picks September 28, 2009

Teresita Fernández

This exhibition presents an exquisite selection of Teresita Fernández’s recent sculptural works that reveals her perceptual experience of the natural world through a set of reductive materials. Featuring forms constructed of raw and milled graphite, precision-cut aluminum panels, glass, and onyx, Fernández deftly blends biomorphic patterning, fractal-like repetition, and complex systems of reflection to invoke phenomenological experience as framed by the act of looking. Vertigo (sotto en su), 2007, a cantilevered, highly polished metal array comprising eleven stacked layers that resemble the

picks February 03, 2009

Werner Reiterer

On entering Werner Reiterer’s exhibition “Raw Loop,” viewers quickly discover themselves amid an interactive sculptural field seemingly driven by a dark presence. Evoking the early video works of Vito Acconci, Come Closer to Leave, 2008, comprises a stack of public-address speakers that, once approached, broadcasts the voice of the artist speaking a seductive monologue: “Hi . . . come closer . . . don’t be scared . . . ” But as viewers do come closer, the sound track abruptly shifts to a profane rant that includes “Go away, leave me alone, suck my . . . ” among other insults, with their expletives

picks October 30, 2008

Bob Wysocki

Bob Wysocki’s Post Metal, 2008, presents one hundred thousand pounds of sand—refined of any metallic elements—arranged into a crescent-shaped dune in Flight 19’s converted historic train-station wing. Installed in the gallery is an array of industrial fans blowing nonstop, which began transforming the curved volume when the exhibition opened. Referencing Robert Smithson’s non-site displacements, Post Metal demonstrates the vivid process of wind patterns in the space combining with the architecture to render structural effects in the sand. The powder-fine grains are continually redistributed by

Olaf Breuning, Home, 2003, still from a two-channel color digital video with sound, 32 minutes.

picks October 09, 2007

“Elsewhere”

This exhibition foregrounds notions of being elsewhere, largely through abrupt juxtapositions, displacements, and the conflation of fiction and documentary, in which the viewer is projected abroad, into other historical eras, or into the distorted psychology of the characters themselves. In Olaf Breuning’s comical two-channel video Home, 2003, a raving-mad protagonist is transported out of himself in several vignettes, including one in which he tours Peruvian mountains and another in which he materializes as a pathetic cowboy in the middle of a classic western shootout. Stuart Hawkins’s video

picks March 23, 2007

Siebren Versteeg

In his first New York solo exhibition, Siebren Versteeg examines the state of human subjectivity as immersed in the flood of contemporary digital imagery. In As the World Turns, 2006, an animated self-portrait depicts the artist flashing notes to a webcam, each missive relaying real-time plot summaries of the soap opera As the World Turns drawn from the CBS website. The work, displayed on a monitor, presents a sardonically punning version of daily life in which the subject is locked in a virtual eternity and only able to re-present captions of a fictional TV series. Something for Everyone, 2007,

picks March 02, 2007

Isa Genzken

Isa Genzken’s relentlessly brutal exhibition, comprising conglomerations of commercial debris, is a postapocalyptic tableau of a world left to the autonomous forces of global capitalism. In the first gallery, nine vertical aluminum panels (all works Untitled, 2006) form an abstracted urban skyline clothed in collages of photographs, holographic foil, mirrored tiles, and neon tape, all bound together with splashes of white lacquer. In the second gallery, nineteen works unfold in a spread of lighting fixtures shaped like soldiers and readymade wheelchairs and walkers, all flanked by a row of

picks November 09, 2006

Josiah McElheny

Encompassing industrial design, art, and ultimately, cosmology, Josiah McElheny here indexes a parallel in 1965 between a critical moment in the development of the theory of the Big Bang and the history of high-modern design. An exquisite, low-hanging aluminum and glass chandelier titled The Last Scattering Surface, 2006, occupies the center of the gallery and is based on the those fabricated for the Metropolitan Opera House in 1965. Its title refers to the moment, also discovered that year, when light particles within the early cosmos broke free from physical matter and scattered throughout

picks October 18, 2006

Avery Preesman

Deploying a reductive technique similar in intent, if not in result, to that of Piet Mondrian, Dutch artist Avery Preesman’s paintings and reconfigured architectural motifs make for solemn but rewarding viewing. Spanning the center of the gallery is Staketsel Floor Sculpture, 2006, a horizontal floor piece constructed of fir timbers and cement that suggests both a tweaked Minimalist grid and an exterior wall of a chalet laid on its side. Several grayscale paintings on view likewise seem to embed dislocated architecture; from within Echo II, 2006, an abstract diptych painted in layers of oil and

picks September 22, 2006

Steven Husby

Steven Husby’s first solo exhibition in Chicago presents seven works that bring together geometric abstraction with conceptually oriented text painting. Carefully designing each work on the computer, Husby employs sophisticated symmetries, pictorial inversions, and mirroring effects to produce beautifully alien compositions. Through a strictly recursive form of pictorial arrangement, these works distill sets of logical operations into concrete and reflexive systems of internal reference. On one canvas (all works are untitled and dated 2006), ribbons of gray paint are cut away to reveal underlying

picks July 17, 2006

Richard Rezac

In this sparse and eloquent exhibition, Chicago artist Richard Rezac employs a complex sculptural language that evokes both early-twentieth-century Constructivist design and Baroque architectural motifs while maintaining the intimacy of human scale. In Glisan, 2006, a pale yellow structure placed atop an aluminum wall-mounted base suggests turned columns rendered with the materials and exquisite austerity of high-end modern furniture. Similarly, Lancaster (04-03), 2004, the most suggestively literal of the works on view, creates a symmetrical opposition between the suggestion of a hand railing

picks July 17, 2006

Maureen Gallace

The twenty-one paintings on view here survey the last five years of Maureen Gallace’s output. It’s a broad yet succinct selection that consists primarily of her exquisitely phenomenological renderings of the New England countryside: Morandi-like, tightly geometric visions of windowless beach houses, desolate farms, and isolated highways. In Icy Barns, 2003, the structures move quickly into dialogue with geometric abstraction while remaining refined icons of the buildings themselves. Similarly, Merritt Parkway, 2003, a depiction of one of the bridges over the Connecticut thoroughfare, places us

picks June 07, 2006

Ulf Puder

Ulf Puder emerged postreunification in Leipzig; this exhibition, his first in the US, frames and underscores his reliance on the traditional mechanics of figurative painting in order to present landscapes rendered with an exquisite, densely wound pictorial logic. Four large-scale canvases depict derailed trains turned into makeshift housing units, floating platforms, drifting ferry-docks, and stranded camper-trailers, all shown from above. Both surreal and purgatorial, these landscapes taken together suggest not doomsday itself but rather a postdisaster frieze; these are the bright houses,

Gregg Perkins