Terri Zupanc’s new landscape paintings, at the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph St., are the most varied in size, atmosphere and handling that the artist has exhibited in town.
The show includes only seven pieces, but within that number the range of expression perhaps will be surprising, given that Zupanc has adhered to a fairly strict program of subject matter and vantage point.
As before, depictions are of actual places on family land in Wisconsin, all unpeopled and caught at times of day-dawn, the deep of night-when they lend themselves more easily to equivalents for interior states.
However, where the artist previously showed winter images that revealed their chromatic intensity only slowly, here the season is spring, though one that has come suddenly and retains a good measure of dankness in spite of more variegated colors. It is the chilled, newly awakened spring of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony or Igor Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps.”
One of the smaller pieces also indicates a kind of atmosphere that seems to eat at the landscape, partially dissolving it as in the case of paintings by J.M.W. Turner. But that is not to say Zupanc indulges in Romantic bravura. Her brushwork, while freer, retains much of its customary beauty and polish.
New to the artist is a large mural-like format that shows her moving extremely close to pure abstraction but rigorously controlling the (slow) rate at which representational elements reveal themselves so that the piece gradually becomes a vast, almost heroic landscape, after all. (Through Jan. 9.)
– Wesley M. Dixon Jr., a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago for 24 years, this week became chairman of the museum’s board, succeeding Marshall Field, who served in the position since 1987. Nominated last June, Dixon was confirmed for a term of three years at the board’s annual meeting on Monday.
– The Pritzker family of Chicago has given the Art Institute $1 million to endow a curatorial chair in the museum’s department of Asian art. Tom Pritzker has been a trustee of the institute for five years. He and his wife, Margot, also are longtime advisory members of the institute’s committee on Asian art. Yutaka Mino, head of the Asian art department since 1984, will be the first curator to occupy the chair.
– Artist and publisher Dick Higgins will give a free talk, “Something Else Press and Fluxus,” exploring the relations between printed matter and an anarchic international association of artists formed in the 1960s, at 11:45 a.m. Thursday at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, 1967 Sheridan Rd., Evanston.
– Holiday store windows created by more than 20 Chicago artists will be unveiled at a benefit for the Museum of Contemporary Art from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday at Barneys New York, 25 E. Oak St. Admission to the event, curated by Chicago artist Adam Brooks, is $35. Call 312-280-5163.
– More than 40 Chicago-area museum and cultural center stores will participate in the Newberry Library’s “Very Merry Bazaar” beginning at 10 a.m. Friday and continuing through the weekend at the library, 60 W. Walton St. Admission is $5, free for children under age 12.
– “Museum, Nations, Identities,” a two-day symposium on the roles museums have played in forming local, national and transnational identities, will begin at 6 p.m. Friday in the Rubloff Auditorium of the Art Institute, Columbus Drive near Monroe Street. The event is free but requires registration with the institute’s Department of Museum Education. Call 312-443-3680.
– Jorge Fichtel and Jose Maria Cobarrubias, activist artist-curators from the gay and lesbian cultural community in Mexico City, will give a free slide-and-video presentation at 6 p.m. Friday at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1852 W. 19th St.
– A free roundtable discussion among five artist members of the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland, will be held at 4 p.m. Tuesday at the Northwestern University Department of Art Theory and Practice on the university campus in Evanston. For specific location and reservations, call 708-491-7346.
