"Coloring Book"

By Damien James

Riva Lehrer’s art is fundamentally about one thing: the body in the world. Which is not to be reductive. The potential for variation is limitless; how we live in our space and interact with each other, how we are shaped by and how we shape each experience. Lehrer’s most frequently considered variation is that of variation itself, often in the form of disability and the psychological freight of being seen as something other, something different, which stems from disability. With variation come questions of beauty: what is beautiful and how do we define it, and how can our ideas of beauty expand to encompass more than the sort of vacant-eyed plasticized images constantly crushing down on us. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Shooting in lush, muted color, Art Fox continues the modernist tradition of wall photography pioneered by Aaron Siskind, and redeems the ruins, as Siskind put it, by capturing the enthralling blend of textures, splashes of paint, pock marks and blistering lettering and rust that bedeck weathered surfaces that can exert a hypnotic effect. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a happy conceit, photographer Lee Bey has paired his sensitive contemporary color shots of landmarks in Chicago’s neighborhoods with images of the same sites taken long ago, to show how much the scenes have changed, and in some cases have remained the same, at least in their meanings, if not their overt appearance. Nothing depicts how continuity and contrast intertwine with more telling effect than a vintage take of the original memorial to the police who fell in the 1886 Haymarket Riot at Desplaines and Randolph, where the anarchists and the forces of order faced off and a bomb exploded; paired with Bey’s shot of the monument that stands there today. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

By way of a cultural exchange, two exhibitions, one from Italy, the other from Chicago, are now showing side-by-side at the Zhou B. Art Center. And who would want to miss such a tempting opportunity to make a comparison? Read the rest of this entry »

Joan Mitchell in 1951

By Janina Ciezadlo

How much do we need to know about the feelings and ideas that give a painter the energy to push a brush around a large canvas? Having just read the new biography ”Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter,” by Patricia Albers, I now know a great deal about what Joan Mitchell did from day to day. Some of it, not all, by any means, is pertinent to appreciating and thinking about her work.

This extraordinarily detailed biography on Joan Mitchell will be particularly compelling to Chicagoans for the picture it offers of a financially and culturally privileged girlhood on the Near North Side during the 1930s and forties. Mitchell, the daughter of an overbearing doctor, who “wanted his daughters to compete like boys, but also, confusingly, to behave like little ladies,” grew up with mixed messages. Her mother was an editor for Harriet Monroe’s modernist journal Poetry and friends with Chicago artists like Manierre Dawson. Her maternal grandfather, Charles Louis Strobel, a steel and wrought-iron engineer, a colleague of Louis Sullivan, John Holabird and Sylvia Shaw Judson, among others, constructed the rolling bascule bridge at Van Buren Street. Read the rest of this entry »

Carole Harmel

RECOMMENDED

The genre of photo-works, which was one of the developments of the artistic revolution of the 1960s, calls for embedding the photograph in the context of other media to convey a comment on the relation between art and life. In this exhibition of three artists who create ingenious and involved photo-works, Carole Harmel steals the show with her three-shot sequence of color images that are placed in metal frames, torn out to reveal the subjects, and that reflect on the sin of sloth: a sensuous nude woman lies on a bed of roses that progressively engulf her until only the flowers are left. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

One of the legions of Chicago photographers who testify to their love for their sweet home’s cityscape by shooting on the streets in their own distinctive styles, Joe Koecher distinguishes himself from the others by his split personality that makes him a visual Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Look at Koecher’s clear and sometimes garishly illuminate color and black-and-white images that he has printed on canvas, and you are in the comfortably familiar aesthetic of celebration, served up with the panache of angle shots—like a breathtaking view of steel-and-glass skyscraper caught through the spaces opened up in the Picasso sculpture—and striking effects like the downtown wreathed in a billowing fog captured from Olympian heights. Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: The gallery is temporarily closed due to an electrical fire.

Way back before the millennium, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted an exhibition of French artist Annette Messager’s amazing textile-based installations. I wandered among hanging forests of plush organs, taxidermied birds wearing crocheted sweaters and perched/impaled on rebar, tangled webs of yarn and crayons, and ceremonial dresses laid out in long glass coffin-like cases. And, like the opening reception for Karen Reimer’s show at Monique Meloche Gallery, the space was sunk in a twilight gloom. Negotiating Reimer’s hanging pillowcases adorned with ornate text, the sense of being in an upside-down cemetery was only enhanced by the fact that Reimer was selling rubbings of the embroideries, one of which hung framed near the gallery entrance. Read the rest of this entry »

Those who saw his 2009 retrospective at the Renaissance Society might well be surprised that Jim Lutes is painting moody landscapes. Until now, his career has moved back and forth between abstract expression and spectral, sketchy, flabby figuration. But the four wall-size landscapes now showing in Valerie Carberry are far too picturesque to be considered contemporary, which is not to say he hasn’t tried to bring them up to date. His paintings are still recognizably twenty-first century, with space that feels flat, objects that are pixelated, erratically nervous mark-making, and little concern for Baroque luminosity or realistic textures. But still, each huge image has given this viewer the overwhelming and uncomfortable feeling of standing smack in the middle of Kelly Creek, Idaho, confronted by impenetrable walls of boulders, encompassed by dark, dangling foliage, with no apparent pathway to escape this dark, remote valley in the Bitterroot Mountains. The Impressionists shared their pleasure with the great outdoors, the Romantics shared their wonder at its mystery and Lutes shares his anxiety with what he calls the “Dumb Country.” Read the rest of this entry »

Krista Wortendyke, from "Crime Unseen"

By Jason Foumberg

During a typically violent summer in Chicago this year, Tony Fitzpatrick wrote an article for Artnet magazine about Chicago’s legacy of crime and murder—among cops and gangsters alike—and he arrived at the moral that “the city gets just as many killers as it deserves.” Fitzpatrick innately understands, as do many artists, that gloom-and-doom tragedies make for great art. Contrary to the common good, some of our greatest art is fueled by conflict, war, irony and struggle. “Reading about the happiness of others is often boring,” writes Charles Baxter in his essay “Regarding Happiness.” Baxter cites Adam and Eve. Before their sin, “they are virtually non-narratable.” It is their sin, and their guilt, that gives their story meaning. Following them, we have the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare, George Carlin and Lars von Trier. Two current exhibitions investigate the delicate topics of happiness and violence: “Crime Unseen” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and “The Happiness Project,” a citywide curatorial initiative organized by Tricia Van Eck. Read the rest of this entry »