Joakim Ojanen

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In talking about the “Drunk Vs. Stoned” exhibits that Scott Reeder and the General Store in Milwaukee put on at Gavin Brown’s Passerby space in New York in the mid-oughts, art critic Ken Johnson said that while “drunk art” is “impulsive, active, aggressive,” stoned art, on the other hand, “tends to be introverted, tends to focus on details, tends to be repetitive.” The companion psychedelic shows now at the Hyde Park Art Center, curated by Chris Kerr and Paul Nudd, blow away any such clear symptomatic distinctions. Read the rest of this entry »

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Albeit largely monochromatic, there’s a lot to enjoy in the fanatically perverse visuals issuing from the unholy twenty-year legacy of Scandinavian black metal. There are the band logos, which incorporate traditional Nordic and Celtic design elements with expressionistic lightning cracks and blood splatters; there’s the album art, featuring epic landscapes, cryptic pagan diagrams and shadowy photos of musicians made up in ghostly black-and-white “corpsepaint,” contorted rapturously under the weight of medieval accessories. Read the rest of this entry »

John Santoro, "Godzilla"

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In 1845, J.M.W. Turner reportedly joked: “Indistinctness is my fault,” in response to an American collector who despaired finding many recognizable details in one of his atmospheric seascapes. In some of his magnificent swirls, nothing was recognizable at all. Was Turner an early Abstract Expressionist? Not if you distinguish the epic struggle of man against nature from the psychological struggle of self against the world. Curiously enough, a similar Romanticism has recently emerged simultaneously in the work of two painters now exhibiting work in adjoining galleries at 835 West Washington. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s a wild and crazy world out there, and it seems to be the mandate of the School of the Art Institute to make sure we all know it. Defiance, despair, humor and social criticism are some of the predictable expressions. But the crazy-beautiful paintings of 2008 graduate Andrew Holmquist seem to be celebrating the chaos, as if to say, “yes, it’s a train wreck, but isn’t it a beautiful one?” Or, more like an explosion at a fireworks factory, brilliant colors in random patterns stream across the sky in a celebration of technology gone berserk. But the beauty of an aerial explosion vanishes in an instant. It’s only a few paintings that continue to feel that way for as long as they hold your attention. Holmquist has the rare talent to make that happen, whether by adding something unexpected, like a big, blue grid to one of his larger works, or by whipping together whatever he can paint, or find, in his small, daily studies. Interestingly enough, he credits some of his success to recent experiences with paintings by Titian and Rembrandt at the Louvre. Obviously he’s a guy who haunts art galleries. Read the rest of this entry »

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Shooting in black and white with a 35mm camera, John Sevigny—although he has been producing his documentaries and poetic studies of Mexico and Mexicans in the twenty-first century—is a throwback to the street photographers of seventy or more years ago in both style and subject. If one were to go by Sevigny’s images of a beaming accordion player in a sombrero, down-and-out bar girls in Guadalajara, coils of rough rope, and bedraggled migrants making their way from Central America to the United States, one would have no idea of the cosmopolitan Mexico of today, with its vibrant middle class, billionaires, drug lords and a dizzying array of sub-cultures; or of the changes in photography that have accompanied globalization everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

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Following its tradition of mounting thematic group shows, the Collective comes up with its best effort to date in its decidedly adult paean to Halloween and horror. All eleven contributing photographers cut deeply and tellingly, with featured artist Rosemary Warner taking the existential honors with her layered and ominously dull brown-toned photo-works that combine images of a ubiquitous skeleton melded with or conjoined to shots of people who are still bedecked in their flesh. In Warner’s most grisly piece, “One Eyed Jack,” we see a figure straight on; its head is bisected into a stony skull and the face of a man with a grim expression on his lips. Read the rest of this entry »

Combining as best it could the functions of a youth-tutoring and adult-education provider, a counseling center and a social service agency, the Blue Gargoyle, located in a grand decaying mansion in Hyde Park, closed its doors in 2009. But for the next year, the space will be brought back to life as a community art center, known as the Southside Hub of Production, or SHoP. John Preus, formerly of the reclamation and construction collective Material Exchange, has been central to the buildout and programming of the space, along with Laura Shaeffer, whose Op Shop initiative has occupied various temporary locations throughout the Hyde Park neighborhood over the past two years. For last weekend’s grand opening, people got a chance to see some features that are intended to remain consistent throughout the SHoP lifespan, things like a child-care area with guided art-making, a potluck table, an ongoing rummage sale and a functional woodworking shop for adults as well as another for kids—aspects that offer at least a grassroots echo of the nonprofit functions undertaken by the former residents. In addition, there will be a seed bank, a library, a movement space, studio spaces for artists and a time bank for service bartering. Read the rest of this entry »

Philip Pearlstein, "Two Nudes and Four Duck Decoys," oil on canvas, 1994

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What do the objects in a painting mean? This is a very important question for historians who study art made for the sake of religious or political ideologies. But when art is done for the sake of art, success often depends on what they don’t mean, especially in the post-war American art world that reacted so strongly against the idealism that accompanied two world wars. Philip Pearlstein (born 1924) and Ellen Lanyon (born 1926) are two artists, and friends, whose careers emerged at the beginning of that era, and their contrasting strategies for an engaging meaninglessness are currently facing each other on opposite walls at Valerie Carberry Gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

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Contemporary classical realism doesn’t have a home in Chicago, but Korean-born Anna Koh is temporarily bringing it into some empty storefronts in the North Park neighborhood, in what is now becoming the annual North Park Art Walk. Koh and her husband Jeffrey Varilla make classical sculpture for churches, universities and public parks, and now she has created something of a salon where she has invited like-minded artists to display their work. She’s also something of a community organizer, so many other organizations have been invited to participate, including the neighborhood universities, public schools and the Chicago Korean-American Art Association, with the ultimate goal of building a North Park Arts Center. The weekend exhibition is centered around the recently built studio of the Koh-Varilla Guild, where one can walk amongst angels, saints and heroes before they’re crated off to their final destinations. (Chris Miller)

October 8 and 9, Kedzie and Bryn Mawr Avenues

Victor Koretsky, Untitled, c. 1960s. Ne boltai! Collection.

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“Propaganda is hyperbole rendered urgent,” according to the exhibition’s catalogue, written collectively by a team of art historians, curators and media studies professors, accompanying the Smart Museum’s “Vision and Communism.” The exhibition centers on Cold War posters and maquettes by Soviet cultural worker Viktor Koretsky, and is the Smart’s contribution to the citywide conversation regarding the visual language of Russian posters, The Soviet Arts Experience. Koretsky’s incendiary posters take aim at the myth of capitalist democracy and give shape to its external threat (whereas more common Soviet realist images exhorted workers toward productivity) to the communist vision with images of Klansmen hugging bombs, a black man about to be hung by a rope in the shape of a dollar sign, and unemployment lines. Read the rest of this entry »