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

RECOMMENDED

“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.

RECOMMENDED

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 »

"Love Knots," 1996

RECOMMEDNED

At 84, Morris Barazani qualifies as the grand old man of Chicago abstract painting. His personal history here goes all the way back to Maholy Nagy and the Institute of Design. That remote outpost of Bauhaus civilization is long gone, but its sense of carefully measured design lives on as a kind of constructivist blueprint beneath the turbulent, Ab-Ex surfaces of Barazani’s gutsy painting. The current exhibit at Corbett vs. Dempsey spans the last thirty years of his career, from 1972 onward, and makes a nice comparison with a previous show that spanned the first twenty (1948-1968) shown at the gallery in 2006. “I’ve always tried to adjust between those two poles, formal and informal,” Barzani recently said, and it seems like his “adjustment” just keeps getting better and better, running the gamut from subtle arrangements of almost-white, almost-perfect rectangles to Ab-Ex explosions that look like the jumbled memory of driving all the way down Western Avenue. His paintings feel positive, passionate, modest, sincere, and hard-working—which is to say, they are very Chicago—though a few miles inland from the fashionable lakefront. (Chris Miller)

Through February 14 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 N. Ashland.

RECOMMENDED

Frank Vavruska’s exhibit, “The Horizon Is a Circle,” encapsulates the history of art in both style and context through a series of paintings masterfully collected at Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery. The collection showcases some of his most successful work from the artist’s career, a period spanning 1942 to 1956. Stylistic influences range from expressionism to cubism to pure abstraction, all of which reflect significant events in Vavruska’s life and time in Chicago, London and the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico. The early expressionist paintings possess a flatness of construction, but subtly highlight his transition into more cubist work. Pieces such as “Untitled (Mexican River Scene)” and “Air Raid Sirens Sounding Over London” focus on specific events or places, yet they lack visual depth. Conversely, his later work, composed of purer abstractions, provide an abundance of depth while lacking a clear context. The work is primarily oil on canvas in earth tones with a smattering of vivid colors woven into the background, such as scarlet stars or an emerald green rooftop. The subject matter is so widely ranged, it may seem as though the exhibit contains three separate artists, but the common element of Vavruska’s work is in the careful placement of abstract patterns. These patterns become the focal point for his later work, which are richly layered abstractions, reminiscent of Klee or De Kooning. Frank Vavruska was based in Chicago and lived from 1917-1974. His work reminds us that the horizon, like art, can be more than a straight line. (Shama Dardai)

Through August 23 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 N. Ashland.

RECOMMENDED

Dominick Di Meo’s early works combine painting, drawing and relief. Made while he lived in Chicago, the imagery evokes the subjective nature of collection, accumulation and collage. The figures and objects in the paintings are often fragments, conglomerated and repeated in the space of the canvas to emphasize their dismemberment from the whole to which the eye is accustomed. Di Meo’s fragments range from body parts to everyday objects (such as forks, spoons, wrenches, bobby pins and tweezers). By cataloguing such icons of civilization in a dark and subjective landscape, Di Meo’s work suggests that dissociation and chaos can occur by altering the relationship between humans and their tools. Although Di Meo’s works seem to debunk organization and scale, they do convey a fleeting sense of hierarchy; hovering over a few of these collections of fragments is a single face or head, suggesting the unifying power that the mind has over collections, regardless of how disorganized they may seem at first glance. Other reliefs and drawings are simpler, with single, mask-like faces. There is recursion within the symbols Di Meo uses; his works show faces within faces, faces within eyes, faces within arms—all suggesting that disruption of scale and contingency is an integral part of both Di Meo’s universal semiotics and his deeply personalized landscapes. These Chicago-era works confront and overcome a fear of deconstruction, as well as a fear of what becomes of the icon once it is separated from order and context. The gallery has compiled a hundred-page catalog to recognize Di Meo’s contributions and influential role in the Chicago art scene and on fellow 1950s artists. (Marisa Plumb)

Through June 28 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 N. Ashland.

Philip Hanson plays compositions filled with vibrant notes of color and form. Pieces consist of bold abstraction, some of which are layered upon with text based on the work of various poets. The small-scale paintings house the preciousness of a poem, and when juxtaposed with text, create an altered yet familiar environment. Like a piece of prose that partakes of both speech and song, the pieces are rhythmical and metaphorical, evoking formal elements that reminisce stanza and meter. What I enjoy most about poetry, besides its musicality, is its mystery. The concision that is both brief and comprehensive, yet enigmatic, is left open to interpretation and within this space the audience can meander. But viewing these paintings did not permit such space. There was no work involved for me, no exegetical journey, or translation to perform. The text placed on top of the beautiful abstraction was not integrated to enfold with the form, but instead concealed it. I stood in front of each painting, read the text, then moved on. The paintings felt stiff and inhibited in meaning by text and lacked the harmony, characteristic of the organ, between the visual and written to produce beauty, form and unified expression. (Karissa Lang)

Through Feb 9 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 N. Ashland.