photo by John W. Sisson Jr.

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Where Ed Ruscha and Kay Rosen’s text paintings tend to satisfy some autistic word fixation, it is Mark Booth’s text-based work that, for me, finally prompts poetic reverie. And that’s because the work is poetry, and Booth’s own. His drawings on paper, of texturally dense and hand-lettered phrases, may be familiar to Chicago gallery-goers, but for his solo exhibition at Adds Donna, Booth takes an expansive approach, filling the rectangular gallery with hand-cut vinyl sentences that extend over three walls, a sound recording of the artist reading a looping poem, plus several of the drawings. The result is a holistic presentation of Booth’s skill as a writer and a visual thinker.

It’s by perfect chance that any visitor to Booth’s show, titled “God is represented by the sea,” must first pass eight derelict wooden church pews crammed in the corridor by the gallery’s entrance. The pews are a non sequitur prelude to Booth’s own chain of figurative associations that begin God. The recorded poem, “God is represented by the sea,” which is broadcast over the gallery’s speaker, has little to do with God or even religion, except to be of use as an open abstraction, breeding metaphor after metaphor in a hall-of-mirrors game of compact visual phrases. Read the rest of this entry »

David Fredenthal, 1935

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When the stock market crashed in 1929, American art detoured off the road to Modernism, and traditional pictorial techniques were used to look at the society that had lost its way. “Who are we?” these realistic images seem to ask, often with the heaviness and dramatic chiaroscuro of earlier ages rather than the lite-bright sunniness of Impressionism. The postwar economic recovery would be announced by the triumph of abstract, individual expression, but in the intervening decades American artists took a look at Americans and how they lived.

The Terra Museum of American Art was once the best place to find special exhibitions of this kind. Now that it’s closed, Yen Azarro of Madron Gallery has done a good job of assembling a museum-quality show, drawing from a variety of galleries and private collections with big national names as well as local artists, like Aaron Bohrod, Edgar Rupprecht and Emil Armin. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the mid-nineteenth century, Scottish mathematician Hugh Blackburn invented the harmonograph, a device that draws elegant abstractions through the movements of two or more pendulums. Blackburn observed that the visual “harmonies” resulting from intervals of ratio in pendulum height correlated to similar steps in the musical scale. University of Chicago musicologist Larry Zbikowski is exploring the visual patterns of movement made by dancers of the waltz, and correlating these patterns both to the musical scores that accompanied the dancing and to states of emotion and consciousness in the brain. These synchronistic models serve as inspiration for Conrad Freiburg, whose virtual universe, erected in the main gallery at the Hyde Park Art Center, is divided into sections matching the seven notes of the Western major scale with sconce-like chimes affixed to the wall. While Freiburg doesn’t claim adherence to any esoteric system, the number seven recurs throughout occult cosmology; in theosophy, for example, the seven-step “septenary” describes the various “energy envelopes” of the soul that exist in subatomic emptiness. Read the rest of this entry »

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Huma Bhabha’s sculptures and collages at Rhona Hoffman Gallery seem like untimely ruins of contemporary culture. Although best known for her sculptures, it is Bhabha’s collages on display here that chiefly create this sense of dislocation between past and present. The foundations of Bhabha’s collages are photographs of abandoned construction projects in the desert landscape of the artist’s hometown of Karachi, Pakistan. The landscapes in Bhabha’s photographs appear stretched and twisted, an effect attenuated by streaks of ink lapping over the images. Bhabha’s collages are grungy and frenetic. The conflict between man-made development and nature is vividly rendered: the sun-drenched landscapes are awash in hot pink and neon orange better suited to billboards than pastoral scenes. The spontaneity and density of Bhabha’s collages speak to the upheaval of the landscape depicted in the underlying photographs. Read the rest of this entry »

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Painters and graphic artists make thousands of aesthetic decisions on every piece, so one might expect them to be the most sensitive and demanding art critics. On the other hand, one might also expect them to narrowly prefer work just like their own, which is what makes the artist/critic/teacher/historian Franz Schulze (born 1927) so exceptional. A freelance writer for the Daily News and then the Sun-Times, he coined the phrase and wrote the definitive history of “Chicago Imagism” in his 1972 book “Fantastic Images: Chicago Art since 1945,” and also introduced the term “Monster Roster.”

Though he may have celebrated the “freakishness,” “eccentric individualism” and “introversion” that continues to dominate Chicago figurative art, his own large-scale drawings celebrate the sanity, brilliance, strength and responsibility of his portrait subjects, most of whom are twentieth-century architects such as Helmut Jahn and Thomas Beeby. Schulze is an expert on that subject, which he covers in many of the 1,369 publications credited to him, including major biographies of Mies Van Der Rohe and Philip Johnson.

Depicting strong human character within an architectural setting is a Renaissance agenda, requiring a demanding representational style, where sloppiness cannot be excused as expressive eccentricity. Even if Schulze is no Dürer or Titian, he still carries it off quite respectably. (The exhibition also includes some deft still-lifes of the tropical plants, coffee cups, and drafting tables that might be found in an architect’s office.)

As a bonus, this current show also features self-portraits made over several decades, giving us a good picture of a frumpled, restless, discontented man driven to explore, explain and create. (Chris Miller)

Through March 26 at Printworks Gallery, 311 West Superior

Chicago buildings look like dirty cakes, Edie Fake tells me, and I imagine not a wedding but the bachelor party—who or what kind of person might jump out of a giant dirty cake? Fake’s drawings from the “City of Night” series, which are fictional portraits of architectural façades, inspire a little guessing game. “I trust you can imagine what goes on inside,” says Fake.

He begins with the name of a historic Chicago spot that served or promoted the gay and lesbian community, such as Sappho, The Virgo Out and The Cabin Inn, and dresses it up in architectural fantasy. Although all of these clubs, bars, community centers and gathering spots are now shuttered, photographs and narratives exist in various local archives. Still, Fake refigures their street-view facades using a composite of architectural details culled from his observation of Chicago vernacular styles. These are small, human-scaled buildings, decidedly not skyscrapers, that sport rainbow siding, or a swinging saloon door, or slanted roofs like a suburban residence. There is little sign of people in these drawings, besides a half-pulled window shade in one. The facades are still and quiet, like the exaggerated monuments to the dead in Graceland Cemetery. Read the rest of this entry »

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In 1974, Charles White (1918-1979) was commissioned by John H. Johnson, the founder of Johnson Publishing, to do twelve illustrations for each chapter of “The Shaping of Black America,” a popular history written by Lerone Bennett, the longtime editor of Ebony magazine.

The iconic images of African Americans that he created were a far cry from the revolutionary, Afrocentric images that young black artists of Chicago, like the members of Africobra, were making at that time.

But White, just like Johnson, was from the earlier generation born during the Great Migration. They both grew up poor on Chicago’s South Side, both of them rose to prominence by virtue of patience, hard work and imagination, and they both shared a dedication to the unfolding social changes that would transform America in the 1960s.

Done in monochromatic oil on board, the panels have the feeling of watercolor on paper, and perfectly complement the sensitivity, tenacity, dignity and self-reliance of the cultural ideals they shared, as well as the mature character of the artist himself at the age of 56.

There’s not a lot of joy in these severe monochrome images that seem to carefully, painfully emerge from crumpled brown wrapping paper. But this was intended to be a history lesson, not an aesthetic banquet, and aren’t most of the lessons from history grim ones? (Chris Miller)

Through March 5 at G. R. N’Namdi Gallery, 110 North Peoria.

Kay Rosen, "Inez Has One Nose," 1996.

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This exhibition is a wild, exuberant, associative group of works arranged around a solid conceptual and art-historical center. Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm exposes the visual matrix out of which Jim Nutt’s (whose retrospective is across the hall) work emerges. She hinges her rich and chaotic haul from the museum’s holdings on critic Dennis Adrian’s remark that “seeing is a kind of thinking” for artists.

If you enter from the exit of Nutt’s retrospective, the exhibition begins with a group of pieces including a lyrical sculpture of found material by Frances Whitehead and one of Kay Rosen’s comedic (though obsessively rendered) anagrams. These represent the end of mid-century formalism, providing structure to the imagery of artists like Nutt and Ray Yoshida. Much of the writing and curating associated with the Chicago Imagists is centered on the history of the shifting boundaries of the group, their interconnections and the development of their shared visual language and styles. The recently closed Ray Yoshida retrospective also found reason to surround the central artist with his peers and spheres of influence (much like the Roger Brown house, too), as if the Imagists should only be considered in chorus. The work in this exhibition extends well beyond the seminal group itself to bring in dynamic work from the peripheries: Oyvind Fahlstrom, Wifredo Lam, Francis Bacon, Magritte, Matta and non-western sources along with work by the usual suspects: outsider artists Joseph Yoakum and Martin Ramirez, the group and their Chicago affiliates among them the uncategorizable H.C. Westermann. Read the rest of this entry »

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The mid-eighteenth century was the heyday of Georgian England. The civil and international religious wars of the previous century were a dim memory, revolution had not yet risen in France, and commercial swag was flowing into London from the far-flung empire. As brewers, gamblers, young women and musicians flocked to the capital, the prosperous citizens of London did their best to thoroughly dissipate themselves. Writers such as Henry Fielding (“Tom Jones,” 1749) and John Cleland (“Fanny Hill,” 1748) were developing the comic and pornographic novel to depict that scene, and Thomas Cannon was one of the first gay activists (“Ancient and Modern Pederasty,” 1749).

In 1768, thirty-four prominent British painters, sculptors and architects, with the official endorsement of King George III, proclaimed the establishment of a Royal Academy “to promote the arts of design.” Its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, proclaimed the purpose to train artists capable of creating works of high moral and artistic worth. But ten years later, two of its earliest students, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, were applying the exceptional pictorial skills of the European Baroque to that very English activity of mocking, laughing and celebrating the pomposity of authority and every other human foible. Which is to say that Rowlandson, who was himself no stranger to the gambling dens and brothels, was not the moralizer that his famous predecessor, William Hogarth, had been. Read the rest of this entry »

"Lippy," 1968

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The current Jim Nutt retrospective traces the artist’s decades-long preoccupation with female faces. These personages are not drawn from specific sitters—here they are called “imaginary portraits.” The matriline evolves from violent and violated amputees in the late 1960s (perhaps the victims and/or instigators of feminism) to subdued bust portraits of women who look as if they’re evaluating themselves, alone, in a mirror.

It is well known that the Hairy Who artists, Jim Nutt among them, culled source material and inspiration from comics—but so did Willem de Kooning, a collector of much early twentieth-century comic art. The female personage was the only subject of de Kooning’s for a long while, and although he later moved on to fully non-objective paintings, Nutt has varied little since closing the Hairy Who chapter. Both Nutt and de Kooning have achieved an expressive potential through the often-generic format of a cartoonish woman’s head. Nutt’s long, sustained experimentation with female faces grants viewers an opportunity to witness the slow procession of his creative output. Many pencil drawings in the show are interspersed among the paintings, which are supposed to reveal the artist’s precise process. But what painter doesn’t have working drawings lying around the studio? Nutt’s message reaches fever pitch when rendered in exacting, glossy and complex paint. Read the rest of this entry »