“ Shechet is the first living artist to exhibit in depth at the Frick. Her installation—a balancing act of respectful and radical—pairs early-eighteenth-century Meissen porcelains with sculptures she recently made at the same German factory. It’s a triumph that could have been a disaster, a paragon of Old Master virtue jumping on the make-it-new bandwagon, and the museum’s curator of decorative arts, Charlotte Vignon, deserves major credit for taking the risk. So does the collector Henry H. Arnhold, who gave Shechet free rein of his trove of hand-painted plates, bowls, vases, tea services, and sublimely absurd figurines. What makes Shechet such an inspired choice isn’t simply the twenty months she spent, on and off, in a Meissen studio, working closely with the company’s artisans. It’s her long-term interest in East-West connections. Since the nineteen-eighties, Shechet has made a close, secular study of Buddhist art. At one delightful point in the show, a robin’s-egg-blue-and-white fluted bowl, from 1730, seems to float in midair above an elegantly chunky sculpture, made from the same mold in 2012. The bowl’s form was inspired by a lotus, which, in Buddhist lore, is a reminder that even beauty is rooted in mud. It’s a good metaphor for porcelain, too.”