Installation view, “Surrealism: The Conjured Life,” MCA Chicago /Photo: Nathan Keay
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In his 1951 Arts Club of Chicago talk, Jean Dubuffet decried Western humanist culture, advocating for “primitive” values of “instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.” That same year Dubuffet painted the raw, densely textured portrait of a hat-donning gentleman, an uncanny prefiguration of Leon Golub’s heads, both currently on view in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Surrealism: The Conjured Life.”
The original 1920s-30s “Surrealist” circle preceded Dubuffet and Golub, and therein lies curator Lynne Warren’s premise: after the narrowly defined group disbanded during WWII, artists continued with great gusto to channel the subconscious to create imaginative, symbolic figurative work, which resonated with independent-minded Chicago artists and collectors. Notably MCA founders Joseph and Jory Shapiro, the Bergmans and the Manilows amassed highly regarded collections of such work. “Surrealism” exhibition-goers have a unique opportunity to discover artists like Enrico Baj, who are less-well-known in the United States but were vetted by Chicago’s top Surrealist collectors.
Marcos Raya. “Night Nurse,” 1993/1996/Photo: James Isberner
A kaleidoscope of dream-like paintings and wily sculptures, “Surrealism: The Conjured Life” contains jewels by a wide range of artists including Lee Bontecou, Jaume Plensa and H. C. Westermann; Gertrude Abercrombie and June Leaf; self-taught Forrest Bess, Martin Ramírez and Hector Dreygo (collected and fetishized by rationality-averse Surrealists); and Chicago’s Hairy Who and Monster Roster, who are currently the subject of much renewed art world interest. The show spirals out from “classical” Surrealists Max Ernst, René Magritte and Paul Delvaux, hanging centrally on a curving purple section, to a roughly chronological survey of other manifestations on the exterior. New conversations abound: Claude Cahun’s self-staged, gender-performing photographs are paired with Cindy Sherman’s; Victor Brauner’s bird painting hangs nearby suspended sculptures by Bontecou and Gabriel Orozco; and fiber pieces by Nick Cave, Anne Wilson and Claire Zeisler gain new meaning in the surrealist context.
“The Conjured Life” is a cornucopia of Chicago history as much as Surrealist strategies in twentieth-century art, and it opens doors for further research into the independently minded artists cultivated by the Second City. (Anastasia Tinari Karpova)
Through June 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago.
Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert is a curator, critic and editor. She is the inaugural Curator of Contemporary Art at the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University. She was formerly Curatorial Fellow at the Chicago Artists Coalition, Art Editor of Newcity and Assistant Curator at the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University.
Reflections of Trauma: A Review of "Enter the Mirror" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Each piece in "Enter the Mirror" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago reflects on a trauma, an injustice, an unfortunate demise, or a total loss of life. The artworks in the show range from the 1970s to the mid-2010s, and include installation, video, sculpture, film, photography, and painting.
Symbols of Life: A Review of Theaster Gates at the New Museum in New York City Gates unites his artistic beginnings as a ceramics sculptor with the impressive amount of objects that he has acquired as an archivist. Titled “Young Lords and Their Traces” it follows the lineage of his artistic and archival practice through multiple times and histories.
