Jacob Hashimoto is an original. Nobody did what he does before he did it, and his work is so singular that it’s impossible to imagine anyone following him now.
Hashimoto’s recent works at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery are all installations and wall reliefs of paper, thread, paint and wood. Their debt is to the ancient practice of kite making. But they are so successful because of a much later influence of the grid from 1960s and 1970s abstract art.
This debt is clearest in the wall pieces; row upon row of colored geometric forms are arranged according to underlying grids. The apparent riot of forms and colors thus is restrained, shaped up by the grids, and the sense of freedom within strict limits is seductive and elevating.
“Plumes I,” on the other hand, occupies an entire room, ceiling to floor, with “columns” of paper cutouts, most geometric but some butterfly- and bird-like. Here the grid is not in play. But neither is color. The restraint of the grid has been maintained through all-white segments that make up a “forest” drained of chlorophyll or any other color accent. So a strong feeling of order emerges from apparent randomness.
The largest piece, “Landscape Omnibus,” returns to the grid in 15 sections that here are joined but may be shown independently. Sweeping around the room, it is at once monumental and airy, dense and weightless. In its own way it recalls the grandeur of European decorative art from the early 20th Century.
At 118 N. Peoria St., 312-455-1990.
Heather Marshall’s first solo show, at the Linda Warren Gallery, presents small representational paintings in oils on wood panels. They are usually atmospheric, sometimes nostalgic and meticulous to a fault. She paints people and animals as persuasively as still lifes and buildings, though the latter pair is, at least this time around, more poetically concerned with light.
Her subjects are from the urban everyday, simple things such as a dented car hood that won’t close or bottles on basement windowsills or dresses in the window of a resale shop at night. She paints them crisply but evocatively as the stuff of contemporary life. And only once does she seem to editorialize, when televisions, crutches, an American flag, ashtray and possible bag of grass in a grimy room receives the title “American Dream.”
Marshall’s pictures in which there are people are somber, her figures pensive, lost in thought. Were the people to move, it would be slowly, deliberately and without the sharp awareness shown in her lone painting including a dog. This is not to say she is better at things than people, though her range of feeling with humans is as yet largely unexplored. Now she is fully in command of unpopulated spaces in which objects reverberate with the intensity of her patient, unflashy rendering.
At 1052 W. Fulton Market, 312-432-9500.
John Himmelfarb’s exhibition at Flatfile Galleries is said to be the first the veteran Chicago artist shows examples of all the media he works in. It presents, then, paintings, prints, works on paper, tapestries, ceramics and bronzes that indicate the development of a language that has proven remarkably adaptable.
Central to this language is a veritable “alphabet” of forms that seems derived from hieroglyphs or Asian calligraphy. Some of these forms look more representational than others, seeming to depict such objects as a cup, boat or grenade. But others are purely abstract, and it is the combination, with each black “letter” set in colored geometric or biomorphic surrounds, that builds up the widest variety of works in a way that is distinctly personal. The sculptures of individual glyphs are as successful as more elaborate tapestries and paintings.
Himmelfarb also shows paintings that have an all-over pattern reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. These sometimes suggest landscapes, both urban and rural. Skeins of color have been set down in a dense overlay that suggests a rawness counterbalancing the order of the “alphabet” works. But these paintings do not declare themselves as personally as the others. Their antecedents are clearer, whereas Himmelfarb’s signature works occupy the more interesting position of seeming to have few antecedents and no followers.
At 217 N. Carpenter St., 312-491-1190.
Todd Pavlisko’s 2005 show at the Monique Meloche Gallery had him cashing in on the Zeitgeist by pretending to criticize how money and religion serve as ways toward inclusion in contemporary America. Now, in a Jeff Koons-like turnabout, Pavlisko returns to Meloche as an existential hero who urges persistence in the face of futility and despair.
As before, the artist’s seven pieces are in different media, including paintings, a drawing, construction, installation, found objects and an altered Readymade. The construction, an operable bumper car in an impossibly small arena, establishes futility. A painting and drawing, of scientist Stephen Hawking suspended in a zero-gravity environment, proposes the possibility of escape from despair. The remaining pieces are more or less exercises in establishing a high coolness quotient, which is of course another way out of the oppression Pavlisko posits.
All of this is linked by the image on the invitation: a close-up of a male with mouth open and tongue out making a hand gesture signifying “Rock On!” It is today’s equivalent of Albert Camus’ image of Sisyphus smiling. But for an earlier generation, including my own, the same gesture communicated awareness of nonsense, lies or exaggeration. So for some it is hard not to see it as a reaction to the works on exhibition.
At 118 N. Peoria St., 312-455-0299.
Jacob Hashimoto through Oct. 13 at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Heather Marshall through Oct. 13 at the Linda Warren Gallery
More Top Picks Fellowes Powershred 73ci
John Himmelfarb through Oct. 26 at Flatfile Galleries
Todd Pavlisko through Oct. 13 at the Monique Meloche Gallery
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