Alexander Dubovyk, "Golgota," 1996

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“But is it art?” is a question that will never come to mind in the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. The level of skill is so high and the references to art history are so many—especially in this current exhibition of two mature, well-established members of the Ukrainian Artists Union. As with all the work shown at this gallery, as well as in the nearby Orthodox churches, it all feels so fresh, clean and high-spirited. But still, often something seems to be missing.

Vasily Fedoruk (born 1950), who recently moved to Illinois, is a master stone carver working in both figurative and abstract styles, practicing an art that’s been absent from American monuments for almost a hundred years. His geometric stone pieces are like architectural details, cut from some great, whimsical palace, while his eclectic figures belong in some kind of temple—Egyptian, Persian or Byzantine. There’s a lot of playful variety. There is also some, but regretfully not a lot, of power.

Accompanying Fedoruk in this show are the paintings of an older colleague, Alexander Dubovyk (born 1931), in a mini-retrospective, with pieces from 1958 until today. The two early pieces, a figure and a landscape, show the high level of training that artists received in the Soviet era. The subsequent work seems to be on some kind of intense spiritual quest, but its orthodoxy is Modern rather than Christian. It’s as if he had a repressed desire to be painting religious icons—and I wish he had totally surrendered to it. (Chris Miller)

Through August 30 at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2318 W. Chicago Ave.

By Jason Foumberg

Elijah Burgher introduced me to sigils, which are words or sentences with the vowels removed and the remaining letters crushed into a compact shape. The phrase, now unreadable, resembles an abstract line drawing in its careful composure. If the sigil’s creator wishes to release its original meaning into the world, like a spell, he must successfully activate it by gazing at it during an orgasm or other climactic experience.

Sigils look wonderfully artistic, but they’re not usually displayed as artworks. Instead, they are private matters representing personal desires—for power, love, whatever. Elijah’s sketchbook contains a few sigils interleaved among his drawings, and he admits to burying some sigils in the undercoat of his paintings. The sigils have produced results, he says. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the attention paid to the New Museum survey show “Unmonumental” at the beginning of 2008, the conception of modernism as a deflation of Wagnerian pomposity can be traced to any number of cerebral twentieth-century artists and thinkers, from Duchamp and Adorno to Debord and Venturi. Eel Space director Patrick Holbrook reflects this modest respectability in a concise summary of his curatorial approach, “I take pleasure in finding common threads among diverse strategies.” And, indeed, the works shown since March in this fledgling first-floor nook tend to be fragmented gestures employing the contingency of everyday symbols, found materials and simple craft. May’s “Gained in Translation” group exhibit was largely text-based work, and Val Snobeck’s audio walking tour of the gallery’s Humboldt Park environs dispensed completely with the specificity of objects. Read the rest of this entry »

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A straight, classical, meditative photo-abstractionist, David Weinberg became fascinated by the visual intricacies in the details of a greenhouse complex in southern Wisconsin, revisiting the site over and over again, and shooting dynamic compositions in color and black and white. Looking into Weinberg’s images, we would not guess their provenance; instead, we see involved designs of undulating latticed rectangular patterns, vector-like juxtapositions of bars and wire, and turbine-like spools that seem to be spinning madly. “Reconstruction,” Weinberg’s latest series, represents a quantum leap in his pursuit of Zen photography; here he has surrendered himself to his strength—an intense receptivity to the power of elemental yet complicated and irregular forms—and gives us visualizations of force fields that function to enhance our sense of the vitality of the world and ourselves. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 29 at David Weinberg Gallery, 300 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

“Public Works,” a collaboration between four renowned graphic artists with roots in Chicago’s independent art and music scenes—Chris Eichenseer, Justin Fines, Cody Hudson and Andy Mueller—combines fine and commercial art in ways experienced in the artists’ careers.

At the show’s core, a dense collage of the artists’ commercial work (largely musical in nature) serves as a collective retrospective, making relative the new works that surround it. There is a notable difference between works old and new, however. Unlike the concentrated wall of past designs, the new works, freed from meeting commercial ends, carry more critical weight.

Perhaps stemming from the show’s title alone, aspects of this inaugural show of “Public Works” evoke an association with social art from the early to mid-twentieth century.  With current economic-political crises-responses what they are, the work that came out of the WPA (an artistic program initiated by the New Deal) comes to mind. Works Progress, Public Works…there’s something there, whether linguistic or otherwise. Considering the overlapping influences of commercial and fine art, it is fitting that social content pervades in varying degrees. When dichotomies of fine/commercial art collapse, so do public/private and communal/individual, enabling design to become didactic. From Andy Mueller’s playful screen prints to Cody Hudson’s Constructivist-recalling designs, the works combine to illustrate the possibilities for art to literally design our communal perspective.

“Public Works,” self-described as a series of shows and events based on enriching communities through creative occupations is as clear as its mantra: “When art makes work and work makes art, everyone benefits.” With graphic design—among today’s most socially profound and prolific mediums—at the heart of “Public Works,” this exhibition holds true to its intent. Moreover, like the artists it showcases, the show simply works. (Justin Natale)

Through August 29 at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, 835 W. Washington

You’ll have to tell the elevator man to stop on the fifth floor, but that novelty, in itself, might be reason enough to stop by Deirdre A. Fox’s installation at Finestra Art Space, located in the Fine Arts Building.

In the installation, Fox explores a formula: integration = form + concept + context. The equation’s solution is Fox’s exhibition, “To Locate Again: establish or lay out in a new place.” Here, Fox has reimagined the Finestra Art Space as a museum display case. She reappropriates, recontextualizes and redeploys artifact-based art-historical drawings from sources as varied as the fourteenth-century Middle East to the fire hydrant outside the Auditorium Theater. Read the rest of this entry »

John Metoyer, "Curse of Eleusis"

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Women with undelineated white faces and closed eyes nearly vanish in a pinkish-white mist in Lou Raizin’s ultra-muted photographic images. Helmut Horn presents his color sculptural nudes in chiaroscuro, with their textured, illuminated and softened bodies bathed by shadows. Ian van Coller offers up segmented color portraits of hyper-dignified South African domestic workers at their places of employment. Always the sly deconstructionist, John Metoyer upends this meditative show with his “Curse of Eleusis,” where we are confronted by an old-fashioned kallitype print of a zombie in a stately dress staring at us through empty eye sockets, garnishing the visual buffet with the spice of a frisson. The four photo-artists here are emotional aestheticists, sharing an absence of pretensions to realism and evoking sentiments ranging from romantic idealism through mystery to sheer gothic horror. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 22 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

Ian Hornak

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It’s off-season in a slow economy, so many galleries this summer are showing off their taste rather than any one particular artist, and one of the most tasty is Galleries Maurice Sternberg in the Hancock Building. It’s also one of the most unusual—presenting that most European of themes, the human figure, not as a concept or angry cartoon, but as a savory dish. Plus the savory environs, landscape and still life, in which beautiful people should be found. All of which would belong in a suburban shopping mall, except that it’s accompanied by that high level of formal intensity that officially divorced figure painting about a hundred years ago. Rotating through the gallery this month are paintings by Ian Hornak (New York), Izvor Pende (Croatia), Robert Amft (Chicago) and, the most intense of all, Niels Strobek (Denmark). Actually, the several Strobek figures and landscapes are what make this a great show, with a beautifully evil “Bathsheba” that deserves to hang beside Manet’s “Olympia.” Slowly but surely, this gallery has been building a market for this alternative kind of contemporary art in the Chicago area. (Chris Miller)

Through September 7 at Galleries Maurice Sternberg, Hancock Building, 875 N. Michigan.

By Jason Foumberg

On a recent summer evening at dusk, a group of people decided to go for a walk together, silently. This involved, most basically, a quiet herd of amblers moving through a Logan Square neighborhood eyeing green grass and fingering cinderblock walls. On another level, though, this was a Walk, as Thoreau would have it; not just the shuffling of sneakers against sidewalk to get from train to home, but a saunter—Thoreau’s word—for the sake of sauntering. Thoreau, of course, wrote a treatise on it. Buddhists call it “walking meditation” when you’re consciously walking, but it is decidedly not exercise.

Walking seems to be the perfect antidote to a full day of writing, or reading, or working creatively. The poet Wordsworth’s working method included obsessively pacing a path in his yard to help stoke the creative fire. Solutions and connections become clear while walking, as the brain and senses are reminded of a world beyond the fifteen-inch tunnel connecting your face and the computer screen. A little breeze tickles your eyeball. The mind becomes unburdened.

The Logan Square walk was coordinated by Michelle Tupko and Adam Jameson as part of the Red Rover reading series. The value of walking for a bunch of happily sedentary types was made clear by Tupko and Jameson as they introduced the phrase “reading a space,” meaning that a walker may observe the sights—say, a burning shopping cart—as metaphors and symbolic pieces culled from a larger text, the world. Perceiving the banal set piece of one’s life with elevated intentionality helps us to recognize the built environment as built, says Michelle. But why would she want to do that? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a project of photographic outreach, the Center offers works by eight artists who are clients of social service agencies and are passionate about what the camera can do. Luminous beauty in bright colors, often accompanied by inspirational text, dominate the images here, but a more somber and meditative note is struck by Diane’s muted color studies of Chicago in winter—captured by song titles—that emphasize solitude and sometimes abandonment. In “Lonely (Akon),” we see the North Pond restaurant at the Lincoln Park lagoon backgrounded by steel-and-glass high rises through a finely spun veil of snowflakes. In an untitled shot, Diane presents a forlorn park bench shot from behind surrounded by mounds and swathes of snow, and a pile of dead leaves. In all her works, Diane reminds us of the times when we were out alone and quietly came upon scenes that elicit the pathos of a wanderer. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 21 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln

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