Mike Baur’s exhibition of sculpture and drawings, at the Zaks Gallery, 620 N. Michigan Ave., evinces how artistic richness is achieved slowly, over the long run, rather than through epiphanies or bursts of energy.
Many years have passed since the sculptor showed at the Zriny-Hayes Gallery on Halsted Street, when the basic elements of his art were present but awaiting elaboration and deepening.
If memory serves correctly, even then he worked with concrete and steel, creating pieces that looked like parts of ruined, excavated machinery. A huge outdoor work from the ’70s, with rusted gears, virtually announced what has come to be called the “post-industrial” era.
In no exhibition seen in Chicago do I recall Baur ever departing from brute materials or an appearance at once contemporary and antique. But most of his pieces sounded the same strong tone without much variation, and only gradually have shadings and shifts of emphasis crept in.
The complex playfulness of Baur’s 1993 piece titled “Trans” clearly did not come overnight, and if it had, few viewers would have known what to make of it. Yet here, now, the odd and almost humorous sprawl seems a logical extension of the artist’s work, made possible by the maturity that brings increased confidence.
The same holds true, though in a different sense, for an inverted hanging piece called “Sloth,” also from 1993. Baur does not here indulge any tendency to anthropomorphize. The piece remains resolutely industrial in its form and strength.
However, the artist has reached a stage where, on one level, he can risk a whimsical association with an animal both passive and sedentary because, on a deeper level, the piece still bristles with threat. Baur has it both ways, and easily allows us to grasp his intentions either separately or at once.
Little on view proclaims its freshness, though the drawings are bolder and further removed from the feeling of studies for sculpture, and three-dimensional pieces are subtly enriched through the addition of mahogany, marble and rubber.
Baur has introduced such materials as if by stealth, as you often can’t distinguish them immediately, and even after learning of them, they remain in close harmony with other components, creating no dramatic effect by pushing themselves forward or leaping out.
The openwork wall piece titled “Gird,” for example, has a chain-link belt that hangs and attaches to rollers, giving the work a good deal of its visual interest. But the material and how Baur has used it still looks natural, almost inevitable, without having the belt’s convolutions draw undue attention to themselves.
In “Universe,” the artist guides the viewer from a cracked podlike hood to an examination of its interior, and the gentleness with which Baur’s sequence of forms leads us is really quite a wonder, given the piece’s central cleft and armorlike grille with panels stressfully warped.
Smaller tabletop pieces are compact, with less variety in materials and deployment, though here, too, Baur has sometimes introduced rubber and wood in a sly, self-effacing manner, making the works not at all as blunt as they may initially look. (Through March 15.)
