RECOMMENDED

Huma Bhabha’s sculptures and collages at Rhona Hoffman Gallery seem like untimely ruins of contemporary culture. Although best known for her sculptures, it is Bhabha’s collages on display here that chiefly create this sense of dislocation between past and present. The foundations of Bhabha’s collages are photographs of abandoned construction projects in the desert landscape of the artist’s hometown of Karachi, Pakistan. The landscapes in Bhabha’s photographs appear stretched and twisted, an effect attenuated by streaks of ink lapping over the images. Bhabha’s collages are grungy and frenetic. The conflict between man-made development and nature is vividly rendered: the sun-drenched landscapes are awash in hot pink and neon orange better suited to billboards than pastoral scenes. The spontaneity and density of Bhabha’s collages speak to the upheaval of the landscape depicted in the underlying photographs. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In her new exhibition, “Rewinds,” at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Anne Wilson showcases an artistic practice rooted in hands-on processes of making, forming and creating. Wilson reintroduces a visual vocabulary relying on depictions of sewing tools and ephemera to advocate for the contemporary relevance of craft-based production in material culture. Rather than rely on a kitsch or homespun style, she communicates through starkly beautiful minimalist forms and surfaces that have almost clinical suggestions. Although previously known as a textile artist, Wilson explores a new medium for this show, glass, that when molten can be similarly woven, shaped and spun.

Half of the space in the gallery’s main room is occupied by Wilson’s eponymous “Rewinds” sculpture, a series of horizontal glass panels forming a raised sterile surface. Wilson littered the long minimal expanse with handcrafted glass forms that reference small sewing bobbins, specifically rewinds, which are spindles wound with leftover thread. Implying an interrupted or paused action, these static remnants of labor are clustered seemingly sporadically, forming a type of topographic assemblage that could be a sewer’s careless workspace. Kneeling pads positioned at both ends encourage onlookers to become participants in this space and its suggested fabrication work. Read the rest of this entry »

Chromatic Patterns for Chicago

RECOMMENDED

Walking into the heat and light generated by Judy Ledgerwood’s “Chromatic Patterns for Chicago” from the cold, bleak street in January is one of the best parts of her exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Ledgerwood deftly appropriates Color Field abstraction’s scale and subsequent power to activate space and affect viewers by drenching Hoffman’s front room in prismatic vibrations. Two large paintings applied directly to opposite walls of the gallery (one wraps around the corner) transform the cold cube into a temporary souk. Fully saturated hot pink, manganese, royal blue, silver and copper is applied in wide horizontal bands, which curve slightly to reference the drape of textiles, while also emphasizing the flatness of paint on plaster with an overlaid simple pattern of flowers and crossed lines. There is a generative tension between the spontaneous, not-taking-itself-too-seriously quality of her hand-drawn patterns and the very carefully worked out interactions of color that belie their apparent insouciance. Read the rest of this entry »

Kehinde Wiley has had twenty-six solo shows in museums and galleries since 2003, and his work is in the permanent collections of sixteen American art museums, including those in Milwaukee, Brooklyn, Denver, Minneapolis and Detroit. Obviously there has been a strong upscale market, both critical and commercial, in the opening years of the twenty-first century for dandified depictions of healthy young men of color, beginning with African-American, and now expanding into sensitive young dudes from Asia. And yet, art critics still continue to discuss whether Wiley can actually paint. Like Louis Comfort Tiffany, he seems to be less an artist and more a manufacturer of high-end luxury goods, with workshops in New York and China, and twenty assistants employed to paint around his digitally manipulated source material.

As Roberta Smith in the New York Times wrote in 2008, his earlier paintings “usually felt dead and mechanical, despite having been painstakingly handmade; their compositions were often fussy and unstable,” while in his more recent work “he is beginning to paint skin in ways you can’t stop looking at….the compositions are consistently calmer, and the spatial play between the figures and their backgrounds is more tightly controlled.” David Greenberg, in Art in America, judged that “Wiley is most successful when depicting in oil the vibrant contemporary street wear of his models with a painstaking skill that borders on the fetishistic.” And perhaps, compared with what passes as figure painting in summer art fairs, these judgments are reasonable. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Rhona Hoffman Gallery is presenting the collaborative group Art & Language, with works ranging from 1965 to 2007. Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson founded Art & Language in the late sixties in England, and during the following decade the group grew to include other members (and a New York branch). The group is currently comprised of Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden.

Sometimes, we forget that Art & Language is a group of theoretical visual artists, not (plainly) writers or theoreticians. Unlike many of the calcified conceptual art experiments from the sixties, the works on view here are immediately fulfilling and effective visual art. The visual, of course, is still given a textual component. Be sure to consider the take-away writing component of the show provided by the gallery. The texts read as both preparatory sketch and conversational presentation. Through this writing the twenty works in the show—while arranged loosely by date—are given an even, contemporary, presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Rezac

There’s a trend practiced by some of Chicago’s established and regarded sculptors that, while not new, resurges every few years like a scheduled comet passing overhead, illuminating the heaps of unsorted recyclables that calls itself “contemporary sculpture,” for a brief flashing reminder that we can trust our eyes, not just our minds. In short, formalist tendencies persist. City of grime and grit and gut this is not. This city was built on beauty, so it’s no surprise that spirituality or mysticism or whatever unnamable eternal thing creeps in from time to time.

Christine Tarkowski (born 1967), Susan Giles (born 1967), and Richard Rezac (born 1952) all stoke a formalist eroticism, as their sculptures pierce right through to the core of perceptual understanding, without having to busy the mind. There’s an ease of access partly provided by familiar materials—cherry wood, polished and rustic cast metals, cardboard and tape—but each also favors architectonic forms: Giles plays with minarets and crenellations, Tarkowski breaks and re-circuits parking-garage ramps and the geodesic dome, and Rezac’s sculptures evoke knobs, nooks and floorboards. There’s a logic to each construction but the direct response is pleasure. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon attending the opening of Richard Rezac’s third solo show at Rhona Hoffman, I remembered how old I am.

Like many of my peers, I consider Rezac’s work inseparable from the mythology of Minimalism, a period of art history we simply did not experience, born too late. While our pilgrimages to Marfa may help us to feel more acquainted with this period, Minimalism is our ornery grandfather whose offspring founded IKEA and gave birth to a breed of infidels with limited concern for geometry. By the time we came to cognition, people weren’t arguing about rectangles anymore. Everyone seemed so worried about AIDS, crack and the Gulf War, that splitting hairs over formalism didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Recently, we found credence in a group of artists dubbed “Unmonumental,” or post-Minimalism part two, precisely because it contaminated the sensibilities of a generation of artists we never fully understood.

Richard Rezac, however, grew up during the height of most monumental of all Minimalism; Carl Andre and Walter De Maria surely became Apollonian idols of the artist as a young man, but his work over the last three decades is not a mere placeholder in this clearly living history. Between works newly installed in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing and the solo show at Rhona Hoffman, Rezac demonstrates an ongoing inquiry into the geometries of environments ranging from Baroque cathedrals to a child’s bedroom.   Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Mel Bochner, considered by many to be the godfather of text-induced conceptualism, insisted that he never wanted to be seen as a formalist. If taken too seriously, his pieces on language can seem like an impenetrable combination of word formulas, math charts, color-coded lists, groupings and color studies that read more like excruciating word puzzles than pieces fit for a commercial gallery. The new show at the Rhona Hoffman gallery, “Blah, Blah, Blah,” revisits themes that have occupied Bochner for decades in a more palpable, if not more visually appeasing way.

In a large, banner-like installation, a long row of velvet canvases stretches on the gallery wall painted with words that feel like a revenge on language. Recall that Bochner’s last showing from this series of oil-on-velvet at Rhona Hoffman Gallery included thesaurus lists, but here he’s stripped the phrasing to a sardonic “Blah, Blah, Blah,” filling the galleries with a silent, absurd chant. Multiples of smaller black-velvet canvases echo the words in various combinations of complementary colors with nearly identical word compositions. Luminous in color and battered in black they appear and disappear into the canvas—some look like they are dripping thick with paint others like they were smeared with a butter knife. From afar they resemble both, a child’s game and a revenge on Bochner’s earlier works on Wittgenstein’s language theory. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

An unlikely combination of experimentalist, aesthete and meta-photographer (anything is possible these days), Spencer Finch produces series of images infused with a moody sensibility that hide more than they reveal. In order to show us an “anti-image,” Finch offers “Thank You, Fog,” fifty-eight small color shots taken at one-minute intervals with a static camera as the mists moved across the northern California forest—we have to squint to see more than shadows and we barely glimpse traces of color, but if we are willing to peer intently, we will be rewarded with a plenitude born of subtle effacement and attenuation. The banner attraction of Finch’s show is “Periscope,” a device that lets us see the sky outside appear on the gallery wall, permitting the artist to create prints of his subject on a photo-sensitive surface. Attention-grabbing as that might be, the glints of hue in the miasma end up being the more compelling seductions. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 2 at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 N. Peoria.

By Jason Foumberg

“Creative nonfiction” is a polite way of saying that the truth has been embellished, the facts have been garnished, and many parts have been made up for the entertainment of the reader or the writer, or both. Despite this relatively new literary classification, James Frey’s memoir was dubbed a lie, whereas Hunter S. Thompson famously got away with it—even had a banner raised to trumpet his self-styled appropriation of fact, and dubbed “gonzo journalism” by his editor. Thompson’s first published account of his foray into the pits of his mind was, oddly, on the subject of the Kentucky Derby in 1970. Now, almost forty years later, we’re faced with gonzo graphic design and New Catalogue’s latest pirating of historical events.

The artist-team comprised of Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler, called New Catalogue, have dabbled in the field of creative nonfiction before, notably by creating a quasi-real photographic record of the nature trail where Hitler mused on his writings. Their latest project stylizes several historical events: the death of United Nations diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello is conflated with the annual Paris-Dakar motorcycle rally, except the artists have relocated the destination to Darfur, the war-ravaged city on the other side of Africa. The rally’s finish line is always on the west coast of Africa, but New Catalogue’s map shows different.

There is no clear link in the art between the transcontinental race and de Mello, who died in an Iraq bombing. The idiosyncratic pairing is noted in a poster advertising the rally, which is also a poster advertising New Catalogue’s exhibition, so that the dates of the rally self-referentially mirror the dates of the exhibition in this month of this year.

This is internet-browsing stream of consciousness, where one Wikipedia page flows into another. Likely New Catalogue’s last graphic-design project, where former UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld’s life story was given the graphic treatment, sparked interest in other UN heroes such as de Mello, but viewers aren’t really privy to all the inward turns—the search history—that brought them to the motorcycle rally.

What we do have access to is the presentation of the connections. Graphic design, and its big sister, typography, are means of conveying information in a direct visual manner. New Catalogue have effectively designed a graphic identity for a fictional event using posters, simple and bold paintings, and brilliant vinyl decals that dress a motorbike—which advertise the rally’s pit stops (Geneva, Sorbonne), the Canal Hotel where de Mello was killed and, appropriately, one that reads “Oh Shit.”

Rodney Graham, in his latest exhibition, delights in plopping the viewer into his sidecar for a trip through his synaptic mind. The first clue comes as a large lightbox photograph of a Wild West tableau. Costumes, the saloon’s player piano and mounted deer head all point to historical reenactment. Likewise, a nearby bicycle (yes, you can ride it) activates the Rotary Psycho-Opticon©, a prop that creates psychedelic visuals, as in 1960s rock stage theatrics.

The meat of the exhibit, though, is what at first looks like a traditional painting show. Thirteen abstract oil paintings line a gallery, and these aren’t ordinary oil paintings—they’re made by Rodney Graham, the Renaissance Man and trickster, so you know something’s up. An adjacent gallery reveals his process. The story begins with a New Yorker-style cartoon—yet not so over-ambitiously highbrow—drawn by one Dan Kilgo (no information available; likely invented by Graham) who pokes fun at abstract art connoisseurs. Two paintings by “Picado,” one made in 1893 and the other 1942, hang side-by-side as a viewer remarks, “If you ask me, his earlier paintings were much better.” Meanwhile, the paintings are all but exactly the same except for a few squiggles, dots and whimsical shapes in different places on the canvas.

In a moment of Vonnegut-like absurdity, Graham gets carried away with Kilgo-the-illustrator’s original attempt to “make” an abstract painting. Graham produced seventy-seven variations on the illustrator’s faux-Modernist painting, but fails (as expected) at distilling any sense of mystery from the already watered-down fakes. Then, Graham actually made oil paintings inspired by the illustrator’s stereotype of Modernist painting. (There’s another step in-between the prints and the paintings, but you should go see the exhibit and be surprised).

It’s difficult to like Graham’s faux-Modernist geometric abstract paintings as paintings. Sometimes painting is bad because it’s derivative of good art, even if it contains moments of real discovery. But Graham’s paintings are props. Their “impasto” is created from some sort of chunky plaster under-painting. They are derivatives of phonies, which means they need a lot of words to be explained away. The paintings almost too easily wrap up somebody’s graduate thesis on abstract art as decoration, our comfort with simulacra and the failure of contemporary painting via its reception.

The paintings do succeed, though, as set pieces for the historical moment when taste was invented, recalling Francis Picabia’s first “bad paintings” at the dawn of irony. The line between lowbrow and high art, fact and fiction, has been drawn; Graham just dances on it.

New Catalogue, “Sérgio Vieira de Mello: Rally Paris-Darfur,” shows at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 North Peoria, through November 14. Rodney Graham shows at Donald Young Gallery, 933 West Washington, through November 14.