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HELEN MIRRA Spread out on the malt brown floor of the Renaissance Society this summer were 110 equilateral triangles of indigo cloth partially sewn together in a segmented field: Helen [...]

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY The films of Mark Lewis are earnest, disarming, and seditious. In construction they couldn't be more straightforward: Each of the two films shown here unfolds in real [...]

BETTY RYMER GALLERY SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO Robert Blanchon, who died in 1999 at thirty-three from AIDS-related illnesses, was the ultimate accelerated man. Whether sending out press [...]

COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO CENTER FOR BOOK & PAPER ARTS One of the founders of Fluxus in the early '60, Dick Higgins (1938-98) lived long enough to witness the '90s revival [...]

ZOLLA/LIEBERMAN GALLERY INC. As this recent show demonstrates, painting can still serve as color's laboratory, with pattern one of its most powerful investigative tools. Anoka Faruqee breaks down painstakingly observed [...]

Still impish after all these years, Karl Wirsum's whimsical trove of figural invention continues to mesmerize. He's been at it since the '60s, this meticulous yet goofy rearticulation of the [...]

MEXICAN FINE ARTS CENTER MUSEUM The idiosyncratic and evocative work of Remedios Varo (1908-63) constitutes a superb but little-recognized episode in the history of Surrealism. This exhibition of seventy paintings [...]

BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Harvey Opgenorth knows that one way to consider the many legacies of modem painting is to step into its shoes. Opgenorth begins the works in his ongoing [...]

Nina Bovasso revs her paintings right up to the point where the riotous starts to dribble over into the giddy. But the swirling up-tempo pacing of her works, their curvy [...]

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY Walter Niedermayr's wall assemblages of panoramic photographs record both the spectacular profile of his native region of the Italian Alps and the results of its relentless colonization [...]

TBA EXHIBITION SPACE The title of Stephen Lapthisophon's exhibition, 'Defense d'Afficher,' refers to signs forbidding the posting of printed materials on public walls ('post no bills'). But a deliberate mistranslation [...]

PETER MILLER GALLERY Julie Heffernan provides precisely the kind of thing one might expect from fin-demillennium painting (though it's pretty rarely found): a mannered, even claustrophobic engagement with canonical Western [...]

Post-arcadian, neo-romantic, and curiously classical, Rodney Graham's seemingly contradictory investigations of nature negotiate the seditious terrain between criticality and homage. His signature large photographs of inverted trees (perhaps less an [...]

Matthew Rich makes art in patchwork fashion. A pictorial quilter, he stitches--tapes, actually--imprecise geometric forms together, creating compositions that never hide the means of their production. He begins by painting [...]

Conversations about Jim Lutes regularly devolve into assessments of his 'Chicago-ness,' or the degree to which the artist from Washington State who relocated to Chicago for his MFA and remained [...]

All twelve paintings Ciaran Murphy showed in his recent solo at Kavi Gupta allude to nature. This was an exhibition of leering monkeys, blasted tree trunks, moonlit hills, hunting hyenas, [...]

Michael Piazza's death in 2006 robbed Chicago of one of its most persistent cultural and social activists, an artist and teacher who believed that creativity could be a corrective and [...]

John Frankenheimer's 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate depicts the brainwashing of captured American soldiers during the Korean War, with one soldier programmed to become an assassin. It's an eerie tale [...]

After thirty-three years spent supervising inventory in a state-run home-supplies store in Brno, Czech Republic, Jana Seda (1930-2007) retired and began to drift into a diminished old age. Widowed and [...]

Up, down, left, right--the seeming inexhaustibility of the possible formal (and even psychological and emotive) variations in the geometric structure of the grid is what maintains its curious hold on [...]

What if several elite and prestigious landmark homes and apartment complexes around your city metamorphosed, suddenly and inexplicably, into blue-collar, working-class residences? Such was the premise of 'Status L Phenomenon,' [...]

For thousands of years, the trade routes of the Silk Road have linked China and the West. It was almost exclusively the cultures at either end that benefited economically from [...]

Arguments in favor of zoos--that they preserve and provide opportunities for researching 'at risk' species, compensate for diminishing natural habitats, and educate new generations about the diversity of life--always come [...]

This must have been an annus horribilis for Laura Mosquera, so forlorn and melancholic are the images in her exhibition, called 'in the deep end.' Best known for large and [...]

Giorgio Vasari's tale about how Paolo Uccello would sit at his desk late into the night, drawing obsessively, refusing his wife's entreaties to come to bed, muttering, 'What a sweet [...]

Of the eight works in Donald Young Gallery's recent Gary Hill micro-retrospective--dating from 1978 to 2005--Accordions (The Belsunce Recordings, July 2001), 2001-2002, is the largest. A room-filling video installation, its [...]

Bringing the outside inside is an established artistic strategy, but rarely is it taken to the lengths Yutaka Sone attains in his recent show at the Renaissance Society, 'Forecast: Snow.' [...]

Botanical gardens are to nature what art museums are to culture, highly selective showcases in which materials are forcibly recontextualized and arranged in hierarchies for public consumption. They speak about [...]

Bruce Nauman as Midwestern artist par excellence? He was, after all, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, but the heartland has rarely been noted [...]

Vintage porn might be the last place one would expect to encounter Arcadia, but Tracy Nakayama unequivocally positions it there. Her seemingly endless series of sepia ink drawings on paper [...]

The recent appearance of endless hours of amateur video documenting last year's Southeast Asian tsunami has provided numerous examples of precisely the kind of imagery that fascinates artist Susan Giles--not [...]

Peter Gallo has all the (slow) moves of a neoslacker: an apparent disdain for materials; an alert scavenger's attitude toward culture; an eye for the poignant frailties of the vernacular; [...]

The raspy clackety-clack of 16 mm cine projectors is already a poignant and wistful sound, and this exhibition of recent films and drawings by Jenny Perlin included four such projectors [...]

A certain fantasy of the American Southwest as barren, inhospitable, timeless, stony, and impassive--Mars with sagebrush--has long held a grip on the American imagination. Kirsten Stoltmann, who lived in the [...]

In the '60s and '70s a generation of photographers appeared, concerned with both the intrinsic nature of the camera and the social nature of the photograph, and began to investigate [...]