Why might you set about wrapping something? It could be to preserve it, to present it as a gift, or to prepare to throw it away.
Any and all those motives might apply to Francis Hines, at Hollis Taggart through November 18, but with a bitter irony. His work ended up in a dumpster, when an “environmental and demolition” firm cleaned out the barn that he had used for a studio. He had lived well into his nineties, long past the days when he was prominent enough to have wrapped Washington Square Arch, for a performance and sculpture that no one could miss. Now he returns to New York, and he proves not so easy to wrap up. 
Hines snagged that Connecticut studio in the 1970s, but he was a New Yorker in his own way to the bitter end. He began as a commercial artist after studying art in college and service in World War II—becoming chief artist for a Brooklyn department store. Andy Warhol started much the same way, although without a condo in the Village and a second studio on the Bowery. Something, though, was nagging at Hines, like abandoned cars on the streets. He assembled five of them into a pyramid, wrapped it, and translated it into pastels wrapped in fabric as well. They became his Mutagenesis and Hoboken Autobody series of the mid-1980s.
It also rescued his legacy from the dumpster. A worker spotted the auto parts and called in someone who knew cars. Fortunately, the newcomer knew something about art as well. He saw pastels on paper with the scale of paintings and with the physical presence of oil on canvas. Colors run to deep red, blue, and pure white. Taut fabric adds thickness, elasticity, and tension.
That tension is crucial. Hines may have named the work for Hoboken to insist on the gritty side of a city, for all his Manhattan assets. It also links wrapping to a discomforting physical intrusion. It cannot help suggesting kinky sex and artists like Senga Nengudi who work with stockings, stones, and a woman’s body. It may be just a coincidence that a Web search links to instructions for wrapping a body (firmly) for taxidermy. It is no coincidence that he called his late series Cages and Organisms.
He was, then, prescient and mainstream. He wrapped the arch in 1980, twenty-one years before Christo wrapped the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He stretched his gauze at waist and eye level across an aisle of the Port Authority bus terminal, where it seems less a wrap than a barrier. He had his illegal incursions, too, before Jean-Michel Basquiat, Banksy, and graffiti made “Defacement” fashionable. Still, Hines had a fragile success. Most, myself included, had not heard of him until the dumpster made him easy copy for The New York Times.
It might have been his late start apart from commercial art. The gallery, which leans to recoveries from those days, includes two paintings from the 1960s, and both are intriguing. People take to the beach and to an enigmatic gathering that the title identifies as a funeral. Technique relies on cuts into paint, for slim lines of yellow amid the red. Still, they look small and conventional. He needed the city to come to life—that and a fuller encounter with gestural abstraction and Post-Minimalism. Maybe, too, he needed to acquire the arrogance of wrapping the body and the city.
Then, too, it might have been his reserve that kept him under wraps. His art may belong to New York, but he had no trouble at all moving away for good. He gets along well with Dana James, an artist in her thirties in the gallery’s main space, through November 11, with her own play between the layered and the visual. She builds a work from more than one canvas, some of them curved at top or bottom, with encaustic and collage as well. Her pale blues look less bland in person. Still, Hines belongs to the 1980s, when painting was losing its credibility but challenges to painting from within painting had not.