“Do you remember what I just said about the hammer?” asked Martin Heidegger in an imaginary encounter with Robert Solomon. “That it is not first of all a thing but a tool that we use. It is only when we suspect that something has gone wrong with it that we stop using it and look at it as a thing.” For Jared Madere, Ilia Ovechkin and Leah Patgorski, there does not seem to be any problem acknowledging the thing-ness of everyday implements, but rather problems with their representation. “What is a Hammer?” is the second exhibition at Adds Donna, organized by the quartet of artists who operate the space (Jerome Acks, Justin Jackson, Xavier Jimenez, and Jesus Gonzalez Flores). Upon my visit to AD, I was charmed to see how things in Garfield Park return to tools, finding this collective hard at work in an adjacent suite. Read the rest of this entry »

Here Rebecca Warren exhibits two types of sculpture. Medium-sized steel planks with a corroded patina are propped in a vague Constructivist revival style, each adorned with a single pom-pom ball. The steel sculptures are, plainly, a one-line joke, parodies of historical Minimalism. Humor in art can be a great antidote to the junk of life, but these sculptures are jokes about art, as if invented during an art student’s drinking game.

The second type of sculpture presented here is a series of clay piles on pedestals. The formless piles are manhandled and sparsely painted with some colors. There are, unfortunately, about eight of these sculptures, each no different than another (although one clay sculpture, with female parts, is quite good, though not better than Hans Bellmer). Personally, I get a lot of pleasure from abject and “unmonumental” art, but these pieces of shit pack no punch. As pieces of shit go, they don’t stink at all. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

After a splash on the London art scene in the 1990s, and an infamous controversy regarding elephant dung and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, painter Chris Ofili quietly relocated to Trinidad in 2005 to remove himself from politics and focus on his art. The Tate Britain, which also presented Ofili with the prestigious Turner Prize in 1998, held a mid-career retrospective of his work earlier this year. With Ofili’s current exhibition, “Afrotranslinear,” The Arts Club presents a more specific survey of more than 100 works on paper created over the last decade.

“Afrotranslinear” is the first Chicago exhibition of Ofili’s art, and his graphic, cartoonish figures present a 1960s and seventies style that aligns remarkably well with Chicago Imagist art. This may be the simplest, most restrained work of Ofili’s to date. As in his most recognizable paintings, his hand still strays toward the intricate and adorned. Yet, in his bright, flat watercolor portraits, and with a reduced palette in his graphite drawings, it is easier to notice the simple beauty and thoughtful humor in his work. With vibrant colors reflecting tropical Trinidad, Ofili’s lush watercolor portraits are crude in execution, yet purposeful in hue. Local flora is inseparable from the portraits, as the brightly patterned clothes seem to grow from the base of the page, flowering in the figures’ heads. The Arts Club’s choice to present solely Ofili’s works on paper is a significant one; they get all of the flashy, secret thrills of “that shit artist” with none of the obvious, immediate scandal. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael McElroy, from "An American Nightmare" series

RECOMMENDED

The Gage Gallery’s latest offering is a searing and unsparing investigation of the desperate fates of the people from around the world who are suffering the gravest effects of the current and seemingly intractable global recession. Among the contributors to the exhibition, Khaled Hasan shows us the grinding and wasting life of the stone gatherers and stone crushers of Bangladesh whose health is ruined by their backbreaking and dangerous work; Tomasz Tomaszewski reveals the grim labor of coal miners and steel workers in Poland’s Upper Silesia region, whose jobs are vanishing by the day; and Shiho Fukada introduces us to the horrid and lonely lives of old and unconnected unemployed men who fill the streets of Osaka Japan’s “welfare town” neighborhood where they die unnoticed and unattended. Perhaps we can remain at a distance from those people, but we cannot avoid the wrenching grief that we feel when Michael McElroy shows us what transpires in the “An American Nightmare” of Howard Mallinger who has lost everything—we first encounter him comforting his wife through a chemo-therapy session, then see him break down in despair in his condo where his electricity has been shut off and which is about to be foreclosed, and finally witness him praying over his wife’s grave. This show is required viewing for everyone with any smidgeon of conscience and taste for truth. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 31 at the Gage Gallery, Roosevelt University, 18 South Michigan.

Lloyd DeGrane

RECOMMENDED

Featuring Alan Teller and Lloyd DeGrane, this lush and varied exhibition of twelve Chicago photographers shooting in black and white and color, that is themed on the environment, runs the gamut between beauty shots of nature and gritty studies of trashy urban places. DeGrane strikes a middle ground with his color images of industrial and commercial landscapes, which put us in the midst of the infrastructure that sustains our lives, providing a sense of problematic empowerment, whereas Teller focuses on the odd and endlessly involving textures and shapes of trees and thickets. The most moving and significant images are from Matt Tuteur’s series on the Cabrini Green housing project, covering the stark buildings on an icy pale-blue winter day, the gutted hallways as the tear-down of the project proceeded, and a remarkable wall painting of “Desiree,” floating above a patch of multi-colored brush in a pink frock and a towering pink bouffant, her arms outstretched in pure elation as she sports the most cherubic smile. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 30 at Chicago Photography Collective, 29 East Madison

Alexis Mackenzie, "El Arbol," 2010

Death, in the board game lotería, is safe as Rose. They are simply nouns, presented in picture, as playing-card decoration. Lotería is a game of chance but you don’t really get Love or Death from it, only win or lose. In the card set of tarot, though, Death or The Fool mean what they mean, whatever they mean.

Two current exhibitions recruited contemporary artists to re-imagine these well-worn decks of cards. “Wild Card” at Johalla Projects uses the Major Arcana tarot deck as its jumping-off point, and “Mano/Mundo/Corazón: Artists Interpret La Lotería” at Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts draws from the popular Mexican card game lotería.

The common tarot deck (twenty-one cards) and the lotería deck (fifty-four cards) share six characters: The Devil, The Moon, The Sun, The World, The Star and Death. Both decks were popularized about 200 years ago, in Mexico and Europe. The current enthusiasm for and allure of these card decks is their singular, focused imagery. Spider or sliced Watermelon, they float against the blue sky. The Devil, what’s he got to do with it? Homage to these decks reinforces the supernatural perception that images have meaning in our lives, as talismans. Metamorphosis is a common theme in many of the remakes. People morph into animals, and animals morph into dead animals. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul D‘Amato, "Tashma II," 2007

RECOMMENDED

Drawn to Chicago’s African-American West side as a white male who yearns to be a homie, Paul D’Amato continues in his latest series of black-and-white and color photography, shot in the past five years, his longstanding romance with the streets. Neither a slummer nor a voyeur, nor a failed wannabe, D’Amato is a sensitive appreciator, as is evidenced by his color street and interior portraits, in which his subjects evince nuanced emotion rather than stereotypical expressions or unease with the encounter. Although the portraits dominate the show, its gems are the involved, richly textured, edgy and exquisite studies of places and perspectives that show D’Amato off as a beauty photographer. “Catholic School Library, Cabrini-Green” (2008) depicts a wall boldly blistered with peeling paint that supports rows of collapsing shelves filled with books spilling over each other. There is a social message here, yet it is overcome by sheer compelling complexity. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 30 at Stephen Daiter Gallery, 230 West Superior

Robert Amft, "Self-Portrait," 2009

RECOMMENDED

Robert Amft, born 1916, has been painting for more than seventy years and, incredibly, he’s still painting quite vigorously at the age of ninety-four. Amft’s style has been playfully eclectic. His work encompasses so many things that have happened in twentieth-century art, from Neo-Classicism to Pop to Color Field to commercial illustration and cartooning, even Chicago Imagism (he was there at the very beginning, making small silhouetted figures just as Roger Brown was starting out). He loves to mimic things, and has done variations on Leonardo, van Gogh, Duchamp and Seurat. But it’s really the “Peaceable Kingdom” of folk artist Edward Hicks with which Amft has the most in common, reflecting his love of animals and a free, easy and gentle attitude towards life.

Like many outsider artists, Amft is not limited by materials, using oil paint, photography, spray paint, watercolor, wire, wood, tin and various found objects—whatever feels right. But his work also obviously reflects the high level of professional training he received at the Art Institute in the 1930s, and being such a good draftsman and tight designer, his erotic watercolors (not on view here) are among the best among what that marginalized genre has to offer. Amft is a thoroughly secular man of our time, with a life directed more towards personal enjoyment than any kind of divine plan. Read the rest of this entry »

Natan Dvir, "Ehab (Muslim, Be'ine)," 2009

RECOMMENDED

Lebanese Rania Matar and Israeli Natan Dvir have independently undertaken photographic projects to explore the lives of Lebanese and Palestinian adolescents (Matar) and Israeli Arabs (Dvir). As an insider, Matar’s color portraits of young women in the private recesses of their rooms dispel any illusion that these people are exempt from globalized youth culture; even when they are in headscarves, Matar’s subjects partake in the hip romanticism that goes along with growing up. Dvir, as an outsider, confronts a higher bar to leap; his subjects, mostly male, pose themselves predictably as tough and defiant, yet he comes up with the show’s banner shot, in which a young woman in a hijab is captured in a mirror applying eyeliner, as a younger girl in black jeans and an entrancing t-shirt vogues seductively. Every rising generation has to encounter cultural conflict; Matar and Dvir know this and make us appreciate that truth. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 30 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior

Luc Tuymans, "Turtle," 2007. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

RECOMMENDED

The French term mâitre à penser refers to a person who does more than just produce philosophy or art, it designates a person with a public profile who teaches people how to think. Luc Tuymans, a Belgian who might not like the French reference, poses very specific questions about what it means to be Belgian. He is a good example of what Americans might call a public intellectual, even though our first impulse would be to classify him as a visual artist. Seventy-five of Tuymans’ wan, sketchy and unprepossessing, yet extremely influential paintings, chosen by MCA head Madeleine Grynsztejn when she was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Helen Molesworth, now at the Boston ICA, will be on display in Chicago until January 9. The subjects of Tuymans’ work are often images of images of images, glimpses from snap shots, newspapers, the web, apparent throwaways until some detail leads us to their historical and political significance. Read the rest of this entry »