reviews

  • Arch Connelly

    Illinois Art Gallery

    All dressed up in a sumptuous array of baubles, bangles, and beads, the works of Arch Connelly are charming essays that keenly probe some aspect of pictorial surfeit. His regular descents into overt opulence are so openhanded as to be disarming, and his ebullient manipulation of the faux-jewels, jazzy sequins, and glitter that make up most of his palette is assured enough to carry a weight far beyond that of the materials themselves. Connelly—who died of AIDS in New York City last year and is celebrated here in a memorial retrospective in the state of his birth and training—was an artist who

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