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Art Chicago
Art Chicago
Author: Jeff M. Ward
ArtNexus No. 50 - Sep 2003
|  | The success of this spring’s Art Chicago 2003 was challenged by a trio of harrowing obstacles: the faltering economy of the United States, the expense and hassle of traveling during war-time, and fierce competition from newer art fairs on the international scene. Both the new Basel Miami Art Fair, which met with much success last December, and New York’s Armory Show in February drew many European and New York galleries away from their annual visit to Chicago. Consequently, Art Chicago felt airier than usual, and although the number of participating galleries was on par with last year’s fair, some bought fewer booths than usual. The opening night party, traditionally a fundraiser for Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art was relatively successful, attracting more than 2,000 partygoers and bringing in around $300,000 for the museum. Attendance after this official opening seemed a little diminished from past years, but the aisles were still crowded with avid onlookers and possible purchasers during the early May weekend.
A positive outcome of the European and New York no-shows is that there was room for newer galleries from around the world. Galleries from Korea, China, and Russia, mixed with an unusually strong showing of galleries that featured Latin American art. Among the most successful was the Valencia/Madrid gallery, My Name’s Lolita. Their booth was filled with paintings that attracted much interest on the part of local and national collectors, especially the work of Joel Mestre, Paco de la Torre, and Juan Cuellar. This was the gallery’s second year at Art Chicago, and sales were purportedly up by thirty percent from 2002. Galeria Visor from Spain was not as optimistic, explaining that this was the worst of the five years they have exhibited here. However, their artists, the Spanish couple Bleda y Rosa, garnered some sales activity with their large-format color photographs of landscapes that appear empty but are resonant with the history of past civilizations.
Ramón Cernuda suggested that the emphasis on photography on the part of the fair’s organizers was responsible for slow sales at his gallery, Arte Cernuda, from Coral Gables, Florida; his gallery focuses mainly on modern canvases, including work by the widely-collected Wifredo Lam, as well as traditional tropical landscapes.
Though they conceded that the American economy was poor, seven-year veterans Praxis International from Buenos Aires, Argentina showed a new series by artist Iturria which generated enthusiasm for their booth. In these works on shaped Formica the artist’s elongated figures—painted in his trademark Dubuffet-like, thick and crude impasto—danced among a computer’s keys.
Galería Isabel Ignacio, from Seville, Spain, plans to return as well, but the director will be certain to alter her strategy for next year’s fair. In her first Art Chicago outing, she chose to showcase the sculpture, digital prints, and static video of a single artist. Though Jeseus Algovi’s breakdown of the alphabet into drawn graphics rather than syntax was well received, Ignacio felt she would make a stronger impact for the identity of her gallery, as well as its coffers, by showcasing several of her gallery’s artists in the future. It would be unfortunate, however, if refreshing aesthetic cohesion were to be seen as not entirely financially viable at an art fair. Luckily, the Project Room spaces, sponsored by Art Chicago, afford dealers the opportunity to devote an entire space to a single project.
Dominating Galería Enrique Guerrero was a strange large steel-and-plastic pod, a special project by Pedro Reyes. This low-cost practical structure was crawling with small children, who happily ducked in and out (one little blonde girl cautioned her peers to be careful not to slip and get trapped by the pod’s slotted floor). Reyes’s furniture/sculpture is also on view in the section curated by Carlos Basualdo for the Venice Biennale. Poetic, but politically charged work rounded out Guerrero’s booth. Two large paintings by Manuel Cerda in the series “Entre ahora y hoy” appeared to be happy and bright, until one donned the 3-D glasses dangling in front of them, which filtered the coy camouflage to reveal scenes of social strife. A suite of drawings by Guillermo Kuitca were similarly seductive: his theater scenes and seating charts were disturbingly spontaneous and blurred due to a fluid that forced the solid colors of the computer printouts to run.
A multi-media extravaganza by Enrique Marty lurked in Galería Espacio Mínimo. Along one wall, the booth suddenly turned into a domestic hallway with wallpaper and wainscoting, which led into a darkened room. Marty filled it with weird sculptures of ugly old men, who also leered scarily from the video projection. This aggressively messy and loud installation juxtaposed with the cool, white-walled gallery was like a bad dream sequence planted into the niceties of the art fair.
Another Project Room was Brígida Baltar’s video projection for Galería Nara Roesler. Adjacent to the Brazilian booth, Baltar’s projected video depicted a woman ambling through foggy grassland; the moisture in the air around her condensed in glass vials affixed to her bubble-wrap backpack. Another significant piece in Roesler’s space was Arthur Omar’s garish, color-manipulated photographs of carnival performers, which were featured in the last Cuban Biennial.
Eduardo Lopez, the perennial favorite of Alexterri, a gallery from San Sebastián, Spain, showed multi-paneled, gray-toned painting doodles that abjectly depicted cartoon references. Also popular for the San Sebastián gallery was Carmen Calvo’s combination of found objects affixed to the surfaces of vintage-looking photos. The work looked even more nostalgic than it did in the Spanish pavilion of the 1997 Venice Biennale.
Another collusion of surface and object was evident in the work of Dario Escobar at the Jacob Karpio booth. Escobar creates political synergy with decorative patterns, liturgical motifs, and military camouflage on quotidian objects. Most memorable were his gilded exercise machines. In its twenty-two year history the Jacob Karpio space from San José, Costa Rica, has made mobility a part of the gallery’s mission, as it professes “to break the borders among the hegemonic centers, exhibiting and confronting contemporary art without geographical designations.”
A kinship might be found between these ideals and the new Chicago phenomenon, “The Stray Show.” Conceived by the organizers of Art Chicago, “The Stray Show” was designed to be a local, art fair-style convention for galleries spread out among Chicago’s many neighborhoods but has quickly matured over its two-and-a-half-year history to become Art Chicago’s answer to Art Basel’s “Liste.” In its third presentation—and first simultaneous exhibition with Art Chicago at Navy Pier—not-for-profit space M&M Projects from San Juan, Puerto Rico became the first Latin American exhibitor. Their booth featured Chemi Rosado Seijo’s banner documenting the artist’s painting of a mountain town in varying shades of green. Although the preponderance of “Stray’s” approximately 50 young galleries arranged in a large raw warehouse space still come from Chicago, the lively booth of one local exhibitor, Seven Three Split, featured Puerto Rican artist Pedro Velez’s works.
Back at Art Chicago, Hispanic artists also made a strong showing among the booths in the International Invitation section that was filled with newer galleries from around the world. Carla Arocha’s mirror pieces, combining a slapdash modernism with a politically anxious undercurrent, were in high demand at Monique Meloche gallery. Also at Meloche’s booth were Laura Mosquera’s vibrant, graphic paintings of gallery openings in which figures are cynically depersonalized behind free-floating, geometric design flourishes, pattern-encrusted clothing, and soupy, out-of-focus faces. Julia Friedman was at the fair this year with a hybrid architectural model/sculpture—half alligator, half ranch house—by Sergio Vega. Across the aisle Body Builder Sportsman highlighted work by Diana Guerrero Macia: fabric collages of familiar pop items, and a curiously pleasant circular bench made of color-coded modules. Lizabeth Oliveria from San Francisco had a nice suite of small paintings by Clare Rojas, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute.
The new Los Angeles gallery, Cherry de los Reyes featured delicate embroidered pictures by Ruby Osorio, also part of the International Invitational. The little girls who inhabit Osorio’s fantasy world appear sweet, but their actions foretell darker natures. Peres Projects, also from Los Angeles, was very psychedelic—updated Peter Max mixed with very urban skateboard culture. Most appealing in this style was a brightly colored composition by someone apparently named “Assume Vivid Astro Focus,” (Eli Sudbrack); the work comes on a CD Rom with a certificate of authenticity and the buyer (of an edition of 3 at $2,000) can then print the work in any size, on any media, in a user-friendly Sol Lewitt-type method. Havana, Cuba’s Galería la Casona was also part of the Invitational. They sold several prints of the whimsical, if not especially erotic, black-and-white photographic close-ups of the artist René Peña’s crotch in jockey underwear.
Argentinean-born Liliana Porter was the darling of the fair overall, making an impressive showing in several booths: Galería Espacio Mínimo, Art Core, Casas Riegner and the Tamarind Institute. In her photographic work, Porter’s extensive collections of toys are given voice and agency through straightforward lighting and monochromatic backgrounds. A louder use of cultural artifacts was on display at Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Here, Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn fabricated a giant gold chain and pendant with the CNN network logo in proletarian materials of cardboard and foil. With this piece, Hirshhorn questions the facile transfer that occurs among commercialism, youth culture, and the construction of identity. A similar investigation is taken up by Siebren Versteeg in a silent video, in which television news reporters discuss their intimate lives by means of the closed captioning designed for the hearing impaired. This technological trick is accomplished by hooking the subtitles in a live feed to people’s personal “blogs” (web-based journals and logbooks).
Another noteworthy booth in the fair was Wendy Cooper Gallery from Madison, Wisconsin, an Art Chicago first-timer, who interested buyers with fresh figurative work from young artists such as Scott Roberts, Chris Johanson, and Nancy Mladenoff. Donald Young Gallery of Chicago featured elegant glass work by Josiah McIlheney. Chelsea-based D’Amelio Terras brought work by Yoshihiro Suda, who opened his first U.S. museum exhibition at the Art Institute this summer with tiny trompe l’oeil weeds sprouting out of improbable places.
Although the usual grumblings continued, many dealers also expressed the feeling that visiting the Chicago art fair had been both productive and successful. Even as Chicago’s historic art fair is said to be on the wane, new wrinkles in the tried and true, as well as whole new crazy scenes are combusting to create new life forms here.
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