David Klamen has had one of the more remarkable careers of any Chicago painter, for in 19 years he has not only succeeded with the kind of academic realism that seldom gained much currency in this city, but also has convinced viewers that it was a conceptual enterprise.
His exhibition of recent works at the Richard Gray Gallery contains pieces in both abstract and representational styles. There are realist drawings and a large painting, an installation of 35 canvases both realist and abstract plus several Op art translations of images including a Poussin painting and pin-up photographs.
All of this is adeptly executed and optically stimulating. However, it has the air of art as sport, done mainly because the artist can do it rather than as a response to any formal or conceptual necessity.
Considerable craft is involved, particularly in the representational pieces, though the drawings and a meticulously dotted painting use gimmicks to contrast flat and deep space in a way that anyone should be able to detect, though Klamen’s audience hasn’t, evidenced by continuing acceptance.
The installation is an exercise in style that’s brought off well enough but is empty. Ballast is not a part of Klamen’s arsenal; he is too busy convincing us of his versatility to see the use of it. So the show as a whole has little weight, which is not fatal but at odds with how much the artist wants to look serious.
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At 875 N. Michigan Ave., through Feb. 7. 312-642-8877.
Tony Phillips
Tony Phillips’ exhibition at the Gescheidle Gallery is his first in Chicago in eight years, and that’s much too long an absence for an artist of his caliber. But presumably he is extremely demanding and self-critical; at least, that’s what the hardness and finish of his lone graphite drawing and seven pastels would seem to indicate.
His vision is harder to pin down. Certainly it’s fantastic and often grotesque. But there’s a clear vein of tenderness in it too, that’s never quite overwhelmed by broad, cartoon-like mayhem or images blunt and pathetic.
This time the artist is preoccupied with mortality, twice offering grim, contemporary versions of the ages of man alongside other treatments of dismemberment, decay and horrific passage. Several of the pieces have the strangeness of dream or nightmare images in lurid color. But one is simply a human skull turned on its side and observed intensely.
If memory serves right, the pastels in Phillips’ show a decade or more ago at the Hyde Park Art Center were larger than these new ones, and proclaimed an ambition as great as painting. Now that kind of statement seems to matter less, though the works are no less strong; they’re actually, in an odd way, stronger, like off-kilter, phantasmagorial chamber music.
The precision of the drawing seems essential to fix with clarity images the mind would rather forget, and this task is achieved most beautifully.
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At 300 W. Superior St., through Feb. 8. 312-654-0600.
Burnham architecture
Of all the people who made Chicago an architecturally great city, Daniel Burnham most resists us when it comes to specifics. What did he alone give to the buildings created by D.H. Burnham and Co.? It’s difficult to say, so difficult in fact, that some think him overrated as an architect and more an organizer who headed a successful prototype of a large corporation.
Still, Burnham is a legendary figure, and legends are engrossing to explore, particularly through seldom seen material like that assembled by the Architech Gallery. Here are rare pastel and chalk drawings in Burnham’s own hand plus plans, blueprints and drawings used on-site for some of his most famous Chicago-area buildings including the Rookery.
One of the premises of the show is that the effect of Burnham on the city continued long after his death in 1912, so works are shown from his firm almost to the end of the ’20s. Thus a case is built to suggest that Burnham’s chief architectural contributions were in the areas of scale and a refined backward-looking European taste.
As is usually the case at Architech, the primary material is supported handsomely, with such curiosities as an 1892 panoramic engraving of the heart of Chicago and an early 20th Century bronze bust of Caesar from Burnham’s collection.
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At 730 N. Franklin St., through March 22. 312-475-1290.
