Stephanie Dost and Franziska Holstein at Marianne Boesky

Graduates of the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts and former students of Neo Rauch and Arno Rink, Stephanie Dost and Franziska Holstein first showed in New York at Boesky's 2004 group exhibition called "Clara Park, Positions of Contemporary Painting from Leipzig" (a reference to a gathering place favored by artists in the former East German city). This new outing provided Dost and Holstein with the running feet appropriate to ambitious solo exhibitions, separating the gallery into two spaces plus a shared foyer that set forth their joint interest in representations of the figure.

The montage of their production quietly resonated across the introductory gallery. Dost titled her show "Private Function." Her collages mounted onto MDF panels suggest a nonlinear narrative incorporating altered and sequenced portrait drawings, photocopies and photographs of landscapes. An untitled collage (2006-07) occupying two 97-by-49-inch panels that together form a near square introduced photo-booth images in the manner of Warhol, disaffected youth by way of Larry Clark and Nan Goldin but nothing so erotic as an Abercrombie & Fitch campaign. Hoodies and tank tops are wardrobe mainstays. The assembly includes drawings--offhand, sometimes intentionally crude line portraits--and small paintings reminiscent of concerns ranging from Gerhard Richter's to Elizabeth Peyton's. An androgynous figure wearing a hunter's cap with ear flaps waving, which appears in the first, introductory panels, crops up again in what is effectively the last of the series. It is a Peyton-style portrait mounted on a small stretcher not more than a foot high, a key element of another untitled 2006-07 work on four panels adding up to 97 by 214 1/2 inches. Here the individual's features are more defined, even arrogant, and bear a similarity to others in this arrangement; the configuration also includes a greater number of landscapes.

Holstein introduced her exhibition, "Weekend," an informal sequence of acrylic-on-canvas paintings (2006), with two works mounted close to each other and across the room from Dost's scattershot panels. The roughly 36-by-48-inch grisaille Ice Seller--a merchant at a frozen-confection machine--has the incidental composition of a photographic image captured in passing. The text that identifies the approximately 36-by-24-inch The Child has the reductive look of prose on an album cover.

In the left part of what appears to be a diptych, the 20-by-16-inch Dancing with Deer in Background depicts a man dancing, but no visible deer. A slightly larger companion panel, Christmas Tree Lost, offers a bar or lunch counter and the back of someone seated on what may be a bar stool; as the title indicates, no Christmas tree is seen. Elsewhere, Holstein installed the 16-by-12-inch Christmas Tree, which completes the interior of Christmas Tree Lost by further defining the figure at the bar and adding the Christmas tree, adorned with holiday candles, just beyond. The 40-by-47-inch Bubble Wrap depicts what may well represent the backs of a number of small paintings the size of snapshots, placed face down on a preparator's packing material, bits of adhesive stuck to them to assist with installation.

The proximity of works by these two emerging artists in separate, generously scaled spaces underscored their association and the importance of their differences, which are considerable: the handling of materials, the rendering of the human figure, the integrity of line and the believability of form.

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