By Rachel Furnari

Matthew Metzger’s paintings address themselves directly to the history of abstraction, but they’re also astonishing and accurate representations of the discarded objects of everyday life. They are about both the lives of things and their renewed vigor on the flat surface of a painting. The opening of his new exhibition at DOVA Temporary, “The Interrogative Remainder,” brought up a number of questions about Metzger’s process, motivations and the importance of 1970s arena rock.

For the most part, your paintings are fanatically illusionistic, reproducing the surfaces and two-dimensional forms of various ordinary objects and ephemera with great skill. And yet you are not interested in the painting “passing” for the object itself. I am tempted to describe your realism as entropic—always undoing its own illusion or betraying its artifice. Can you talk about your paintings’ relationship to the real, to the thing itself? Read the rest of this entry »

Self portrait, courtesy of the National Academy Museum

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The most surprising thing about this retrospective of an American Impressionist is that it happened at all. The genre hasn’t exactly fallen out of popularity, as it’s still highly collectable and collected. However, along with all the other non-French varieties (Russian, Spanish, Scandinavian, etc.), art history has deemed it tangential to the story of Modernism. It was only when the Terra Museum opened in 1978 that solo exhibitions of American Impressionists were consistently mounted in Chicago (with the exception of Sargent and Whistler).

Now that the Terra has closed, only a very ambitious private gallery will spend the big money and years of work necessary to borrow pieces from museums around the country and commission a professionally produced catalog—as Madron Gallery has just done for Robert Vonnoh (1858-1933), in only the second retrospective since his death.

This is a small show—about a dozen pieces that span thirty years and the many styles of Vonnoh’s career, reflecting the serious, careful drawing of the Boston school and the French academy where he studied, as well as the Impressionist and post-impressionist movements that followed. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Parallel Plot,” Matt Saunders’ solo show at the Renaissance Society, features photographic prints and rotoscoped animations by the Berlin-based American artist. Saunders’ process, making use of photography, collage and painting, starts with film stills, Mylar, ink and oil to create prepared negatives for the darkroom. These negatives are in turn used to produce original prints ranging from the very small to the very large. Trained as a painter at Yale, it is not surprising to see that Saunders’ work runs the gamut of painting’s genres: landscape, interiors and portraits are the focus of this artist’s portfolio, though pure abstraction is equally at home in the work presented here. Of particular interest are large-format contact prints made by taking original paintings, taping them down to large sheets of photographic paper, and exposing them to light in the darkroom, resulting in x-ray-like images that compress the painted image and its support into a single layer. Many of the works presented here are altered portraits of actors and actresses who have departed popular memory, appropriate for Saunders’ ghostly images. The subjects refer to the traditions of representational painting and cinema, like Warhol before him. However, Saunders is working toward the opposite end of the Warholian conceptual spectrum: away from endless reproducibility and toward uniqueness; away from the glamour of film and toward the obscurity of history. Beautifully installed and conceptually rich, this show surely warrants a visit. (David Emanuel)

Through April 11 at The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis, (773)702-8670

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Seamlessly merging single color images into panoramic “constructed landscapes,” Kevin Malella comes up with compelling scenes that could be taken as straight shots featuring brilliant juxtapositions. Sheer beauty is Malella’s strong suit, as when he offers up a study in which railroad tracks dusted with a fresh carpet of snow foreground a tract of suburban duplexes abutting the towers of Chicago rising in the distance on a soft partly sunny day. Guillermo Srodek-Hart moves inside and shoots cluttered old shops in rural Argentina, delivering rich and subtly lit color photos that combine complex composition with densely overflowing content, as in his study of shelving in a general store on which cases full of gaucho knives vie for attention with crates of vegetables, spools of twine, bags of dog food and fertilizer, and a stuffed wildcat and falcon, not to mention most of the rest of the stock. Evincing perfect complementarity, Malella and Srodek-Hart, each in their own ways, achieve rare marriages of form and fact. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 8 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

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Founder of the Institute of Design, which for a brief moment in the mid-twentieth century made Chicago the center of world photography, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was the great experimenter, addicted to the idea of a purely photographic vision that would develop his medium’s possibilities for transforming human sensibility so that people would be fit to survive and prevail in an industrial environment. Although he has been shown in his adopted home many times, this lavish exhibition, which covers five galleries and is accompanied by informative wall text and handouts, finally—through the efforts of curator Carol Ehlers—gives Moholy his due and allows us to appreciate his many facets whole. From his straight shots of cityscapes from unfamiliar angles (now part of the visual vernacular) to his “light paintings” and photograms in which directed light and objects play on photo-sensitive media without the mediation of a lens, Moholy was ever breaking new ground in technique; yet, in retrospect, a look at the light paintings, which were his boldest endeavors, reveals that the forms of those haunting astral abstractions are photographic versions of the contemporary paintings of the era that are most kindred to the works of Joan Miro and Paul Klee. Rather than being ahead of his time, as he wished to be, Moholy was of them as a genuine creator. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 9 at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan.

Photo: Ray Pride

British photographer Martin Parr may be the tallest, yet most unobtrusive figure at Stephen Daiter Gallery Friday night, leaning toward admirers, adding quiet comments. Handed fliers, Parr slides a Sharpie from the pocket of his crisp blue shirt. He has a look a photographer would affect: bemused, unremarkable, with fleeting but deadly accurate awareness. The room is crowded and the dozens of pictures on the walls range across three decades of his career, sampling from the satirical eye that has made him perhaps the most controversial of the Magnum Agency’s members. It’s hard not to type the milling observers the way this quiet man might. There are crackers and crudités and dip, and wittily enough, green gummie soldiers on their bellies on a bright red plate near his “British Food” images: of WHITE SUGAR packet, a wad of chewed gum in a glass ashtray like a kidney in a surgery tray, a bitten donut proffered in front of a homely tweed jacket, clumsily extruded baby bangers ready for a fry-up. Nearby, a man compares his need for a personal trainer to the work of an art restorer. “I just want to be lean and hard.” Read the rest of this entry »

Vintage Victim of Activism, sculpture, from Jogging

By Jason Foumberg

Winter keeps us indoors, and so it’s a good time for contemplation. This past season, there’s been a blooming of art manifestos. When so much feels out of control or beyond the purview of art—job loss, politics as usual, shrinking budgets and attention spans for art—artists take their message back into their own hands, just as they have done for centuries, and address manifestos to the masses. As published online, the Internet is the perfect marriage of medium and message.

In February, photographer and educator Dawoud Bey gave the keynote address to the College Art Association, where he had the ear of art professionals from across the US, and which he later posted on his blog, What’s Going On? The three-thousand-plus-word speech asks a series of questions about the established norms of the art world. Bey’s speeches and blog posts always emit an aura of calm, through which he enacts his activism, but a tone of anger cuts through his present speech. He asks, “Are we ready to rethink the notion of institutional prerogative, privilege, and exclusivity, or is the current institutional climate as insular as ever?”

Bey’s speech strives to empower its audience to build relationships with those who are usually excluded from the arts. “How do we go about making what we do matter not just inside of the institutional space of the college, university, museum or gallery, but outside of it as well?” With equal doses idealism and realism, Bey critiques the institutional systems of exclusion, with an anti-authoritarian, yet sane, message. The fix? “One has to believe that the work of bringing others into the center of the discourse truly matters.”

On Jogging, a new Internet art website, a three-part manifesto was published this January (Jan 2, Jan 5, Jan 13). Although the manifestos are unsigned, the writer(s) frequently use the first person. The anonymity of this manifesto is key to its message, which reasons the imminent disappearance of art objects and physical spaces to exhibit art. Read the rest of this entry »

“RimWare” is a handmade, four-piece porcelain dinnerware set with inlaid drawings of gay rimjobs. On a small appetizer plate, a man washes his behind in the shower. As the meal moves on to salad, soup and dinner courses, the scene gets progressively dirtier. Assholes receive lickings. Each piece of flatware has a decorative gold mesh pattern around its lip.

Thirty years after Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party,” a gathering of thirty-nine vaginal-themed plates (on permanent display in the Brooklyn Museum of Art), over-sexed ceramics no longer seem that shocking—not that Dustin Yager’s “RimWare” needs to shock in order to be successful. Yager is after something different than sexual liberation, perhaps, even, critiquing its opposite. As gay sex practices shed their taboo associations, commemorative plates, such as the “RimWare” collection, codify the dream of domestic bliss. “Oh, what interesting china,” remarked the conservative senator’s wife in “The Birdcage,” from 1996; “it looks like young men playing leap frog.” Today, sodomy need not be reduced to ambiguous detail. As the gays love their home decorations, and home-decoration retailers know this all too well, the market for fashionable homoiserie grows with the force of a Viagra-laced boner. Read the rest of this entry »

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The theatricality of peeling back the red curtains, which drape the entrance to Diane Christiansen and Shoshana Utchenik’s first collaborative work, sets the tone for their multimedia wonderland currently occupying Gallery One and its flanking catwalk at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Imbued with a whimsical sense of play, this artist environment, which incorporates elements of collage, painting, drawing, sewing, linocut prints, sound art, animation and sculpture, is a winsome accumulation of objects and ideas that explores the dichotomies of internal and external relationships.

The journey begins amidst the coniferous trees of the Ego Forest, complete with a canopy of stylized, Buddhist-inspired swirling paper clouds suspended overhead. The sprawling tentacles of a softly glowing paper-mâché octopus dominate the Relationship Bardo, and the two-dimensional pup tent in the Teacher Garden is a sort of Potemkin pit stop. The viewer’s quest ends in the Meditation Clubhouse, constructed of re-proposed wooden doors and boards, if one is brave enough to walk the narrow plank up it. Read the rest of this entry »

Helen Maurene Cooper, "Tuskegee," 2008

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As hip as they come, Helen Maurene Cooper and Michael Ratulowski are postmodern to the core, deploying their cameras to make ambiguous cultural statements in color. Seizing upon the conceit of commemorating the anniversaries of rappers’ deaths, Ratulowski would buy a 40 and proceed to shoot himself pouring out its contents in alleys and on stoops and sidewalks, without any discernible reverence and somewhat off-handedly, as though he was performing an assignment; yet he has encased his photos in ornate old-timey frames. Is it irony or camp? Cooper, who is blazing along with her third show of 2010, had previously exhibited images that played mercifully with fashion. Here she takes a walk on the wild side with scenario shots that place her subjects—mainly herself—among urban rubble or verdant glens where their passions are brought forth, although, of course, in provocative fashion poses. Bent over with her hands on her thighs, her dress riding up, her legs spread apart and her hair tousled over her face, Cooper stands in an orange-brown haze amidst construction trash as a forest looms in the background. Is it high concept or burlesque? (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 10 at David Weinberg Gallery, 300 W. Superior