RECOMMEDED

Wilco fans have already seen Joanne Greenbaum’s work, though they might not know it. Greenbaum provided cover art for the band’s 2011 “The Whole Love,” as well as illustrations for a fifty-two-page booklet that accompanies the deluxe two-CD edition.

Her forty-two abstract paintings at Shane Campbell Gallery stand as her own kind of concept album. Together, the identically sized sixteen-by-twelve-inch canvases constitute a single experiment in the expressive capacities of gesture. At the same time, each of these pictures rewards close attention, as individual works convey different levels of complexity at the heart of those same gestures. Read the rest of this entry »

Melissa Oresky

RECOMMENDED

“New Formalisms 2” is curator Abraham Ritchie’s sequel to the 2009 exhibition “Beautiful Form,” presenting four young artists who, he claims, are taking “new directions in formal painting,” but who do seem to be using a playbook that’s been in university art departments for at least fifty years. Whether their work is compelling is another question. Most of the pieces would serve well in a technical textbook on the application of paint in simple, repetitive patterns: as delicately applied to a hand-woven support (Samantha Bittman), heavily applied in adjacent stripes (Todd Chilton) or, better yet, comparatively applied, thick on the left, thin on the right, in bilateral symmetry (Steven Husby). These are all pieces that, like the work of Sol LeWitt, could have been executed by a technician following the instructions of the artist, reminding us that, in the late twentieth-century, formalism became a kind of conceptual art, appealing more as idea than as aesthetic feeling. Read the rest of this entry »

photo by Sophia Nahli

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Stickers are an idealized art medium—an attempt to connect with an audience through means not acceptable within traditional art institutions. Here, in a selected retrospective of sticker art, they are organized by theme and placed with some care behind glass, which is a type of presentation that could deflate the antagonistic allure key to their interest, but the exhibition at Maxwell Colette Gallery does a good job letting them tell their own stories. All anyone who stuck a sticker wanted anyway was to reflect themselves a little bit back into the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeroen Nelemans

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Susan Giles’ site-specific sculpture of the unbuilt Calatrava tower, toppled over inside The Mission, is a model of something unrealized. Although it might refer to the economic crash that scuttled the plans for the building, Giles’ “Crumpled Spire,” deftly built of wood, rests gracefully in the space, echoing the shapes of the windows, lighting grids and setting off the tin ceiling. Downstairs in the basement project room is an alluring and incisive set of photographs by Jeroen Nelemans that look beautiful at first glance but quickly assert a complex critical project that eludes the more poetic sculpture, upstairs. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

When the New York World’s Fair closed in October, 1940, the map of Europe was not the same as when it opened, in 1939. The Republic of Poland no longer existed, so the contents of the Polish pavilion were bought by the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America. Many paintings and sculptures were taken to Chicago where they have resided ever since, in the Polish Museum on Milwaukee Avenue. But they haven’t always been on display, and the museum gallery has been closed for the past five years. Now, thanks to a major donation, its exhibition space has been remodeled and reopened as the Kusmierczak Art Gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Schlie, "Cutoffs"

RECOMMENDED

The history of modern-art education, i.e., the attempt to train artists and designers for a distinctly modern world without the unnecessary trappings of tradition, begins with Walter Gropius and the amazing faculty he assembled in 1919 at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Many of the artists who taught there are legendary: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks. And there was a very strong Chicago connection, as its third director, Mies van der Rohe, would eventually run the architecture school at IIT and a Bauhaus instructor, László Moholy-Nagy, would found the New Bauhaus, still open as the IIT Institute of Design. So it seems appropriate to bring together the heirs of those institutions, in both Weimar and Chicago, to “explore the contemporary application of the Bauhaus legacy and ideals.” Read the rest of this entry »

Leigh Ledare

By Gretchen Holmes

My lover always complains about the smudges I leave on his glasses when my nose and cheeks and forehead smear oil and makeup across his big, thick lenses. ”Darling,” he says, “your love and its little mark-making project, it obstructs the aim of my gaze.” This seems ungrateful: my love’s lenses, the point of contact between his appraisal of my formal qualities and my own expression of desire, are the palimpsest where my filthy face writes and rewrites its love letters. They are a screen onto which intimacy is projected from both sides. But that kind of screen is also a barricade ensuring that these two hopeful, hungry trajectories never meet. The scene encourages the unilateral effusions that make intimacy so seductive: my to-be-looked-at-ness and his wanting-to-be-wanted-ness condone each other, and ideology’s most despondent-making pathologies become sweet, private yearnings that nurture our bond. A more doctrinaire feminist would toss her lover’s glasses aside, thus disarming the patriarchy and transforming the male gaze into a dizzying, haptic blur. But me? I persist. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s happy hour at Hinge Gallery. Co-owners Gretel Garcia Cuba and Holly Sabin sit in the front room of their storefront space on Chicago and Damen, drinking Blue Moons and talking with two friends and a printmaker they’ve commissioned to paint his first mural in the gallery’s back kitchen. “We like to encourage people that already have a body of work to continue exploring new ideas,” says Cuba.

After meeting seven years ago as members of the same art collective, Deadline Projects, the pair began seriously talking about opening a gallery this past February. “We thought if we put our forces together we could really create a space of our liking [to showcase the work of] artists who are around the same age range as us and whose work is just undersold and underrated, but we think is extremely valuable,” says Cuba. Read the rest of this entry »

Jerzy Nowosielski

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More than a dozen twentieth-century Ukrainian artists have been selected by curator Stanislav Grezdo from the 200 pieces that were donated to the UIMA by Bohdan Kowalsky (1923-2008) who, like most of these artists, fled his homeland. The results are a tribute to what can be done without the funding, professional scholarship and contemporary agenda that accompanies major museums of modern art.

This exhibition especially serves as an introduction to sculptor Gregor Kruk (1911-1988) and painter Jerzy Nowosielski (1923-2011), both of whom Kowalsky kept in contact with and collected in depth.

Kruk worked at that intersection of folk art and formalism that early modernists discovered in African sculpture. At its best, like Kruk’s work, it expresses a vibrancy of folk culture that makes life bearable in a problematic modern world. And one might note that Kruk moved from Ukraine to Germany in 1940, living through the worst the last century had to offer. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Saul, "Stupid Argument"

RECOMMENDED

In the mid-1960s, a handful of young Chicago painters stunned the art world with rebellious, often disgusting, pop-cartoonish imagery that the art critic of the New York Times, John Canaday, called “greasy kid stuff.” Now, forty-five years later, as the current Jim Nutt retrospective might suggest, some of them have mellowed and aestheticized their practice. But not their fellow traveler Peter Saul (born 1934), whose latest work on view at Corbett vs. Dempsey is just as high-energy obnoxious as his earlier piece now showing along with Nutt at the MCA. The centerpiece of the show, his “Stupid Arguments,” in all its day-glo, cartoonish horror, feels like the cacophony of a dozen cheap radios tuned to different stations, many of which are angry talk shows, with all the fervent conviction of the ignorant and stupid. What a terrible world in which we live! Read the rest of this entry »