Works on paper — watercolors, drawings and prints — are the neglected stepchildren of paintings and typically considered their inferior. So it’s interesting to see that Clyfford Still, an artist known exclusively for his paintings, also used ink, watercolor, pastels and paint, all of them applied to paper, as an…
Aspen, along with the nearby towns of Snowmass, Carbondale, Woody Creek and Basalt, is one of Colorado’s centers for contemporary art. Although most of the artists in that community rarely show here, that’s starting to change. The latest example is Basalt’s Richard Carter, who has the lead role in Mandalas:…
In January 2014, Hugh Grant, founder of Denver’s Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, announced that the beloved cultural attraction would be vacating its original Capitol Hill location at 1311 Pearl Street and moving into a new facility to be erected at the corner of West 12th Avenue and…
Spark Gallery on Santa Fe Drive consists of a pair of mid-sized rooms and one very small one, so the space can get cramped when each area is assigned to a separate exhibit. The crowded feel is exacerbated when the styles of the art in the various exhibits don’t jibe…
In the hierarchy of exhibits, the retrospective solo ranks at the top of the heap, as it allows viewers to follow an artist’s aesthetic life through the course of a career. The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is currently hosting just such a show, Kim Dickey: Words Are Leaves, organized…
Bobbi Walker, owner and director of Walker Fine Art, has assembled Inherent Intent, a seamless group show that brings together seven contemporary abstract artists from across the country. All of these artists employ subtlety as their principle aesthetic philosophy, yet none of them can be called minimalists — at least…
This summer, as the start of an abstraction extravaganza, Space Gallery presented Expanding the Dialogue: Part One (which I reviewed September 14), and now Expanding the Dialogue: Part Two is on view. While the first show explored the subtlety of certain approaches, the second takes the opposite tack, looking at…
Conceptual art has a century-long history, dating back to Marcel Duchamp’s radical “Readymades” in the early 1900 s. By appropriating a snow shovel and then calling it a sculpture, for instance, Duchamp proved that artists had the sole authority to define what art was. From there, conceptual art grew to…
Michael McClung and Warren Campbell — the Michael and Warren behind Michael Warren Contemporary — have done a good job of introducing Denver audiences to Colorado artists who live and work outside the metro area, especially those from the Western Slope. An excellent example is the current exhibit Chasing Dragons:…
The Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities is marking its fortieth anniversary with two notable shows: Looking Back: 40 Years, 40 Artists, a survey of Colorado contemporary art over the past four decades that I reviewed last week, and Moving Forward: The Next Forty Years, an exhibit in the…
Boulder-based painter Sarah McKenzie has a handsome solo at David B. Smith Gallery called White Walls. The show’s title refers to the traditional exhibition space in a gallery or museum — typically a set of white walls on which art is hung — and in this show, McKenzie depicts these…
An inordinately large proportion of Colorado’s art-exhibition venues — including alternative spaces, galleries, museums and art centers — are located within the relatively confined area of central Denver. We’re talking about approximately 80 percent of the art infrastructure in the entire state. And while a number of surrounding suburbs and…
Painter Mark Brasuell has been part of Denver’s alternative gallery scene since the 1990s. For most of that time he was a member of Edge Gallery, but a couple of years ago he made a surprise move to join Spark Gallery on Santa Fe Drive. He now has a solo…
In northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, various Native American cultures stretching back to antiquity created distinctive works of art. Hundreds of years ago, Latino culture began to flourish in the area, establishing its own set of artistic currents. Finally, a century and a half ago, European-Americans came, and among…
The handsome Transforming Milk Into Milk, now installed in the Project Space at RedLine, is a loosely conceived group show that’s as enigmatic in places as its name. The exhibit was put together by former RedLine resident Derrick Velasquez; he took the title from an Allen Ginsberg quote related to…
This is your last chance to see Drawing Never Dies at RedLine, which closes at 7 p.m. today, August 5. Keep reading for my capsule review of that show, as well as other exhibits you can still catch along the Front Range. — including Performance on Paper, which I review…
Space Gallery director Michael Burnett is contributing to the current women’s art craze here in Denver by mounting the elegant group show Expanding the Dialogue: Part One. At a time when some Denver galleries have only a handful of women in their stable, female artists account for fully half the…
An ambitious painting solo at Point Gallery, Jennifer Davey: What You Believe Is What You See, features a nice selection of recent abstract paintings by Jennifer Davey, a Loveland-based artist. Davey’s style references classic modernism, in particular abstract expressionism and color-field abstraction. Most of these pieces sport wide swaths of…
This has been the summer of women’s art in Colorado, with the Denver Art Museum’s heralded Women of Abstract Expressionism already looking like the show of the year and inspiring a number of other exhibits around the area featuring women artists. These events are part of a national re-evaluation of…
Over the summer, the Denver Art Museum has presented shows and events about dance — not something ordinarily associated with fine art, since dance’s defining characteristic is movement, and few fine-art forms move. The programming has all been inspired by Rhythm & Roots: Dance in American Art; mounted on level…
Denver artist Michael Brohman is juggling dualities in his solo at Pirate, In a World of Circles and Squares, which closes this Sunday. Not only does each piece express some kind of double meaning, but the show itself comprises two distinct bodies of work. It’s almost as though Brohman is…
Last call for a smart-looking solo, Baroque Selfies: Matthew Harris, at Leon Gallery. Harris is a Denver sculptor who earned an MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2011, and is now head of 3D Fine Arts at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. His work combines…
