David Kroll’s new paintings at the Betsy Rosenfield Gallery continue in the artist’s familiar antiquarian style that reproduces the look of old landscapes and still lifes but turns them to contemporary ends.
Most of the incident takes place in a narrow strip at the bottom of each canvas where Kroll positions fruits and decorative porcelains against backdrops of foliage caught at sunset.
Relatively new to the work are birds, insects and reptiles that inject depredation and decay into what clearly are manmade idylls.
Kroll does not go so far as Chicago painter Laurie Hogin, who has made her feathered and furry creatures monstrous. He gives just a hint of something ominous and leaves it open to interpretation, as it could be just part of a cycle of nature made to look worse for being juxtaposed with man’s artifice.
Kroll’s lavishes his representational gifts only on the incident in each canvas, tending to generalize lazily everywhere else. His smaller pictures, however, force a greater concentration and, thus, more painstakingly detailed rendering. (At 212 W. Superior St. through Oct. 8.)
– Amada Cruz, since 1989 associate curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, will become the Manilow Curator of Special Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, effective Jan. 2. She will manage the organization, planning and implementation of the MCA’s temporary exhibition program, including related publications. Cruz fills a position endowed by Susan and Lewis Manilow and the Nathan Manilow Foundation.
– Michael Conforti, chief curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, will become director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., on Nov. 7. Conforti will succeed David Brooke, who is retiring after 17 years as the Clark’s director.
– The next installment of the Carnegie International, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious surveys of contemporary art, will be held from Nov. 2, 1995, through Feb. 18, 1996, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The show will be organized by curator Richard Armstrong, with the counsel of Bice Curiger, Mark Rosenthal and Vicente Todoli.
– Thirty-six contemporary works from the estate of Chicago lawyer Gerald S. Elliott will be offered at Christie’s auction house in Manhattan on Nov. 2 and 3. Pieces by Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz will be included. Last week Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art received 109 works from the Elliott estate, the largest gift in the museum’s history.
– The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art have received grants for annual operating support from Marshall Field & Co. and Target Stores. Eight Chicago area arts institutions were recipients. The grants were for $50,000 and $25,000, respectively.
– “Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist,” a retrospective co-organized by the Art Institute, opens Friday at the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition, which marks the centenary of the artist’s death, presents 117 paintings and works on paper. It will continue in Paris through Jan. 9. Then the exhibition will travel to Chicago (Feb. 18 through May 28).
– Vito Acconci, one of the key figures in American art of the 1970s, will speak on his work at 5 p.m. Monday in Room L285 of the Education, Communications & Social Work Building of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Harrison and Morgan Streets. Free admission. A show of Acconci graphics continues through Oct. 1 at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria St.
– Robert J. Bianchi of the Metropolitan Museum of Art will give a free talk on “The Role of the Artist in Ancient Egyptian Art” at 6 p.m. Tuesday in Fullerton Auditorium of the Art Institute, Michigan Avenue at Adams Street.
– Abstract painter Louise Fishman will speak about her art at 6 p.m. Wednesday in the auditorium of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbus Drive at Jackson Boulevard. Admission: $3.
