Gallery owner Thomas McCormick has mounted a show of the paintings and drawings of the late THOMAS KING BAKER, an amateur Kansas City artist who worked by day as an insurance salesman and died in 1972. Titled “An Eccentric Original,” the show displays a large selection of the works McCormick came upon in the basement of another deceased Kansas City painter, Frederic James. Baker’s talents range from succinct illustrations in ink of a single person, akin to New Yorker magazine cartoons, to very detailed, richly colored paintings of a person or group of people in a highly decorative setting. Capturing the mood of a bygone era, most of the works on display reflect Baker’s fascination with the sophisticated worlds of fashion, theater and music. But he simultaneously poked fun at those circles and the people who inhabited them, including himself. The titles he gave his works suggest how pointed his his comments could be. One oil painting on paper, depicting a bored looking woman in fancy evening attire, is titled “Oh for pity’s sake, we’ve already seen this opera.” A simple ink on paper sketch shows a rich-looking lady at a seemingly proper restaurant who is wearing a very silly yet probably trendy Pilgrim-style hat, from which leaves or arrows sprout forth. Baker’s title is, “I thought the Iroquois were extinct.” A catalog from a larger show of Baker’s work mounted earlier this year at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City is available for sale. It details the artist’s life, his long-standing interest in art, his method of working and his other pastimes. He wrote two comic operas and illustrated a spoof on Vogue magazine. Pages from Baker’s vestpocket daybooks, including his daily logs, are reproduced. They detail his compulsiveness about recording lunch and dinner dates, bills, doctor appointments and even his paintings. They record the day he started each painting, what it looked like, any revisions he made and to whom he gave the work. At the back of the daybooks, he drew tiny sketches of each painting. The show continues until Dec. 20 at 2055 N. Winchester St.
In a joint exhibition, German artists Stefan Eberstadt and Stephan Fritsch depict the concept of layers and relationships through their choice of different traditional genres and how they display the results in a specific space. But don’t expect the ordinary from these artists who work separately but collaborate. As Eberstadt said in a conversation with Ulrich Wilmes, a Munich curator, “. . .we work with traditional media — sculpture and painting — but we don’t necessarily fulfil the viewer’s expectations.” Their aim is also to present novel work that tests our definitions of what a painting and a sculpture is and how it should be displayed. Fritsch works with household emulsion paint and places his rectangular canvases on several walls of the TBA Exhibition gallery. He is inspired by the colors of the room or house where he is working, and paints his fields of mostly solid colors, plus some with stripes, atop black backgrounds, which are allowed to show through ever so slightly. For this exhibit, the 10 canvases were inspired by a home where he stayed and worked on West Wilson Avenue in Chicago. And he has installed them fairly low on the walls, drawing the eye toward Eberstadt’s sculptures. Eberstadt builds low-lying very architectural forms of wood and screws, the latter left visible, and sometimes incorporates glass and emulsion paint. The two he has exhibited here also reveal layers, including the empty space between the sculpture and the floor in his unpainted, sprawling “Ground Plan 1997.” The other work, “Proportions 1997,” made of timber, plywood, glass, white emulsion paint and black drywall screws, lies off to one corner of the exhibit space, appearing almost an afterthought, though very much relating to the white gallery. The show continues at TBA, 230 W. Huron St., through Nov. 26.
