September 17 to September 20, 2015

Four years into its latest iteration under the management of Tony Karman, what is there to say about Chicago Expo?

Let’s start with the art, which was wide ranging and of consistent high quality. Naturally, Chicago galleries were present in force and brought along some of the more pleasant surprises. For instance, at Richard Norton, two paintings by the hermetic Chicago painter Gertrude Abercrombie, notably Broken Limb (c. 1940). Corbett vs Dempsey, a gallery whose programming grows more interesting with each passing year, shared a booth with New York’s David Nolan Gallery, which allowed them to pair two Jim Nutt drawings across from Karl Wirsum’s painting Count Fasco’s Mouse Piece Whitey Jr. #2 (1983). In the Exposure section for smaller galleries, the one-year old Regards Gallery featured work by Megan Greene.

With the high cost of participation, there can be an understandable tendency in art fairs for galleries to spread their risk with overly wide selections of materials. This can easily lead to a kind of visual overload, where you see so much that you wind up remembering very little. Happily, to make a more forceful presentation perhaps, quite a number of booths at Chicago Expo showcased a single artist’s work. Flowers Gallery (London and New York), for instance, featured a notable mini-retrospective of Richard Smith, highlighting works from his “Kite” series, and created an invitation-sized catalog with essay especially for it. Galerie Zürcher, with venues in Paris and New York, featured a solo show of Cordy Ryman’s funky painted 2×4 sculptures and wall pieces that stood out for being so raw in a sea of polish. On Stellar Rays, out of New York’s Lower Eastside, focused on J.J. Peet, whose paintings, drawings, and a sculpture are so diverse they could be mistaken for a group installation. One of his paintings went on to be selected for the Northern Trust Arts Club of Chicago Purchase Prize. And Garth Greenen Gallery out of New York devoted his entire space to only three jewel-like paintings, each not much bigger than a sheet of notebook paper, by Victoria Gitman.

The professionalism, range, and quality of the galleries no doubt owed something to the selection committee, which included not only some of the heavy weight gallerists that one might expect – Marianne Boesky, David Zwirner, David Nolan, Rhona Hoffman, Isabella Bortolozzi – but also younger visionaries such as Jessica Silverman, Suzanne Vielmetter, John Corbett (Corbett vs Dempsey), and Candice Madey (On Stellar Rays). The result was a happy mix of blue chip, mid-range, and emerging dealers from 16 countries.

The art was good, then, and so too the venue. The large hall at the end of Navy Pier provided a friendly and vastly superior art viewing space than the slightly claustrophobic Merchandise Mart space that hosted previous fairs. The layout of the booths was generous and intelligent with wide, easy-to-navigate aisles. And Jason Pickelman’s JNL Graphics, the design team that gave the distinctive look to Chicago Art Expo during its heyday in the ‘90s, was once again in charge of the Expo’s image where a clean, professional atmosphere prevailed.

This is all welcome news for an art fair that has gone through as many incarnations as Dr. Who. It’s hard to remember now, but for a long time in the 80s, the fair started by John Wilson to mirror Art Basel was the most important art fair in the Western Hemisphere. Reformulated by Thomas Blackman (who had been the director of the fair under Wilson) its dominance continued into the late ‘90s even as competitors emerged. But it stumbled as it entered the 21st Century, at one point with three competing fairs fighting for dominance, this at the same time that New York, and then Miami, began to become major venues. Moreover, when the first Chicago art fair opened in 1980, it was at the geographic center, literally, for American collectors who were also the major buyers. This is no longer the case; art collecting is international, with major collectors in London, Moscow, Dubai, and other world financial capitals flying from continent to continent to attend the 200 art fairs currently hosted annually. It is a long way to Chicago from Shanghai, or Abu Dhabi.

Chicago very much wants to host a world-class art fair. Tony Karman and his team, along with the selection committee, have worked very hard to give them one. The galleries came and brought the art. But it is yet to be decided if collectors can once again think of Chicago Expo as a must-see destination.

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March 29 to May 5, 2012
529 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-439-1700

Peter Howson has found religion.  To longstanding students of this Scottish brutalist-realist the news will be a matter of some surprise, or not.  He has dealt with apocalypse for most of his career, and it is clear from often harrowing imagery that here is a man with his own demons.  But he is a painter who takes such relish in the underbelly of humanity, dealing out cruel satire, that one wonders how he could paint salvation or bliss.

Howson belongs to the generation of realists who established Glasgow as a significant center of figurative revival in the 1980s.  While Adrian Wisniewski and the late Steven Campbell brought respectively fey and fogey twists to the Italian transavanguardia, Howson, with fellow fiery man-of-the people Ken Currie, represented the more social realist side of the Glasgow Boys.  Less party line than Currie, who tended towards murals celebrating labor leaders of yore, Howson came to specialize in an extreme mannerism that married a veneer of Renaissance/Old Master technique with moral excoriation of social dystopia.  He tapped the mood of anger at economic polarization in a Britain under Margaret Thatcher even if the stylistics seemed a half-century out of date: Satanic mills on fire,  street fighting mobs, depraved scenes worthy of Hogarth’s Gin Lane.  Stylistically, he is a sort of cross between Thomas Hart Benton and John Currin, but without the humor of either of these Americans.  Not that Americans reject him for that—Madonna and, it was reported, Sylvester Stallone became loyal collectors.

Starting out at the legendary Glasgow School of Art in a fully-fledged neo-expressionist style, his work matured through the 1990s from cartoonish “bovver boy” National Front-supporting thugs with bulging neck muscles and bull terriers who looked like their canine twins to sprawling, brooding, hysterical and riotous crowd scenes with lighting to recall the operatic Victorian John Martin and allegory of a neo-medieval sensibility redolent of Bertolt Brecht and early Fritz Lang.  His eight-foot wide frieze, Age of Apathy (1992) massed his bull-necked pot-bellied, wife-beater and baseball-cap sporting yobs, many sieg heiling in the general direction of condemned men strung-up on poles.  The only female admitted to this mayhem was a dazed, voluptuous blonde lolling her beefy thigh over a pedestal and gazing nonchalantly at the doomed scene.

Later in the 1990s, Howson was picked by the British army as an official war artist and sent to cover Bosnia.  What he found there largely confirmed his already resolutely misanthropic worldview, but according to a sensitive if somewhat sensationalizing recent documentary from the BBC, the experience precipitated a nervous breakdown.  He was eventually to receive a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.  Religion came with recovery from acute alcoholism.  The BBC film recounts his struggle to fulfill a commission from Glasgow’s Roman Catholic cathedral (Howson is a Protestant and Glasgow is still a city with a sectarian divide) for a mural of the reformation martyr St John Ogilvie.  What was to have been a massive crowd scene was eventually delivered as focus on the victim awaiting his noose.

His present show at Flowers Gallery in Chelsea, the New York outpost of his longstanding London dealers, shows a series depicting the harrowing of hell and other scenes of massed damnation in a show optimistically titled “Redemption.”  Most of Howson’s stock characters are here in trumps, though in a concession to the timelessness of ecclesiastical imagery, the thugs have lost their singlets, if none of their meanness.  Males continue to dominate the scene (the women one hopes are in heaven) though there are occasionally buttocks and thighs to continue tempting the damned.  Stylistically the artist has graduated to adventurous compressions of space and imaginative liberties with scale, making his paintings feel more old-masterly, although the expressionist treatment of distant architecture, one of his more potent tropes, remains.

The problem for Howson is how to depict the saved, not to mention the Savior, when his figural vocabulary remains so resolutely binary. His murky mannerism only admits two types: the siren and the ghoul.  His uncouth Christ doesn’t merely conform to Gothic norms that would perfectly make sense of an artist of northern sensibility: no one would expect Howson to deliver an effete, Italianate beauty for the Man of Sorrows.  But the Christ in his Outcast (2011) seems only distinguishable from the gargoyles tormenting him thanks to his crown of thorns.

Everyone should be happy for the artist that he has found consolation in religion.  But blessedness is still banned from Howson’s canvases-spiritual or alas aesthetic.  In pictorial terms, the convert remains happiest in Hell.

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February 20 – March 27, 2004

“Art if it is anything, is a blood and death battle, into which you have to throw everything you got.”
– Roger Hilton

Along with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, and others, Roger Hilton was an important part of the post-war artistic vanguard in Britain. The critic Lawrence Alloway ascribed avant-garde status to Hilton in 1954 due to his non-figurative proclivities. Like members of the New York School, Hilton exploded the cubist grid with his compulsive love of the intuitive mark. Although Hilton exuded existentialist drama, in part due to his drinking and also as a product of his times, he thought about art making in a pragmatic way; as if it were something he needed to do everyday, not unlike a bodily function. The typical modernist was ambivalent about the act of making; partially convinced it was a necessity, something they could not do without, and at the same time ironically circumspect about their misanthropic existence in a free market society. Not unlike other twentieth century painters, Hilton believed in the notion of inner necessity, that the artist had to transform their entire existence, to translate their being into works. The modernists who strove to regain the “genius” of childhood, believed in an idealized regression, as compared to realism’s idealized progression. As his body wasted away Hilton’s compositions became more like annotations; confident scribbles hovering over and slicing into the void of the blank page.

The gouache and pencil drawings in this small exhibit were done in 1973-4 when the artist was bedridden. A year before the artist died he wrote, “Because I have peripheral neuritis I have largely lost the use of my legs, the arms and midriff are going. I have a skin condition which is driving me mad. All this is caused by alcohol.” Hilton drew all the time. What do abstract artists perfect after years of making? Perhaps their line takes on a life of its own, suggesting many things but avoiding specificity. Achieving complexity using simple means might be a goal. Hilton embraced ambiguity and avoided references to his own identity, his autobiography. He strove for the timeless.

In the same letter he said that “I no longer have any balls.” “I have been left-handed from birth, but because I lean on my left hand, I have been forced to paint with my right.” So the naivete of these drawings may be due to the artist’s use of his non-dominant hand, but this does raise interesting questions about the nature of abstract art. How important was the final product, and was the transmission of energy and the act of making more important? As conceptual artists have pointed out again and again, the final product was certainly important with regards to the art market. There is something heroic about his efforts in these final years. The alcoholism had destroyed his body and sapped his vitality, but he still derived pleasure from the act of mark making. He learned from Matisse that less is more, that blank spaces could be as charged and meaningful as the imagery and that a few lines could conjure forth a plethora of associations, especially the complexities and nuances of the female form. The female form played an important role in Hilton’s oeuvre and even though this might not be immediately obvious, these drawings are infused with a strong sense of carnality.

Some of these gouaches suggest landscapes, the meeting of earth and sky, and the presence of plant life and/or the human figure. This anthropomorphizing of abstract shapes in the mind of the viewer is unavoidable. The same way we cannot stop the constant stream of thoughts and images in our minds, we can’t stop ourselves from translating ambiguous marks into something identifiable.

The rectangle, which appeared in many of his early oil paintings, is present in only one composition in this exhibit. It has a bright yellow square with crayon line drawing over it. The rest of these gouache drawings could easily be mistaken for the inspired artwork youngsters make at school and parents proudly display on their refrigerators. This is not a put down. Hilton had tremendous drawing skill, but he rejected representation. This fit in with his existentialist mindset. The fact that he was always sloshed added to the drama, the urgency and fury of these works. Picasso claimed that he wanted to recover the purity of childhood in his work, and the playful sloppiness and simplifications and distortions of the human form found in many of his late oils testifies to this. Hilton manages to recapture the pure abandon or lack of self consciousness found in children’s art in these gouaches.

By drawing for so many years Hilton could balance a composition with ease. Although he liked to think he was struggling with the materials, he must have known that he could “get it right” whenever he wanted to. An artist feels a private sense of pleasure when making a drawing that is the offspring of years of experience. Hilton loved to cut into a painted surface with a pencil. He also liked using unmixed colors, and reacted against preciosity. He wanted to “humanize Mondrian” and a love of mark marking eventually consumed him. He did three to five gouaches a day during his final years and was proud that they were selling quite well.

The pencil drawings in this exhibit are metaphysical meditations on the female form and imaginary creatures consisting of symbolic orifices and phalluses. Hilton displays tremendous sensitivity and visual wisdom in the way he varies the amount of pressure he applies to the surface of the paper with the tip of the pencil. He caresses imaginary forms with pent up sexual energy and allows his mind to travel to very odd places while he doodles.

When do you stop? When is a work that consists of tapering scribbles and half formed shapes finished? Like the traveler in Frost’s The Road Not Taken, Hilton “took the one less traveled by.” An abstract artist is a wanderer in the wilderness in the sense that the masses prefer realism and tend to scoff at abstract art and the artist must constantly turn inward which can be a meditative or hellish experience depending on the artist’s temperament and mental makeup. There is an overwhelming sense of clarity in these works on paper, but we can never be quite sure what we are seeing or what the artist was feeling. These are enigmas, a triumph of will and energy over emaciated matter. And the playfulness that is apparent in all of the them attests to the fact that Hilton derived enjoyment from making stuff until the very end.

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