Wolf Kahn, the subject of a solo exhibition at the KN Gallery, is 80 and has been painting and drawing rural landscapes in high, sweet color for more than half a century. He says in the catalog for the current show that he wants to get to a “danger point” in color, a place where it is at risk for becoming too cloying or grating or soft or noisy. That’s where his reducing landscape forms to essentials — stripes, bars, spindles, wisps — brace the color, withholding it and giving a peculiarly American strength.
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To my eye the pastels on view do that more consistently than the oil paintings, which I think has something to do with an illusion of all decisions occurring rapidly, without deliberation. The degree to which the images become abstract is counterbalanced by their palpable sense of atmosphere, and that tension is felt somewhat more than the physical beauty, which younger viewers may think is fine but perhaps a bit too easy.
At 875 N. Michigan Ave., Ste. 2515. 312-640-5550.
The Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery is back in its old space, which has been newly configured and renamed (for its director all along) the Tony Wight Gallery. To mark this rechristening is a group of eight new paintings by John Phillips, who more than any other Chicago-area artist has kept hard-edged abstraction fresh by making it intelligent but also bouncy and fun.
“Joey,” one of the smaller and older pieces (from 2006), has a seductive surface of wax tempering the humor of three cropped ovals that are disposed to suggest an extreme close-up of a cartoon face. Thereafter, the wax drops out and the works get much larger. I’ve said before that I miss the refinement of Phillips’ earlier surfaces, and I still do, though here, in gray oval-and-stripe pieces, the coolness of palette again seems to check rumbustiousness, acting as a balancing agent.
Along with jazzy disc paintings, sometimes playfully titled, is one that borders on that short-lived phenomenon of the 1960s, Op Art. Called “Hey Joe (Albers),” the work recalls brilliantly colored geometric canvases by the German artist, mathematician and educator. But it does so by bringing into play the ubiquitous Chicago “wiggly line” that here gives a tremulousness like colors in an offset lithograph being out of register. This vibration, combined with rectangles arranged in the work’s center to suggest a face, give an optical thrill buoyed by high spirits that is sometimes aimed for in contemporary abstraction but most often missed.
With photographs and a video by Ken Fandell at 119 N. Peoria St. 312-492-7261.
German artist Rosemarie Trockel last showed in Chicago 17 years ago in the first major survey of her work in the United States at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Then she looked very much a feminist, both for her celebrated “knitted paintings” made from so-called feminine materials and themes having to do with sexuality.
Remnants of the knitted paintings remain in Trockel’s show of ceramic sculpture and collages at the Donald Young Gallery. But here she is more a humanist meditating on death than narrowly a feminist, and she also refers to past artists literary and visual that remind us, as her first show at the gallery did in 1989, of the cultural breadth Europeans feel as their inheritance.
The two largest ceramic pieces are the most minimal, combining autobiography and art history in equal measure. When her sense of form becomes less strict, as in smaller wall and floor pieces, the work loses austerity and something of its charge. However, Trockel’s wall-mounted, boxed collages look thin when their components are just painting and photography. They require patterned wallpapers and knitted fabrics in addition to two-dimensional work of hand and camera to engage us fully, if still not to the depth of her most sober ceramic pieces.
At 933 W. Washington Blvd.. 312-455-0100.
I like how in recent years art has appeared in venues consecrated to something else. The Museum of Science and Industry, Field Museum and Chicago History Museum always mounted art shows sporadically, so they were not as much as a surprise as when conservatories in Lincoln and Garfield Parks began organizing exhibitions of contemporary art. The much newer Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum also now is doing this, and while difficult, the current selection of color photographs by Tom Denlinger are an inspired choice.
For these digital prints made from analog sources, the artist has constructed dioramas onto which he has projected images from museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, Berlin’s Pergamon Museum and the Notebaert. He then has reshot the combinations along with refuse collected from around the museums, thereby reflecting on landscape imagery, inside and outside, natural and constructed.
Some of Denlinger’s juxtapositions are so seamless they suggest actual scenes of, say, forest and beach. But the more challenging ones are not only discordant in what is brought together but also disorienting in light and space, giving viewers an exhilarating workout.
At 2430 N. Cannon Drive. 773-755-5100.
EXHIBITIONS
Wolf Kahn at KN Gallery through April 12
John Phillips at Tony Wight Gallery through April 12
Rosemarie Trockel at Donald Young Gallery through April 30
Tom Denlinger at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum through March 30
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