c.1950s-60s

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Chicago’s premier photojournalist Art Shay captured a moment in place and time, here in the early 1950s, when the gritty old city still held on, with its bittersweet ironies and brutalities, its harshness, and its anticipations of technology-fueled urbanity. Shooting straight and on the fly in unremitting black and white, Shay could pull the heartstrings and captivate the eye, as in his shot of a man taken from behind on a dingy commercial street who holds a duffel bag in one hand and a tiny kitten peering at us in the other, cradled on his shoulder; next to him a sign propped against a brick wall reads, “Be Kind Now.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Over the past decade, Mary Borgman has done one thing, and done it well: monumental, six-foot-high charcoal portraits of handsome, multi-ethnic young dudes, often with their shirts off, set against a glowing background. These are young adults in that exciting, though sometimes dangerous period of self-discovery before settling into the responsibilities of family and career, and the artist shares the thrill of staring into their emerging selves.

Each drawing is based upon a single photograph, selected from many others, taken under controlled conditions in her studio. So, why not just make sixty-foot photographic prints?  Why take two to four months to finish each charcoal drawing? One part of the answer is that photographic forms feel cold and factual, while drawn forms can be warm and alive. Another is that hundreds of hours of concentrated focus can give pieces a sense of overwhelming, leap-off-the-wall presence that a momentary shutter flick can never achieve. Although similar, each pose/personality presents a different challenge. Her second version of Kaveh Razani is one of the most compelling pieces she’s ever done. Read the rest of this entry »

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From 2005 through the present, Viktoria Sorochinski has been photographing the relation between Anna and her daughter Eve, not as a documentary of the vicissitudes of their bond, but through Sorochinski’s imagination of the many forms it might take in her staged and directorial color scenario shots. What Sorochinski’s images lose in spontaneity and the suppleness of life, they make up for in their sharply delineated moods and meanings. Read the rest of this entry »

Gao Yuan, "Untitled (Woman with construction scene)," 2010

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Contemporary Chinese photography continues to impress by its conceptual power, sophistication and aesthetic richness in this exhibit of four artists who combine postmodern complexity with subtle senses of beauty. Nobody puts it all together better than Gao Yuan in her “Tattoo” series, in which she placed her models bedecked in their body art in poses derived from Italian Renaissance paintings, and then added to her studies backgrounds from China today of which the early moderns could not have dreamed. 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 »

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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 »

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The legend of Edgar Miller continues this month with a collection of sketches and memorabilia at Richard Norton Gallery. Drawing from the estate of his brother, Frank, this selection is much larger than the few objects that appeared at ArchiTech Gallery earlier this year. But it’s still disappointing, compared with the glories that are shown in “Edgar Miller and the Hand-Made Home,” the coffee-table book that was published in 2009. The problem is that so much of his work was built into and onto homes, including his own on Burton Place. He had the kind of “see horse, draw horse” genius that goes back to the beginning of art history, and just like the masters of the Lascaux caves, Miller could capture the life of an animal, or a person, in just a few simple strokes. This show has dozens of his drawings, done from ages thirteen to seventy, all of them showing that mimetic spark that makes his art deco designs so enjoyable, including the etched-glass panels on display at the Art Institute. Read the rest of this entry »

"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 »

Carole Harmel

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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 »

untitled, 2007

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If you’re in the mood for a full-strength shot of grotesquerie, glom on to Gary Briechle’s black-and-white Collodion portraits of Maine rednecks (they’ll beat the southern gents and belles any time for their unstudied naivete and unadulterated rawness). Ralph Meatyard’s backwoods surrealism and Diane Arbus’ freakish individualism fuse in Briechle’s studies of people who let their emotions hang out because they don’t know how to front, even if they’ve been posed. Read the rest of this entry »