RECOMMENDED

Belgian photographer Claude Andreini’s black-and-white small-format studies of the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Terezin are meant to renew memories of the Holocaust, yet—more than anything—they evoke the quietude and loneliness of derelict institutional spaces of any kind that, in this case, have been kept intact frozen in time, stripped and bare. Often shot at dusk or in the dead of night, always shadowed and often dimmed, and usually empty but sometimes including a solitary walker, Andreini’s images are reposeful and contemplative, not horrifying, even when they depict guard towers. We need to know what happened at these sites for Andreini’s photographs to incite remembrance; if we do not, we are moved to think of life that has departed, leaving its shell behind, rather than death. A sense of peace permeates Andreini’s images—the peace that inheres underneath and that surrounds human desires and deeds, for good or ill. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 3 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln

David Fredenthal, 1935

RECOMMENDED

When the stock market crashed in 1929, American art detoured off the road to Modernism, and traditional pictorial techniques were used to look at the society that had lost its way. “Who are we?” these realistic images seem to ask, often with the heaviness and dramatic chiaroscuro of earlier ages rather than the lite-bright sunniness of Impressionism. The postwar economic recovery would be announced by the triumph of abstract, individual expression, but in the intervening decades American artists took a look at Americans and how they lived.

The Terra Museum of American Art was once the best place to find special exhibitions of this kind. Now that it’s closed, Yen Azarro of Madron Gallery has done a good job of assembling a museum-quality show, drawing from a variety of galleries and private collections with big national names as well as local artists, like Aaron Bohrod, Edgar Rupprecht and Emil Armin. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Duggan at Johalla Projects

By Damien James

“It’s the same old shit punctuated by happ­iness and tragedy,” read Ryan Duggan’s screenprint for Johalla Projects, a statement that aptly encapsulated 2011’s Artropolis. That happiness is the piece causing you to gape in wonder, the rare work you can’t tear your eyes from, while the tragedy is everything else on display, reiterating the fact that you can show art wherever you want if you’ve got the money.

What’s been true of Artropolis in the past still stands: NEXT continues to excite more than Art Chicago; people-watching is worth the price of admission; and the entire fair is becoming smaller, evidenced by joint tenancy on the twelfth floor of both NEXT and Art Chicago, which only sharpens your focus to the difference between the two. The energy of NEXT is undeniable, where art spreads itself across more forms; it rolls, spins records, hacks itself to pieces, stretches across rooms, flashes and sings at you, and even makes you want to take a bite out of it. Art Chicago, on the other hand, exists mostly in squares and rectangles on white walls.

Not that Art Chicago is bereft of enjoyment, though if you pulled the Ed Paschke’s down the overall temperature would’ve grown tepid. All of the Shepard Fairey’s sold, which makes Santa Monica’s Robert Berman Gallery the big winner, but Hammer Gallery stood up for Chicago by releasing a $75,000 Roger Brown painting into the world, along with a lovely Karl Wirsum. Carl Hammer himself said that the weekend was moving slower than in past years, but that he was pleased with how his space came together. If I had Chris Ware and Henry Darger on my walls, I’d be pleased too. Read the rest of this entry »

"System of Display, X (EXTENEDED/Jean-Luc Godard, Le Grand Escroc, episode from Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde, 1964)," 2011, silkscreen on glass and mirror

RECOMMENDED

Adam Pendleton isn’t afraid to cut, copy, erase or mark other people’s artwork, whether it’s a Jean-Luc Godard film still or a documentary photograph of the Congolese revolution. Shane Campbell Gallery shows selections from Pendleton’s recent work, “System of Display,” a series of three-inch-deep black shadowboxes that present this bold approach to appropriating and revising visual culture.

Pendleton encloses the top of each squared object with a glass surface imprinted with a simple letterform. These characters are remnants of words—such as “N” from “ancient” and “S” from “sullied”—Pendleton culled from poems. Removed from their original meaning, the letters become markers, seemingly signifying a defined logic to the object-forms hung in neat rows across the gallery space.

Inside each box, Pendleton placed a mirror displaying a grainy, blurred image of a female subject. Pendleton selected the women from film and photo sources, isolated the figures from their original settings, and then repeatedly Xeroxed each image to strip out details. In “G,” “C,” “E,” “U” and “X,” Pendleton telescopes on a solitary woman with her face partially concealed by the book she’s reading. Each iteration reinterprets the scene, alternately revealing the title of the book, more of her facial features, or fingers clasping the book’s corners. It’s unclear whether Pendleton intends to highlight minute stylistic manipulations, or a shifting voyeuristic gaze cast upon this unknowing subject’s private moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Suzy Poling, "Bacteria Mat #3," archival pigment print, 2011

RECOMMENDED

Occupying a highly specialized niche of natural-beauty photography, Suzy Poling’s luscious color images of geysers in Yellowstone Park have the eerie and disquieting yet seductive feel of scenes of shimmering sites of environmental pollution and devastation, wrought by mines in the western desert. Stark color dominates among the photographic values that Poling achieves; her palette emphasizes earthen oranges, reddish browns, light purples, roiling blues and yellowish greens that bleed over the land and scar it, painting it in unfamiliar and threatening hues. Poling’s studies fascinate, yet their colors and irregular shapes make them border on the sublime, introducing us to aspects of nature that are alien to our sense of and quest for comfort, tranquility and harmony, or even of our taste for adventure and excitement. As one visitor to the show said as he quickly left, “These photographs seem to come from another planet.” They remind us that the world is neither made for nor belongs to our species. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 25 at ZG Gallery, 300 West Superior

Cornelia Hediger, "01.16.07"

RECOMMENDED

In an effort to lay bare the conflicts that sear her subjectivity, Swiss photographer Cornelia Hediger takes multiple images of herself and combines them into segmented compositions in which her personae engage in dialogical confrontation with one another. Hediger’s several selves are dominated by a pair, one of which is passive, creative, and skeptical—verging often on victimhood—and the other of which is more assertive and, if not confident, then at least determined. Incipient violence, agony, severe judgment, imminent death and an undercurrent of terror shoot through Hediger’s scenarios, never consummated and always renewed and unresolved. In one of her most telling studies, Hediger’s passive and, in this case, childlike self sits hunched in a corner, having scrawled an unkempt tangle of chalk marks on the floor, as she looks up apprehensively at her would-be dominating double who stands before her holding an empty bird cage. For many feminist photographers, imprisonment is a condition to be borne or battled; for Hediger, it is an ever-present horror and threat, continually deferred. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 25 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior

RECOMMENDED

Impressionism never caught on with sculpture the way it did with painting, probably because spontaneity is so much more problematic in three dimensions. The tempestuous surface of Rodin is still much admired but very difficult to imitate, while the sentimental, soft-focus wax surfaces of his contemporary Medardo Rosso went almost immediately out of fashion in an era that was responding to the power of archaic classical and primitive art, and reviving direct carving. But former Chicago sculptor Susan Clinard is bringing Medardo’s style back with a number of small, well-modeled clay figures framed within the wunderkammers that she has built for them.

The nooks within these cabinets of curiosities seem to reflect the compartmentalization of the artist’s own body as well as her life as mother, wife and artist, while also feeling like a display of odd relics in a very remote, rustic museum. They contain pieces of wood, stone and metal, as well as small, wax-covered clay figures, and the entire effect is the sadness of something lost before it was ever quite understood.

By themselves, many of the figures express a joyous and remarkable facility of modeling.  Clinard has a magic touch for making lumps of clay come alive as human heads, hands and postures. A dozen or more small portrait caricatures have escaped the cabinets and are displayed on a table beside them. One wishes that more figures would break free from their compartments, slough off the sentimentality of the soft-focus wax, and defiantly command the space of a room. (Chris Miller)

Through May 15 at Art Matrix Gallery, Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 West 35th.