Drawing is big on the contemporary art scene, as are references to popular culture. The one serves the other arrestingly in Peregrine Honig’s recent works at the newly relocated Gescheidle gallery.
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The pieces are ostensibly images of contemporary women’s fashions. But the fragility of the drawing and sweetness of color give a sickly quality apart from written titles that proclaim illness, deformation, even moral corruption.
Here specific designers violate female bodies that appear at once innocent and wasting away. Some drawings are caricatures of actual people, such as Britney Spears (cast as a French collaborator during World War II). But anonymous figures make the point equally well that conditions bordering on disease are desired in modern society.
Honig’s drawing, achieved with egg tempera, gouache, spray enamel and pen and ink, does not have the barbed line of Egon Schiele or violent jaggedness of George Grosz, though its cartoon style is meant to cause comparable sting. One by one, the sheets seldom do. But the force of the artist’s protest gains weight as her project moves along because a palpable sense of damage accrues.
That this damage is inseparable from burgeoning sexuality only adds to the queasiness. Honig’s vision is narrow but just broad enough to get stomachs to turn.
At 1039 W. Lake St., 312-226-3500.
The photogram is a camera-less image that at the dawn of photography was used for scientific records and nearly a century later was found to have particular artistic potential. Some artists created photograms as daring and modern as anything else they had done. Others produced works more akin to documents but charged because of their X-ray-like appearance.
Karen Savage’s photograms, at the Packer Schopf Gallery, are in the latter camp. The artist collects vintage clothing and accessories. Some of them she has recorded in these photograms. The earlier styles of the garments combined with their varying degrees of opacity and translucency contribute to a remote look, as if the pictures documented endangered relics.
Savage, raised a Roman Catholic in the 1950s, has recalled the Seven Sacraments, external visible ceremonies believed to be the way God conferred certain graces. Each of the garments in the photograms was worn in one or another of the ceremonies, such as Baptism, Communion, Confirmation or Wedding.
The garment theoretically retains something of the ceremony, though it is not, of course, visible. But Savage’s photograms seem to make it so, for each glows, as if numinous. Images of smaller, older pieces communicate this best, having a character similar to vestments.
At 942 W. Lake St., 312-226-8984.
To be a realist painter these days is difficult. Those who observe and paint what they see are relegated by tastemakers to a ghetto, being thought deficient in ideas and reliant on craft. But at the same time realist technique is praised when it appears at the service of “concepts” that take the artist away from observation, into the realm of fantasy that can be interpreted as cutting edge.
Jennifer Presant, in her first solo exhibition at the Linda Warren Gallery, is a realist who gives special attention to figures. But nowadays that is not sufficiently contemporary, so she uses the idea of projections to give the work a layer of meaning that is intended to go beyond observation of the visible world.
When Presant sets single figures or figure groupings against landscapes, that is fairly straightforward, involving mainly the dissolution of, say, a wall of a home to suggest the relationship is imagined. But the artist also brings together figures to hint at memories or desires, and here one may be seen against the other, as if watching a film on a screen, or superimposed on the other, interrupting space as recollection or longing interrupts thought.
In the main, this is accomplished deftly, and we instantly grasp what the artist is after, yet she holds us less by such devices than the quality of her painting of figures and, particularly, the flesh of female nudes.
At 1052 W. Fulton Market, 312-432-9500.
Not so long ago artists equated “newness” with a departure from conventional — meaning academic — notions of beauty. But now, after more than a century of loosening the academy’s hold, it’s much harder to determine what notions of beauty might be, conventional or otherwise. So every return to “the beautiful” has to define its terms precisely if it is to be more than a subjective declaration.
“The Last Seduction,” the group exhibition in many media at the Carrie Secrist Gallery, purports to “go against the grain of what has become the standard over the last few decades[:] ‘autonomous’ art that is seemingly unaware or disinterested in its audience.” Beauty here is found in work that “entices/engages/lures.”
But the exhibition fails to show us how. Works are paired to play off each other. Yet in some pieces the shared characteristic is subject matter where in others it’s the human form or light or unusual medium or echoes of earlier art. None of this is “beautiful” in and of itself. It is “beautiful” here because Secrist has pronounced it to be. So in place of a demonstration of verifiable qualities such as balance or proportion or chromatic sensation, we have beauty by declaration after all. Still, the chance to see pieces by Yves Klein, Anish Kapoor, Zilvinas Kempinas and Kiki Smith should be taken.
At 835 W. Washington St., 312-491-0917.
Peregrine Honig at Gescheidle through July 14
Karen Savage at the Packer Schopf Gallery through July 7
Jennifer Presant at the Linda Warren Gallery through Saturday
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‘The Last Seduction’ at Carrie Secrist Gallery through July 31
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