John Neff Prints Robert Blanchon at Golden Gallery

Top 5 Exhibitions of 2011
John Neff, Golden Gallery
Jeff Carter at Crown Hall
Mark Booth, ADDS DONNA
Dianna Frid, Devening Projects + Editions
Crime Unseen, Museum of Contemporary Photography
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Painting Exhibitions of 2011
Andrew Holmquist, Carrie Secrist Gallery
Michelle Bolinger, Northeastern Illinois University Art Gallery
Elsa Muñoz, National Museum of Mexican Art
John Henley, Slow gallery
Luminous Ground: Artists With Histories, Illinois State Museum
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »

It is tempting to take the temperature of today’s cultural climate by sticking a finger in the cold past. How do we compare to those who triumphed before us? Is the past our tradition, our culture? But the things that grow in shadows are strange, and there is no darker shadow than the one cast from someone else’s departed golden age.

The New Art Examiner, an art-criticism newspaper and then a magazine published in Chicago from 1973 to 2002, has recently been collected into an edited anthology called “The Essential New Art Examiner,” which contains thirty-seven selections from its roller-coaster run through Chicago’s contemporary art landscape and insightful reflections from five of the publication’s editors. This King James version of the New Art Examiner condenses the battles of the old guard into a doctrine of Chicago’s signature art styles and controversies. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

After eight years away from the copper plates, Tony Fitzpatrick has bought a new press, hired a master printer and staff, and is back in the printmaking business with two new, complementary series of multicolor etchings. As with his designs for collage, he starts with a big evocative figure in the center and then works out to the edges with the horror vacui of a medieval monk, compulsively free-associating to fill in the margins with energetic patterns that carry the mood of his story. His art is about life, not the art world, and it follows his endless exploration of what’s going on—in Chicago, Mexico, New Orleans, Japan or wherever else his voracious curiosity has led him. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Between 1990 and 2001, Chicago’s gifted and gutsy documentary photographer Lloyd DeGrane went on the adventure of his life, going inside the walls of Cook County Jail and Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, shooting the entire world of incarceration from beginning to end, from the captors to the captives, and from the grinding oppressive tedium to the specks of creativity and wisdom. Read the rest of this entry »

Damon Shell

RECOMMENDED

Among the eighteen accomplished Chicago photographers displaying their “favorite images” here in a variety of straight genres, the most abstract pieces are the standouts, preparing us to take some comfort and even joy in the blustery days that loom ahead. Remember last February’s blizzard. Damon Shell lets us relive it blissfully with his color studies of cars thickly coated with fresh white snow from which a taillight, windshield wiper or the hint of a windshield sometimes peeks through to create an entrancing composition. Then turn to Alan Teller’s dense and involving color abstractions of shards of ice amid bare twigs, dead leaves, and brown grass at the Ryerson Conservation Area near Deerfield, and you will find some redemption for all of the slips and stumbles of outrageous winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Dennis Oppenheim, "Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y.," 1970.

By Monica Westin

In my notes for the exhibition “Light Years,” I scrawled to myself that of the multitude of photographs and other lens-based work in the Art Institute’s ambitious show of photo-conceptualism, half a dozen or more involve scenes of beaches. Jan Dibbets’ careful formal studies of tides and waves in photography and film bookend the show. Beaches also appear in more playful work like John Baldessari’s “California Map Project” and Eleanor Antin’s “100 Boots.” And Dennis Oppenheim’s “Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y.” documents the artist self-inducing a sunburn with a book on his chest while lying in the sand, treating his body like a kind of raw photographic plate to be exposed by the sunlight. A consideration of these images alone suggests not only the scope of this show but also this reviewer’s psychological need to focus, at times, on a single motif so as to keep from feeling utterly overwhelmed by an exhibition this big, which makes a strong argument about a decisive watershed moment in art history. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Cynic” seems an unfair label for the uncompromising Diogenes, who carried a lantern during daylight in search of an honest man. At bottom, Dada was similarly nostalgic for art as a lost ideal, an end in itself rather than a vehicle for reflection. This starry-eyed hopelessness applies to an evolving exhibition now in its third iteration at ADDS DONNA, whose title, “Wish You Were Here,” underscores the theme of glibness thinly masking absence and loss. Read the rest of this entry »

These are illusionistic paintings of a pretty girl with her clothes off. But rather than presenting either an ideal of femininity or a sharp look at reality, they are related to academic discourses in art, economics, gender and media studies. It’s what you might call “postmodernism,” which in this case centers on a respectably erudite obsession with an icon of film history, Jean Seberg, the Iowa teenager who was plucked from obscurity and starred in that classic of French New Wave Cinema, “Breathless,” by Jean-Luc Godard. To persuade you that this is not just about a cute girl in dishabille, everything’s in black-and-white, just like the 1960 movie. The setting is invariably the bedroom, but behind all the naked flesh and tussled sheets are references to famous paintings. And finally, to make absolutely sure you take this project seriously, many of the scenes include the painter himself as a small boy. So it’s not just about an elfin nymphet with big breasts, it’s also a self investigation of the male gaze. Read the rest of this entry »

"Virginia City Mine, Cave-in," ca. 1867-1868.

RECOMMENDED

Between 1867 and 1869, the U.S. government sponsored a survey of the wondrous lands between the California border and Cheyenne, Wyoming, including in the team photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who set about shooting intriguing rock formations of various and undreamt of kinds, views from above of budding towns, a vista here and there, and—the gems of the show—studies of the gold and silver mines and miners that are worthy of Lewis Hine’s famous twentieth-century takes on industrial work. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In one of the most important photography shows of the new century, the Spanish Ministry of Culture has gathered the work of twenty critical, socially engaged, free-thinking and autonomous collectives from southern Europe and Latin America, giving us a chance to see one of the most vibrant and progressive art movements in the world today that has passed by the benighted, pseudo-individualistic and self-absorbed U.S.A. Take a look at state-of-the-art photographers getting together, exhibiting their images without attribution, and skewering the pious frauds of hypesters, and you will get an idea of what we have been missing. Read the rest of this entry »