A handful of works in the show—like this one by John Chamberlain—incorporate the sleek, shiny, ready-made colors of automobile paint. They're all by male artists, and I don't think it's a coincidence. For men, choosing a car color is what selecting a shade of nail polish is for women—a point at which personal taste expresses itself through a standardized, industrial palette.

Chamberlain has a long-standing car fetish. He's best-known for the large-scale sculptures of wrecked car parts and metal scraps that he began making in the late 1950s. In 1963, he briefly tried his hand at painting, producing a suite of small, square works on Masonite and Formica, which he sprayed with Ditzler automobile enamel. Using a metal template he found in a junkyard, he added neat little grids to the monochrome fields. The titles of the paintings all refer to pop singers and R&B groups—the Orlons, the Marquees, Joey Dee, Elvis—brand names as American as Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors.