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 »

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 »

Catherine Maize

A variety of annual, national juried exhibitions have been emerging in Chicago over the past few years, and now Chuck Gniech, of the Illinois Institute of Art, has mounted his second “Human” exhibition, intending to explore “the human form as well as the human condition.” Ninety artists responded to his nationwide call, and twenty were chosen to participate: painters, sculptors, graphic artists and photographers. As one might expect from artists of our time, the human condition is considered problematic. If there’s any joie de vivre, it’s an occasional enthusiasm for being confused and disoriented, which makes for an art that’s not especially enjoyable to view. Most spectacular is E. Thurston Belmer’s wall size, triple-view of “Jean Porter Green” which the artist calls a “presentation of embodied trauma,” but why should we care about Ms. Green’s problems? She seems to be an aspiring actress auditioning for a role in which she’s not very convincing. I can’t work up a concern for any of the characters on display, despite how tastefully photographed (Ted Preuss), well painted (Brandon Briggs) or well drawn (Marisa Andropolis) they may be. Most of these characters feel depressed, and I’m wondering whether our bleak Chicago winter needs any more discouragement. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“In the Spirit of Walser” at Donald Young Gallery is a series of exhibitions by artists inspired by the poetic, rambling stories of Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956). The second exhibition in this series features new works by Moyra Davey, including “Subway Writers II,” a grid of twenty-five photographs, and “Les Goddesses,” a sixty-one minute film reflecting on the life of writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Davey’s artwork, similar to Walser’s writing, balances melancholic introspection against a fascination with daily life. Read the rest of this entry »

 RECOMMENDED

An ambitious retrospective of fin-de-twentieth-siecle art, architecture and design at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum illuminates the dreamlike nature of the “postmodern” moment, a dizzying refraction of hedonistic anarchy and abject terror. In her review of the exhibition, Artforum editor Elizabeth Schambelan sets “beguiling images of playful incongruity” against Fredric Jameson’s notion of “hyperspace” as an “anti-map, its incomprehensibility figuring the dark mysteries of global capital.”

All the more reason for another po-mo retrospective, this one being the exhibition showcasing the drawings and ephemera of contemporary Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, now on display at the Graham Foundation, to adopt the Magritte-tweaking title “Ceci n’est pas une rêverie,“ or “This is not a dream.” Taking a cue from “The Titanic,” a 1978 Tigerman collage in which Mies van der Rohe’s ultra-rectilinear, ultra-Modernist Crown Hall sinks into Lake Michigan beneath a canopy of clouds, the grand Madlener mansion (which houses the Graham Foundation) is divided up into thematic “clouds” such as “utopia,” “division,” “identity,” “allegory,” “humor,” “death” and “drift.”   Read the rest of this entry »

Melissa Oresky

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“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 »

RECOMMENDED

Gallery 400’s double exhibition of “Global Cities, Model Worlds” and “The World Finder Pocket Guide to Hell” is a heavy-handed but nonetheless powerful pair of explorations of mega-events and their unplanned impacts.

“Global Cities, Model Worlds,” the more striking of the pair, is more tongue-in-cheek than it first appears. Referencing children’s and science museums, with bright plastic models and timelines in primary colors, the installation visualizes the implications of mega-events through studies of the Olympic games and world expositions, or World’s Fairs, from recent history. 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 »

RECOMMENDED

Mannequins, grocery-store checkout belts, paintings and an assortment of domestic detritus are a few of the items in Cathy Wilkes’ mixed-media installation, “I Give You All My Money,” at the Renaissance Society. Most of these items have undergone some form of decay: ash-covered pierrot mannequins, jars of encrusted baby food, tattered bits of cotton, flower petals and a rusted basket.

The death of a child imbues the overall theme and tone of the exhibition. Macabre traces and remnants of this child—an empty stroller and empty jars of baby food, bowls with baby spoons and a knee-high table that suggests a child’s accessibility—imbue the installation with maternal mourning. Wilkes’ installation, in total, is a still-life arrangement that remarks on the fragility of life. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

One singular obsession jumps out in Tadeusz Bilecki’s paintings: the female face. These large-format abstract portraits—female faces covered in large, often colorful brushstrokes—navigate the space between representative portrait and complete abstraction. Seeing the nearly dozen faces in the one-room gallery creates the feeling that you’re being watched, balanced only by Bilecki’s use of bright vibrant colors. Read the rest of this entry »