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 »

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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 »

photo by Marian Frost

By Laura Fox

In a day and a half in Bridgeport last weekend, connections both professional and personal formed between local art groups and artists. The catalyst was the new MDW Fair.

The fair’s genesis itself is a bit of a feat in community-building. In February, Ed Marszewski, the founder of The Co-Prosperity Sphere, Version festival and Public Media Institute, asked threewalls and Roots and Culture if they wanted to help host an art fair focused on Chicago artists and art organizations. In two months and with less than $10,000, the three partners recruited sixty-plus exhibitors to fill 25,000 square feet of exhibition space in the Geolofts warehouse, plus a separate sculpture garden. Read the rest of this entry »

An exhibition opening at 65Grand

Bill Gross has been given thirty days to cease and desist gallery operations in his apartment, on the 1300 block of West Grand Avenue. Named 65Grand after the bus that passes below his third story window, the apartment gallery has operated without intervention from the city since October, 2005, until this recent April, when two representatives from the Department of Business Affairs and Licensing visited for a peaceful shakedown. The current show, a solo exhibition by artist David Ingenthron, will be the gallery’s last at this location.

Gross, himself an artist, started the informal gallery in his living room and kitchen as a way to engage friends and peers in a self-made art community. Soon after, the gallery openings were always crowded, and the shows received attention from critics (with three coveted reviews in Artforum) and collectors, and therein lay the problem. Gross was selling art without a business license, and he could not obtain one in his present location. The restaurant on the first floor is zoned to conduct business, but the apartments above are not. Read the rest of this entry »

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Scott Wolniak, with concurrent shows at 65Grand and Andrew Rafacz Gallery, says his work is “an investigation into how art-making can be a template for examining everyday occurrences and experiences.” It’s about elevating the everyday to aesthetic significance.

For “You Can Lose Your Balance” at 65Grand, Wolniak contorts, tears and twists canvases painted all white. He slices canvas and hangs a brick in a tear to create a ‘balanced’ composition. He punctures the rippling, white surface of a Little River in acrylic using a twig. The paintings, he explains, consist of “dumb acts of wrestling and sabotage” that “occur in lieu of anything remotely resembling technique.” So he splinters the canvases’ wooden frames. He has you believe that the paintings in this show leave more to chance than to the artist’s touch. In the words of Argentine canvas-slasher Lucio Fontana, punctured canvases like Wolniak’s reveal “a dimension beyond the painting” that illustrates “the freedom to conceive art through any means.” But Wolniak takes this a step further when, in ”Flash Art (Circles and Rectangles),” the image of a lightbulb going on and off paired with the switch click, click, clicking on and off becomes mesmeric. The sound takes on a meditative repetition like listening to tap-dancing, typewriting, rain falling on a tin roof and a stream of flighty, illuminating, then extinguished ideas enter and exit the viewer’s mind. Read the rest of this entry »

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If one thought of Kim Piotrowski’s current show at 65Grand in musical terms, it would be an accomplished, refrained EP album from a talented artist who has had several hit albums. Simply titled “Crowns,” the show presents a selection of works that allegedly depict crowns sourced from Internet searches, though some are more literally apparent as such than others. The jeweled tiaras and golden coronets are so lush and layered that each piece adds a distinct timbre to the record. And the artist has allowed the works to be playful and experimental, adding new materials to her repertoire, like plenty of gold leaf and a synthetic paper that absorbs less of the paint. With the variety of instruments at her disposal, the pieces could be cacophonous messes, but they veer brilliantly toward cohesive inventiveness and sustained melodies. The strongest pieces are works like “She King” and “Sunken Glory,” but each of the tracks adds a new element and supports the whole experience. Like any good EP, the show whets your appetite for the upcoming releases. Luckily that’s not too far in the future with Piotrowski’s solo at the Hyde Park Art Center this Fall. (Jason Pallas)

Through February 13 at 65Grand, 1378 W. Grand, entrance on Noble.

Top 5 Museum Shows
Olafur Eliasson, Museum of Contemporary Art
Your Pal, Cliff: Selections from the H.C. Westermann Study Collection, Smart Museum
Paul Chan, Renaissance Society
Mary Lou Zelazny, Hyde Park Art Center
James Castle: A Retrospective, Art Institute of Chicago
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Gallery Shows
Rob Carter, Ebersmoore Gallery
Big Youth, Corbett vs. Dempsey
Sarah Krepp, Roy Boyd Gallery
Everybody! Visual resistance in feminist health movements, 1969-2009, I Space
Ali Bailey, Golden Gallery
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »

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David Corbett’s solo exhibition marks his third showing at 65Grand. Titled “Change Makes It New,” the collection includes paintings and sculptures. Each medium appears intricately connected to the others. The paintings contain thick, geometric figures, sharply constructed of opposing brushstrokes on a light, hazy ground. The brilliantly colored figures are always at the fore, yet it’s the tension between the articulate and the inarticulate that animates the paintings. This tension between the architectural elements and their amorphous grounds finds a fuller expression in Corbett’s two sculptures. For instance, “There is No Way, There is a Way” is a hollow maquette made of slender sticks submerged beneath layers of paint. This eludes easy comprehension. Initially, the paint conceals the structure of the random star-like cluster except when viewed from the side, thereby revealing colorful regular stripes. A device to submerge order within chaos, it also privileges a viewpoint that just happens to be very near the floor. More effective still, and without the stripe gimmick, is the other sculpture, “Star.” A similar cluster of pencil-sized dowels and micro-lumber, “Star” gets its haze from its structural tangle and secondarily from its lacquered paint and gold-leafed sheen. The tangle also does something that the paintings cannot do. Because it is porous, the view of the inside shifts as one walks around it as the shiny lacquer glints in the gallery lights. In this instance Corbett’s sculptures do what the paintings can only hint at. (Dan Gunn)

Through November 14 at 65Grand, 1378 W. Grand Ave.

Is William Staples a man out of time, or does the rigor with which he poses questions about his medium provide an unsettling reminder of how easy it’s become to collapse art history into visual culture, paintings into “images”? To look at Staples’ paintings is to grapple with this question. Most of his works are small enough to fit comfortably on an easel, though Staples himself doesn’t use one, and use classic art-historical subjects like flowers, landscapes and horses to ask questions about perception and artifice that obsessed Modern painters but are now often assumed to have been sufficiently answered.

“I’m interested in painting as a continuum, as a tradition, not in trying to break away from something or destroy or subvert it,” says Staples, who earned an MFA from UIC in 2002 and is a founding editor of the late, great visual-art journal Blunt Art Text (B.A.T.), published in Chicago from 2005-2007, which dedicated itself to the art of long-form art criticism. Read the rest of this entry »

Jodie Mack

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The mystique of an appealing product has everything to do with denying its disposability and reproducibility. So, while the admirable handicraft of the unique artworks in “Post-scarcity” at 65Grand would seem to resist the economic connotations of curator Thea Liberty Nichols’ exhibition title, a common thread in all three pieces is a hypnotic anonymity of sorts, evoking the siren beauty of the commodity. Read the rest of this entry »