Kenneth Josephson has had revealing solo exhibitions at both the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, so one might think the time for surprises had passed. But Josephson, whose work always has looked fresh and so continually has seemed young, is 75 and his output stretches back half a century. So there’s much more in it than the “conceptual” pictures of the 1960s and 1970s for which he became famous. “Kenneth Josephson: The First Fifty Years,” at the Stephen Daiter Gallery, presents, in fact, a number of unpublished images that wonderfully expand our view.
Now, at last, in a gallery that long has recognized the achievements of contemporaries at the Institute of Design, Josephson emerges as the most versatile of a particularly gifted photographic generation. Urban documents, nature studies, nudes, street pictures, city abstractions, mirror images, pictures about pictures — Josephson excelled at them all, though in several areas his efforts were scarcely known. Where in regard to certain kinds of picture we might think only Harry Callahan or Ray Metzger or Lee Friedlander, the exhibition shows us Josephson was there too.
The self-reflexive playfulness of his ’60s and ’70s work was preceded by as strong a formalism as in the work of any of his teachers, including Aaron Siskind, Minor White and Callahan. Sometimes it produced recognizable images of Chicago, such as the Woods theater marquee shot from across the street under the marquee of the United Artists. But on other occasions, such as the image of human shadows through glass doors or windows bringing slices of a severely restricted landscape into an elevated train, Josephson’s city becomes mysterious, almost hallucinatory and with a sharp cutting edge.
There is not an unresolved picture among the 42 on view, and that is saying something. Moreover, the exhibition shows there is little falling off in the work Josephson continues to do. Some of these European views of landscape and architecture are simple in the extreme, but what’s there is pointed out so keenly that their lightness comes to seem the pictorial equivalent of wisdom.
At 311 W. Superior St. 312-787-3350.
Marianna Levant’s drawings at the Architrouve gallery are in the same vein as her paintings from a year ago, meaning they are animated still lifes that become fantastic abstractions. However, the generally pale, cool colors of her earlier works now admit warmer bursts that occur here and there, sometimes suggesting even fires in the vicinity of her crisply drawn machinelike fragments.
Where before all the whirring, pulsing and mutating appeared innocent, there now is a hint of darker, more menacing forces, as if the bench of a watchmaker had suddenly become an agent of science fiction. The futuristic cast of some of the forms makes them a cross between, say, the spiny creatures in Roberto Matta paintings and the monster in “Alien” films. The latter is, I think, an unfortunate evocation, as it introduces an element of popular culture that newcomers may assume was crucial to the formation of Levant’s vision whereas it developed independently and was all the better for it.
Only once does the artist depart from a pronouncedly horizontal format, and that comes close to the comfort of a square. Even so, the shift gives a different, more clearly thrusting configuration to her lines of force and the variance is good. What more she can do with space and her whiplash line remains to be seen once she begins to work vertically. Now is not the time to get either settled or timid.
With Brenda Barnum paintings at 1433 W. Chicago Ave. 312-563-0977.
Ann Craven is an artist who in 1996 made a splash by creating 101 oil paintings of the moon. Then, a decade later, she produced 400 more paintings of the moon, which included copies of the first set. So the issue of repetition, which initially might have been embedded, came to the fore to share the spotlight with questions of originality. If at all present, a concern for each painting as an independent aesthetic object came last.
That order remains in Craven’s recent paintings at the Shane Campbell Gallery. The largest group shown contains diagonal stripe paintings on vertically disposed rectangles in large and small sizes. Some of the canvases are in from six to nine colors, but others equally bold are black and white. Part of the boldness comes from the swift gestural nature of the stripes and concomitant splatter. Another part is owing to the width of the stripes relative to the size of the canvas.
Lest viewers focus on visual impact, however, Craven shows a few works from a second series. The image here is representational: a panda, which the artist has painted cloyingly as if on a greeting card. Then she reproduces it in large and small size, with unavoidable tiny variations. So to repetition Craven adds systemization, which presumably distracts from what otherwise is a conservative act (painting) performed on kitsch (an animal anthropomorphized and sentimentalized).
At 1431 W. Chicago Ave. 312-226-2223.
Exhibitions
Kenneth Josephson at Stephen Daiter Gallery through April 19
Marianna Levant at the Architrouve gallery through April 12
Ann Craven at the Shane Campbell Gallery through Saturday
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