"WEAR THE BRACELET," 2008.

By Laura Fox

Mark Bradford’s mural-scale “Helter Skelter I” fills nearly an entire wall in his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Complex, competing layers of images, colors, textures and materials are lacerated by overlapping networks of arterial lines streaming endlessly across its expanse. I attempt to follow one line across the plane, trying to absorb particulars despite its nearly hyperbolic immensity. Starting with the faded, upside-down text scrap “King,” the remnant of a merchant poster that Bradford found on the streets in his south Los Angeles neighborhood, my eyes travel to the layers of bubbling silver paper, bright day-glo colors and a half-submerged image of a woman’s face. My singular line disappears, merging with the larger system, so I jump from passageways to smaller alleys navigating my way through Bradford’s landscape.

Bradford’s art seems to welcome these intimate interactions. Although composed on canvas, none of his works are stretched or mounted onto a backing board. Instead, they adhere unceremoniously to the wall; the left-hand corners of “Helter Skelter I” even curl up, implying the limited temporality of its constructed surface. Read the rest of this entry »

Uta Barth, "... and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.3)," 2011. Inkjet print

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A conjurer of visual effects in the quiet setting of her Los Angeles home as it interfaces with her yard outside through its windows, Uta Barth has explored the eye’s exhaustion by taking repeated photos of a tree, the liminal state of dusk in one of her rooms and, most recently, the play of ribbons of light on a curtain. In her latest body of work, “…and to draw a bright white line with light,” Barth has dropped any pretension to representation and has crimped and spread the curtain to make the light-line undulate with wavelike rhythms, broadening and narrowing against an off-white nearly monochromatic background. The result is a series of hypnotic images that deploy abstraction to put us into reveries that concentrate attention on the simultaneity of stillness and irregular movement. By giving herself over to abstraction, Barth beckons us to a psychedelic experience in the most faded of colors. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 14 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.

By Jason Foumberg

When we’re tourists we often find ourselves standing on graves or admiring tombs of the illustrious dead. Several years ago, after a traipse through some European cemeteries and catacombs, I became (morbidly) obsessed with the Capuchin ossuary in Rome, a series of underground chapels decorated with the bones of monks in the seventeenth century. Where a tomb designed by Bernini or Michelangelo hides the deceased behind decadently carved marble, the Capuchin monks used actual bones for their headstones, creating decorative patterns in the style of Baroque stucco bas-relief or fresco—swirling aureoles and floral motifs—while other skeletons are collaged into tableaux, such as a clock made from phalanges and flying cherubim composed of skulls and winged shoulder blades.

I wanted to learn why the Capuchins built their shrine to death but, oddly, I could not find any full historical accounts about this strange place. I realized that the thousands of tourists who visit the chapels each year are not informed about why this place exists or how it came to be; we are simply left to ogle the lugubrious sculptures and ponder our own mortality. Tourists to the bone chapel can purchase postcards of the crypts so that the visceral images of bodily decomposition may be contemplated in private or distributed around the world like a decree: death trumps art. Read the rest of this entry »

Enrique Chagoya, "Return to Goya No. 9," 2010

By Julia V. Hendrickson

Comic and cartoon artists work quietly but profusely in Chicago, drawn, perhaps, to the functionality of its gridded streets, city blocks like frames on a page. Comic book and specialty bookstores like Quimby’s and Challengers flourish because there is an audience for experimental narratives and a vibrant community surrounding comic art. In reaction to such public interest, January brings a flurry of exhibitions related to comic and sequential narrative art.

For those interested in historical context, the Block Museum in Evanston offers a small but superb collection of prints in “The Satirical Edge,” with work from the 1950s to the present, all using graphic comic and cartoon imagery for socio-political commentary. The majority of this collection features a group of artists, the “Outlaw Printmakers,” who were part of a 2004 exhibition at Big Cat Gallery in New York. Most striking are Tom Huck’s series of small-town narratives depicted in large, hypnotically intricate woodcuts. A handful of R. Crumb comic books from the early 1970s are the only direct connection to comics, but the influence of comic art is evident in works like Richard Mock’s bug-eyed linocuts and Enrique Chagoya’s collaged accordion book.

Chagoya’s newer work is also prominently displayed, and includes an etching from his latest edition, a dancing, demon-chased Obama, a subtle revision of Goya’s “Los Caprichos.” The Block aptly compliments the “Satirical Edge” with a concurrent exhibition of prints by eighteenth-century caricaturist and political cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson. Read the rest of this entry »

"Still Life," oil on canvas, 1946

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Abstract Expressionism was the big art news of the mid-twentieth century, at least as far as America was concerned. Breaking free from the materials and techniques, as well as the political, religious and aesthetic ideals of shattered Europe, Ab Ex epitomized Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”—however confused, voracious and gnarly that self might be. Since anyone, even elephants or chimpanzees, can express some kind of un-fettered self-hood, it was also the triumph of American marketing, as it established one brand of self expression over another. James Brooks (1906-1992) was right in the thick of it, sharing a studio with Jackson Pollock, and joining sixty other progressive artists in Leo Castelli’s groundbreaking Ninth Street Show of 1951. But where many of the artists from that show would soon become iconic names in art history (de Kooning, Pollock, Frankenthaler, Motherwell, Reinhardt, Rauschenberg, Hofmann), Brooks never quite made the “A” list, perhaps because his work was not so much puzzling and confrontational as pleasing. He really had an eye for graphic design, whether applied to the social realism of his early murals, or to his later lyrical abstractions. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrea Zittel, "A-Z Cellular Compartment Units," 2001. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of Marshall Fields by exchange.

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“Without You I’m Nothing” is at once an impressive survey of contemporary work and an unsettling spectacle. To be reminded of one’s role as a viewer is, here, frequently to be indicted, whether as part of a culture of waste or sexualized violence or as a consumer in a marketplace of art that no radical stab at gift economy can disturb.

The south room of the MCA’s main floor features art highlighting audience “engagement” (like Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Turkish Bath,” wherein a mirror locates the audience in relation to an odalisque) while the north room’s pieces require viewer “activation” (floor tiles, for instance, or a collection of rubber stamps with which to play).

Much of the work is explicitly political, either in the accessible sense of Adrian Piper’s lecture on racial labeling or as an artifact of activism, like Olafur Eliasson’s monofrequency light designed to shine from boutique windows as a provocative advertisement for an Ethiopian nonprofit. Here, however, Piper’s overturned table and Eliasson’s yolky light glare from competing corners of a show that dilutes itself by accumulation. As empty as these vast warehouse rooms feel, physically, within seconds the sensation of the show is one of thumbing through a hefty art-history textbook. Read the rest of this entry »

As days shorten, streets turn cold, and skies turn even grayer, Joseph Spangler (born 1976) returns to Chicago for an exhibition of his new work and new life as a young father in Portland, Oregon. His earlier Chicago work was all about our big, blue-collar, rust-belt city, and some of his rather grim, stark, lonely cityscapes are included in this exhibition. They all have that strong sense of design that got him picked up by a Michigan Avenue gallery a few years after he graduated from SAIC in 2000, but Chicago urban landscape is a crowded genre, with many talented practitioners over the last century who have found more to love about our sophisticated, bustling metropolis than he has. His new genre, scenes of family life, is also crowded—but nowadays it’s crowded with the kind of sentimental photo-realism that might make a demanding viewer more than just a little nauseous. Spangler has gone in a different direction, breaking up his canvas into a grid of small, color-filled squares, producing the rich, sensual effect of a mosaic or tapestry. Indeed, Spangler’s strong, angular designs would translate quite well into other mediums and, perhaps, like June Wayne, whose narrative tapestries are now on display at the Art Institute, he should collaborate with the weaving ateliers of Paris. This is not to say that his designs are not also effective as oil paintings. They celebrate the healthy/hopeful/normal instead of the demented/hopeless/weird side of the human condition, and that’s a bit unusual for a Chicago painter. Is that why he moved to Portland? (Chris Miller)

Through December 4 at Galleries Maurice Sternberg, 875 North Michigan.

Derek Chan, "Daily Practice," 2010.

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Derek Chan is no stranger to the “monastic residency”; at the invitation of Theaster Gates earlier this year, he performed one as part of the Whitney Biennal. For his current solo exhibition, however, he was not contained within a courtyard as he was at the Whitney, and instead headed West, embarking on a trip to the four corners.

His travels are the fodder for this show and his trip across the sacred Salt Song Trail also inspired the publishing of a book, in conjunction with Golden Age, on view within the exhibition. It compiles the text and images from his journey.

Chan transforms the gallery space into a gathering place. The peaceful residue of his performed rituals (Chan performs here each Tuesday in November from noon to 4pm) clings to the meditative, process-oriented paintings, collage and works on paper.

The shapes, patterns and repetitive mark-making they display are drawn from a mixture of Eastern religious symbolism and Western Modernism, with the new addition of Navajo and Hopi imagery and objects bubbling to the surface. The recurring grid matrix, evocative of the warp and weft of a loom, frame many of these individuated marks like relics stowed within the cubby holes of a desert shrine. Read the rest of this entry »

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After a splash on the London art scene in the 1990s, and an infamous controversy regarding elephant dung and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, painter Chris Ofili quietly relocated to Trinidad in 2005 to remove himself from politics and focus on his art. The Tate Britain, which also presented Ofili with the prestigious Turner Prize in 1998, held a mid-career retrospective of his work earlier this year. With Ofili’s current exhibition, “Afrotranslinear,” The Arts Club presents a more specific survey of more than 100 works on paper created over the last decade.

“Afrotranslinear” is the first Chicago exhibition of Ofili’s art, and his graphic, cartoonish figures present a 1960s and seventies style that aligns remarkably well with Chicago Imagist art. This may be the simplest, most restrained work of Ofili’s to date. As in his most recognizable paintings, his hand still strays toward the intricate and adorned. Yet, in his bright, flat watercolor portraits, and with a reduced palette in his graphite drawings, it is easier to notice the simple beauty and thoughtful humor in his work. With vibrant colors reflecting tropical Trinidad, Ofili’s lush watercolor portraits are crude in execution, yet purposeful in hue. Local flora is inseparable from the portraits, as the brightly patterned clothes seem to grow from the base of the page, flowering in the figures’ heads. The Arts Club’s choice to present solely Ofili’s works on paper is a significant one; they get all of the flashy, secret thrills of “that shit artist” with none of the obvious, immediate scandal. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Amft, "Self-Portrait," 2009

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Robert Amft, born 1916, has been painting for more than seventy years and, incredibly, he’s still painting quite vigorously at the age of ninety-four. Amft’s style has been playfully eclectic. His work encompasses so many things that have happened in twentieth-century art, from Neo-Classicism to Pop to Color Field to commercial illustration and cartooning, even Chicago Imagism (he was there at the very beginning, making small silhouetted figures just as Roger Brown was starting out). He loves to mimic things, and has done variations on Leonardo, van Gogh, Duchamp and Seurat. But it’s really the “Peaceable Kingdom” of folk artist Edward Hicks with which Amft has the most in common, reflecting his love of animals and a free, easy and gentle attitude towards life.

Like many outsider artists, Amft is not limited by materials, using oil paint, photography, spray paint, watercolor, wire, wood, tin and various found objects—whatever feels right. But his work also obviously reflects the high level of professional training he received at the Art Institute in the 1930s, and being such a good draftsman and tight designer, his erotic watercolors (not on view here) are among the best among what that marginalized genre has to offer. Amft is a thoroughly secular man of our time, with a life directed more towards personal enjoyment than any kind of divine plan. Read the rest of this entry »