We’ve already shared a few of our own personal favorites from 2014, and to round out the year, we asked artists themselves to offer up their highlights from the past 12 months in the art world. Here’s the second installment of our two-part list (you can find year-end selects from Diana Al-Hadid, Gary Panter, and others here, in Part One).

Ted Gahl

Paul Lee at Maccarone

“A departure from his signature towel-based and appropriated works, Lee’s show ‘Matinee’ consisted of eight modestly sized figurative works executed in the dark. Made with pastel on wood and then constructed with movie theater carpeting, it was a bizarre mix of Twombly blackboard, mandatory freshman year art school ‘blind contour’ drawing, and fifth-grade birthday parties at Loews. Satisfying.”

Robert Janitz at Team

“Large-scale paintings made with oil, wax, and flour reminded me of the view in a drive-through carwash, or a stick of butter being pushed around in a heated pan. Rounding out the show were small portraits depicting the backs of heads, and a mock houseplant made of common industrial refuse. The works showed movement, sublime palettes, and traces of figuration. Like the show’s title (‘Stick Shift Heaven’), the works are about labor, the domestic, and the analog — themes that any other painter should be proud to identify with.”

Sam Moyer

“Off the top of my head, Mika Tajima at Art in General was one of those shows that just hit a perfect tone (no pun intended). She is a master of installation: the elegance of the freestanding Jacuzzi... Also there was this strange thing Graham Collins did in November. He had a solo show in Italy at Luce Gallery that was made up of work that ‘reflected’ the work of a solo show he simultaneously opened in Brooklyn at Soloway. Both beautiful and complex shows in their own right, the transatlantic mirroring adds a dimension beyond physical restraints of a gallery... time travel? My mind was blown by the Albert York show at Matthew Marks. And Gober, Gober, Gober.”

Ryan Wallace

“As the loudest sector of the market seems fully intent on punishing ideas, here were three exhibitions that prized wildly inventive thought and virtuosic handling to playful, hilarious, and appropriately dark ends: Matt Kenny at 55 Gansevoort; Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer; and Glen Baldridge, Ian Cooper, and David Kennedy Cutler at Planthouse.”

Nicolas Lobo

Sigmar Polke at the Museum of Modern Art

“I usually get disappointed for some reason or another with retrospectives like this one. This time it lived up to my expectations and more, although of course Mr. Polke may have imagined it differently...”

“The Look” at Guccivuitton

“This show was great, and it could only have happened in Miami. Group shows are usually tough for me to like, even more so when they are based on geography. Somehow this one worked out; it really stuck with me.”

Chris Byrne

Scott Reeder at 356 Mission

“I’ve been a big fan of Scott’s work since first seeing ‘Symmetrical Pirate’ at Pat Hearn’s gallery in 1998. For the installation at 356 Mission, the combination of movie props, parody paintings, and parody props (and wigs) was completely disorienting with an immersion into a Reeder-esque alternative universe, culminating for me in the viewing of the movie ‘Moon Dust’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD): a masterful, all-encompassing, epic social critique... masked as a DIY parody of sci-fi camp.”

Charles Andresen at The Green Gallery

“Possibly the greatest image maker of his generation (if you’re able to stop long enough to look). Once you allow yourself to enter the deep space trapped inside these blobby pigmented rectangles, you discover a universe made of paint a la Malcolm Morley or Eugene Von Bruenchenhein.”

Peter Saul at Lincoln Center’s Schwartz Gallery Met

“Peter made five paintings to accompany the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of Mozart’s ‘Le Nozze di Figaro.’ (They’re on view through January 3.) When Peter taught in Austin, I’d often visit him and would typically hear a ‘turned up to 11’ opera blasting from his studio. He may be the most audio/operatic visual artist working today and his first idea/best idea approach truly came alive in this context.”

“El Greco in New York” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“This exhibition, up through February 1, 2015, includes paintings from the Metropolitan Museum and the Hispanic Society of America’s collections. It still seems inconceivable to me that many of these works were made in the late 16th century. If a painting could be a Greatest Hits compilation, ‘Opening of the Fifth Seal,’ 1608-1614, alone offers the complete Modernist vocabulary with one stop shopping for Cezanne’s ‘Bathers,’ Matisse’s ‘La Joie de Vivre,’ Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,’ and when Jackson Pollock said, ‘That’s what’s wrong with [Thomas Hart] Benton. He came face to face with Michelangelo — and he lost.’ I think Pollock may have actually meant El Greco.”

Gina Beavers

Jesse Chapman at Algus Greenspon

“These paintings combined the best of the feeling of Old Master painting with contemporary angst. Connection versus alone time. The group versus a close-up of the hand. These paintings are incredible in person, and Jesse’s one of the greats.”

Kaari Upson at Ramiken Crucible

“Sculptures, many cast from discarded sofas, found on the street in LA. Tapping that Van Bruggen/Oldenburg lineage, but these are cushiony couches, rendered firm, that appear soft — subjects that are normally so lazy, but working hard in this awesome show.”

Joe Nanashe

Ragnar Kjartansson at the New Museum

“I keep thinking of Kjanrtansson’s durational performance here. The sprawling scene of young male performers (some shirtless and do I recall several in boxer shorts?) casually strumming an amorphous score by a member of Sigur Ros as they sat on beat-up couches surrounded by empty beer bottles. I was told the preparators’ duties included maintaining a steady stream of beer for the young boys. Part sonic spatial opera, part college stoner flop house; wood paneling would’ve truly completed the tableau of some Larry Clark wet dream.”

Zoe Crosher

“Bathymetry” at Del Vaz Projects

“An enigmatic and elegant figure, Jay Ezra Nayssan drew me to his inaugural apartment exhibition due to the incredible image and text on the show’s press release (which didn’t really have much of anything to do with the show and was written, it turns out, by Alex Miller, of whom I am a big fan). Rarely do press releases work on me, but this one did, and given that my friend was driving, the fact that it was on the west side, in an anonymous and forgettable apartment building with very little parking around (so very LA) didn’t bother me in the slightest. It turned out to be a wildly fun night that involved a slight cheap champagne hangover, good art on the walls, and a late night renegade harp performance with a charming, talented, and young symphony harp player dragging his huge instrument up the elevator, decked out in Elton John-esque sequins. It was a surprisingly and refreshingly fashionable-without-being-lame crowd, with the strangest installation consisting of glow-in-the-dark miniature crabs eating fish eyeballs off of a destroyed laptop that someone related to the artist (the mother?) wrote her PhD on. That makes it sound much more dark than it was, but really, in the end it was quite dark, even with the ruffle of Jay’s silks, toilet paper in a very nice bathroom with a lock that worked, and the very Mediterranean-diet-appropriate snacks on the table. It was like a proper cocktail party turned upside-down underground art party, that was most importantly made up of good work overall, even though I don’t remember loving anything particularly. There is something about Jay — in his effortlessness, his camel hair coats, and the fact that he is trying to buy a title — that manages to pull all sorts of unexpected people together (along with good art), making this a very memorable hot LA night for me.”

“Too Soon” at Perry Rubenstein Gallery

“This show has been, sadly, entirely forgotten due to its unfortunate place and horrendous timing as the final exhibition at Perry Rubenstein Gallery before he went bankrupt. It was a show that had absolutely nothing to do with Perry, instead initiated by his then associate director Meredith Bayse, and it was probably one of the best group shows I saw this year. Which has taken me a whole year to finally be able to say. Curated by Santi Vernetti, who I think is one of the most promising young curators in town (and now the assistant to Helen Molesworth at MOCA, some serious props to her for hiring him), the exhibition managed to show me (and mind you, not to explain to me) what this ‘Post-Internet’ moment is, in an exceedingly interesting way that made me want to engage seriously in a movement with such a lame name. I’m going to barter with Marc Horowitz as a result of it. I’ve even changed the way I think about art because of it. Although I didn’t love everything in the show, nor the movement for that matter, Santi, and the artists in it, did it right. It is heartbreaking, though, that the bullshit surrounding Perry Rubenstein’s closure was the way a lot of these younger artists had to learn about the absolute worst of the art world.”

Adam Broomberg

“The first highlight of 2014 was a private visit to Hauteville House, where Victor Hugo spent his last 15 years of exile on the island of Guernsey (his son called it ‘an autograph on three floors’). Any description would just not begin to do it justice. Spending the night in Le Corbusier’s studio apartment in rue Nungesser et Coli was equally sublime. My wife is doing a show in the apartment later this year so we really breathed deeply in the space. They are both exquisite plays on scale and light but more than anything hauntingly personal and intimate. On both occasions I felt like a spy in the house of love.”

Jasmijn Visser

Michael Müller at Galerie Thomas Schulte

The 11th part of a cycle of 18 at this Berlin gallery. The concept of this exhibition contained all the ingredients to become a pretentious, pompous, and overreaching show — but due to the eye for detail, and the concise execution, it was nothing short of amazing. While the fuzzy pink carpets were tickling your feet, your eyes would fall on rare fishes, Egyptian sculptures, rare birds, and archival texts. It was a world that swallowed you up as a whole and made you just want to exist among the elements.”

Eric Sidner at Circus

“Circus is a relatively unknown gallery quite hidden in Berlin, but well worth a visit. On the first impression Sidner’s first solo show there had something unheimlich (sinister) over it. This feeling started with the blow-ups from the the Black Panther coloring book — a product of an FBI domestic program in the ’60s — covering the walls. The accompanying installation balanced between statuesque and randomly placed, with ambiguous organisms, balloon shapes, and strange decorations. There was a friction between gesture, form, and meaning in the spaces that always demanded a further look.”

Trudy Benson

Katherine Bernhardt at Canada

“KB’s work is consistently inspiring, and this show pumped life into the current painting climate. She is a true natural whose work I have been following for years. She’s only getting better. My favorite painting at Canada was the one of cigarettes.”

Matt Mignanelli at Richard Heller Gallery

“Matt’s work is like John McCracken meets Bridget Riley. It’s all hand-painted, and there’s a mix of matte and slightly reflective paint that creates an optical effect which shifts his shapes from positive into negative.”

Daria Irincheeva

“Beyond the Supersquare” at the Bronx Museum, organized by María Inés Rodríguez and Holly Block

“Superbly designed in its use of space, composition, and conceptual rhythm, this exhibition (up through January 11) presents a large group of artists who explore the influence of Modernist architectural projects constructed in Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1920s through the 1960s. My personal highlights include the almost levitating sculpture ‘assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously’ by Leonor Antunes; ‘Casa Domino,’ a concrete piece by Felipe Arturo; and Terence Gower’s video ‘Ciudad Moderna,’ which superimposes architectural-style drawings over buildings and interiors featured in 1960s Brazilian films.”

“Bringing the World into the World” at Queens Museum

“This exhibition came across as a kind of ‘theory of relativity’ through illustrations in a wide variety of media. The exhibition gathered works by a diverse group of artists combining macro and micro cosmoses and deconstructing common objects, histories, and everyday rituals, thus allowing one to enjoy alternative perspectives on well known concepts. I especially enjoyed Harun Farocki’s ‘Deep Play’ from 2007, a multi-channel video piece presenting different ways of seeing, deconstructing, and analyzing a football match. And Chris Burden’s sculpture “Scale Model of the Solar System,” made in 1983, was a total thrill; it shows the distances between the planets, if the earth was the size of a pea, placing the other planets at proportional distances throughout the museum and beyond. And last but not least, a fantastic selection of old and out-of-print science books were presented in the main hall of the museum, as a functioning library, equipped with a computer station and scanner, where you could study and scan material from any book and email it to yourself.”

“Beyond Visual Range” at the Central Armed Forces Museum of the Russian Federation, Moscow, curated by Katerina Chuchalina

The V-A-C Foundation in Moscow recently launched a program of bringing contemporary art into non-art museums, thus merging diverse fields of research. This museum was a particularly outstanding place for one of the first presentations of this program because of Russia’s history, current political situation, and future perspectives. Artist Mihail Tolmachev conceptually cut an exquisite poetic slice through the thick body of the museum’s collection of trophies from different wars, and highlighted the usually silent (or silenced) voice of the individual in the massively destructive machines of the State at war.”

Ryan Schneider

Chris Ofili at the New Museum

“The room of ‘Night’ paintings was transcendent and transformative. It showed me, and hopefully others, the infinite possibilities of what oil paint can achieve in the right hands, and was nothing I would expect from a painting show — the works essentially changing completely depending on where you stand to view them. They go from a deep blue-black void to vibrant, bizarre scenery with one step left or right. This show completely raised the bar for what I aspire to in my own work in the coming year.”

Scott Benzel

Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1

“As ambitious as — and far weirder than — MoMA’s excellent Sigmar Polke survey, it showed the just-deceased artist’s lifelong commitment to the investigation of interior states and possible modes of their expression including but not limited to ‘impure’ formal experimentation, threatened murder-suicide, cyborg and alien mutation, and synaesthestic body/color reverie.”

Public Fiction in “Made in LA,” Hammer Museum

“A cuckoo’s egg within the larger survey, LA alternative space Public Fiction’s principal Lauren Mackler and guest co-curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer brought an insanely-paced weekly changeover and a dizzying roster of artists including Fiona Connor, Eric Wesley, Leslie Hewitt, and Chris Kraus simultaneously to the Hammer and Public Fiction’s eastside space.”

Sarah Charlesworth at Maccarone

“Elegant and startlingly fresh, the 1980s-originated Cibachrome prints (some among the last-produced of the now-defunct technology) from ‘Objects of Desire’ exactingly cut from glossy magazines and mounted on fields of saturated color with matching painted frames anticipate and exceed much recent work in photography: the photograph first as object of desire and second of the desired object.”

Karl Haendel

“One of the best shows I saw in 2014 was Samara Golden’s ‘Mass Murder’ at Night Gallery in Los Angeles. Golden’s mastery of materials, space and narrative transposes you to another dimension. Imagine the love child of Liberace and Jason Rhoades, in the year 2100, on Mars, wearing mixed plaids and prints, a hot glue gun in one hand and the keys to a stolen car in the other, followed by the Stasi, playing a minor cord, on rewind.”