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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

RECOMMENDED

The perverse enjoyment I get from looking at the assemblages of found organic detritus (leaves, icicles, rocks) in Andy Goldsworthy’s photographed interventions in natural settings is digestive—the way he takes an otherwise lovely bucolic scene and vandalizes it by, as humans do, taking something perfect and making it (look like) crap. He might as well just litter. I had something of an inverse, but still perverse, response to “Mountains and Matter,” Bob Jones’ great solo show at 65Grand. What his floor sculptures and wall pieces did to the pristine white gallery was similar to what one does to a pristine white sheet of toilet paper. Recoil if you must, but, for my money, there’s a lot more to look at “after,” as opposed to “before.”

Smeared with tar, pebbles and spray paint, mired in concrete, grout and latex, bound in filthy rubber and canvas, festooned with hay and twigs, these pieces operate for me as thoroughly enjoyable riffs on psychedelic-pastoral art of the 2000s. Read the rest of this entry »

Joan Mitchell in 1951

By Janina Ciezadlo

How much do we need to know about the feelings and ideas that give a painter the energy to push a brush around a large canvas? Having just read the new biography ”Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter,” by Patricia Albers, I now know a great deal about what Joan Mitchell did from day to day. Some of it, not all, by any means, is pertinent to appreciating and thinking about her work.

This extraordinarily detailed biography on Joan Mitchell will be particularly compelling to Chicagoans for the picture it offers of a financially and culturally privileged girlhood on the Near North Side during the 1930s and forties. Mitchell, the daughter of an overbearing doctor, who “wanted his daughters to compete like boys, but also, confusingly, to behave like little ladies,” grew up with mixed messages. Her mother was an editor for Harriet Monroe’s modernist journal Poetry and friends with Chicago artists like Manierre Dawson. Her maternal grandfather, Charles Louis Strobel, a steel and wrought-iron engineer, a colleague of Louis Sullivan, John Holabird and Sylvia Shaw Judson, among others, constructed the rolling bascule bridge at Van Buren Street. Read the rest of this entry »

Those who saw his 2009 retrospective at the Renaissance Society might well be surprised that Jim Lutes is painting moody landscapes. Until now, his career has moved back and forth between abstract expression and spectral, sketchy, flabby figuration. But the four wall-size landscapes now showing in Valerie Carberry are far too picturesque to be considered contemporary, which is not to say he hasn’t tried to bring them up to date. His paintings are still recognizably twenty-first century, with space that feels flat, objects that are pixelated, erratically nervous mark-making, and little concern for Baroque luminosity or realistic textures. But still, each huge image has given this viewer the overwhelming and uncomfortable feeling of standing smack in the middle of Kelly Creek, Idaho, confronted by impenetrable walls of boulders, encompassed by dark, dangling foliage, with no apparent pathway to escape this dark, remote valley in the Bitterroot Mountains. The Impressionists shared their pleasure with the great outdoors, the Romantics shared their wonder at its mystery and Lutes shares his anxiety with what he calls the “Dumb Country.” Read the rest of this entry »

"Autumn with Drawings" by Wyatt Grant

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The title of New York-based artist Lionel Guzman’s light-box sculpture, “Synthetic,” operates in a few registers. First, a single visual impression is created from disparate elements, by arranging cutouts, rotating color filter gels, a microcontroller, a fan and LEDs inside a stereo speaker case and behind a layer of Plexiglas and vintage graph paper. Guzman’s grid-curtained window shows rows of rectangular lights, like glowing flickering screens, receding into an illusory distance. Read the rest of this entry »

"368 S. Michigan," watercolor on cardboard

RECOMMENDED

David Lefkowitz’s exhibition, “Facilities and Grounds,” is a careful examination of the relationship between the natural world and the built environments we inhabit everyday. In his series of pristine watercolors on meticulously unfolded cardboard boxes, Lefkowitz depicts everything from grand views of a city, to sturdy-looking stone buildings, to airport terminals. The architecture, however, is completely nondescript; it seems to be no place in particular, just a sprawling expanse that could be any Midwestern city. Read the rest of this entry »