of a piece.

Buste de Jeune Fille, a many striking of a two, in that a contours of Gilot’s face are rendered in one continual U-shaped line, recalls a directness and morality of Matisse’s sketch character (Matisse did make a cut-paper mural of Gilot in 1949).

Strong lines and shapes conclude Castle’s new pieces, that move certain surrealist works to mind and demeanour some-more like sculpture than furniture. Midnight (2010), a black-stained mahogany chest on prolonged insectlike legs, could be a cartoony loyalty to Louise Bourgeois’ spider sculptures, while dual mahogany benches with seats done like birds advise an African change as filtered by surrealism.

Though not fur-covered, and outset from a pedestal, his yellowheart chair, Sun King (2009) has a figure suggestive of Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup and spoon, Object (Le Dejeuner en fourrure) from 1936. The winding forms in Moonbow (2011), a chair forged from Peruvian walnut, make a closest tie to Picasso.

It’s sparkling to be means to see a uncover of this scale and aspiration in Old City – and intelligent of Wexler to put a regulars like Castle into a new context.

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Wexler Gallery, 201 N. Third St., 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays by Saturdays. 215-923-7030 or www.wexlergallery.com. Through Feb. 25.

Same/not

Abstract portrayal is everywhere in Philadelphia these days; during a same time, a groups between minimalist, gestural, geometric, and a code of epitome portrayal that takes a cues from routine art and designation are crook than ever. Take a works that make adult a organisation shows during Larry Becker Contemporary Art and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, for instance.

Becker’s “Eight American Abstract Artists,” that gathers works that were recently seen in a American Abstract Artists’ 75th anniversary muster in a Crane Arts’ Icebox gallery, is a uncover that expresses this gallery’s cultured to a T (indeed, dual of a show’s 8 artists are represented by Becker). Stripes, grids, zigzags, and several aspect textures are deployed in high tone combinations, many memorably by Stephen Westfall, Thornton Willis, and Merrill Wagner (there is also a poetic tiny cast-metal sculpture here, by Tom Doyle, perched on a pedestal).

“Twee Abstraction,” during Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and curated by TSA member Alex Paik, is stoical of 9 artists from a younger era who make any bid to criticise formality. The coming of a miss of technique is distinguished in these paintings, that mostly occupy frail found materials and underworked surfaces. A demeanour of abjectness is cultivated.

Three of this show’s works file a ideals quite well: Jeffrey Scott Mathews’ sewn board combination of red and white triangles, DLTA SQNC (RED HEX) (2011); Suzanne Goldberg’s ethereal sculpture of wire, cosmetic concealment and wood, The Lovable Pauper (2011); and Tamara Zahaykevich’s Pumpkin Queen (2011), a embellished paper-and-foamboard construction that puffs out roughly dual feet from a wall, and charmingly so.

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Larry Becker Contemporary Art, 43 N. Second St., 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 215-925-5389 or www.artnet.com/lbecker.html. Through Saturday.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid, 319A N. 11th St., 2 to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. www.TigerStrikesAsteroid.com. Through Sunday.

Pen pals

Down a gymnasium from Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Grizzly Grizzly has “Duett,” a collaborative bid of British, Berlin-based artist Alanna Lawley and Philadelphia photographer Matt Giel, done in response to any other’s practices as gifted from distant and orderly by art author Becky Hunter.

Lawley and Giel used Internet technologies to promulgate opposite a pond; eventually her appropriations of repository imagery and his photographs of general subjects came together in this unpractical melody, an designation that takes over a tiny gallery with Giel’s seascapes coiled, draped, boxed and differently displayed with her montages of scans from interior-design catalogs mounted on a four- row construction.

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Grizzly Grizzly, 319 N. 11th St., 2 to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. www.grizzlygrizzly.com. Through Saturday.