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.

By Jason Foumberg

The art world in summer is pretty quiet, so if a gallery isn’t shuttered while the staff vacations in St. Barts, they’re likely having the ubiquitous summer show, which usually amounts to revisiting the stock that didn’t sell from the past few seasons. Sure, it’s forgivable to take a break, but what’s an art enthusiast to do when the temperatures get too high, and the cool white cube beckons? Some galleries take the opportunity to take a risk with their summer show by exhibiting artists and ideas just a touch outside of what’s safe during the in-season. Here’s a few worth checking out.

“Summer Group Show” at Contemporary Art Workshop

This venue, perhaps the oldest non-profit visual-arts space in Chicago, has been granting solo exhibits for emerging artists as long as anyone can remember. The summer group show, installed in two sessions (July-August and August-September) continues the mission. On view are twenty-two works by nine artists, all either in art school or recently graduated, from Chicago and beyond. The media ranges from painting to sculpture to installation, most of which are stylistically similar: controlled messiness, lots of black paired with neon colors, graphically strong, and for lack of a better word, hip, as if everyone went on a field trip to New York’s New Museum and took extensive notes at the “Unmonumental” exhibit. That’s fine; it looks great and feels fresh, and there’s something to say for making an attractive picture even if meaning isn’t immediately available.

542 West Grant Place, (773)472-4004

“Several Landscapes and 3 Landscapes (or more) in the Modern Style” at Western Exhibitions

Closing out Western Exhibitions’ season before it moves to the North Peoria hotspot is a show with a loose curatorial premise about landscape. Most of the paintings discuss mankind’s involvement with nature. Megan Euker’s studies in oil continue a series wherein she observes bathers who use water for healing purposes. (Larger paintings are currently on view at Linda Warren Gallery.) Her brush is getting to a point of confident application, similar to Claire Sherman’s small studies of large events in nature, such as a geyser or a crater. In a painting by Dan Attoe a Native American ghost gazes out from a scene with pristine mountainscape, and an inscribed phrase warns, “There is no life on other planets.” The sentence is perhaps in response to a nearby painting by Kevin Cosgrove of a semi-truck on a murky road with an ashy sky and a cloud that hangs like a crusty stain.

The highlight of the exhibit is the smaller back gallery with landscapes in the “Modern style,” likely a jokey title that culls all the ghosts of landscape-painting’s past. Indeed, art-historical influences abound here in a joyful way. Carl Baratta’s expressionist painting “The Faithful Protector (after Nick Englebert)” is a slight departure from his comic-book style. The monstrous characters are pushed back, and there’s a narrative about a spirit protecting a (dead?) body lying in a forest clearing. Baratta’s sense of color reigns, and the whole scene undulates from ground to sky.

1821 West Hubbard, (312)307-4685, Saturdays through August 16

“Paper Love” at Devening Projects + Editions

The show includes only work on paper, with more than seventy pieces on view hung frame to frame, and two sculptures (made from paper, of course). Subjects range from the humorous to the strictly compositional, and styles include non-objective and figurative. Devening is clearly a formalist, as most works contain a strong sense of smart and tight artistically intuitive compositions, such as Rodney Carswell, Susanne Doremus, Howard Fonda and William Conger. As most of the artists on view are working in Chicago the exhibit gives a great overview of current practices in the city.

3039 West Carroll, Saturdays through August 8.

Also on view: A single work by one artist graces the gallery for only one week throughout the summer in “Rotations” at Rowley Kennerk Gallery (119 North Peoria). “CSI Biennale” at Flatfile Galleries (217 North Carpenter) showcases sculptures by thirty-five international sculptors, through August 22. 

Native American tribes at one time believed that Earth was carried on the back of a giant turtle. Though this idea may seem silly now, Hollis Brown Thornton has taken this ancient concept and used it as the basis of his latest solo exhibit at the Linda Warren gallery. Thornton combines his paintings and his digital work to represent reality and virtual reality within our world and how both are valid realms of existence. The bigger paintings have a raw quality of physicality to them, whereas his eight-by-ten-inch prints of manipulated family photographs and sketches are manipulated to the point of fantasy. Bright colors are predominant throughout the exhibit, ranging from multi-colored mountains to bright, almost sun-like colors splashed onto the canvas. The paintings and prints may not be strong alone but together they create a complete story. Thornton says that the figures present in his smaller pieces are the main characters in his story about our Earth and it’s relation to the virtual world and outer space, two places inconceivable and vast to most human beings. One painting, depicting an astronaut floating in endless space only attached to life by his breathing tube, shows how isolated we can be in a realm we strive to conquer. Another, a print of the html code for his Web site, makes something tangible in the internet world abstract in reality. The interplay between Thornton’s work is fantastic, a great juxtaposition between fact and fiction. (Amy Dittmeier)

Through August 16 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W. Fulton Market, (312)-432-9500.

RECOMMENDED

Simplicity is refreshing. Grouping a screen-printed image with a straightforward sentiment can oftentimes produce more of a stomach punch of emotion to a viewer than something overly constructed and vague. The Academy Records exhibit demonstrates the varying relationships between visuals and context. The intent of the project, co-operated by Steve Lacy and a revolving group of contributors, is to use graphics and text to personalize otherwise historically mundane subjects. The work in this particular exhibit is set up in a screen print poster fashion with a simple image of a cartoon character or graphic, matched with a quote such as “and reflect that whatever misfortune may be your lot … it could only be worse in Milwaukee.” (Ain’t it the truth.) The Chicago-based art collective operates with a toolbox of music culture, drawing, typography and phrases to expand the normal setting of an art experience. Viewers of an Academy Records showing often take with them souvenirs such as recordings made on the spot by collaborators. By specifically creating accessible art, the artists insure that there will be something for everyone, provided they come willing to receive. (Kelly McClure)

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