5 MUST-SEE GALLERY SHOWS IN NEW YORK: HEIDI HAHN, AMY SILLMAN, AND MORE

Are you stuck in the Waiting Place but are not quite sure Flip the gender on Keith Gessen’s 2008 book, “All The Sad Young Literary Men,” and you’d end up with a suitable alt-title for the terrific group of paintings in this young artist’s first solo with the gallery. Dudes, however, have been banished here — unwelcome, or perhaps just uninteresting. Hahn’s style tiptoes around Dana Schutz, Genieve Figgis, and fellow newcomer Grace Weaver. Her compositions feature groups of women, either clownishly happy or extremely sad-faced — this is emotion as emoji, surely. Her characters hang out on beds that are more like roiling oceans of abstract pattern (you might be sad too, or at least a little freaked out, if the fabric of reality proved so absurdly malleable). They mope beneath the clock’s angry tick-tocking hands, hide in the shadows behind the light cast by an oversized candle, or — in one instance — jump up in the air while their friends paint them, a suggestion that (no matter how bad shit gets) there’s a way to work around it, literally.