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“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 »

Alec Regan

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It’s been over six years since Brandon Alvendia and Caleb Lyons put together a Spring Break-themed art show at the Butcher Shop Gallery, a cavernous warehouse on Lake Street, now closed. Featuring over fifty artists (including me), it was primarily and ultimately a formidable bacchanal. Alvendia, who was giving out stenciled spray-tans, was again present for another iteration of the gallery beach party, again in a cavernous warehouse right by Lake Street. Read the rest of this entry »

Bo Zhang

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In 1955, the Soviet Union sent Konstantin Maksimov (1913-1993) to Beijing to teach a select group of Chinese students how to make social-realist art. Thus began another East-West cultural exchange, one that is still practiced by Chinese artists around the world. With Maksimov, as well as many others, the work often seems to have been made to impress other artists, not just the unwashed masses, and at its best can be enjoyed as subtle, expressive, post-Impressionist painting in the style of Cezanne or van Gogh.

Now, more than fifty years later, we have the fifteen members of the Oil Painting Society of Chinese American, most of them art professors in Midwestern universities, and now free to express whatever they wish. All but one were sent to peasant villages during the Cultural Revolution, triumphed against the odds to win the post-Mao national competition to get into college, studied art with the generation trained by the Russians, learned English and finally realized the dream of coming to America. Each of them would be a success story even if they never lifted a brush again, but indeed these fifteen are still painting, some of them quite well, and a few of them, like Zhi Wei Tu and Victor Wang, gaining national reputations despite an art education that was incompatible with the academicism of contemporary art. Read the rest of this entry »

Cameron Crawford, from "Sick Sic Six Sic ((Not) Moving)"

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Renaissance scholar and mystic Nicholas of Cusa said of divine truth: “I experience how necessary it is for me to enter into the cloud…and to seek there the truth where impossibility confronts me.” An elegant failure to achieve perfection shines through in the pale, porous works of Cameron Crawford and John Almanza, now on display at New Capital, a new warehouse project space. In the upstairs gallery, Almanza’s Ryman-ish monochrome canvases feature a black ground scrubbed and dabbed into a ghostly haze, on top of which white paint is dragged across in near-parallel diagonal strips. The total effect is of textured fields of strobing static viewed through decomposing blinds. Crawford’s installation downstairs is a labor-intensive world of abstracted forms, similarly arrayed in shades of gray, silver and white. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Tio, “Portrait of Brigid Marlin”

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The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, founded in 1946 by students of Albert Paris-Gütersloh, is one of the many living traditions of world art that’s never made it to Chicago. Maybe that’s because Vienna is as quintessentially aristocratic as Chicago is blue-collar. Or perhaps this less-irrational variant of Surrealism has been deemed tangential to that narrative of modern art so important to local cultural leaders. But now, one offshoot of the school is covering the endless white walls of the Murphy Hill Gallery.

Begun as the “Inscape Group” in 1961 by “a group of artists from England, dissatisfied with the way the art world was going,” they soon connected themselves to the aims and methods of Ernst Fuchs (born 1930), a prominent founder of the Vienna school. It was American-born Brigid Marlin (born 1936) who went to Fuchs in 1966 and brought back his meticulous “mische” technique of tempera and layered glazes. Thirty years later, she founded the Society for the Art of the Imagination for the “promotion of imaginative art around the world,” and now she and seventy other international visionary artists are showing their work in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

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While the unbounded freedom of conceptual art is the empty kernel at the core of our aesthetic era, much art nonetheless still makes its point more effectively in what it does than in what it says. And it seems no coincidence that France, the nation that formulated sadism, the most perfected practical realization of modern solipsism (as well as other, lesser political and cultural revolutions), also gave us Le Dernier Cri (in French, “The Last Scream”). Le Dernier Cri is a printmaking collaborative, begun in Marseilles in 1990 by then-couple Pakito Bolino and Caroline Sury, that has printed mountains of eye-popping (or, more properly, eye-gouging) work by artists from Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Perversion of all sorts is rendered impeccably on sumptuously beautiful matrices, almost choking the viewer with a dazzling fecundity of bodily expulsions and amputations, presented in profuse silkscreened colors and pristine textures. Read the rest of this entry »

“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 »

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It was by good fortune that I made a pilgrimage to the Farnsworth House, Mies van der Rohe’s disciplined and graceful glass and steel dwelling on the Fox River, the day before I saw Renate Wolff’s new wall painting, “Skies in Between,” at Devening Projects and Editions. Wolff has produced a cool and stunning non-objective composition in a long narrow room. Asymmetrical balance, preternatural attention to detail, preoccupation with the problems of space and an extremely limited palate echo the restraint of the international school associated with Mies and his Bauhaus colleagues. Mondrian, Itten (interaction of color is key in Wolff’s painting) and El Lissitzky (although there are no diagonals anywhere) might be Wolff’s other godfathers. She is likewise in conversation with colleagues working on a contemporary reopening of the investigations of early and mid-twentieth century Modernist abstraction and reappraisals of the dictums of its cadre of famous interpreters. Read the rest of this entry »

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Peter Otto’s putrid palette befits his ghoulish subjects. He is a painter of the dead and the dying.

Contrary to the literal documentation produced by photojournalists, Otto employs painterly abstraction for the purpose of preventing fixation upon the graphic details of the horror he depicts. He, like most good artists, requires his audience to move beyond the particular and toward the universal, and constant, in human nature.

Otto isn’t common. Knowledge of the art and history of Modernity seem to be prerequisite to access the deeper levels of meaning available in his paintings. The selection of works on display at Devening Projects directly considers the distance of time and space extending from Europe in the 1940s to the present-day Middle East. Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Smith, "Banner for a New Black Nation"

“Black Men – We Need You – Preserve Our Race – Leave White Bitches Alone,” screams the angry text on a silk-screened poster from the early 1970s. Thank goodness Barack Obama Sr. didn’t heed that advice ten years earlier! This is but one of several historical issues that arise when contemplating the AfriCOBRA exhibition at Northwestern University’s Dittmar Gallery.

Why did the young women carry rifles? Why do the colorful graphic designs seem as psychedelic as they do African? And whatever happened to the Chicago-based AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists)? As it turned out, most of the commune artists began or continued careers in academia. Forty years later, all that anger and Afrocentric cultural activism seems gone, especially in the concurrent exhibition of “African American Contemporary Paintings” at the Murphy Hill Gallery in Garfield Park. The skills in graphic design seem gone, too, as Murphy Hill has assembled a hodgepodge of local artists, most of whom lack professional training, have any kind of ideological commitment, and some of whom aren’t even African American (similar to the “post-black” strategy used in “Black Is, Black Ain’t” at the Renaissance Society in 2008). Ethnic boundaries may not be drawn as sharply as they were back in 1970, and, as opposed to relentless ethnic idealism, there’s instead mugshots of relentless despair, as seen in attorney Tim Leeming’s paintings and drawings of young criminals.

Most of the AfriCOBRA people were competent graphic designers who could carry and sugarcoat a message as well as any commercial artist. Some are exceptional artists, like Murry Depillars (1938-2008), who managed a brilliant synthesis of narrative figuration with African-American folk-art quilting in his homage to the imaginary “Queen Candace.” Depillars eventually retired as Dean of the Visual Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Frank Smith (b. 1939) took that quilting back and forth with abstract expressionist painting in his “Banner for a New Black Nation,” and later became a professor at Howard University.

At Murphy Hill, Mary Qian’s recent drawings effectively record and celebrate the individual spirit of people she meets on streets and trains. It’s too bad that Murphy Hill could not pull in more good work on African-American themes, and even show local masters like Kerry James Marshall or Robert Guinan. Perhaps, though, only museums can mount that kind of comprehensive exhibition—but would they, and have they? (Chris Miller)

“AfriCOBRA and the Chicago Black Arts Movement” shows at Northwestern University’s Dittmar Memorial Gallery, 1999 Campus Drive, Evanston, though March 17. “Contemporary African American Painting” shows at Murphy Hill Gallery, 3333 W. Arthington, though April 3.