RECOMMENDED The alt-space SWINGR is an artist-operated gallery in Vienna, Austria. This month they are participating in a Vienna-Chicago exchange with artist Dan Devening’s gallery in Garfield Park. “Ocean Ranch” brings artists Christoph Holzeis, Luisa Kasalicky, Birgit Knoechl and Rainer Spangl to Chicago. Each artist is exhibiting their particular brand of neo-Modernist revisionism, displaying equal parts painterly concerns (such as the question of flatness in representation) and a joy in articulating form using their chosen media, here ranging from paint to paper sculpture. Holzeis’ delicate postcard-sized paintings waver between defining a form’s essence and obliterating it in a haze; all are perched atop small wood shelves. Kasalicky’s shallow reliefs made from cardboard re-figure domestic architecture by fragmenting interiors into gobs of good design, like dead satellites in space. Spangl’s brightly colored garden scenes include shapes that have been transformed into gestures. The forested, undulating surfaces breathe with Spangl’s florid imagination. (Jason Foumberg) Through November 11 at Devening Projects & Editions
Other Forces: A Review of Maw at Apparatus Projects Ailes and Lopez’s installations, images and sculptures function as a cosmos of life—worlds where the viewer is placed in a disordered exercise of cognitive sense-making between rather than sense-making of.
