Untitled, n.d., from Los Alamos, 1965-68 and 1972-74 (published 2003.) 1965-68 and 1972-74. Dye transfer print, 12 x 17 ¾ inches (30.5 x 45.1 cm.) Private collection. © Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York.

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Known for being one of the first serious photographers to work in color, William Eggleston is much more than that, as this well-curated retrospective exhibition admirably demonstrates. Shooting mainly in his native country, the American South, Eggleston was a leader in the post-World War II wave of street and social photography that relished in the popular environment and documented its beauties and quirks without sentimentality–but, in his case, with affection. Devoted to perfecting “a democratic way of looking around,” which had already been pursued by Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, Eggleston reached his peak in the 1980s with his series of street scenes and interiors, “The Democratic Forest,” which introduces us to a kitschy shrine to Elvis Presley in Graceland, a mouth-watering chicken dinner set out on a picnic table (we see its remains in another shot), an auto-parts store bristling with signage and a little boy in white overalls appreciatively studying a gun catalogue, among many other vignettes and slices of life. In contrast to his northern counterparts, Eggleston lightened his gentle irony with love. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 23 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan.

Daniel Gordon

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The eleven images by seven photo-artists, working in color and black-and-white, in this decidedly modernist show, run the gamut from Sebastian Bremer’s illusionist abstraction of pulsing waves that breaks down into spiny curlicued lines on close inspection, to Daniel Gordon’s stunning surrealist image of confused dismemberment, “Blonde Wig.” In between are James Welling’s two elegant studies of etiolated flowers, Walead Beshty’s four  miniature geometric studies, Barbara Kasten’s layered and filmy abstraction, Tamara Halpern’s blurred, layered and segmented abstraction with surrealist overtones, and Sara VanDerBeek’s out-front surrealist construction of a headless torso covered by a draping scroll. Extremism in the cause of art wins here with “Blonde Wig,” in which the lightly curled and flowing tousled headdress bedecks an inverted, cracked, bandaged and disfigured mask of a young woman, whose eyes shine out at us eerily and the top of whose head is resting on a man’s extended arm. None of the images here is conceptual; they have their impacts, for the abstractionists, in the play of forms of visual perception—more or less reduced to pure shape—and, for the surrealists, in the unbridled dreamlike imagination, more or less nightmarish. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 15 at Tony Wight Gallery, 845 W. Washington

By Jason Foumberg

Wellington “Duke” Reiter moderated a panel discussion at the School of the Art Institute last Wednesday, April 7, just one day after announcing his resignation as the school’s president, a position in which he served for two years. The panel discussion, titled “Creative Economy: Galleries, Artists, & the Market,” was convened to give post-graduation career advice to art students and alumni. Much advice was prefaced with the phrase, “In this economy…,” reminding everyone that a multi-thousand dollar college degree does not itself fling open the doors of success. The “Creative Economy” panel was one visible manifestation of Reiter’s attempt to introduce concrete and realistic career awareness in an art world where tight-lipped luck often dominates.

The panel consisted of the cast of characters that an artist could expect to encounter among the various stages of a commercial art career. There was Shannon Stratton, founder and director of Three Walls; David Weinberg and Aaron Ott, gallerists from David Weinberg Gallery; Rhona Hoffman, a dealer with thirty-plus years of experience in Chicago; and Larry Fields, collector of contemporary art and museum philanthropist. They represented the several forces, extrinsic to an artist’s talent, that, in the best circumstances, guide an artist to commercial viability, from the experimental art space (Three Walls) to placement in museums and collectors’ homes (Larry Fields). Read the rest of this entry »

“How do you talk about relationships of power with giant mounds of goo?” Noelle Mason asks as she pries small magnets out of metal clasps with a hand bandaged by duct tape. It’s a question that she has asked again and again in her work.

Mason is an object-based performance artist. While her works demonstrate a high level of polish—even an obsessive attention to craft technique—they also have a strong experiential quality. Mason makes frequent use of shock tactics and theatrical relationships between object and viewer.

The work on display in “Bad Boys,” her solo exhibition about “hysterical masculinity,” demonstrates a thoughtful use of materials in collaboration with horrific content. In “Nothing Much Happened Today (for Eric and Dylan),” surveillance footage from the Columbine school massacre is hand-stitched into a cotton tapestry. In “Sonata,” laser-etched sheet music is produced from Al-Qaeda beheading footage, which was translated into a twelve-tone scale and transcribed, tattoo-like, onto calf’s-hide vellum. Read the rest of this entry »

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As Chicago’s premier space for showcasing contemporary critical social photo-documentary, the Gage Gallery has come up with another searing exhibition, this time of Eugene Richards’ unsparing black-and-white shots of the inmates of mental hospitals—they would be better called madhouses—in Armenia, Hungary, Mexico and Paraguay. The insane asylum is no bed of roses even in the most progressive Western institutions; outside advanced industrial democracies, it remains an impoverished bedlam, nowhere more so than in the Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital in Asuncion, Paraguay. For sheer agony, nothing could possibly match Richards’ shot of a contorted woman screaming and grasping at the broken panes of the window of her cell as she extends her feet through their open spaces in a vain and desperate attempt to liberate herself. And that is only the beginning of what Richards calls his “procession of them,” in which one image after the other strikes the eyes of the beholder with pity and horror. To call Richards’ subjects the wretched of the earth would be a gross understatement; in Asuncion, abject suffering achieves its limit. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 14 at the Gage Gallery, Roosevelt University, 18 S. Michigan.

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Noodle arms and legs akimbo, a multitude of figures dance across the walls of the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (UIMA) in a brightly colored survey of the work of Chicago painter Gladys Nilsson. Organized by the UIMA, in partnership with the Illinois State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the exhibition coincides with Nilsson’s seventieth birthday in May, and is a joyful celebration of her life and work.

As is indicated by the sheer masses of elongated people crowding her paintings, Nilsson’s work continues to exude a Chicago Imagist style. The Imagists, a loosely defined group of Chicago artists working in the 1960s and 1970s, were often known to have an irreverent focus on the figure, and used imagery culled from advertising, comics and non-Western art. Pointy-nosed women predominate in Nilsson’s paintings, their bodies bending and distorted. The figures are often floating in narrative scenes that are filled with marginalia both familiar and otherworldly, reminiscent of the fantastical paintings of fifteenth-century artist Hieronymus Bosch.

Nilsson’s most recent painting, a large watercolor titled “Big Birthday Gladys,” was created specifically for this exhibition. With an always-present sense of humor, Nilsson depicts herself comically sprawled in the center, complete with drooping décolletage, clutching a slice of cake while surrounded by celebrating people. The horned helmet on her head is a nod to her Swedish ancestry, and a bespectacled man (presumably Jim Nutt, Nilsson’s longtime spouse and fellow Imagist artist) perches on her shoulders while daubing paint on her nose. One small square sketch exists for this painting in a case in the center of the room, displayed amongst a fascinating array of sketchbooks and ephemera selected by Nilsson herself. (Julia V. Hendrickson)

Through May 23 at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2320 W. Chicago Ave. Conversation with James Yood, and cake, May 14, 5:30pm.

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As the rest of the world rushes madly off to plastic surgeons or cosmetologists to efface the disfigurements of skin diseases, Lauren Kalman runs in the opposite direction: creating jewelry that simulates pustules and lesions, affixing her handiwork to the skin of female models and then shooting their “embellished” bodies in uncompromising color. It would take a treatise in postmodern cultural theory, which Kalman provides, to explain why she has undertaken her subversive task; suffice it to say that seekers after beauty should look elsewhere and aficionados of the grotesque will experience their eyes’ delight. More faux medical illustrations than fashion shots, Kalman’s images evoke the deeper sense that unwanted eruptions are the pits and cannot be redeemed by art. Turn a pimple into a jewel and it still has the same effect as a zit, which is not Kalman’s purpose (she intends deep play with the culturalized body), yet it is what she has revealed. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 21 at the International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. Lake Shore Drive

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Michiko Itatani is on a spiritual quest, not just in her current paintings, but in the entire sequence of nine themes that have spanned forty years of her career. With titles like “Movement,” “Body,” “Self/Others” and “Micro/Macro,” she has systematically explored the natural and human world within and without. As she moved further into the new millennium, she finally left our suffering planet behind, especially in the two parts of her latest series that she calls “Personal Codes.” In one part, “Hyper Baroque,” she presents interior views of what seems to be a spaceship. The interior looks like a fantastic hotel ballroom, somewhere beyond O’Hare, but it also contains a library with sixty-foot-high bookshelves and globes for each of the planets that it has visited. All this imaginary architecture is wonderfully luminescent. Beyond that, she has envisioned what a Buddhist might recognize as the “pure land” or “Western paradise”—that empty but sacred place that has been the goal of Japanese culture since the eighth century. To stand in a room enveloped by Itatani’s wall-size gray-and-white “Moonlight/Mooring” paintings is probably as close as any of us are going to get to achieving it. Which is to say, these paintings belong in a temple rather than a living space. Almost all these paintings feature a mysterious necklace of lights that seems to indicate a supra-human presence. The evident craft in all of these productions is staggering. (Chris Miller)

Through April 17 at Walsh Gallery, 118 N. Peoria.

"Night and Day," 2009, oil and wax on linen

Richard Hull is a painter’s painter. Forgive the trite expression, but in this case it’s an accurate observation. A host of other renowned painters were in attendance at the opening of Hull’s latest solo show, a few weeks ago, at Western Exhibitions, carefully assessing Hull’s latest group of abstractions. Given their depth and the range of activity involved, the paintings deserve the attention. Their bearings on the external world are numerous, resembling magnetic fields, circulatory systems, topological mathematics, topographies and, or, transportation systems (speaking only of the most obvious examples), though these associations seldom impose upon the viewer’s imagination. The guiding principle required for their interpretation: make of them what you will, and do enjoy yourself.

Hull has been living and working in Chicago for nearly three decades, spending the entirety of that time as somewhat of an institution in the city’s fine-arts community. Those familiar with his work—there are many—praise it for the same qualities one praises in a good jazz musician: lyricism, rhythm, spontaneity and energy; moreover, though one may not view Hull’s work exclusively as the embodiment of jazz music’s principles in visual form, these principles are certainly a dynamic force behind his artistic ethos. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mike Schuh’s work is quiet and unobtrusive, and seamlessly integrated into the apartment-gallery architecture of Golden. It’s so seamless, in fact, that a first-time visitor would be hard-pressed to pick out all of Schuh’s pieces. His works, mostly site-specific, were created to emphasize the fact that Golden, while currently un-lived in, began as a residential apartment. Schuh implies a domestic space, and his installations hover between residential function and household decoration. For an artist who professes an interest in objects in his artist statement, there are remarkably few objects on display, but the very sparseness of the exhibit brings attention to all of the elements of domestic life that would normally fill the space if someone made Golden Gallery their home. Read the rest of this entry »