Ian Hornak: The paintings in this mini-retrospective at Galleries Maurice Sternberg are mostly landscapes and still lifes in which hot color is allied with tight, hyper-realist rendering. Transcription is not the aim. Hornak, who died at 58 in 2002, was after a splashy intensity more the province of Romantics and Symbolists of an earlier age.
The works showing this best are landscapes that depict dawn and dusk at once while referring to mythological figures such as Persephone, the queen of the underworld, and Hephaestus, the god of fire. But certain still lifes, set into landscapes, reach toward a heightened atmosphere as well, sometimes extending it onto frames elaborately painted by the artist.
The lone figure again refers to an otherworldly being, Asmodeus, the demon of lust. Hornak depicts him partially nude, in bright light, with arms outstretched like a martyr, asleep. Textures of cloth and rock have been attended to as carefully as the torso, and the painting’s wide surround has painted rays that vibrate like emanations. But it is a chilly picture, with none of the over-the-top sensuousness of his still lifes. Strange that the heated grandiosity that is otherwise so much in evidence should not be here.
**1/2 At 875 N. Michigan Ave. Suite 2520,through April 30. 312-642-1700.
“Photographs of the Aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871”: Five years ago an exhibition on the theme of Michigan Avenue began with a desolate picture of the Water Tower. Interest accrued from seeing the image inside the very building it pictured. It apparently was so much a novelty that it has returned to the City Gallery at the Historic Water Tower with 32 other landscapes.
The photographer is unknown, but is assumed to have come from another city; were he here, his equipment likely would have been destroyed. The images date from three to four weeks after the fire. No photographs exist of the conflagration, long exposure times making them impossible.
Nearly all the images are of collapsed or partially standing buildings. According to a text panel, that puts the pictures in the category of those recording “ruined civilizations,” though there’s also an obvious kinship to war photographs, such as those from the American Civil War that documented the scorched-earth policy of Sherman’s march to the sea.
Now that responsibility for shows at this venue has reverted to the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, it is hoped that periodic exposure of such historic material will continue.
**1/2 At 806 N. Michigan Ave., through Aug. 23. 312-744-6630.
Roger Brown: In 2006 Russell Bowman Art Advisory presented a group of works made by the popular Chicago painter in the two years prior to his death in 1997. Now there is a show that begins at the beginning, which means the late 1960s, when Brown was in his second stint as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The limitations of his style were apparent from the start — and he never transcended them. But, early on, Brown’s symmetries and silhouettes helped create a stillness that in street scenes and theater pieces achieved a touch of mystery. As he edged closer to a Midwest version of pattern painting, such mystery diminished, to be irrevocably lost when he came to think of himself as a social commentator. But it’s still present in five works from 1968 to 1972 shown here and has not yet developed the crust of formula.
These plus several later canvases are accompanied by painted objects — irons, footstool, door — that carry his affection for, say, non-Western art or Depression Modern streamlining into the third dimension. Again, the examples on view are fresher than many that followed, though no matter their size the objects remain elfin additions that do not substantially enlarge the fantasy of his output.
**1/2 At 311 W. Superior St., through May 16. 312-751-9500.
Gordon Muehle: When Polaroid announced it was discontinuing its instant film, there was the thought that a demand by artists would somehow keep it alive and, sure enough, it continues to be produced in Germany, where Muehle is a successful commercial photographer. His portraits at the Schneider Gallery are made entirely of Polaroids, recalling but not recapitulating David Hockney’s work in the medium decades ago.
Hockney’s composites took off from the fractured planes of Cubism to slow an audience down. Muehle’s interest lies elsewhere. He builds each likeness of figures that are important to him bit by bit, as with mosaics, arranged in a grid. Each unit is an abstract picture in itself. All of them together show little fracturing.
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Where Hockney played with time, Muehle plays with space, creating environments that the figures may not actually have inhabited. His grandmother, for example, was not at the cemetery near the tombstone of her late husband, and the church architecture of Muehle’s priest did not wrap around him as in the image. Some of the pictures thus are more fiction than the transcription the process initially may suggest.
**1/2 At 230 W. Superior St., through April 30. 312-988-4033.
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