At Pace’s main building, Julian Schnabel has taken over the primary, ground-floor space with a show centering on the theme of Italian pine trees, whose distinctive, layered canopy appears as almost abstract forms in his paintings on maps and broken crockery. Schnabel’s art has gotten prettier over the course of his career—I don’t know whether that’s a function of his work as a filmmaker or just something that comes with age. But the pine trees and sky-blue backgrounds of these works are only part of the prettification; the flat maps allow Schnabel to show off his draftsmanship, too.

Schnabel’s most recognizable format remains the broken plates, which serve as a substrate for image-making. If you saw Mnuchin Gallery’s final exhibition this year, it was clear that the plate paintings Schnabel made in the late 1970s and early 1980s were darker, cruder, and more enigmatic. His return to the format years later—when he started copying bright, iconic images—suggested that he was still quite self-conscious about the plate paintings and how they defined him as a painter. But in this show of the Italian pines, the plates are just one alternative to the paintings on maps—and the pictorial emphasis is back on the images themselves.

Upstairs at 540 West 25th Street, Pace is showing a room of David Hockney’s iPad paintings, which were created during the pandemic when he was holed up in a farmhouse in Normandy, as one does. Between April and December of 2020, Hockney, an eager adopter of new technology for the making of art, drew the night sky on his iPad every time there was enough moonlight to cast shadows. Remote Normandy’s lack of light pollution, combined with the backlit screen of his device, gave Hockney the opportunity to do something that’s difficult for any painter: work in the dark to capture the subtleties of moonlight.

The show brings together 15 of these works in a dimly lit room with cobalt blue walls that re-creates the artist’s own experience of the landscape. After your eyes adjust, you are transported to the French countryside under a night sky. But the subject matter is only one feature of the iPad drawings. Printed on paper and mounted on aluminum, these works are now very much in demand—recent sales of iPad drawings at auction have reached prices as high as a million dollars, although these are surely not priced anywhere near that.

Finally, it just so happens that across 25th Street, at Glenn Fuhrman’s FLAG Art Foundation, there’s a show featuring Ann Craven’s Moons, from 2012. The work is 87 small, 14-inch square canvases depicting moons, and it only takes five minutes to get a welcome perspective on the subject matter.