Review: Art Fox/Chicago Cultural Center

RECOMMENDED

Shooting in lush, muted color, Art Fox continues the modernist tradition of wall photography pioneered by Aaron Siskind, and redeems the ruins, as Siskind put it, by capturing the enthralling blend of textures, splashes of paint, pock marks and blistering lettering and rust that bedeck weathered surfaces that can exert a hypnotic effect. Fox’s images range from straight representational shots to nearly pure abstractions, the latter of which are the most successful by virtue of our ability to concentrate on composition and color to the exclusion of everything extraneous. Fox reaches the perfection that Siskind sought of besting abstract expressionist paintings in “Wire and Wall,” in which the involving cracked and striated gray concrete surface is broken by a vertical swathe of red, orange and yellow paint within which a rigid black vertical line (the wire) sections off the composition. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 21 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington

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