Marta Kubrak, "Resistance to Snares," 2011, silkscreen

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Looking at Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition of the Wroclaw School of Printmaking, one gets the sense that there might be more time in Wroclaw, Poland, than we have here. Three galleries filled with large, complex, detailed and technically brilliant prints provide evidence that artists in Poland have time to concentrate on dense, romantic images. Printmaking is a traditional form which, despite the rigors of its pre-twentieth-century technology, continues to speak to the present. Like glassblowing or textiles, both taught at the Academy where these artists are faculty, reproducing images somehow seems essential to human life. The craft of printmaking shifts and expands to absorb technical innovations over time, like photo and digital applications and modernist design sensibilities, but retains its connection with traditional forms. Read the rest of this entry »

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Shooting in lush, muted color, Art Fox continues the modernist tradition of wall photography pioneered by Aaron Siskind, and redeems the ruins, as Siskind put it, by capturing the enthralling blend of textures, splashes of paint, pock marks and blistering lettering and rust that bedeck weathered surfaces that can exert a hypnotic effect. Read the rest of this entry »

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Albeit largely monochromatic, there’s a lot to enjoy in the fanatically perverse visuals issuing from the unholy twenty-year legacy of Scandinavian black metal. There are the band logos, which incorporate traditional Nordic and Celtic design elements with expressionistic lightning cracks and blood splatters; there’s the album art, featuring epic landscapes, cryptic pagan diagrams and shadowy photos of musicians made up in ghostly black-and-white “corpsepaint,” contorted rapturously under the weight of medieval accessories. Read the rest of this entry »

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What’s charming about Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry, after Bollywood, the most prolific in the world) is that the quality of production is no greater than the quality of narrative. They work with low-rent soap operas spiced up to satisfy the West African taste for violent revenge and juju magic, and they are shot with what appears to be hand-held home-video equipment. The budget for one Hollywood blockbuster could fund nearly a thousand films made in Nollywood, so there’s some comfort in knowing that not  a lot of cash and talent has been wasted on making them.

This is also true of the hand-painted movie posters that mobile movie theaters in rural Ghana used in the 1980s to advertise their shows. Slap-dashed together on the recycled cloth of flour bags, the images are as demented, ugly and goofy as anything the Chicago Monster roster and their descendants ever made, but far less serious since the intended audience is bored adolescents of all ages rather than art collectors. Read the rest of this entry »

“Was dying as she thought, or different?”

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Art is one of the few professions where playfulness is encouraged. You don’t want your orthopedic surgeon playing around with your hip, but it’s okay for an artist to play around with shapes and references, and the artworks themselves, like tarot cards, for example, can be used for either serious divination and self knowledge, or just to play a game like poker.

Rita O’Hara’s acrylic, gouache and watercolor paintings are very much like tarot cards. They offer archetypes like the mandala (self), the butterfly (soul), the fish (transition), etcetera, and she is quite serious about them. She is not a commercial artist dabbling in metaphysics to design posters that hang above the scented candles in a new-age bookstore. She’s had a long career counseling the chronically mentally ill and adults with developmental disabilities. But neither is she a therapist dabbling in art. Over that period, she has chosen and followed a single teacher, Robert Guinan, the master of a clean, sparse narrative style that effectively presents gritty life on the streets of Chicago. O’Hara has adapted that style to present the buoyant but sometimes desperate life of the soul in the sunless world of dreams. The sense of craftsmanship is impeccable, as it should be for such a serious subject. Whether they work as vehicles for self-awareness is another matter, and perhaps, despite claims to the contrary, the archetypes she employs are more specific to her background in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family than they are universal. To her, for example, a swan represents the supernatural, while to me, it’s the aggressive, voluptuous bird that’s always been trying to mate with poor Leda. But still, I found some of her images haunting and memorable, like the parade of uniformed women in “Was dying as she thought, or different?” Read the rest of this entry »

"Filleted Male Salmon," 2010

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Marion Kryczka’s well-made, highly ordered, masculine vision of reality may fit the blue-collar streets of Chicago, but he’s been peripheral to the contemporary art world. Kryczka’s work also lacks either the photo finish and sentimentality, or the anger and ugly distortions that other corners of the art world  might appreciate, and he’s not even goofy, damaged or unsophisticated enough to qualify as an outsider.

As critic G. Jurek Polanski wrote about Kryczka’s 1999 exhibit in the Fine Arts Building, “The variety of pieces tell a story, one in which each work, while complete in itself, is placed to build a context with its companions and comprehensively reveal the artist’s personality.” And the same is true today, although the story is changing, as the artist mellows into his sixties. The still-lifes include the same dead fish, sharp knives and bottles of alcohol on low-rent kitchen counters that he’s been painting for decades. But the light feels less harsh, the whiskey has been replaced by wine, and fish seem almost happy to be offering their tender, pink, slaughtered flesh. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Adonis Flores, "Sieve/Tamiz, 2005," Digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam.

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In 1996 guitarist Ry Cooder traveled to Havana, assembling a group of aging Cuban musicians to record the hit album that would be called Buena Vista Social Club, introducing many Americans to the unique sultry swing of old-school Cuban nightclub music. But judging from this exhibition, a similarly unique enchanting style of visual art has not been cultivated by the National Council of Fine Arts and the Wifredo Lam Center (which also sponsors the International Havana Art Biennial). It’s more like what you would expect a hundred miles north, in Art Miami, only a bit less outrageous, more provincial, and twenty to forty years behind the times. Rather than a contemporary Cuban style, the themes and devices of mainstream contemporary art have been applied to Cuban subjects. So much of this exhibition feels like a trip to Havana and the surrounding countryside—with photographs of quirky peasants, decaying sugar refineries and weathered doors. Even more so, the blurry, damp-but-dynamic cityscape paintings of Luis Enrique Camejo share a real affection for a time and place. A homeboy affection is emphatically proclaimed by Roberto Fabelo’s installation called “Damned Trips”—in which a collection of well-worn suitcases are impaled by a twelve-foot dagger suspended from the ceiling. Velasco and Arellano have photo-manipulated the iconic Plaza de la Revolución into a series of images where the towering Marti Memorial is subjected to some rather severe weather conditions and finally partially submerged by the sea. This is all more than just a little nostalgic and is augmented by many works on that overworked twentieth-century theme of modern man lost in the maze of his own high-tech civilization. Read the rest of this entry »

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Europe’s Large Hadron Collider recently knocked Fermilab out of the number-one slot for having the largest particle accelerator in the world. Its job? To smash different types of particles into one another at about the speed of light in hopes of finding out what type of stuff the universe is made of. The notion that the tiniest imagined particle could hold the key to the entirety of our vast universe is related to the telescoping attention artist Jeff Zimmermann pays to everything from the reflective foil of a Fritos’ bag in the gutter to the individual faces that orbit the popping, well-designed tableaus of his large-scale murals. Read the rest of this entry »

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A man on a mission, Grant Ramsey took his camera to the streets of Nicaraguan cities and towns, snapping informal color shots of everyday life that are uniformly affirmative. Ramsey is out to dispel the victim myth that third-world people live lives of drudgery and desperation; the way he sees it, we are all human-all-too-human, trying to take pleasure as we can in the daily round, whether it be hanging out, trading at the market, stoking a fiery furnace, dancing at the club, or washing clothes as a pig roots around in the dirt and the kids go off in every direction—among other humble scenes too numerous to mention. Is there a danger in presenting the upside of relatively impoverished life? Ramsey, who has a doctorate in philosophy, does not see one, opting for the family-of-man approach, which dignifies our shared vital will to be happy wherever we are. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 26 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington