Solo Exhibition - Jeff Hirst: New Paintings. encaustic paintings on shaped panels

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Recent Exhibitions

July/Aug, 2024
Solo Exhibition - Karen Perl: "When the Dream Came". Oil paintings on panel

Solo Exhibition - Steph Roberts: Divers. Oil paintings on panel





Also, announcing two new Summer additions to the gallery:

Joan Geary: Atmospheric Abstraction



and

Brian Sindler: Tonalist Landscape





Susan Kraut: As the Light Changes - May/June 2024



Urban Alchemy: Seeking the Spirit of the City, April 12, 2024

The paintings by Chicago artists Anthony Adcock, Misha Goro, Karen Perl, and Jeff Hirst all express a search for transcendence amidst the urban fabric of Chicago's streets, architecture, and meteorological events. While engaging in a process-heavy exploration of painting's physicality, each artist paradoxically uncovers an almost ethereal dimension within the Chicago urban experience.

            

Anthony Adcock, solo exhibition. "Gridlock", April, 2024
"Minimal trompe l'oeil" paintings that explore the similarities between early renaissance painting and contemporary construction road signage







Julia Katz - "Backyard and Beyond" - Jan/Feb 2024





Deborah Maris Lader - "Fin, Feather, Shadow, Stone" - printmaking and mixed media - Nov/Dec 2023





Robin Denevan : Portals and Passages - Sept/Oct 2023



Above: Robin Denevan. Blue Spring. 32x46. Click image to view available work.

Also, Group Exhibition - A Sense of Place, featuring new work by Misha Goro, Karen Perl, Rebecca Stahr, Brooks Anderson, Susan Kraut, Michael Dubina

Joan Holleb: Heading Home - July through August, 2023





May /June 2023, 2023
CITY VIEWS: Misha Goro and Karen Perl

An exhibition featuring two artists that explore the visual nature of the city from different viewpoints.





Above: Misha Goro. Click image to view available work.



Above: Karen Perl. Click image to view available work.

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March/April, 2023
In Pursuit of Spring

An exhibition featuring contemporary painting that explores a vision of nature and environment through image, color, pattern, and process.

Including NEW work by Joan Holleb, Michael Dubina, Rebecca Stahr, Jeffrey Hirst, Cat Crotchett, Sandra Dawson, Kathleen Waterloo, and Molly McCracken Kumar.







January/February, 2023
TERRAVISTA

An exhibition featuring contemporary painting that explores a vision of nature and environment through image, color, pattern, and process.

Including work by Brooks Anderson, Joan Holleb, Michael Dubina, Rebecca Stahr, Mark Flickinger, Jeffrey Hirst, Paula Blackwell, Cat Crotchett, Robin Denevan, and Ron Clayton. Also featuring new work by Kathleen Waterloo.





Nov / Dec, 2022

Kathleen Waterloo: Road Games

Waterloo develops her very modern abstract compositions using ancient encaustic processes and techniques. Molten beeswax is combined with resin and a host of pigments. Each color is applied separately with brushes to wood panels, and a torch is continually used to fuse one layer to the next. It is this process of torch fusion that reveals the natural properties and possibilities of the wax and pigment mixture, and it's the "in-between" spaces - the places where the shapes in the painting butt against each other - that offer such beautiful, exciting visual reward.



Solo exhibition: Robin Denevan: New Encaustic Works.

Robin Denevan's process begins with drawings of the exotic rivers he has visited which become the source material for his paintings once he returns home to his studio in San Francisco. Robin's work is about process with an emphasis on the organic properties of the materials he uses and how they mimic nature. He does not render a landscape but allows the materials to naturally create one. The paintings are on canvas stretched over a wood panel, which provides a rigid and porous surface. He melts resin and beeswax together and applies it with a brush. His paintings are made up of many layers of wax, resin, shellac and oil paint. He continually adds materials and then removes them with a torch, solvent, sandpaper, and a variety of sharp tools. Using translucent layers allows the viewer into the history and process of the paintings. The finished work is both luminescent and beautifully textured.
Two person exhibition: New work by Sandra Dawson, and Karen Perl
The exhibitions will be on view September 9 - October 29, 2022


July / August, 2022 - Two solo exhibitions:

Jeffrey Hirst: Parallel Structures

Jeffrey Hirst is highly regarded and widely recognized practitioner and teacher in the technique of encaustic painting, which involves the use of molten beeswax to achieve its evocative translucent effects. Hirst's current work is characterized by deeply constructed shaped and beveled panels, which serve as the support for luscious and seductive surfaces that play with light, color, structure and space. Hirst investigates relationships between man-made architecture and natural phenomenon; questions arise as to how these forces coexist in our environment. Hirst is especially interested in the dynamic in an urban context. The correlation between urban decay and natural beauty (both at the micro and macro level) influence the work. How we interpret beauty and questions about values are addressed.

Exhibition continues through August 30, 2022

See the exhibition here





Carl Linstrum: Habitat

Carl Linstrum's work centers around nature with a focus on the metaphorical use of subject to represent themes of caring, memory, and the passage of time. Linstrum works through these ideas in long bodies of connected paintings over periods of study and experimentation. Once he arrives at a 'prototype' that best expresses the theme, it becomes the model for the paintngs that follow. Using color, form, light, and pattern, the subsequent works evolve as an intuitive exploration of core ideas that bind together each series.

Exhibition continues through August 30, 2022

See the exhibition here



Summer 2022
Bronze Sculpture by Judson Chatfield.



May / June 2022
Michael Hoffman: New Work

Michael Hoffman draws on his eclectic past and and love of architecture and design for inspiration. His paintings are meditative studies done with rich colors and bold graphic compositions, often incorporating circles, grids and stripes. The appeal of this symbology helps to captivate the viewer and hold them there to explore the many subtle details present in the work. Hoffman claims that he works with abstraction because "I want to put forth something universal that, like music, can be open to interpretations that are unique to each individual and can continue to evolve over time." A common theme in his painting is the relationship between rigid linear form and the organic flow of nature, order and disorder. Says Hoffman, "I feel this is reflective in many ways of our society and our longing for something more than the sterility of technology in our modern lives." Hoffmans paintings are notable for a very tactile and textured surface interest with often glossy almost glasslike colors. Hoffman uses unconventional ways of applying paint - dripping and pouring paint and creating patterns using the natural arc of his arm.

See the exhibition here.

"All Terrain: Landscape Exporations" features the work of Julie B. Montgomery, Diana Cutrone, Paula Blackwell, Joan Holleb, and Karen Perl

This group exhibition showcases the work of four painters that use a variety of media to explore the subject that intrigues and moves them most: nature and the landscape. This exciting installation of paintings reveals the breadth of possibilities that the landscape subject offers both contemporary artists and viewers alike. 

Julie B. Montgomery distills the poetry embedded in our natural world. Atmospheric, subtle, almost ephemeral, these paintings whisper quiet truths about color, space, light, and form. 
Diana Cutrone sees human possibilities and potential narratives in her subtle yet dramatic vistas. Often rendered from the perspective of an ascending or arriving airplane, these evocative works suggest the thrill of arrival and new experience, and the potential beauty found in alternate points of view.
Paula Blackwell uses the encaustic process to create deeply expressive, evocatively atmospheric works that exist in a balanced state between realism and process-oriented expressionism. Her recent works exhibit a beautiful sense of depth, subtle shifts of light, and atmospheric translucent surfaces.
Joan Holleb creates paintings on copper which occupy an exciting place between abstraction and image. The material qualities of these works set them apart from traditional landscape paintings, generating the unexpected effect of slowing down our gaze and causing us to look carefully at the interaction of copper, patina, and paint on the surface of the work.
Karen Perl's landscapes of beautiful brick buildings are veiled by a fog of gray paint evoking faintly recalled images obscured by the haze of a dim memory. Perl is after shifting, transitional moments. She paints - and repaints and then paints again - the same street corner, say Western and Clybourn or Touhy and Western in Rogers Park, until she feels the matter is settled.

    

"Colorful Language" features the work of Joanne Mattera, Cat Crotchett, Kathleen Waterloo, Alicia LaChance, Joan Holleb, Julia Katz, Michael Hoffman, David Versluis, Rebecca Crowell, Allison B. Cooke, Lisa Pressman

This ambitious group show presents an exciting selection of artists who have each developed a unique visual vocabulary based on their history with color. The works in this exhibition derive their unique chromatic characteristics from each artist's understanding of color properties, meanings, and relationships. This understanding is married with the artists' experimental sensibilities in the studio. Shape, pattern, and occasionally imagery often provide the framework for the color investigations present in the work, but the color explorations are rarely at the mere service of description and imagery. Instead, color itself most often acts as the primary life force of this work. In addition to their attraction to saturated tonalities, these artists demonstrate a commitment to process, materiality, and the physicality of the surface. Texture plays an important role in these works, and the tactile qualities of surface, which are widely varied, work hand in hand with each composition's optical properties.

       

See the exhibition here

Artist Susan Kraut has been teaching painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for over 20 years, and in that time, she has been instrumental in mentoring a number of young artists. Two of these artists who have continued on to make strides in their own art careers are Jaclyn Mednicov and Jeffrey Janson. All three artists have been working in recent years with the time honored subject matter of flowers, and this exhibition presents their work together. In one exhibition space, a fascinating conversation takes place between the work of these three artists, not only about the implications of their chosen subject matter, but of the very nature of the acts of drawing and painting. Various personal approaches to the elements of line, space, color, and surface, and their emotional effects on the viewer are explored.

Exhibition continues through December 31, 2021

See the exhibition here

Also on view in the main space and continuing through December 31, 2021
Alicia LaChance: New Village

LaChance makes large scale, process driven paintings built up through layers of acrylic, casein, latex and spray paint on a fresco-secco ground over canvas. Her mark-making involves traditional brushwork, sign maker's techniques, silk screen, taping, powdered pigment stains, scraping and sanding. LaChance's work conveys a layering and compression of multicultural traditions and art historical references, from ancient folk traditions to street art. Her highly worked paintings often use open source graphs as a compositional map and armature to hang intellectual ideas from as they relate to pushing boundaries in abstraction and process.

Exhibition continues through December 31, 2021

See the exhibition here

Sept / Oct 2021
Julia Katz: Backyard Views

Julia Katz creates work that explores and celebrates energy, movement, and our environment - both immediate and universal. These exciting new paintings bring a whimsical quality to her painterly investigations of life, color, and movement, demonstrating a growing interest in formal elements of design, color and process. While Katz's work has often drawn from experiences of nature - hiking, swimming, spending time on the beach, this series of paintings is inspired by her observation of activity taking place in her own back yard. While the artist's yard, dogs, and observation of other wild animals and birds serve as the initial inspiration for the work, the paintings' structure provides a formal sense of balance counterpointed with the expressive gesture of the artist. Katz's love of paint, layering and drawing are all in evidence here, and the overt boldness of her compositions provide a stage where her actors can live, exhibiting vibrancy, action, and energetic life.

See the exhibition here.



July / Aug, 2021
Joan Holleb: Woodlands and Cowscapes

The paintings of Chicago artist Joan Holleb occupy an exciting place between process and image, between poetry and narrative. The material qualities of these works set them apart from most paintings, generating the unexpected effect of slowing down our gaze and causing us to look carefully at the interaction of copper, patina, and paint on the surface of the work.

Holleb begins the act of painting by pouring a patina solution on the surface of the copper and letting it run in various directions and oxidize. Typically, this process dictates the direction the composition will develop, and the use of chance and spontaneous activity becomes the foundation for all that follows.

See the exhibition



April / May, 2021
Cat Crotchett, "TETHERED"

Cat Crotchett is an innovative practitioner of pattern-based abstract painting. Using the medium of wax and pigment (encaustic painting), Cat's visual vocabulary includes stenciled shapes, layered patterns, and burned-in texture accomplished using heated metal much like a branding iron. Cat uses a bold but sophisticated color sense to engage the eye, and creates a sense of complexity through built up textures and layering. The results are color fields that feel at once organic and man made, rich with detail and incident. The complexity of her surfaces and the tactile nature of her work engage both mind and body, ensuring that we will always find new elements in these paintings as they unfold and reveal themselves over the course of multiple viewings.

Exhibition continues through June 30, 2021

See the exhibition



May, 2021
Paula Blackwell: Out of the Blue
Encaustic landscape paintings.