"Untitled (woman with floral hat)," 1961

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A nanny by profession, Vivian Maier’s passion—and that is no exaggeration—was street photography intensively pursued in New York City, Los Angeles and her base of Chicago. Shooting mainly during the 1950s and 1960s, Maier’s archive was only discovered after her death in 2009, and a selection of fifty-seven black-and-white images, mostly portraits and mostly candid, now receives its first gallery show. Maier comes out as a minor master, a child of her time whose images resemble those of Diane Arbus; her subjects are quirky, often discomfited, not especially conventionally attractive, and sometimes downright dyspeptic. Of course, the Chicago school is never as extreme as the New Yorkers, so we can get close to and familiar with Maier’s subjects, and then find out that we might have wanted to keep more of a distance. An elderly bony-faced lady sporting a helmet-like floral hat gives a sidelong look into the camera that defines what is meant by baleful. Maier serves up the all-too-human family of the morose. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 18 at Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 West Superior.

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Ed Paschke’s legacy has had an incredibly prolific past several years—despite, or perhaps because of, his death in 2004 at the age of 65. Currently, a dual exhibition titled “Ed Paschke’s Women” is being shown at Russell Bowman Art Advisory and Alan Koppel Gallery, both in River North. Simultaneously, at Gagosian Gallery in New York, Paschke’s work is on view in a show curated by Jeff Koons, a former student and studio assistant of Paschke, whose large monographic exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2008, featured a small side exhibition called “Everything’s Here,” which incorporated some works by Paschke.

Perhaps the trend began in 2006 with the excellent “Ed Paschke: A Chicago Icon” held at the Chicago History Museum, featured a partial re-creation of the artist’s studio and a work in progress at the time of his death. It revealed the very traditional approach to oil painting that Paschke took, beginning, as the Old Masters did, with an under-painting of black and white, which lent his figures their juicy volume, followed by an over-working of color, sometimes in slick, thin glazes, and sometimes in sculptural, thick impasto, accounting for the depth that his paintings achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Mapplethorpe

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From William Wegman’s notoriously fey portraits of his beloved Weimaraner dogs and Lucas Samaras’ tiny and decidedly unflattering funky Polaroid self-portraits, through Joel Sternfeld’s biting and luscious color photographs of the (de)humanized American landscape and Candida Hofer’s cold color studies of depopulated institutional interiors, to Robert Mapplethorpe’s signature sculptural yet flowing impressions of body parts, this show throws us back to the heydays of postmodern subversion, criticism and play, when shooters shot out in every conceivable direction. Forget the last decades of the twentieth century, though, and find the treats in the back room in Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s small black-and-white erotic photos of sultry and voluptuous Marie, particularly the triptych of negative images of her face in which she appears as a wild witch. Von Bruenchenhein shot in the 1940s, when political correctness was not yet ascendant and film noir and the femme fatale reigned supreme. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 11 at Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 W. Superior

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After finishing high school in Alabama, Roger Brown enrolled in Bible school, intending to become a preacher. Instead, a figure-drawing class strengthened his interest in art and redirected his course to Chicago. He arrived just in time to help form the group of artists that would come to be known as the Chicago Imagists. The pieces included in “Roger Brown: Early Work” date from 1968—when Brown began his MFA studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—until 1980, when his critical acclaim was beginning to grow thanks to exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, Phyllis Kind Gallery, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, among other venues. Read the rest of this entry »

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Charles Steffen’s amiable monsters have taken up residence at Russell Bowman Art Advisory, staring from the walls of his second solo exhibition here with genial and otherworldly countenances. The Chicago artist, who died of cancer in 1994, favored nudes, portraits and flowers as subjects, often combining all three in the same drawing. Most of his works were drawn from life with the simplest of materials—graphite, colored pencil, brown paper bags and wrapping paper—yet they appear as fantastic eruptions within an otherwise mundane existence. All of Steffen’s portraits (which were usually based on friends and family members) seem to be extensions of the artist himself. Diary-like annotations written across the drawings detail Steffen’s daily routine: what he ate for lunch, how long the drawing took, his artistic touchstones (particularly de Kooning’s nudes) and his continual efforts to improve his work. Steffen tended to hybridize human and botanical forms. Flesh has the scaly texture of tree bark, fingers and hands are gnarled and knotty, bodies are either tumorous or attenuated, their limbless nether regions dangling sinuously. This was somewhat an expression of mental illness (he lived on and off at Elgin State Hospital for thirteen years beginning in the 1950s), but given the proclivity of so many other twentieth-century artists for whom radical transmogrifications of the body are the norm, Steffen’s mental state seems only secondarily relevant. Steffen clearly sought to portray the essence of his subjects; whether this aligns him with the trajectory of twentieth-century art or cements his “outsider” status is a question worthy of further debate. (Claudine Isé)

Charles Steffen shows at Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 W. Superior, (312)751-9500, through January 10.

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For this small show at Russell Bowman, the unflappable William Wegman pastes aged postcard to panels and connects their landscapes with paint, filling in the gaps in between the narrative of each card. The artist’s familiar sense of humor is on display with works like “The Last Summer,” a mélange of sun-soaked beachgoers and Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” More than just wordplay, the cards switch between aerial views, interior shots and close-ups, allowing Wegman the pleasure of engaging in some complex spatial somersaults. The panels twist around and contort and zoom in and out of focus. For instance, in “Up Sugarcreek” (presumably without a paddle) the sky of one shoreline community becomes the ocean to a cluster of bleached seaside condos. Wegman also considers the postcard as a cultural form. In “Expo,” he poignantly places two postcards showing a pair of youthful friends walking by a lake next to each other. It is easy to become nostalgic from the card’s brand of Americana but the reoccurrence of one image reintroduces the reproducibility of the cards and their use as commercial promotional tools. They are tourist advertisements of leisure, hotel lodges, swimming pools, motel parking lots and shopping centers. The automobile allowed this generation to sample America and these postcards remain a vestige of that experience. Wegman’s astute vision is as much about the overpass, the tunnel and the bridge, the fleeting glances out the window and the windshield as it is about the postcard home. (Dan Gunn)

Through November 8 at Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 W. Superior, (312) 751-9500

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Some might think the term “Chicago Imagism” describes a sensibility that is typically Chicago, but the artists in this show are so diverse, one wonders what could possibly unite them under one name. Jim Nutt’s monstrous bodies, Ed Paschke’s cool neons and Karl Wirsum’s cartoon hieroglyphics have defined what Chicago Imagism is for many people, but it is the other artists who show what a surge of creativity and experimentation it really was. Margaret Wharton took a wooden chair, cut it up in little cubes, stitched it back together with wire, hung it up on a wall and called it “Martyr,” a dark, emotional work that is more than feminist. Barbara Rossi’s “Lady Waiting for Dinner” borrows turn-of-the-century design elements (think Chris Ware) and created an obscure surrealist fable in acrylic on masonite. A collage work by Ray Yoshida is refined and restrained, almost classical; he takes unnoticed details of newspaper cartoons and uses them as structural elements in a tense but coherent composition…but then a tiny cutout “AAAIIEE EEAAH!” is thrown in that makes the whole work scream. The works in this show make one appreciate that this was not so much a movement as a time of invention, experiment and indulgence in things that the post-minimalist New York scene just wasn’t interested in—enjoyment, grotesquerie, bodies. (David Mark Wise)

At Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 West Superior, (312) 751-9500, through August 16. 

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Ed Paschke once described his work as “translation”—appropriating photos and other imagery from popular culture, and transforming them into his own idiom. His work is marked everywhere by an engagement with the world of photomechanically reproduced images, like those of photography, movies and television. “I’m interested in scanning and selecting from this reality,” he once said, and by “this reality” he meant the saturation of commercial images all around us, everywhere, powerful and inescapable. When a whole lot of Paschkes are put in a small room, the pressure of this saturation is palpable. They make us notice, for instance, the inescapability of faces in this capitalist mediasphere: and this may be why Paschke’s faces are distorted into blank masks with cowrie-like orifices, or put into constricting bondage masks, or whose noses, eyes and ears have become Mr. Potato Head accessories. Many of the faces are painted in the inverted colors of photographic negatives: black, violet and lime. Paschke’s exercise of translation is one that preserves the original as a defeated ghost, and these pictures document those exorcisms. This is especially true of the later, more overtly political works, like “Force of Nature” from 1990 or “With God on our Side” from 2003. The show is split between the main gallery and a gallery annex, around the corner on 750 North Orleans. In the annex, early drawings show the influence of surrealism (“Green Buckle Shoes,” 1972), Pop Art (“Top Cat,” 1970), and underground comics (“Cleon,” 1974). All of these come to a magnificent synthesis in “Janina,” from 1974, which is in the main gallery—and this makes a trip back from the annex totally worthwhile. (David Mark Wise) 

At Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 West Superior Suite 115, through May 10.