Celebrating 23 Years on Wells St in Chicago's River North Gallery District!
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Upcoming EventsRiver North Gallery Walk: OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, Nov 1, 2024 5-8pm Solo Exhibitions - Michael Hoffman and Cat Crotchett On view through Jan 2, 2025 Solo Exhibition - Michael Hoffman: Winterbloom. Water media paintings on canvas and panel Solo Exhibition - Cat Crotchett: Bound - encaustic paintings Recent Exhibitions
Solo Exhibition - Jeff Hirst: New Paintings. encaustic paintings on shaped panels
July/Aug, 2024 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
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. 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 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
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.
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.
March 4 - April 30, 2022 "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.
January 7 - March 1, 2022 "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 "Dreaming of Flowers", a group exhibition featuring Susan Kraut, Jaclyn Mednicov, and Jeffrey Janson 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Paula Blackwell is a leading artistic voice in the Pacific Northwest. Her emotionally charged, moody landscapes point as much towards our inner life as they do reference the natural world. Process leads the charge in her work as she manipulates layers of wax and pigment, exploiting the translucency of the materials to create a palpable sense of atmosphere, never becoming a slave to detail and illustration. Blackwell offers a vision both personal and universal - a space to explore as we seek to find our place in this world. Blackwell's work is already represented in both public and private collection in Chicago and the Midwest, as well as nationally. Addington Gallery has exhibited the work in a number of group exhibitions, but this is her first solo exhibition in Chicago.
Scott French - Atlanta - oil paintings Brooks Anderson - Santa Rosa - oil paintings Nolan McCants - Chicago - photography Paula Blackwell - Portland - encaustic paintings Joan Holleb - Chicago - oil on copper paintings Kathleen Waterloo - Chicago - encaustic paintings Robin Denevan - San Francisco - encaustic on etched birch Preview week : January 9 through January 15, 2021 Scott French, Days Without End, 36x36, oil on panel, $3800 Our Holiday Show and Sale: Small, Affordable Works of Art November 2020: Robin Denevan. Robind Denevan, Beyond the Blue Horizon, 30x60, encaustic and oil on etched wood panel. Click on the image to see the exhibition.
This 34-page catalog marks Joanne Mattera's 36th career solo, "Hue & Me," her first with Addington Gallery in Chicago. Text includes an interview with the artist. Catalog designer: Karen Freedman Kathleen Waterloo: 20/20Fusion Sharing Shelter: Small, Affordable Works of Art TerraChroma This show explores various contemporary approaches to landscape painting juxtaposed in the same space with richly optical color-based abstraction. The result is an exhibition of bracing chromatic shifts, rich tactile surfaces, and deep enveloping spaces.
Featuring the work of
Kathleen Waterloo,
Alicia LaChance,
Joanne Mattera,
Brooks Anderson,
Thomas Monaghan,
Molly McCracken Kumar,
Robin Denevan,
Michael Dubina,
Ronald Clayton,
Lisa Pressman,
Michael Hoffman,
Karen Nielsen-Fried,
Howard Hersh,
Cat Crotchett,
Julie Montgomery,
Diana Cutrone,
and new small works by
Scott French,
Jill McGannon,
and
Paula Blackwell.
Rebecca Crowell
Also featuring work by Brooks Anderson
Carl Linstrum
Brooks Anderson, Sandra Dawson, Michael Dubina
Read the press release and view work
View Sandra Dawson's Paintings.
View Michael Dubina's Paintings.
"Light in the Forest", Paintings on copper by Joan Holleb
"Free Passage", featuring work by Ronald Clayton, Lisa Pressman, Michael Dubina Click on names to view work.
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Gallery Spotlight: Encaustic Painting at Addington Gallery
Excerpted from Chicago Art News
I asked Dan Addington if I could write about his gallery in my own words based on a number of conversations we've had. Addington features a number of artists who who explore a unique relationship between image and process oriented painting, including the medium of encaustic. It's fun talking to Dan about encaustic art because he's passionate about the medium and the way each artist uses it differently.
Let's step back and start with the basics of encaustic painting. Point one, it's ancient, dating back to the 4th century BC.
And point two: painting with wax is very hard to do, it's hard to control, and you have to work fast because wax goes from molten-lava-hot to dried candle wax in about 10 seconds. And like other mediums in which it's difficult to master the basics, when a medium like this grows in popularity, a lot of the practitioners get lost in the technique, they become "Encaustic Painters" rather than artists who have to be working with Encaustic materials. And with this popularity, classes follow, which evolve into academic studies and before you know it, there are a whole lot of rules.
Dan Addington is, himself, an encaustic painter, and he's been doing it a long time, before it got trendy. In turn, he's a fan of Howard Hersh, Mark Perlman and others who have been doing it even longer than him, before the schools and the hobbyists got their hands on it. Before the rules were written. So Addington's aesthetic, and Encaustic posse could possibly be defined in that way: pre convention.
Addington builds his paintings up layer by layer, drawing on and gouging into the surface, adding oil paint, tar, fabric and other odd materials into the mix, which gives the work a very textural feel.
Now, Howard Hersh, who was featured in a recent exhibit and is represented by the gallery, is also pre-rules, yet he has a completely different approach, and balances the geometric with the inherent chaos of encaustic.
So how to tell the Encaustic painters from the artists who work with wax? Addington gravitates to work that has a conceptual level to it, artists who are going for a specific idea, and not just expressing their feelings through random splashes of color.
As Addington pointed out, "Encaustic has a visual archaeology that exists in each piece. Because you can see the translucent layers, it opens the door to the process. With much painting, the top surface is often the only surface the viewer can access. With encaustic painting, you can dig down through the layers and see the history".
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