Category: Art Criticism
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Peter Plagens at Rule Gallery from adobeairstream.com
Explosions of color are presented in the solo-exhibition of collage paintings by Peter Plagens at Rule Gallery. Vivid color seeps into the paper, full chroma jars the eyes in staggering layers, there is depth, contradiction and spontaneity in the color, packed in relatively small frames. The largest paintings are 24 x 18 inches the smallest…
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Clyfford Still Museum to Open with Fanfare, and Controversy from adobeairstream.com
I wrote this piece last month for adobeairstream.com. The museum opens this week. On September 22, I took a hard-hat tour of the Brad Cloepfil-designed Clyfford Still museum in Denver. The 28,000-square foot, two-story structure— a rooted concrete cube—sits behind its more outlandish neighbor, the Denver Art Museum. By way of transition, a pastoral park…
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Fred Sandback at MCA Denver from adobeairstream.com
One building and 16 ounces of string, that’s what one finds at MCA/Denver. Of course it’s much more than that. The conceptual, minimalist sculptures of Fred Sandback create transparent planes that change the perspective of the otherwise bare galleries at the museum, providing new insight for the viewer. Sandback was born in 1943 and died…
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Robert Adams Photography at DAM: A Bodhisattva Sees the West from adobeairstream.com
Photographer Robert Adams is a bodhisattva to the American West: “I want to make accurate photographs of the western landscape. One goal is to show what’s gone wrong so we’ll change it. Another is to show what’s right so we’ll take some hope in it,” he wrote. Through Adams’s viewfinder, the West, the ideal and…
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The Chair at Shy Rabbit Contemporary Arts in Pagosa Springs from adobeairstream.com
Chairs have been the subject of paintings throughout history. Van Gogh painted one, so did John Singer Sargent, Henri Matisse and David Hockney. Edward Hopper chose a train car filled with mostly empty dark green chairs, focusing on a blonde female figure for his painting “Chair Car.” An exhibit currently open at Shy Rabbit Contemporary…
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15 Artists at Kirkland Not Radical at All from adobeairstream.com
Just as the Impressionists broke with the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the 1913 Armory Show in New York brought the scandalous work of Brancusi, Matisse, Braque and Duchamp to America. The 1948 division in Denver showed that modernism had rooted itself in Colorado brought by John E. Thompson when he came to Colorado in 1914…
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Making Treasure from Trash: Reclamation at Center for Visual Art from adobeairstream.com
Reclamation speaks to the human need to overcome consumption, to subvert capitalistic messages and to focus on the still, quiet voice at the creative core.
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Regan Rosburg: The Understory exhibition essay for David B. Smith Gallery
Regan Rosburg is inspired by the humble network of life that proliferates on the forest floor, in the shade, beneath the canopy of trees that sore above, blocking out the precious sunlight. The artist collects objects and insects from the deciduous forest of Northeastern Tennessee where she lives on a small farm with her fiancé.…
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Patrick Mcfarlin at Goodwin Fine Art in Denver
Mcfarlin began exploring this body of work in 2008, inspired by the obituary postings in Art in America’s Annual Guide. He was initially struck by how the lives of these art-world celebrities were reduced to a two-line sentence.
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Libby Lumpkin Picks Urbane and Quirky Art for New Mexorado from adobeairstream.com
This kind of juried exhibition provides the opportunity to better know some of your scattered neighbors—to learn more about all those loners, hippies, socialites, cowpokes, scientists, and retired generals living at the end of some dirt road, some of whom are developing as artists, and a couple of whom might actually be waiting for that…
Leanne Goebel 