Peter Saul, "Stupid Argument"

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In the mid-1960s, a handful of young Chicago painters stunned the art world with rebellious, often disgusting, pop-cartoonish imagery that the art critic of the New York Times, John Canaday, called “greasy kid stuff.” Now, forty-five years later, as the current Jim Nutt retrospective might suggest, some of them have mellowed and aestheticized their practice. But not their fellow traveler Peter Saul (born 1934), whose latest work on view at Corbett vs. Dempsey is just as high-energy obnoxious as his earlier piece now showing along with Nutt at the MCA. The centerpiece of the show, his “Stupid Arguments,” in all its day-glo, cartoonish horror, feels like the cacophony of a dozen cheap radios tuned to different stations, many of which are angry talk shows, with all the fervent conviction of the ignorant and stupid. What a terrible world in which we live! 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 »

Christopher Wool, untitled, 2009, enamel on linen

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An art show can be like a radio station, bringing together work that seems surprising for a second, and then you realize, sure, people who like Billy Squier might also like Blind Melon. This can also be true for the oeuvre of a single artist, as in the case of star painter Christopher Wool. He made his name in the 1980s as a macho answer to text artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, doing large black-on-white paintings that applied a catchy formalist brutality to conceptual art by making gridded-out all-caps stencil poetry from words like “FOOL” and “RIOT,” and phrases such as “FUCK EM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE” and “HOLE IN YOUR FUCKIN HEAD” (for me these always evoked the ethos and logo of the LA punk band Fear, a word he also put on canvas). But his monochromatic vision extended also into grainy gritty photographs, messy layered screenprints, and scribbly gestural paintings, using at turns rolled, dripped, or sprayed paint, sometimes smeared with turpenoid or “erased” with white paint. Wool demonstrated that he was capable of mining the legacy of Twombly, Rauschenberg and Warhol, as well as Weiner, Nauman and Johns, his offhand yet high-priced gestures leveling all postwar art with the cast-off indifference of a photocopier. Wool’s new exhibition, “Sound On Sound,” at Corbett vs. Dempsey is in conjunction with the release by gallery co-owner John Corbett’s record label of a forty-plus-year-old recording by jazz musician Joe McPhee, and in the show’s catalog we see a ventilator-masked Wool at work on his monumental canvases, displaying his own ability to present a performative persona á la Jackson Pollock’s 1949 Life magazine profile. So while he may have moved from punk into jazz, Wool’s recent collaborations with young Turk painter Josh Smith prove he has lost no cred. And while the density of his surfaces has increased with the blueness of his chip, his swagger has lost no insouciance. (Bert Stabler)

Through November 27 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 North Ashland.

"The World is Charged with the Glory of God (Hopkins)," 2010, oil on canvas

Like his friends and colleagues among The False Image and the Hairy Who, Philip Hanson appropriated the formal strategies and saturated colors of comic books, circus posters and signage, among other popular forms, during the sixties. While Imagists like Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg and Karl Wirsum distorted the human figure to produce psychosexual images and psychosocial critiques, Hanson became interested in a landscape of words. He started with what he calls “aphoristic sequences” and then moved on to entire poems. His current exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey of fifty-nine oil paintings and drawings reference well-known works like Shakespeare’s sonnets and the short poems of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Hanson creates vibrant pictorial space using the words of poems by transposing the formal qualities of language, like tone, color, rhythm and sound, into the elements of painting. It’s an exciting alchemical process combining analytical, symphonic and diagrammatic arrangements enriched by elaboration and improvisation. Hanson studied poetry at the University of Chicago and was impressed by the strategies of the New Criticism popular at the time, called “close reading,” which rigorously examined the interconnections between words and images in literature. Trips to Europe where he was impressed by the “grand sequences of rooms” of palaces and museums and the phantasmagorical work of Adolf Wolfli, who was institutionalized in a hospital for the insane, enriched Hanson’s spatial and formal vocabulary. Fortunately, the Imagists and Hanson were supported in the sixties and seventies by the NEA, foundations, the at-that-time-emergent MCA and galleries like Phyllis Kind, which began in Chicago and moved to New York. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

While you were out for the summer, I took a message. Here’s what you may have missed.

Eleanor Coen, 1916-2010

Deaths in the Family
The West Side gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey reported two deaths via email this summer. Eleanor Coen, wife of artist Max Kahn, experimented with and popularized lithography in Chicago with her contemporaries in the 1930s and 1940s. She graduated from SAIC and later taught there, and continued her printmaking career into the 1950s. She had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1946. The gallery also announced the passing of James Garrett Faulkner, an artist, teacher and art collector. Faulkner also taught at SAIC and collected the work of Imagist and self-taught artists. Both Coen and Faulkner are represented by the gallery, which sells work by established (and sometimes forgotten) Chicago-based artists. This fall, John Corbett and Jim Dempsey (of the gallery’s namesake) will curate an exhibition about Ray Yoshida’s art legacy in the Chicago community. Yoshida died in January 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

"Land of Cockaigne," 2010, oil on canvas

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Robert Barnes played chess with Duchamp, worked with Matta and has a pancake recipe from Max Ernst. With these anecdotes Barnes fed my sense of wonder while I was a student of his, in 1973-74, at Indiana University, Bloomington. A generous and excellent teacher, his painting-class conversations were like his paintings, brimming with allusions, ideas and references all in constant movement. Drama and myth, or more specifically the interpenetration of drama and myth with everyday life, supply the content for a current exhibition titled “Paradise,” with five large works (approximately sixty-inches square) and several smaller paintings.

Abundance is a fitting subject for Barnes, who responds to an era characterized by an increasingly dystopian vision of scarcity, by depicting several versions of paradise. In “Land of Cockaigne,” where an everlasting banquet pours toward the viewer, a man with a collar and crown of leaves and fruit munches on a chicken leg while a pig wanders through another corner of the canvas. “Mag Mell,” “Eden,” “Avelon” and “Opium” make up the set; each one crowded with its own storied plentitude of incidents, settings, nourishment and objects. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

"Siesta Upstairs," c. 1945, oil on panel

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“There is a living, moving geometry in a city, and it tells a human story,” Margo Hoff (1910-2008) explained to an art magazine in 1963, and that’s pretty much the story of her painting, from the thirty years spent in Chicago, to her following five decades in New York.  The current retrospective, at Corbett vs. Dempsey, shows just how much those stories changed after she left Chicago at age fifty. The Windy City was full of mysteries for this Oklahoma girl, and her paintings are small windows into urban life, usually nocturnal. What are those strange neighbors doing tonight, anyway? Moving to New York, she felt more like one of the crowd—a bustling, thrilling, restless crowd, and her paintings began to resemble vibrant, folksy art quilts. Indeed, she had begun cutting painted canvas into pieces and then pasting them all together, with a very precise sense of design, into collage, full of brilliant colors, sharp edges, and rhythmic energy. Was she going to the jazz clubs to hear Monk, Davis and ‘Trane? She went to a lot of places, teaching classes in Uganda, Beirut, and Sao Paolo, as she had at Hull House, and just seemed to have an endless enjoyment and curiosity about the world. “A hospitality of heart,” as one friend put it. More understated, but still quite enjoyable, are a few of the urban geometries of contemporary Chicago painter and post-rock musician, Sam Prekop, which play, like a b-side, in the east wing of the  gallery. Visiting this show will likely be the highlight of any dark, wintry day in Chicago. (Chris Miller)

Through January 16 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 N. Ashland.

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The title of Albert Oehlen’s show at Corbett vs. Dempsey, “A Vanguard With Decorum,” evokes the complicated specter of jazz, a connotation that is reinforced in the catalog essay by gallery co-owner and accomplished musician John Corbett. Indeed, every piece in the show reinforces that association. Oehlen’s monochromatic collages, with their jaunty tangles of parallel lines and calligraphic clef-like flourishes so clearly depict a hard-swung musical score that I could imagine them as a retrospective of Art Blakey album covers designed by Stuart Davis. Their high-energy design is unimpeachable, and it’s great to see a contemporary master like Oehlen showing in such a deserving small space in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Rebecca Shore has been making paintings for about thirty years, and some of her newest paintings are her largest yet. She usually paints on a panel that’s roughly the size of a sheet of paper, but a few of the new works are about a meter high. The change in scale allows for a greater density of visual information, which is what’s so satisfying about her new body of work—collections of objects and symbols, seen in shadow, and laid out as if on a blanket, the treasured possessions of a collector. As with any collection, the more that’s amassed brings a greater understanding of the whole.

Shore began painting what she calls these “irregular patterns” by noticing and photographing faux rock patterns on houses, which are handmade wall paintings of abstract shapes made to resemble stacked rocks. Her photographs are on view in the gallery, in a small case for reference, and in the show’s catalog. Shore is an incessant collector of imagery who documents signage, advertisements, and even oddball shapes taken from television screenshots.

Many of Shore’s older paintings look to decorative motifs, such as filigree flourishes and stylized floral designs, recalling sheets of wallpaper. The new work, however, brings the imagistic associations to the forefront, including butcher knives, alphanumerics, slippers and urns. Shore flattens these images, thereby abstracting them, turning them into both essentialized and ambiguous forms.
Read the rest of this entry »