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 »

Inside the "Knowledge Box" by Ken Isaacs

By Jason Foumberg

It’s telling that no paintings are included in “Learning Modern,” an exhibition conceived to honor and update the twentieth century’s greatest artistic project. Modernism bloomed on canvas, its essences distilled via paint. But any office worker in downtown Chicago knows that Modernism also found expression in concrete, steel and glass. Despite its force and thrust, Modernism was (and remains) people friendly. It’s interactive. By inhabiting Modernist structures we carry its legacy, and we can barely ignore it; we can, however, shelve a crackly old canvas out of view. The persistence, and insistence, of Modern architecture may be one reason why painting was excluded from “Learning Modern.” Another reason may be that Wellington Reiter is an architect and urban planner, and the current president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where “Learning Modern” is held. For Reiter, renewed attention to architecture and design signals a reorientation of the artist’s role in the world. Whereas painters work in private, their coded dialogue trained toward other painters, architects and designers mold human activity. Being relevant is back in style. It’s an ideal even the classical Modernists would abide. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Arriving at the Linda Warren Gallery for the exhibition of Alex O’Neal’s recent works, one meets the startling, “Modern Day Tarzans,” an acrylic and collage on canvas. Here are Day-Glo greens, yellows and reds on a burnished rust background. There is a lion, a tiger, a large, long, green snake. There are androgynous figures with large breasts and moustaches with wide open mouths taunting, yelling, sticking out their tongues, pledging and promising more just ahead. It’s an outright eschatological festival.

“My work is formally rooted in several years of abstract painting done in the American Southwest,” O’Neal shares. “Thematically, the dysfunctional community of Mississippi I moved within in the sixties, early seventies, made a deep impression on me.” The paintings’ dense, dusty reds with vivid blues and yellows and occasional twists of glitter thrust those themes outward. One can feel the heat, smell the hot sauce. Read the rest of this entry »

Consumers are the new criminals: a trope that was always overdetermined and simplistic, and that by now feels worn out and somewhat outdated given the new batch of financier sinners we’re scapegoating these days. In fact, the current economic shipwreck makes environmentalist finger-pointing seem almost nostalgic, as Nicole Gordon’s show at Linda Warren Gallery illustrates. Gordon’s paintings, with obvious influences from Northern Renaissance painters Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch to William Blake, are simultaneously religious and carnivalesque, each one illuminating one of the seven deadly sins as acted upon the planet. Gordon considers each sin from a purely environmental perspective, where, for example, gluttony is imagined as an apocalyptic oil-drilling scene, and envy as a surrealist diamond mine. The connection is hardly new, and the show doesn’t leave very much up to the analysis of the viewer in terms of theme or intellectual challenge. The paintings turn out to be most interesting in their hybrid style, which comprises a striking combination of quasi-realistic backgrounds and cartoon-like, overtly artificial foregrounded figures. This kind of visual mash-up seems to offer much more insight into the way we experience the world now—perhaps a comment on the simulacric way we interact with the natural environment (when we do so at all), where specific fictions have allowed such eco-holocausts to take place. However, the images themselves, from animals in gas masks to a childish depiction of a man being sodomized by a gas line, seem overly simplistic, and it’s hard to know how we’re to take the final image, “The Culmination,” which depicts a literal apocalypse, complete with a nuclear cloud in the distance; the artist statement claims these paintings reflect hope and a possibility for change, but other than the ambivalent style, the work itself shows the frustrating lack of complexity that underlies all propaganda, eco-friendly or otherwise. (Monica Westin)

Through May 9 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W. Fulton Market

RECOMMENDED

Michael K. Paxton’s exhibition title, “Alpestrine,” is also a botanical term meaning “grown at high altitudes or mountainous regions.” This is the birthplace for Paxton’s inspiration and fitting for his first solo show of paintings at the Linda Warren Gallery. Paxton’s aerial views of mountains and islands are on a gargantuan scale. “Full Mountain,” a mixed media on unstreched canvas, is the largest piece in the show, measuring 5×12 feet. More impressive than the pieces’ size is the artist’s approach—though the subject matter is solid and heavy, the pieces appear airy and ethereal. The mountainous structures are not rigidly defined, but flow into amorphous forms that continue off the canvas. Warm reds and browns mingle effortlessly with blues and greens to create temperate textures, a large leap from the artist’s previous black and white palette. Paxton, who has been an active artist in Chicago for more than thirty years, and currently teaches at Columbia College, is originally from mountainous West Virginia. A recent trip to Greece, where he spent his time hiking and exploring some of the highest peaks in the Aegean, resonated with his childhood memories, inspiring this series of work. Though a personal catharsis for the artist, viewers too will be able to identify with the mountain’s symbolism as obstacle or stepping-stone to a higher level. (Patrice Connelly)

Through February 7 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W. Fulton Market

RECOMMENDED

Lora Fosberg’s text paintings are done in a style of lettering once used in display ads of the 1950s and 60s. This style, taught in graphic design trade schools, was adaptable to things like sporting goods, Smokey the Bear, hunting lodge signs, woodburning kits and “Mark Trail.” Nostalgia is one obvious effect here, but Fosberg does not go down that boring road. The pieces create human worlds that are closed in on themselves, unable to move on or break out of their time and place.

In “Thank You for Everything” (2008), catchphrases and clichés radiate from a central transmission tower: “I’ll be whatever you want,” “I want to believe,” “Now or never.” These media-implanted automatisms are presented in a color palette ranging from muted earth tones to rich dark reds. In “Rules for Survival” (2008), bright red callouts are placed on sheets of found paper, barking out rules, such as “Rule No. 4: ENTERTAIN THE MIND (by repeating mantras like ‘I am the man’).” The found paper here happens to be someone’s math homework, a child’s labored handwriting stacking piles of numbers in long division like logs in a log pile. The effect of this is not just funny and pathetic; a little negative miniature is created here of a child’s embattled selfhood. No detail is misused in Fosberg’s work. Some gallery-goers have pointed out a similarity to Darger’s psycho-meteorological cataclysms, but this is only superficial: Fosberg’s art, despite appearances, is about other lives and other people. (David Mark Wise)

Through November 29 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 West Fulton Street.

RECOMMENDED

Showing that the glossy-magazine house-beautiful color tabletop still-life photograph can be used to gently subversive effect, Tom Van Eynde offers us images of flower arrangements in assorted vases that play with commercial convention. At one extreme of his sensibility, Van Eynde presents red and white roses, with stems anchored in a smoldering blood-red glass, spitting orange flames as fine-spun wisps of curly white smoke descend to the tabletop and rise into enveloping darkness. At the opposite pole, Van Eynde eschews romanticism for geometric formalism, as when he partially obscures the flowers with a floral photograph placed on a stand in the foreground, presenting one of the images in black and white and the other in color. Van Eynde comes so close to sleek modernist commercial design that his witty compositions are ready to cross over. (Michael Weinstein)

Through November 29 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W. Fulton Market. (312)432-9500

RECOMMENDED

An interactive deconstruction of the Declaration of Independence, Conrad Freiburg’s installation is a unique contraption. Freiburg has taken verses of the historical document and created from wood, wire and stone an interpretation of the famous words. In one sculpture a lever can be pulled to drag a cement block over ball bearings, which symbolize “the people,” to represent the weight of suffering. Another piece allows the viewer to open a trap door to let a ball fall through the floor conveying the lack of a fair trial by jury. “Burnt our towns” shows the King, represented by a wooden crown, swinging above charred houses. Also on display are sketches of Freiburg’s imaginative inventions and art. Demanding all of one corner of the space and the center of the gallery floor is a wooden village at the mercy of a pulley system which can lower blocks to squash the people and the town—will gallery goers choose to crush or liberate the people? (Rachel Turney)

Through October 11 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W. Fulton Market, (312)432-9500

By Jason Foumberg

Great stories, from the comic to the tragic, are born from conflict. Boy gets girl, boy loses girl; Man versus Nature; Man versus himself: these are the recurring dramatic archetypes that reel through Lora Fosberg’s drawings. Using primarily ink and gouache on found paper—old ledgers, diaries and prescription pads—Fosberg renders the small struggles of daily existence. Each page, browned with age, features a single scenario, a distilled symbol or a glimpse through a small frame of the mind that Fosberg has captured. The pages are then pasted side-by-side on large canvases, four-by-five feet, like a jumbled storyboard. It is fitting, then, that Fosberg has collected ten years’ worth of drawings and canvases in a book, a format that underscores the narrative aspect of her work.

A motif in Fosberg’s drawings concerns man’s place in nature. Fosberg doesn’t rely on personal anecdotes to relate this conflict. Instead, she culls the stock from her iconography, as she calls it, to represent the constant push and pull between civilized discipline and wild freedom: Man versus Nature. Voices float through the drawings: Why do I keep doing it to myself; Here is where it’s gonna count; Don’t smoke Don’t drink Don’t think; Now Never What? When? The stream of banter keeps us inhibited, and in check. On the opposite shore, so to speak, of Fosberg’s iconography, rowboats are constantly stuck in choppy waters and one-man airplanes seem to always be landing on deserted islands. No Thanks, someone has spelled out with tree trunks on the beach where the plane has crashed. No Really… I’m Fine is spelled out below an island with all the implements for survival spread around a woman relaxing on a tree stump. Seen retrospectively in the book, the symbols and icons of Fosberg’s past ten years of art-making follow this consistent and contained narrative of self-sufficiency, its failures and successes.

The call of the wild, as it were, beckoned Fosberg to the forests of Michigan where she bought a summer cottage several years ago. “I’m a nature buff,” says Fosberg. Leaving Chicago on the weekends provided respite and inspiration for her drawings, most of which were created in her 3,500 square-foot, light-filled Bucktown studio. The story of Man versus Man, or Artist versus Gentrification, came to a climax one year ago when the landlord of the building on Damen Avenue, who for many years made it affordable for artists to live and work in such a glorious location, sold the space to commercial developers. Now, Fosberg’s former studio, which can be seen in several black-and-white photographs in the book, has been replaced by the Marc Jacobs store. Fosberg has since taken up residence in her Michigan forest cottage, where the idea of creating a book came into play. Since so much of the work is based on her personal experiences dividing time between city and forest, the interruption provided a moment to reflect on a ten-year body of work. The book is aptly titled “The End of the Beginning.”

“I always knew I wanted to be an artist,” says Fosberg, whose mother owned a print shop, so a supply of paper was always readily available and appealing for a kid “who grew up with a pen in the hand.” Fosberg is the type of person who will pick up any scrap of paper with writing on it found in the street or sidewalk, a dried leaf plucked by the wind off the tree of someone’s life. Peering into a small section of a life, and dreaming up banalities and desires, is an evocative practice living in a city of strangers—perhaps all we need is the confirmation that others are prone to self-doubt, boredom, heartbreak and resiliency.

The End of the Beginning is printed in an edition of 1,000 and available at Quimby’s, Linda Warren Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art and lorafosberg.com, $40.

RECOMMENDED

Megan Euker’s painting show in Linda Warren Gallery’s project space (read: office) contains large and ambitious scenes of bathers. Bathers have been a favorite subject of figurative painters since antiquity, with special emphasis from Impressionists and Post-Impressionists like Renoir, Seurat and Cézanne. Here Euker captures Italian beachcombers and bathhouse men engaged in lively relaxation. The paintings seem to focus their attention on the group behavior of their subjects, with the packs of sun-seekers titled “La Mola,” or sand diggers, roaming the beach, whereas the bathhouse residents seem much more introspective as each goes about their steam. Euker renders these subjects with a wide-ranging, slightly sun-bleached palette. The slathered paint builds up as each layer is added and adjusted creating a significant body of paint. While the tendency to anthropomorphize thick oil paint as flesh has become a bit of a cliché in recent painting, the physicality of Euker’s depictions makes up a majority of their appeal. Each passage struggles into being and confronts the next while still assembling into a tenderhearted scene. The subject of the work still seems secondary to how they are painted but Euker’s works are enjoyable enough to look at as paint, and as paintings. (Dan Gunn)

Through August 16 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W. Fulton Market.