Jan 03
Heather Rasmussen, "Untitled (New Orleans, Louisiana, September 10, 2005)," 2010
RECOMMENDED
Fascinated by the colorful and ruthlessly rectangular shipping crates that festoon California ports, Heather Rasmussen took to making miniature paper replicas of them; arranged her constructions to simulate documented accidents in which piles of containers crashed into each other, collapsed, or scattered in a mess; and shot her scenarios in color, leaving out any trace of context. Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 13
"Virginia City Mine, Cave-in," ca. 1867-1868.
RECOMMENDED
Between 1867 and 1869, the U.S. government sponsored a survey of the wondrous lands between the California border and Cheyenne, Wyoming, including in the team photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who set about shooting intriguing rock formations of various and undreamt of kinds, views from above of budding towns, a vista here and there, and—the gems of the show—studies of the gold and silver mines and miners that are worthy of Lewis Hine’s famous twentieth-century takes on industrial work. Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 06
RECOMMENDED
When Peter J. Cohen went through his vast collection of old anonymous snapshots gleaned from flea markets and garage sales, he was struck by how many of them depicted female threesomes, gathered those together, tacked them on the gallery wall, and titled the exhibition “The Three Graces”—beauty, charm and grace. Billed as a history of women’s presentation of themselves to the camera over most of the twentieth century, the show is nothing of the sort—all of the images are black and white, and most of them seem to come from the mid-century decades, although one cannot be sure, since they are not dated or seemingly chronologically ordered. What we get are informal group portraits and girls just wanting to have fun and more-or-less succeeding, whether by vamping or horsing around. Read the rest of this entry »
Aug 08
Pavel Petrovich Sokolov-Skalia, "Wolf the Moralist," July 19, 1943.
RECOMMENDED
In 1939, Clement Greenberg famously distinguished avant-garde art from kitsch, the “predigested art” manufactured for the “ignorant Russian peasant” who knows “no discontinuity between art and life.” That distinction has framed the discourse of American art ever since, but it was a matter of life and death for Soviet artists once social realism was officially established by Stalin, and even more so after June 22, 1941 with the beginning of a Nazi invasion that would take twenty-three million lives.
In 1997, twenty-six mysterious brown paper parcels were discovered deep in a storage room of the AIC’s Department of Prints and Drawings. They turned out to be the legacy of a cultural exchange fifty years earlier that brought to Chicago a collection of war propaganda posters created by TASS, the Soviet News agency. Ranging in size from five to ten feet tall, their irresistible visual impact is stunning, especially now, after they have been restored to their original condition, augmented with spectacular pieces from other museums (including MoMA and the Hoover Institute), and displayed chronologically to tell the story of both the art studio that created them and the nation that was fighting for its life. Read the rest of this entry »
Aug 08
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, "Ambrose Bierce," 1964
RECOMMENDED
A transplant from Normal, Illinois to Lexington, Kentucky, Ralph Eugene Meatyard took up photography, got into the circle of intellectuals presided over by Wendell Berry, and indulged his proclivities for the surreal suffused with Southern gothic. An early practitioner of the contemporary scenario shot whose trajectory peaked in the 1960s, Meatyard deployed his wife and children in still dramas, in which they appeared in masks and uncovered, often with some dolls thrown in or standing alone. Curator Elizabeth Siegel is correct to dub Meatyard as “enigmatic,” judging by the fifty-one black-and-white images here. At first look, the viewer is drawn to shots like that of a little boy holding a doll and wearing an old man’s wizened face mask, sitting on cracking concrete strewn with dead leaves against the wall of a derelict building. Then one notices that most of the images are much tamer, leaving a sense of peace with what is just a form of low-key voguing—the banality of the surreal. (Michael Weinstein)
Through September 25 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.
Jun 27
Gustav Klutsis, "Worker Men and Women: Everyone Vote in the Soviet Elections," 1930
RECOMMENDED
The separation between everyday life and the visionary designers of the avant-garde is one of the ongoing ironies or misrepresentations of the twentieth century. An exhibition at the Art Institute retrieves the connections among graphic design, designed objects, art and “everyday life,” displaying book covers, teapots, postcards and the dynamic graphic work of six visual artists. What we now take for granted as industrial design was just beginning in the early years of the century when Ladislav Sutnar was designing dinnerware and posters celebrating commerce and industry. His sculptural china embodies the restrained play of spherical volumes, while Piet Zwart’s apple-green pressed glassware is more compact as tubular tea cups sit in hexagonal saucers. The emphasis on form rather than decoration not only severs ties with the clutter of the Victorian past but identifies everyday items with the values—efficiency, durability, mass distribution—of emerging industrial and communications technologies. Read the rest of this entry »
May 30
Uta Barth, "... and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.3)," 2011. Inkjet print
RECOMMENDED
A conjurer of visual effects in the quiet setting of her Los Angeles home as it interfaces with her yard outside through its windows, Uta Barth has explored the eye’s exhaustion by taking repeated photos of a tree, the liminal state of dusk in one of her rooms and, most recently, the play of ribbons of light on a curtain. In her latest body of work, “…and to draw a bright white line with light,” Barth has dropped any pretension to representation and has crimped and spread the curtain to make the light-line undulate with wavelike rhythms, broadening and narrowing against an off-white nearly monochromatic background. The result is a series of hypnotic images that deploy abstraction to put us into reveries that concentrate attention on the simultaneity of stillness and irregular movement. By giving herself over to abstraction, Barth beckons us to a psychedelic experience in the most faded of colors. (Michael Weinstein)
Through August 14 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.
Mar 14
Jean Hey, known as the Master of Moulins. "Madeleine of Burgundy Presented by Saint Mary Magdalene," c. 1490. Oil on panel. Musée du Louvre.
RECOMMENDED
As its title denotes, this is an exhibition of things made to flatter and delight a French royal court, and since so many of the artists are Flemish or Italian, it is French patronage rather than national origin that distinguishes this collection.
When shown in the Grand Palais, in Paris, earlier this year, it was called “France 1500 entre Moyen Age et Renaissance” to focus on the major historic transition underway in that century. By the year 1500, the secular ideals of the Roman Republic had already been reborn in Italy, bankers were becoming more important than landowners, France was uniting into a nation state and Martin Luther was a teenager. Although Humanism and Italian mannerism would soon define French taste, the court of Charles VIII still savored that sweet medieval dream of a divine order with the Madonna’s family at the top, the extended royal family one notch down, and beautiful angels floating freely in between. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb 21
"In the Carpet Shop," from The Sausage Photographs, 1979. Chromogenic print.
RECOMMENDED
Swiss collaborative duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss excel at multiplying mundane elements to create captivating visual summations. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibits three early projects in which the pair plays with materials and imagined environments, demonstrating a subtle humor and unfettered enthusiasm for the acts of looking, experimenting and questioning.
Their first joint undertaking, 1979′s “The Sausage Photographs,” is a photographed series of ten miniature tableaux that use bizarre materials culled from a “typical Swiss-German refrigerator,” which apparently includes processed meats, Styrofoam and cardboard packaging, cigarette butts, parsley, stray bottle caps and peanut shells. Staged in an apartment where bedsheets become mountains and scrawled lines within a soot-lined oven stand in for ancient cave markings, these theatrical scenes communicate a whimsical fascination with make-believe and child-like play. Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 21
Lilli Carré: Untitled, 2010, screen print, 8 x 8 inches. Photo by Angee Leonnard.
Top 5 People and Places We’ll Miss
Kathryn Hixson
David Weinberg Gallery
Rowley Kennerk Gallery
Green Lantern Gallery
James Garrett Faulkner
—Jason Foumberg
Top 5 Solo Exhibitions
Edra Soto/Ebersmoore Gallery
Philip Hanson/Corbett vs. Dempsey
Lilli Carré/Spudnik Press
Gladys Nilsson/Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art
Ian Weaver/Packer Schopf Gallery
—Jason Foumberg
Top 5 Public Art Projects
Ray Noland’s “Run Blago Run”
Pop-Up galleries in the Loop
Nomadic Studio/DePaul University Art Museum
Hui-min Tsen’s tours of the Chicago Pedway
Marwen
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »
