C.J. Matherne & Jamisen Ogg: An unusual place for art in the city — the Old Gold gallery, in a basement apartment-house bar from the 1940s — will close at the end of the month and reopen nearby in midsummer. Its normal emphasis on site-specific work thus has taken on an added elegiac quality.
Matherne’s 20-foot-long canvas of course relates to Claude Monet’s late “Nympheas” murals that gave inspiration to Jackson Pollock. But antecedents for its sprayed-and-brushed color and all-over pattern have less impact than how the canvas occupies the space and is lighted to become a backdrop. With the gallery closing, Matherne’s gently pulsating color is, in effect, a screen for shadows, not only literally of guests at the last opening, but figuratively of two years of the gallery’s achievements. It’s a goodbye projected in CinemaScope.
Ogg’s work in the smaller space italicizes that shed by painting it white and tracing in black its architectural features. A drawing perhaps inspired by the room’s shelves hangs in the space — more are concurrently at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center — but the real “drawing” is the overall environment pointed-up and, with a sobriety appropriate to the day, decked-out. Hail and farewell.
*** At 2022 N. Humboldt Blvd., through April 30 (after Sunday by appointment). 773-653-9956.
Richard Hunt: This is the first of two exhibitions that mark the Chicago sculptor’s receiving the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center. It has 3-dimensional pieces since 2005 plus a selection of earlier lithographs and screenprints. The second show of work from the last 20 years will be at the G.R. N’Namdi Gallery from May 1 through June 30.
For me, nothing compares to his earliest sculptures created under the influence of Matta and Julio Gonzalez. But the reputation Hunt made with them was sustained with pieces that have greater resemblances to plant and animal forms. When these are at their best, as they often are here, they overwhelm in ways that the more delicate first works of machine parts and discarded metals could not.
The finest pieces on view are the least literal, the ones in which a number of influences — bird, fish, tree, water — achieve a thrusting synthesis without strongly representing any one. One easily might overlook how Hunt resolves the age-old sculptural issues of the base or monumental public address. The show does include, however, as close to a human figure — a violinist — that I recall, and to its lyricism it adds charm.
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*** At 300 W. Superior St., through May 30. 312-529-5090.
Cheonae Kim: More than a decade ago the artist told us she was “treating how forms can evoke sound.” But her work was not composed music. Nor was it music notation. She said it was “a visual evocation of a process like breathing — very, very subtle.”
The title of her exhibition of recent paintings at Zolla/Lieberman gallery is “Murmur,” so she’s still, in a sense, working with sound through an extremely minimal way of image-making derived from the 20th Century tradition of geometric abstraction.
There is no irony or jokiness in the effort. Nor should there be. But others have approached purist abstraction as if they sought to undercut its high seriousness, whereas Kim embraces it, risking that she will be seen as an old-fashioned modernist.
Her painting is personal in color, format and variation form. And in each case the works on view take steps forward. If I still prefer the more severe black-and-white pieces, it is because they achieve complexity in their compositional checks and balances. Composition elsewhere is relatively simple, as it has to be to successfully lend itself to variations.
Kim’s color is here more finely tuned than in an already fine show from 2006. Subtle does not at all mean recessive.
*** At 325 W. Huron St., through June 6. 312-944-1990.
Joseph Hronek: Much commentary on contemporary art downplays craft, as if anyone could learn it given time enough. But then you see paintings such as Hronek’s at Addington Gallery and recognize that anyone could not have painted them, as they show a level of craft that seldom is encouraged, pursued or mastered.
Hronek paints with photographic precision. But we have the camera, so why would he do it? Because he can. And, as with a discipline like, say, reading, his pleasure comes entirely through the doing.
All the works are diptychs in which women or still-life objects are shown from different points of view. Some of the viewpoints — front and back, left and right sides — imply the artist has moved around his subjects. Others — ones showing up-and-down movement — suggest he is the eye of a camera that is fixed, and what is before it has moved in or out of the frame.
In “Pear and Wall” only bits of the fruit are visible. But in the “seated” panel of “Standing and Seated Nude” the woman has disappeared, leaving only a section of wall we read as a square of color, less a representation than an abstraction.
All of this is, of course, a game but a game that gives the viewer pleasure in direct proportion to the height of its craft.
*** At 704 N. Wells St., through May 30. 312-664-3406.