Renowned modern sculptor Starr Kempf was found dead April 7 at his Pine Grove Avenue studio in Colorado Springs. Police said Kempf, 77, appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Kempf was best known for his ambitious steel kinetic sculptures, which incorporated ready-made elements like ventilator turbines and…
In a sense, modern art came to the United States because of World War II. Hitler, like some of the more extreme right-wingers of our own time, hated modernism. Among his earliest targets were the artists and architects of the famous Bauhaus school, which was forcibly closed by the Nazis…
I’ll be as clear as glass. It is an act of barbarism to even raise the question of whether I. M. Pei’s Zeckendorf Plaza is worth preserving, let alone to threaten it with destruction, as St. Louis-based absentee landlord Fred Kummer has. The plaza ranks as one of the greatest…
Eric Zimmer, a relatively new member of the Edge Gallery co-op as well as a relative newcomer to Denver, currently fills Edge’s front gallery with an ambitious display of quirky paintings and paper pieces. The paintings are closely interrelated and mostly follow a similar program: Zimmer draws with ink on…
Wes Hempel and Jack Balas, two painters who share a studio and an affinity for narrative content, are now sharing the Robischon Gallery with their separate but equally impressive exhibits. Hempel’s paintings, on display in the front gallery, pointedly evoke art history, specifically seventeenth-century Dutch landscape art–but there’s a feeling…
Current exhibits at Spark and Pirate: a contemporary art oasis each feature art that represents the human body–though you might not know it from simply looking. In Spark’s front gallery, Susan Koenig shows both works on paper and works made out of paper. Her still-life drawings, most combining charcoal and…
Denver city librarian Rick Ashton’s been taking so many bows lately for “The Big New Library,” which is on-time and on-budget, that he really ought to do an aerobics tape. Forgotten in all this excitement is the fact that had it been left up to Ashton, Denver wouldn’t have gotten…
The clouds of the baseball strike have cast a shadow over the long-awaited opening of Coors Field on March 31. More than likely, the new ballpark will be inaugurated with replacement players instead of the real Rockies. But at the art galleries that line Wazee Street west of the ballpark,…
There’s a good reason why Denver’s Dale Chisman is frequently described as one of the most important painters in the American West. But in his latest exhibition, he demonstrates (again) that he is also a virtuoso printmaker. Chisman’s One Man Show, at 1/1 Gallery, is filled with marvelous work in…
The Denver Art Museum has undergone a radical reorganization in the last few years. Huge amounts of material have been shifted among the curators, and a major beneficiary has been Dianne Vanderlip’s Contemporary department, which gained more than just a prefix when the word “modern” was added to its name…
Pity Denver. It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of American cities–it can’t get no respect. Regardless of what’s done here, negative national attention seems to follow. DIA is the most recent case in point. The new airport is nationally renowned not for its radical and dramatic design or its cutting-edge technology, but…
