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Theaster Gates
by Christian Viveros-Faune, Art Review, Jan/Feb 2012
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Great art according to the American poet Emily Dickinson, is what makes the hair on on the back of your neck stand up. So it is with the relentlessly civic-minded performance, sculpture, installation and urban reclamation work of Theaster Gates. continued...
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KaviGupta_Review130.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Museums for Tolerance
by Heidi Zuckerman, Huffington Post, Dec 8, 2011
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Last year Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), spoke at a meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). He came to speak with us about what he perceived as a lack of civility in contemporary American society and to seek our help. His goal was a reactivation of the traditional "town square," where people of all different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences have historically intermixed. He suggested that museums were an appropriate and logical place to emphasize the town hall concept.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review128.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Best of 2011
by Wurtz, Artforum, Dec, 2011
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Tony Tasset's film 'Judy', 1998, shows a woman looking at the camera, which is supposedly being operated by Tasset, her husband. We witness, and relate to, her air of suspicion and self-consciousness, but what is most palpable is the strong psychological bond between her and the cameraman. Like voyeurs, we study the few seconds of footage as they loop over and over again. The piece is presented in a dark room by a cold and impersonal monster--the film projector--which loudly screeches and creaks along, scratching and gradually destroying the film. even with this machine standing in place of her husband, we still detect love on the woman's face.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review129.pdf
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Theaster Gates
by Lilly Wei, Art in America, December 2011
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ARTISTS OFTEN TALK about real estate, but Theaster Gates, 38, multi medium artist, designer and musician, deals in it. An urban planner and developer, community organizer and cultural entrepreneur, Gates is also the inaugural director of Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago; the new program will include artist residencies and collaborations with area cultural institutions.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review127.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Creative Rebuild:Theaster Gates in Hyde Park, St. Louis
by Francesca Wilmott, art 21:blog, August 1, 2011
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Artist Theaster Gates likes systems. And what he likes more than a system itself is knowing how to leverage it. Though formally trained in handling clay, Gates also uses the structure of neighborhoods, cultural institutions, and universities as his artistic medium. continued....
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review125.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Angel Otero at Kavi Gupta and John Santoro at McCormick
by Chris Miller, New City Art, October 11, 2011
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In 1845, J.M.W. Turner reportedly joked: “Indistinctness is my fault,” in response to an American collector who despaired finding many recognizable details in one of his atmospheric seascapes. In some of his magnificent swirls, nothing was recognizable at all. Was Turner an early Abstract Expressionist? Not if you distinguish the epic struggle of man against nature from the psychological struggle of self against the world. Curiously enough, a similar Romanticism has recently emerged simultaneously in the work of two painters now exhibiting work in adjoining galleries at 835 West Washington.
Cont....
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review126.pdf
Related Artists: Angel Otero
Related Exhibitions: The Dangerous Ability to Fascinate Other People
The house that Theaster Gates built
by Deanna Isaacs, Chicago Reader, June 2, 2011
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In 2006 then-emerging artist Theaster Gates, looking to buy himself a home, came across a squat masonry building on the
6900 block of South Dorchester. The neighborhood had a dicey reputation, and the place wasn't in great shape, but it was close to the University of Chicago, where Gates was hoping to land a job—and, in an overheated market, the price was within his budget. The building, which once had a candy store in the front and living quarters in the rear, looked like a good candidate for conversion to an artist's live/work space. He snagged it for $130,000 and moved in.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review120.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
A Bit of Hollywood, Minus the Tinsel
by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, May 31, 2011
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People who take things into their own hands and try to operate outside the institutional grid deserve our gratitude. So hats off to the organizers of “Greater LA,” a sprawling survey of recent art from Los Angeles arrayed in an immense, unrepentantly raw SoHo loft. It represents a tremendous effort on the part of three temporarily allied art professionals: Benjamin Godsill, a curator moonlighting from the New Museum; Joel Mesler, a partner in Untitled, an art gallery on the Lower East Side who began his art-dealing career in Los Angeles; and Eleanor Cayre, a Los Angeles collector and consultant who organized “The Station,” a large group show in Miami during the Basel Miami art fair in 2008.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review121.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Tony Tasset @ Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte
by Chris Kasper, Whitehot Magazine, June 29, 2011
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In the small Leo Koenig Inc. Projeckte space, a film projector sits atop of what appears to be the crate it was shipped in. It casts an image of a woman’s face on the far wall opposite from the entrance to the space, which has been covered with solid black tarps to shut out all daylight. A 15 second edit of 35mm film runs in a loop, and the woman has her gaze set into the camera. Light blond hair falls unto her shoulders, which are covered by a light blue t-shirt. She is framed by a bush of what appears to be powder-pink roses in a field of lush green foliage. A lone earring of some modest gem dangles from her exposed ear, the ear that holds back a lock of hair. She flashes a gentle smile, in a demure manner, which seems to come from some radiant joy that she just can’t keep in, although she seems to try for a moment. Light crow’s feet form in the outer corners of her eyes. She blinks. Our gaze slowly and steadily zooms onto her face through the camera. The smile fades from her mouth, she blinks a few times, and casts her face down into a pensive, inward gaze. The camera moves in closer, a lock of her hair gently blows across her chin, and the flowers around her head are dancing, steadily moving out of the frame. The sober, wistful look suddenly seems to take a darker turn into what appears to be grief. For just a moment, she looks so awfully sad. The camera is still moving in, flowers move out of the frame, and a wrinkle on her brow forms. She lifts her head, blinks, her brow is furrowed, and she casts her gaze, which appears to have grown cold, back into the camera.
Continued....
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review122.pdf
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Theaster Gates
by Julia Langbein, ARTFORUM, May 2011
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In the past, Theaster Gates has couched his work in historical narratives—a 2010 show at the Milwaukee Art Museum, for example, found the artist reimagining himself as David Drake, the nineteenth-century “slave potter” of Edgefield, South Carolina. Since 2009, in his ongoing Dorchester Project, Gates has literally made history a source, specifically the neglected history of Chicago’s predominantly Black South Side. There, the artist, who is trained in both urban planning and fine arts, has been purchasing abandoned homes on a block of Dorchester Avenue, gutting them, and using what he digs out as raw material, while simultaneously transforming the Dorchester complex into an art and archival center. Continued...
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review118.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Related Exhibitions: An Epitaph for Civil Rights and Other Domesticated Structures
Chris Johanson
by Glen Helfand, ARTFORUM, July 2011
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As a barometer of culture (or perhaps of the artistʼs psyche), Chris Johansonʼs current show reports clear skies. A small, washy acrylic on paper is emblazoned with the word SUN, which is inscribed repeatedly in yellowish hues. Like a mantra from a Mel Bochner painting, the term starts to become abstract, though only just—on the opposite side of the gallery is another, similarly scaled piece that offers the term EASY LISTENING, floating among jagged blue forms, affirming an easy vibe. Johanson, who has deep roots in San Francisco (though he currently splits his time between Portland and Los Angeles), doesnʼt go for ironic affect, and the majority of this show maintains the naive exuberance that has typified his work since the mid-1990s. His first show in the Bay Area in three years—and his debut at Altman Siegel, a spiffier setting than his Mission District roots—is a welcome return.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review123.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Sayre Gomez and J. Patrick Walsh III
by Travis Diehl, ARTFORUM, June 2011
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Like the bare frame of a building, the angular name of Zzyzx, California, serves as a kind of linguistic scaffold for this exhibition. A mixture of sculpture, painting, collage, and video articulates a loose imaginary corollary to the town at the end of the alphabet through a series of correspondences that are formally clear yet logically tenuous and, ultimately, charged with unnamed fears. Sayre Gomezʼs use of bold primary colors and J. Patrick Walsh IIIʼs muddled yet ecstatic palette provide easy links between the individual pieces. For example, a chunk of sunny yellow foam beneath the flat-screen television in Walshʼs Knifeʼs Sun (all works 2011) seems to exist only to match the hue of Gomezʼs The Charismatic Object. Similarly, nonsensical text in a serif font featured in many of the works—most notably Gomezʼs Lorem Ipsum Painting (Citations of Thirst)— appears to have a compositional rather than signifying function. Yet, if read, these phrases, like garbled news, suggest vague and poetic dangers.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review124.pdf
Related Artists: Sayre Gomez
Angel Otero
by Meghan Daily, Modern Painters, May 2011
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Otero's first One-person show, "Memento", is also his New York debut, but the painter is hardly an unknown art world quantity. Fresh out of the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the precocious artist had exhibtion in 2009 and 2010of his abstractions and Spanish Baroque-inspired still lifes at Kavi Gupta Galelry and the Chicago Cultural Center. Continued...
Related Artists: Angel Otero
Related Exhibitions: Angel Otero
Claire Sherman: "Palms Wild" at Kavi Gupta Gallery
by James Yood, art ltd., May 2011
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Art historians used to posit that artists from Venice were particularly sensitive landscape painters because their daily environment was so bereft of things like trees and grass and hills that a Venetian could feel a longing for nature that only absence and alienation can create, a vulnerable hunger that makes their images even more poignant and forlorn. Well, we're all Venetians now, probably more collectively disenfranchised and exiled from our environment than any humans in history. And the degree to which the paintings of Claire Sherman raise that clarion call--that art about nature can provide a special parallel zone of humanity and metaphor, that through communion with the observed world we can touch something important and central to who and what and where we are--made this a very intriguing exhibition. That landscape painting itself isn't exhausted from several hundred years of overwork by thousands of artists, that endless mediocre repetition and knee-jerk cliches haven't made it completely descend into a vacant parody of itself is proved by Sherman's work, which throughout this show seems fresh and pertinent, painted with gusto, big and brassy, and always informed by observation tempered by intelligence.
There are never any humans present in Sherman's work; these trees, cacti, buttes, cliffs and caves are "pure" nature, seemingly unsullied by human narrative or exploitation. Sherman is present, though, and makes herself an issue here through slight dislocations and marginally askew compositional and paint-handing decisions that make her images refuse to behave as landscape paintings usually do. Sometimes her point of view seems too close to or too far from her motif, or her subjects are isolated and shown denuded from a context of sky and milieu. Or the image appears too roomy or too cramped, in the latter case as if we're looking at a detail from a slightly larger composition. At times, her paint handling seems diffident and perfunctory then seems
to erupt in a frenzy of slathering pigment. This continual process of reconsideration is just disorienting enough to keep things fresh. Nature is a big thing, after all, and Sherman never presents it as Eden or Hell or some neutral vessel to be filled with human anxieties, hopes, or fears, but rather as a complex and fundamental ur-motif that we just have to return to again and again, acknowledged and respected, though never to be solved.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review117.pdf
Related Artists: Claire Sherman
Related Exhibitions: Palms Wild
Claire Sherman's 'Palms Wild' at Kavi Gupta, CHICAGO
by Michelle Grabner, Art Agenda, April 5, 2011
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Representational landscape is a risky genre. Its natural grandeur and boundless perspectives can seduce, instilling wonder and discovery. Yet more often, the genre triggers trite familiarity with both the subject and the material quality of the medium. Claire Sherman, however, with her nimble brushwork and compositional restraint, manages to navigate the perceptual underpinnings of landscape painting while confidently delivering its abstract realities. Back in the 19th century, Albert Bierstadt, a virtuoso at conjuring the extreme picturesque dazzling landscapes of the American West, elicited profound consternation from his critics. His depictions of glimmering mountain valleys, spectrum flecked waterfalls, and incandescent sunsets were shunned for their shameless idealism and their gaudy staging of the sublime. The only similarity that Claire Sherman shares with Bierstadt is an uncommonly large canvas size and the desire to demonstrate the profound magnitude in the natural world wrought by virtue of paint. Yet where Beirstadt employed fantastic illusionist devices to convey dense atmospheric perspectives, Sherman conversely models the physical properties of paint to constitute the organic and inorganic structures of landscape.
continued
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review114.pdf
Related Artists: Claire Sherman
Related Exhibitions: Palms Wild
Angel Otero
by Merrily Kerr, Time Our New York, March 29, 2011
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Angel Otero’s unconventional process—fashioning assemblages or lively paintings using “skins” of oil paint applied to glass before being peeled off—is the draw in his New York solo debut. An awkward anthropomorphic object perched on a chintzy armchair, messy Expressionist interiors in garish colors and one uninspired composition with text demonstrate the young artist’s competing sensibilities. Far better are Otero’s large-scale abstractions—action paintings in which paint itself seems to have agency, shooting off the edge of the canvas, bunching dramatically or seductively veiling its support.
Continued....
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review115.pdf
Related Artists: Angel Otero
In Grand Crossing, A House Becomes a Home for Art
by Rachel Cromidas, New York Times, April 7, 2011
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The wooden floors of the house at 6918 South Dorchester Avenue came from a West Side bowling alley. The stacks of vinyl records once stocked a Hyde Park record shop, and some of the windows once served as doors in a museum. Viewed from the kitchen, the words “Museum Hours: 9 to 5” run backward across the glass.
Continued...
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review116.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Claire Sherman
by Chris Miller, New City, March 28, 2011
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Claire Sherman’s decorative landscapes offer the explosive joy of youth, which is probably why, five years into her career, she has had solo shows in New York, London and Amsterdam, as well as this, her second show at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. The gallery sales pitch suggests that she is questioning the “historical distinction between abstraction and representation,” as it can be questioned with paintings going back to the Lascaux caves. Other critics have connected her work to the Romantic era and Kant’s notion of the sublime, while it might also be noted that her kind of brush-driven landscape was first developed in Han Dynasty China.
Antiquated as it may be, her work feels as fresh as tomorrow because she’s not looking back. Like Faulkner’s characters in “Wild Palms,” the title she has borrowed for this exhibition, Sherman is exploring her own destiny which, this time around, includes some chthonic visits into enormous caves and a few almost figurative monumental still-lifes. Though traditional in many ways, the one tradition that’s been avoided is European landscape. There are few shadows, and no clouds or natural light. Her paintings are not windows looking out at the natural world. They are the natural world crashing in and dominating a wall. Rather than following the Impressionist way of breaking down the components of light, Sherman breaks down areas of color into jagged, rectangular patches, the way that computer graphics do. Rather than presenting a specific view, each image feels more like an ideogram.
With its architectural scale, use of brushwork and close-up focus on nature, her work resembles those historic Japanese screens that were shown at the Art Institute two years ago, except that the broken angularity creates an effect that is triumphantly rambunctious rather than contemplatively peaceful. Claire Sherman’s natural world is bustling with the unpredictable energy of scruffy trees that grow through the pavement of abandoned parking lots, making a room full of her work as overwhelming as a landslide. If art galleries were sports arenas, we’d all have to stand up and cheer. (Chris Miller)
Through April 19 at Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 West Washington
Related Artists: Claire Sherman
Related Exhibitions: Palms Wild
The Ugly Beauty of Life In A Moment
by Lori Waxman, Chicago Tribune, March 4, 2011
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Folk religion from Iceland to Japan has long held such imaginative possibilities as the reality of our natural world. Claire Sherman's monumental paintings, on display at Kavi Gupta Gallery, are another bearer of geological and floral animation.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review109.pdf
Related Artists: Claire Sherman
Related Exhibitions: Palms Wild
Free-for-All Spirit Breezes Into a Vast Art Fair
by Roberta Smith, New York Times, March 3, 2011
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And yet if art is something you must have — or think you want to have — in your life, you stand to gain from perusing one or more of the several art fairs that have set down stakes across Manhattan this weekend. Open yourself to the best in them and they become pools of information that can humble, broaden and energize you in significant ways.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review110.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Inside the Artist's Studio: Angel Otero in Ridgewood
by Benjamin Sutton, The L Magazine, February 16, 2011
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How do you begin a painting?
The work starts from a very personal point. I'm using oil paint but in reverse, so I paint on glass, and I paint in a very traditional way with oil paint and brushes. After I'm done with the imagery or text we cover that with a whole layer of oil paint. And from there it goes to dry for a while and after a month or a few weeks we scrape it very slowly and it comes out with a really interesting texture. It's kind of like a transfer, because I also have to be thinking in reverse. In a traditional painting you paint a background, you paint a chair and you paint the model in the chair, and here I've got to paint the model, the chair and then cover that with the background. It's very challenging, which makes it really beautiful.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review111.pdf
Related Artists: Angel Otero
New Skin: Q+A With Angel Otero
by Madison Moore, Art in America, March 7, 2011
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Angel Otero's studio in industrial Ridgewood, Queens currently lies fairly empty. Sitting in the main workspace is a reduced-scale model of Lehmann Maupin's Chrystie Street gallery, complete with mockups. In one corner a few gold "oil skins," the artist's sheets of dried oil paint, drape atop a stool like the slough of a reptile. These are the remainders from "Memento," Otero's first solo show at Lehmann Maupin, currently open through April 17.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review112.pdf
Related Artists: Angel Otero
Must-See Painting Shows: February
New Americans Paintings Blog, February, 2011
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It’s February now, which means plenty of snow and plenty of new shows opening this month. The editorial staff at New American Paintings have put together a list of more than 65 of the top painting exhibitions on view at private galleries across the country in February—from New York to Los Angeles, Houston to Chicago, Atlanta, and more—including more than a dozen shows from artists previously included in New American Paintings and featuring more than 50 notable and not-to-be-missed shows from across the country.
EDITORS PICK - Angel Otero, February 17 – April 10, 2011, Lehman Maupin;
EDITOR’S PICK - Claire Sherman, February 19 – March 26, 2011, Kavi Gupta Gallery
Related Artists: Angel Otero , Claire Sherman
Narrative Texture
by James Chad Hanna, Art + Auction, February 2011
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Angel Otero spends as much time working with dried paint as wet. Thr Brooklyn-based artist, 29, who joined Lehmann Maupin last May, fashions the surfaces of his large expressionistic pictures and assemblages from “oil skins,” created by pouring oil paint into glass, allowing it to dry, then peeling away the resulting sheets of color. He combines these skins with other materials-silicone, spray paint, and resin among them-on canvas but also sometimes applies them to furniture and frames. For his first solo show with the New York gallery, from February 17 through April 10 he is presenting new works with such inspirations as Surrealist literature, Latin American poetry, and Jean-Paul Sartre. “It’s fresh subject matter, but they still highlight the process he’s become know for,” says David Maupin. Although Otero’s canvases and assemblages can hint at Georg Baselitz, Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning with a not to the Spanish Boroque, he has also drawn on his familial relationships and life in his native Puerto Rico, which he left at the age of 24 to stud at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Related Artists: Angel Otero
Dinner with Mark Bradford (at Dorchester Projects)
by Theaster Gates, The Mark Bradford Project / Museum of Contemprary Art Chicago, February 2011
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Melanie Schiff: Spider
by Laura Schleussner, Flash Art International, January - February 2011
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Atmospheric, light-infused and highly evocative of the moment, Melanie Schiff's photographs recall modern traditions of American romantic photography (Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander come readily to mind). Unlike these photographers, SChiff is more interested in observing transient moments that suggest youth culture and an alternative milieu. Staged individual portraits, still-lifes with beer bottles, CDs or decaying plants, a hotel room once occupied by Kurt Cobain, album covers floating in an abandoned pool -- too open-ended to be a personal chronicle, Schiff's imagery has an immersive, ambient quality. Multiple references to music and pop icons suggest a sound track that is somehow imbedded in the images and that becomes stronger and more compelling when multiple photographs are brought together.
For her first solo exhibition in Germany at Kavi Gupta, Schiff shows only seven moderately sized photographs taken while on residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. In comparison to earlier works, these are more still, almost silent. The images are also imbued with a certain minimalism, which is perhaps inspired by the context of Donald Judd's former living and workspace. Like the minimalists, Schiff turns her attention towards the landscape and seemingly abandoned spaces, yet she counters all notions of purism and perfection. Nature is the subject of most photographs, but always as touched by human hand. An outcropping of rock bears a spray of graffiti; decaying silk flowers are superimposed over a field of grass; Halley's comet appears merely as a poster hung on an unused door.
There is something highly introverted about this collection of works, whose concentrated field of vision never pulls back to show the landscape. Several photographs inhabit a rough, white-washed interior with an opaque window giving no hint of the world outside. The only creature seeming to populate the space is a tiny spider clutching her eggs against a brilliant white wall that has been irreverently dirtied by her tiny brown droppings. - Laura Schleussner
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review96.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Related Exhibitions: Spider
New York Minute
by Kathy Grayson, Garage Center for Contemporary Art, March - May 2011
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New York Minute features sixty artists in and around New York City who capture the drama, danger, speed and savvy of the vibrant and diverse art activities happening in the city today. For the first time, this exhibition brings together a complete survey of the multiple exciting new tendencies coming out of New York City and its extended networks. It captures the best practitioners in each unique area of exploration and brings them together in a logical and collaborative way.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review105.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Light and Desire: An interview with Melanie Schiff
by Caroline Picard, Art 21 Blog, January 4 2011
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While always being aware of her work, Melanie Schiff snapped into focus shortly after I first heard about Ox-bow, the School of the Art Insitute’s residency program in Saugatuck, Michigan. Friends came back from a summer there looking a little wild. Melanie’s work–color-rich photographs of youths blending into trees, whiskey bottles glinting like a candle in a bath of morning sun–offers a portrait, not just of Ox-bow, but of a feral, post-adolescent youth.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review97.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Studio Visit: Interview with Angel Otero
by Marina Cashdan, The Huffington Post, September 6, 2010
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My inaugural Studio Visit is with a young artist named Angel Otero (b. 1981, Santurce, Puerto Rico). I was first introduced to Otero's work through his Chicago gallery Kavi Gupta. What drew me to his work was his sense of materiality and especially his unique use of what he calls "oil skins," paint that has been left to dry on plexiglass sheets, leaving an almost plastic-like sheet of dried pigments.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review98.pdf
Related Artists: Angel Otero
Editor’s Pick – Top International Shows: January 10 – January 17, 2011
by Rebecca Wilson, SAATCHI Online Magazine, January 10 2011
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In Curtis Mann’s most recent works, found photographs of conflicted and historically complex places throughout the Middle East are subjected to a process of selection and erasure. By painting on portions of enlarged color photographs with a clear varnish and then bleaching away unprotected portions of the image, new and abstract meanings are sought from appropriated snapshots, travel photographs, and casual documentations. The photograph is physically and contextually altered; as a result, the work oscillates between image and object, photography and painting, real and imagined. This is Mann’s first U.S. exhibition since his inclusion in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.
http://magazine.saatchionline.com/top-10-shows/editor%E2%80%99s-pick-%E2%80%93-top-international-shows-january-10-%E2%80%93-january-17-2011
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review102.pdf
Related Artists: Curtis Mann
Related Exhibitions: everything after
Tony Tasset
by Michelle Grabner, Artforum, October 2010
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Contesting the progress-and-mastery saga of twentieth-century modernism, Chicago-based artist Tony Tasset spent much of the 1980s and '90s meticulously crafting insolent, critical objects, and the nine works represented in this ten-year survey (1986-96) unambiguously assert his past affinity for blunt deconstructionist strategies...
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Related Exhibitions: Selected Works From 1986-1996
Rewind: 1970s to 1990s Works from the MCA Collection March 13 - September 5, 2010
MCA website, March 13th- September 5th, 2010
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During its forty-year history, the MCA has distinguished itself with groundbreaking exhibitions that have contributed substantially to the evolving history of contemporary art. These exhibitions have, in turn, stimulated the museum and its supporters to acquire important and often numerous pieces by these artists. A resulting hallmark of the MCA's collection is the presence of significant, in-depth bodies of work by artists. By displaying several examples of an artist's work, visitors can gain a better understanding of their working process and development of ideas over the span of several years.
Rewind presents concentrations of work by artists whom the MCA has collected in depth, or whose pieces in the collection are definitive examples of their singular aesthetic. Showcasing key artists of the last forty years whose work has been and continues to be defining to international contemporary art underscores the MCA's role as a leader in and incubator of artistic innovation.
Rewind focuses on works from these particular decades to show how the groundbreaking work from the recent past is only now becoming historicized for its critical take on art institutions, identity politics, and new approaches to video and photography in the late-20th century. It includes works by Vito Acconci, Richard Artschwager, Matthew Barney, Alfredo Jaar, Mike Kelley, Sharon Lockhart, Richard Long, Richard Prince, Lorna Simpson, Tony Tasset, and Gillian Wearing.
This exhibition is organized by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Backwards Towards the Future
by Joel Kuennen, ArtSlant, September 13th 2010
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review77.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Related Exhibitions: Backwards Toward Forwards
Angel Otero
by James Yood, ARTFORUM, April 2010
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With the ebullience of youth - he's not yet thirty - Puerto Rican-born, Brooklyn-based Angel Otero fills old bottles with new wine, bringing innovative and dramatic formal strategies to bear on conventional formats and subjects
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review67.pdf
Related Artists: Angel Otero
Urban Outfitter: Fresh off the Whitney Biennial, Theaster Gates Jr. shakes up his hometown art fair
by Rachel Wolff, Chicago Magazine, May 2010
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All Theaster Gates Jr. wanted was to be a good city bureaucrat. He worked as an arts planner for the Chicago Transit Authority in the early 2000s, helping artists navigate the lengthy process of getting their work on the walls of el stations. It was all great, in theory. But Gates got impatient.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review65.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Artist Theaster Gates Can't Stop Reaching New Heights
by Rachel Furnari, New City, 3/31/10
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When it comes to his artwork, Gates has no problem overreaching. Arrange for the 200-plus members of the South Shore Drill Team to perform for 150-plus white academics at the University of Chicago where he works and then deliver a companion lecture declaring “you need niggers”? Not a problem. Decide to redevelop an entire block at 69th and Dorchester under the name Dorchester Projects? Walk into the Prairie Avenue Bookstore during its closing days and ask for all of the books to create a reading room on the South Side? Absolutely. Gates will tell you a lot about his ambition, but he’s also a realist. “I can’t finish Dorchester Projects by myself, it’s big enough to receive other people.” He’s also not afraid; and until he’s described the effect that this fear has over cultural and social development in the black communities of postindustrial cities like St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit and Omaha, it’s hard to understand how powerful this self-assurance is. He claims easily, “I don’t ask myself ‘What right do I have to live on my block and think I can do all of this?’ I have the right.”
In the last year, Gates has completed ambitious collaborations with artists, museums, musicians, historians and the Kohler Company, culminating in an invitation to participate in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which opened in New York at the end of February. At the Biennial, Gates was given the outdoor sculpture court for an “impresario piece” titled “Cosmology of Yard.” Gates has said that one of the fundamental questions of the project was: “How do you overcome Marcel Breuer,” the museum’s architect? His response to the spatial and social problem of the Brutalist cement pit at the Whitney was in some ways intentionally incomplete. Perhaps there is no way to overcome Breuer’s architecture and Gates sought to embrace the space’s prosaic functionality as both a food court and smoker’s lounge. His solution was to build out a temporary kind of architecture that includes a central pavilion, a looped sound and video piece, and several of the oversize, fantastical shoeshine chairs built for his performance called “Shine,” in 2009.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review61.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Pattern and Representation
by Erik Wenzel, ARTslanT, October 25, 2010
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review85.pdf
Related Artists: James Krone
Related Exhibitions: Trickle Down Ergonomics
In Favor Of Improvisation: Angelina Gualdoni at Asya Geisberg
by Sharon Butler, Two Coats of Paint, Thursday, October 21 2010
[more] [less]
In earlier work, Gualdoni investigated failed utopias of Modern architecture, portraying decayed, imploded buildings crumbling into pools of paint. In “Shadows Slipping," she loosens control, and, like color field painters before her, begins each painting with a thin veil of poured paint that determines the direction the canvas will take....
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review80.pdf
Related Artists: Angelina Gualdoni
BLEACHED : Opening Up Limits of Truth and Photography
by Kristen Carter, Jettison Quarterly, Spring 2010
[more] [less]
...According to the artist, he has always been curious about the physical nature of the photograph. "Paying attention to the photograph as an object exposes it as something impermanent, fallible and extremely malleable," explains Mann. "Coming from a mechanical engineering background, I have always been curious about the chemicals and inks used to produce photographs. The flat, conventional, image holds potential."...
JettisonQuarterly.com
Related Artists: Curtis Mann
A Q&A Session with Theaster Gates
by Steve Ruiz, Jettison Quarterly, Fall 2010
[more] [less]
With an artistic practice broad enough to include urban-planning inspired social projects, spiritual musical performance and an ability to critique large cultural institutions while still attracting their interest, it's no surprise that Theaster Gates has had a busy time the last few years...
JettisonQuarterly.com
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review79.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
The Slant on Tony Tasset
by Abraham Ritchie, ArtSlant, August, 2010
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Chicago, August 2010-- Tony Tasset is receiving a kind of city-wide, mini-retrospective currently in Chicago. The Museum of Contemporary Art is showing a significant number of his artworks from the 1980s (more), held in their permanent collection. Kavi Gupta Gallery has had a survey of Tasset's early work on view all summer (more). Tasset also has a work included in the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition "Contemporary Collecting: Selected Works from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection." And speaking of selections, Tasset was selected for two commissions in Chicago Downtown Loop area. All along Chicago's busy State Street are Tasset's Cardinal banners showing the titular bird in flight, but the piece that has people buzzing is Eye, a thirty-foot tall fiberglass and steel construction of a very realistic eyeball.
As crews welded Tasset's newest sculpture together under his watchful eye, we had a quick chat about the work, Free Masons, rock and roll and Pop Conceptualism.
--Abraham Ritchie, Editor, ArtSlant Chicago
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review76.pdf
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Chris Johanson's 'Continuality' opens
by Jon Wolff, The Davidsonian Online, March 19, 2009
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Rather than bring a sampling of his works to hang in the William H. Van Every Gallery of the Visual Arts Center, artist Chris Johanson instead chose to arrive empty-handed two weeks ago. The clean white, blank rooms of the gallery were not simply a place for Johanson to mount and show his art, they have instead become the canvas for one large piece.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review86.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Join the Occult
by Nick Hallett, Interview Magazine, July 6, 2010
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There's no shortage of people behind a museum exhibition—curators and artists, for sure, and installers, and security, and administrators. However, the exhibition of Brion Gysin opening tomorrow at the New Museum required more storytellers and historians of sub-culture, and so curator Laura Hoptman enlisted artist Scott Treleaven.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review75.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven
Melanie Schiff
by James Glisson, Artforum.com, September 2009
[more] [less]
Melanie Schiff
KAVI GUPTA GALLERY
835 West Washington
September 11–October 24
Melanie Schiff, Hellroom, color photograph, 2009, 31 1/2 x 35".
Melanie Schiff’s new series of photographs are called “narratives” in the gallery’s press materials, yet her pictures lack figures or anthropomorphized objects that might function as characters, much less any obvious sense of duration. The concrete viaducts and forlorn landscapes that Schiff captures are the functioning detritus of a normally invisible infrastructure that supports vast conurbations. (Perhaps these are part of the web of waterworks that service the parched Los Angeles area, where Schiff lives.)
Unit after unit, mile after mile, the viaducts are gigantic, yet in Schiff’s photographs these bland and imposing structures dematerialize. Take Hellroom, 2009, where the walls and floor of a huge drainage culvert are covered with mostly red graffiti so densely layered that the concrete surface transforms into something akin to intricately tattooed human skin. Further, the square shape of the culvert self-consciously mirrors the square format of the photograph, and the white-and-orange spots in each lower corner of the structure resemble overexposed patches on a negative. The photograph pulls in two directions: to the print’s surface and to the shimmering spray-painted cement. The man-made canyon nearly disappears between these competing poles. It is a ruin of sorts, not from long ago, but instead the recent past or even the present. Ruins manifest narrative in their decrepitude: how much their present form differs from what had once been pristine and new. Perhaps the narrative then resides in that gap and in the taut pull between surface and skin.
— James Glisson
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review54.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Related Exhibitions: The Mirror
Chris Johanson at Deitch Projects
by Paddy Johnson, The L Magaine, September 17, 2008
[more] [less]
Much like the pictorial sequence in a comic book, Chris
Johanson’s Totalities at Deitch Projects transforms the gallery into a path-like architectural space that structures the viewing experience.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review88.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Chris Johanson
by John Motley, The Portland Mercury, February 22, 2007
[more] [less]
When Dada spread through Germany after World War I, its practitioners championed the un-self-conscious
artistic impulses of the child. Its name even referred to that most basic gesture of expression: a child
addressing its father with those first clumsy syllables. But within that movement, privileging nonsensical,
automatic expression was couched within hyper-self-conscious theory that belonged to the intellectual
territory of adults.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review89.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Chris Johanson
by Raman Frey, Shotgun Review, March 23, 2008
[more] [less]
Do you love Jack Hanley Gallery? For better or worse, in many ways Jack's our King Midas, the only guy in the last decade to make a deep and convincing dent in the international art scene from a perch in "provincial" San Francisco (Paule Anglim deserves credit for doing this a decade or two earlier).
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review92.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Form & (un)Function
by Robyn Farrell Roulo, ARTslanT, June 5, 2010
[more] [less]
2010 has been a good year for Tony Tasset. Known for his witty and often sardonic approach to Postmodern art, Tasset’s work has gained quite a bit of attention in the city he calls home. The artist was selected alongside fellow Chicago artist, Phyllis Bramson to participate in the College Art Association’s annual Artist Interviews during the organization’s conference that was held in Chicago in February 2010. Last month, Tasset’s Blob Monster (2009) was one of several large scale installations that made an impressive appearance on Orleans Avenue outside of The Merchandise Mart, in collaboration with Art Chicago and NEXT. This summer, Tasset’s larger than life sculptures will once again join the public sphere thanks to a dual commission from the Chicago Loop Alliance for their inaugural Art Loop program slated for early July. The artist will unveil Cardinal (2010)an installation of more than one hundred banners along Chicago’s famed State Street. Tasset’s vision for the series of installed sculptures is to form a collective image of the state bird, a cardinal taking flight. The second work, standing 30 feet in the air and scheduled for Pritzker Park, is aptly titled Eye(2010), a massive mixed media sculpture of an eyeball overlooking the Chicago community.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review69.pdf
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Related Exhibitions: Selected Works From 1986-1996
Chris Johanson: Totalities
by James Westcott, Art Review, December 28, 2008
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The lo-fi painter and ramshackle installationist Chris Johanson, famous for his stairwell installation at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, fights hard to be childlike in his abject-expressionist cartoony style and instinctive incisions into the sophisticated stupidities of the adult world.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review87.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Adam Scott Interview
by Ryan Travis Christian, Fecal Face Dot Com, June 25 2008
[more] [less]
Adam tell us a little bit about your work, for those who have neither seen nor heard of it.
For the past 7 years I have been pouring heavy amounts of liquid acrylic paint onto super-cranked / tight canvases. On the surface, the work uses representational pictorial languages. Below the surface, the DNA code is made up of process based non-objective painting languages. The content of the work is totally immersed in American vernacular visual culture and hyper reified modern / contemporary art visual culture. The ridiculous and the sublime play equally important roles in my work. There is also a generous helping of good ol' American fear & paranoia. ......
http://www.fecalface.com/SF/index.php?Itemid=92&id=1164&option=com_content&task=view
Related Artists: Adam Scott
Giant Eyeball to Invade Chicago
by Abraham Ritchie, Chicago Art Blog, June 3, 2010
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On July 7th, Chicago will be invaded by a three-story eyeball. There is no word yet whether it will threaten us with death rays. Of course, I am kidding. What will be coming to Chicago on July 7th is Eye, a three-story sculpture by Tony Tasset...
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review73.pdf
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Review: Chris Johanson at Van Every Smith Galleries
by Diana McClintock, Sculpture Magazine
[more] [less]
West Coast artist Chris Johanson recently transformed the white cube of the Van Every Smith Galleries into a raw but whimsical environment of scrap wood, iconic stick figures, and richly painted surfaces.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review90.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
He Walks the Line
by Arty Nelson, LA Weekly, June 8, 2006
[more] [less]
In his early 20s, Chris Johanson moved to San Francisco. It was there, in the early ’90s, that his real-life
education began.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review91.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Adobe proved fertile ground for "Mission School' artist
by Jamie Berger, San Francisco Gate, April 10, 2003
[more] [less]
In a recent segment of KQED's arts show, "Spark," the camera follows artist Chris Johanson as he walks down 16th Street. He approaches Adobe books, where he greets his old friend, the store's proprietor, Andrew McKinley. The two men embrace, and McKinley says, "Chris, you're back!"
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review93.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Art in Review: Chris Johanson -- 'Now Is Now
by Ken Johnson, New York Times, November 22, 2002
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An inspired simpleton sharing a feel-good holistic vision: that's the impression you get from Chris Johanson's art. In comical, faux-naïve painting, drawing and sculpture, this young San Franciscan spoofs New Age therapy culture, yet his art also conveys a genuinely religious urgency.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review94.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Curtis Mann Explores the Varnished and White-Washed Truths of Photography
by Alice Thorson, The Kansas City Star, August 7, 2010
[more] [less]
...“Photographs are so powerful,” Mann said recently. “They want to make you come to judgment so quickly.
A lot of masking, filtering and shredding of the images hold people back from doing that."....
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review84.pdf
Related Artists: Curtis Mann
UBS 12X12: Curtis Mann
by Karsten Lund, flavorpill, 2009
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Like a fever dream, Curtis Mann's bleached and altered found photographs seem to drift outside of time. The images often depict places blighted by violence, but from one work to the next, a large white void swallows the scene and hazy swathes of color lick at what remains like ghostly flames. A few solitary figures inhabit these vanishing landscapes, and the viewer is left to ponder their half-told stories, searching for meaning in the uncertain remnants of the photographic record. There's a doomsday quality to Mann's pictures — not unlike McCarthy's The Road — but they're buoyed by a sense of hope and perseverance. The prints have a certain beauty of their own, as if to say, "Savor the dream, dive deeper."
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review83.pdf
Related Artists: Curtis Mann
ARE YOU a ZOMBIE or a WITCH?
by Elijah Burgher, C Magazine #106, Summer 2010
[more] [less]
Originally from Toronto, and now based in Paris, Scott Treleaven first achieved notoriety in occult and queercore circles for his zine This Is the Salivation Army. He has subsequently created a large body of work consisting of darkly erotic works on paper, hypnotic films......
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review95.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven
Cordy Ryman
by Stephen Westfall, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2010
[more] [less]
Stephen Westfall inspects the typical Cordy Ryman sculpture discovering it to be a seemingly autonomous entity complete with its own agency and the ability to miraculously self-propagate.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review70.pdf
Related Artists: Cordy Ryman
MP3 II
by Abraham Ritchie, ArtSlant, August 2009
[more] [less]
...Mann gets his images from “online auctions, photo-sharing sites and estate sales. These are already once or twice removed from their original authorship, form, context . . . He specifically looks for records of violence in places like Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Kenya.” Mann then manipulates these images slightly with Adobe Photoshop, orders conventional chemical color prints via an online service, uses varnish to preserve specific areas of the print, and bleach to remove other areas. The result is an image with preserved recognizable areas divided by bands of white-hot orange and red. These divisions represent borders, religious sects and violence....
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review82.pdf
Related Artists: Curtis Mann
The Slant on Theaster Gates
by Abraham Ritchie, ARTslanT, May 2010
[more] [less]
Theaster Gates was one of several Chicago-based artists included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. If you missed his work there (Cosmology of the Yard, 2010), there's still time to see his solo exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, "To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter" (April 16 - August 1, 2010) or his work included in the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston's "Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft" (May 15 - July 25, 2010). Theaster Gates' practice takes many forms, and with pottery taking central stage in his most recent exhibitions, ceramics seemed like a good place to begin our conversation...
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review71.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
'To Speculate Darkly' promises to amplify voices, both old and new
by Lonnie Turner, Journal Sentinel Online, April 14, 2010
[more] [less]
A life-size oil painting of Frederick Layton, whose collection formed the precursor to the Milwaukee Art Museum, lords over a collection of American paintings in the museum's lower-level galleries. Around him, luminescent portraits of a privileged colonial class steadily gaze back at us.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review66.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Artists gear up for Armory: Local talent represented at international fair, Biennial exhibition in New York
by Lauren Viera, Chicago Tribune, March 4, 2010
[more] [less]
It's Armory Week. Falling on certain ears, this news conjures knights conferencing in gaggles, their heavy chain mail collectively clinking. But creative types know better: Armory Week is one of the biggest events of the year for visual artists.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review64.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates , Curtis Mann , Angel Otero , Melanie Schiff , Tony Tasset
Odyssey of an Eye
by Lauren Viera, Chicago Tribune, July 4, 2010
[more] [less]
SPARTA, Wis. — On the ides of June, while squinting at a cluster of threatening clouds from his perch on a grassy construction site just outside this small city, Chicago sculptor Tony Tasset is, to use his words, totally freaking out.
“You know those reality shows?” Tasset says, a slightly uneasy smile on his face. “This is that part when the
team is up against their deadline, and it looks like they’re never going to finish on time.”
Tasset’s “team” is made up of a half-dozen fiberglass workers at Sparta’s Fast Corp. (Fiberglass Animals Shapes and Trademarks), who have been assigned to construct the artist’s largest piece to date: a giant eyeball aptly named Eye which, upon completion, will stand three stories tall and stare east from the Loop’s Pritzker Park, at State and Van Buren streets. Tasset was commissioned for the job last fall by the Chicago Loop Alliance, and Fast Corp., with which he had collaborated on prior sculptures (including a 2-foot-high eyeball), took the engineering reins earlier this year.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review74.pdf
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Clay Feat: Theaster Gates and a gospel choir engage a slave potter’s legacy at the Milwaukee Art Museum
by Lauren Weinberg, Time Out Chicago Magazine, April 10, 2010
[more] [less]
Theaster Gates first learned about David Drake while studying urban planning and ceramics at Iowa State University. Born around 1800, Drake—often simply referred to as Dave—was a South Carolinian slave who became a master potter, making practical, beautiful vessels such as an 1858 storage jar, which appears in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s exhibition “Theaster Gates: To Speculate Darkly,” opening Friday 16.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review63.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Clare E. Rojas
by Lori Waxman, ARTFORUM, October 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review55.pdf
Related Artists: Clare E. Rojas
Related Exhibitions: Believe Me
Clare E. Rojas
by Susan Snodgrass, Art in America, October 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review59.pdf
Related Artists: Clare E. Rojas
Related Exhibitions: Believe Me
Clare E. Rojas
by Ruth Lopez, ARTnews, October 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review56.pdf
Related Artists: Clare E. Rojas
Related Exhibitions: Believe Me
Melanie Schiff
by Lauren Viera, Chicago Tribune, September 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review57.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Related Exhibitions: The Mirror
Clare E. Rojas, Believe Me
by Karsten Lund, Flavorpill, July 14, 2009
[more] [less]
flavorpill
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Art
Clare E. Rojas: Believe Me
For her second exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery, Clare Rojas returns with a carefully conceived installation of her distinctive gouache paintings, merging a rustic folk-art style with the self-assured polish of a savvy illustrator. Her works have the feeling of fairy tales, with birds, animals, and shifty-eyed humans appearing as players in obscure but fateful undertakings. And, in classic fairy-tale form, there's also a darker side to the plucky proceedings, hovering like an ominous shadow. Ranging in scale from intimate to muralsized, Rojas' paintings are presented here within a larger hand-crafted environment; smaller works hang from a row of pegs against a blue-painted wall, decorated with wooden moldings, while a nearby bookshelf sports a rogue's gallery of head-and-shoulder portraits.
– Karsten Lund
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review17.pdf
Related Artists: Clare E. Rojas
Related Exhibitions: Believe Me
What Would Neil Young Do?
by Herbert Martin, Modern Painters, March 2009
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Everyone knows that the word photography means writing with light, but few photographers make this etymology as apparent in their images as Melanie Schiff does. While others use light to show people or things, Schiff is more likely to make you think that she is using people or things to show the light around them. Her images are so intimate with the experience of luminosity that they even know how to make a joke of it, albeit a serious sort of joke...
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review8.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Future Greats
by Jonathan T.D. Neil, Art Review, March, 2009
[more] [less]
MELANIE SCHIFF
By
JONATHAN T.D. NEIL
Since her first solo show at the Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago at the end of 2006, Melanie Schiff’s photography has been received as that of a lackadaisical rocker, an easy producer of images that draw upon the tired life of places and things that are of little interest beyond their services as backdrops for late-night philosophizing fuelled by beer and dope. We know this culture by the qualifier of ‘youth’. It’s a noncommittal, quasi-commercial life, one not exactly at odds with the world, but not exactly at peace with it either.
The problem here is that such readings do little justice to Schiff’s achievement as deft composer – or rather compositionalist – of light and form. Her still lifes, light captures and other such composed scenes demonstrate a facility with ‘that old thing’ (analogue) photography that equals even Uta Barth’s more technical gymnastics; yet Schiff manages to make hew work appear as if it is somehow easily intuitive as opposed to rigorously worked through, which , in the end, it must be. Prints such as “Prism” (2005), “Cases” (2005), “Spit” (2006) and the much lauded “Emergency” (2006) – this last captures the distant fireball of the sun just as it caps a bottle of Jack Daniels in the foreground – reveal Schiff’s supreme comfort with the registration of light as such. And her more recent work, black-and-white portraits such as “Natalie I” (2008) and “Sarah” (2007), and the masterful Untitled (2008), ass to this comfort a Las Meninas-type dialogue on the circuit of the camera’s seeing, here multiplied by the layering of windows, mirrors and other reflective surfaces within the profilmic space.
On the whole it is elegant and, most important intelligent work. Schiff’s body-in-the-landscape pieces, such as “Mud Reclining” (2006) and “Skatepark” (2008), too-self-consciously evoke the specters of Ana Mendieta and VALIE EXPORT; but then again, these aren’t the worst artists to channel. Nevertheless, it is composition that Schiff understands, apparently, to a very natural degree, and it is by composition that her work will rise or fall – I suspect it will be the former.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review7.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Introducing Melanie Schiff
by Barry Schwabsky, Modern Painters, February, 2008
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review10.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Tony Tasset
by Lauren Weinberg, Time Out Chicago, June 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review58.pdf
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Leipziger
by Erik Wenzel, Art Slant Chicago
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review40.pdf
Related Artists: Ulf Puder
Ulf Puder
by Kathryn Born, Time Out Chicago
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review41.pdf
Related Artists: Ulf Puder
That Kind of Fall
by Kathryn Rosenfeld, artnet, August 14 2004
[more] [less]
Meanwhile, around the corner on Washington, Kavi Gupta Gallery has rolled out another apparent trend, a style I can only call "nostalgia for 1970s album cover art." In a solo exhibition titled "Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful," Adam Scott shows acrylic-on-canvas paintings of idyllic suburban houses, all rendered in searing, saturated
electric hues and deep black shadows. More recent paintings display a propensity towards mayhem, as latter-day Mickey Mice characters swing axes and aim assault weapons at Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.
Related Artists: Adam Scott
Finding His Voice in the Now
Chicago Tribune Magazine, April 19, 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review48.pdf
Related Artists: Angel Otero
Color Scheme
by Cassie Walker, Chicago Magazine, May 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review46.pdf
Related Artists: Angel Otero
You've Seen the E-Mail, Now Buy the Art
by Jori Finkel, The New York Times, February 4, 2007
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review43.pdf
Related Artists: Claire Sherman
At the Galleries
by Jane Neal, Flash Art, April 2007
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review44.pdf
Related Artists: Claire Sherman
Claire Sherman Slow Pan
by Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune, March 2, 2007
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review45.pdf
Related Artists: Claire Sherman
Ciaran Murphy
by James Yood, Art Forum, October 2008
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review39.pdf
Related Artists: Ciaran Murphy
All's Fair
by Natalie Edwards, New City, May 7, 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review47.pdf
Related Artists: Angel Otero
Scott Treleaven
by Tom Breidenbach, Art Forum, May 2006
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review49.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven
Leader of the Pack
by Catharine Tunnacliffe, Eye, April 11, 2002
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review50.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven
Scott Treleaven
by Michael Workman, Flash Art, January/February 2005
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review51.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven
Sleepaway For the Rejected Scott Hug and friends squat at the gallery
by Wayne Northcross, Gay City News, August 31 - September 6, 2006
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review52.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven
Claire Sherman
by Josh Tyson, Time Out Chicago, March 15-21, 2007
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review42.pdf
Related Artists: Claire Sherman
Tip of the Week Scott Treleaven
by Michael Workman, New City Chicago, October 28, 2004
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review53.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven
Today's Landscapes, Tomorrow's Dystopia
by Benjamin Gennochio, The New York Times, June 1, 2008
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review38.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Anderson , Claire Sherman
Absolutely Mad for Melanie Schiff
by Paul Johnson-Calderon, Paper Magazine, July 23, 2008
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Fotographia/Melanie Schiff
by Selva Barni, Rodeo, September, 2008
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review9.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Scott Anderson
Flavorpill, September 30, 2008
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review22.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Anderson
Scott Anderson
by Terence Hannum, Beautiful/Decay, September 2008
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review24.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Anderson
Review
by Elijah Burgher, artUS, March - April, 2007
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Related Exhibitions: Underwater Photographer
Critic's Pick
by Brian Sholis, ArtForum.com, January, 2007
[more] [less]
Since her solo debut at this gallery, photographer Melanie Schiff has moved out of the studio and into the world, trading fussily arranged, evenly lit still lifes for more casual, serendipitous compositions of everyday objects. These photos are hymns to natural light, and the presence of rainbows, beer cans, and a Neil Young LP cover tempts one to characterize her gaze as a stoner’s glassy-eyed fixation. In Emergency, 2006, the sun, modulated by a porch screen, is a marble-size fireball resting atop a bottle of Jack Daniels. In another photograph, a single beam slices through a compact-disc jewel case, splitting into faint prisms that descend upon dull gray carpet. A third shows a green beer bottle balanced at the tip of a canoe, lit from within by two crisscrossed glow sticks; their angle continues the lines made by the edges of the thin-metal boat and is also found in the X composed of two arrows jutting from disused beer cans in a nearby picture. With sixteen photos and one unexpected (if not unwelcome) foray into video, the exhibition is a tad overhung, but even the oddball images—of the artist making Spit Rainbow, 2006, next to a backyard lemon tree, or a tapestry of drug bags plastered to a cracked window—add to the show’s drowsy-afternoon allure.
—Brian Sholis
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review12.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Related Exhibitions: Underwater Photographer
Everyday Beauty
by Fred Camper, Chicago Reader, January 5, 2007
[more] [less]
Everyday Beauty
By Fred Camper
January 5, 2007
Melanie Schiff
When Through 1/28
Where Kavi Gupta, 835 W. Washington
MELANIE SCHIFF'S EARLY photographs were inspired by the music she loved -- the Jesus Lizard, Big Black, Sonic Youth. "There was such an emotional urgency to their songs," Schiff says. "You hear a sad song and you feel like it's your experience, and I wanted to make art like that, to make photos like that." But her initial efforts were naively literal, and when she started grad school in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she made "melancholy" portraits of girls in their teens and 20s. "I assumed that sad young girls would be interesting to everyone, but I wasn't really making it interesting," she says. "My first critique was a disaster, and I thought I had made a giant mistake in coming here, in pursuing photography." She's come a long way since then. Her 16 photos and one video at Kavi Gupta are visually and conceptually engaging: she often realigns objects as if discovering a new, hidden order to things.
Raised in Glencoe, Schiff sought escape from the blandness of suburban life in sci-fi novels ("I was a pretty big dork about them"). She also wrote poetry and made art but was "really bad at drawing," she says. For a photography class at New Trier she attempted to duplicate PJ Harvey album cover photos with herself as the subject: "I was a huge fan of her and her albums. I felt music was more emotionally communicative than art." She didn't like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams when she was introduced to their work in high school -- but she loved Cindy Sherman. Schiff attended Colorado College, then transferred to NYU, where she took a course with artist Carolee Schneemann, whom she considered "kind of crazy but brilliant." Schiff was especially impressed by Schneemann's Interior Scroll, a 1975 performance documented on video in which she pulls a scroll from her vagina and reads from it. "I thought, here is this totally gorgeous woman doing this really ugly, kind of crazed primal performance," Schiff says. Schneemann and other feminist artists, such as Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, made Schiff think about "possession and self-awareness and connecting to the space around me." For her senior project at NYU she made a video of herself "committing suicide," then shot stills from it off a TV screen, using the layers of media to filter the scene's emotional impact. In grad school she did a series called "Sleeping Boys," which made men rather than women the subject of the camera's gaze: she photographed three different guys asleep in her bed, knowing it would raise questions about whether they were her lovers.
A year ago Schiff saw an early Sol LeWitt wall drawing in a Chicago home that inspired some of the work in this show. "It was really warm and delicate, like a Zen garden, and really domestic," she says. "These simple, thin lines almost felt feminine." Geometric abstraction might have seemed removed from the feminist approach that had previously interested her, but she'd already been making photos involving formal issues. In this exhibit Lagoon shows two glow sticks inside a beer bottle on the prow of a canoe. In Cases CD containers form a line at the edge of a rectangle of light on the floor. Lights shows three ceiling
lights and an irregular, glowing burst of light cast by the reflective surfaces of CD cases -- a study in the modest beauty of everyday things.
In 2004, when Schiff was thinking about connecting the body with its surroundings, she saw a conceptual photography exhibit in Minneapolis that included impressive work by Valie Export. "She had one photo," Schiff says, "in which she lay her body on the city street mimicking the curved curb." In Mud Reclining Schiff lies covered in mud next to the rounded edge of a Florida sinkhole. In Spit Rainbow she spits water at the camera; her confrontational stance is typical of feminist responses to the camera's gaze while the frame's tilt underscores her taunting persona. But the water makes a rainbow. "Beauty is something that shouldn't be left out," Schiff says.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review13.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Related Exhibitions: Underwater Photographer
Review
by John McKinnon, Time Out Chicago, January 4-10, 2007
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review14.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Related Exhibitions: Underwater Photographer
Female Fairy Tales
by Margaret Hawkins, Chicago Sun-Times, Friday, November 4, 2005
Related Artists: Clare E. Rojas
Related Exhibitions: Hah! ha, ha, ha!
Art in Review: Clare Rojas
by Roberta Smith, New York Times, December 10, 2004
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review18.pdf
Related Artists: Clare E. Rojas
Dramatic in any Language
by David Pagel, Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2005
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review20.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Anderson
Young Masters
by Freire Barnes, Bon Magazine, October 2007
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review21.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Anderson
Local Artists Go Make Good
by Alice Thorson, The Kansas City Star, November 26, 2006
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Village Shalom’s most intriguing offering is a painting by Scott Anderson, who grew up in Olathe and earned his bachelor’s in fine arts from Kansas State. Anderson, who lives in Chicago, is gaining a considerable reputation for his enigmatic sci-fi scenarios. The work in the show depicts a kind of subterranean laboratory/game room equipped with control boards and glowing monitors with the attendant wires and cords. The overall sense is rather sinister, but it’s countered by vignettes such as a grouping of chairs around a cooler of Champagne.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review23.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Anderson
Reviews
by John McKinnon, Flash Art, July-September, 2006
Related Artists: Johanna Billing
Related Exhibitions: Magic & Loss // Magical World
Video takes us for brief stay in kids' 'Magical World'
by Margaret Hawkins, Chicago Sun-Times, Friday, April 14, 2006
Related Artists: Johanna Billing
Related Exhibitions: Magic & Loss // Magical World