It was impossible to fully understand Komar and Melamid’s Symbols of the Big Bang at the Mizel Center’s Singer Gallery last fall, but the show was so good it didn’t matter. The former Soviet artists did paintings and drawings in which different symbols were put together to create new ones,…
Denver has spent a fortune on public art, but it hasn’t always gotten its money’s worth — with the latest sorry example being Jonathan Borofsky’s “The Dancers,” which cost more than $1.5 million. Once in a while, though, the city picks up a bargain such as “Fire House,” which internationally…
Local municipalities have been promoting drought-friendly grasses that stay green with less water, but last year, Englewood went further by planting “turf” in a South Broadway median that requires no water. The “grass” in question is a colored-aluminum sculpture called “Virere,” by Lawrence Argent, the first of four works the…
This past fall, one of the state’s most influential sculptors showed off his recent creations in the magical Scott Chamberlin. The Robischon Gallery exhibit featured wall-mounted pieces that looked like traditional European wall fountains — not surprising, since Chamberlin, a University of Colorado ceramics professor, had earlier taken a busman’s…
Art has been doing a double take on pop art lately, with a lot of new creations looking forward to the 1960s. A variety of pieces of this type were put together in This Year’s Model, a great group effort mounted last summer at the now-closed Cordell Taylor Gallery. This…
First Fridays Santa Fe Drive Over the past few years, dozens of galleries and art spots have opened on Santa Fe Drive between 5th and 9th avenues, making this four-block stretch the unofficial epicenter of the Denver art world. And public response to the burgeoning art district has been phenomenal,…
Rule Gallery typically presents the work of established artists, but once in a while an emerging talent gets through the door. That’s what happened with Pard Morrison: Recent Sculpture and Paintings. Morrison’s works fit the gallery perfectly, because they’re neo-minimalist, the style of choice for director Robin Rule. The pieces…
Even though the paintings in David Yust: PAINTING IN CIRCLES and Other Abstract Works included pieces that dated from the mid-1960s to late last year, the display was not a retrospective of the local modern master’s career. Instead, curator Erica France examined a handful of currents in Yust’s oeuvre, most…
Abstract-expressionist painting has miraculously held on despite the onslaught in the last decade of “new media,” a field that includes installation, performance, video and digital. These forms were supposed to make painting look out of date, but, as Wet Paint proves, that’s not what happened. The exhibit, which is open…
The Denver Art Museum pays a lot of attention to artists from the turn of the last century because they’re a popular group guaranteed to bring in big crowds of viewers. The lineup of traveling solos that have stopped by the DAM in recent years includes Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Bonnard, Homer…
Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art has been dealing with its space crunch in a couple of ways: planning a new building and sponsoring off-site exhibits. One of the latter was middle ground: Stephen Batura, a breathtaking display of the Denver artist’s signature representational paintings. Done in casein and acrylic, the…
The wonderful Andrea Modica: Photographs at Sandy Carson Gallery last winter provided an in-depth look at the work of the internationally known photographer, who lives in Manitou Springs. In her poetic photos, Modica explores the relationship between truth and fiction by using posed and documentary shots, which she takes with…
Last summer, ILK@Pirate saw some difficult days during which the gallery was not only closed, but boarded up! So the first show after this hiatus, Jason Patz: Self Series, couldn’t just be good; it had to be great. Happily, it was. The twenty-something Patz displayed his disarmingly simple self-portraits in…
The earliest examples of modern art done in our region are frontier photographs from the nineteenth century. Some of the finest examples of these images from local public and private collections were brought together at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center last winter for the stunning exhibit A Moment in…
The magnificent Reflections in Black: Smithsonian African-American Photography featured major works by contemporary black photographers who have been active during the past 25 years. The impressive traveling exhibit, which alighted briefly at Metro State’s Center for the Visual Arts this past winter, included images by many of the most-talked-about photographers…
The topic of water was on everyone’s minds last summer, and artists were no exception, as demonstrated by Studio Aiello’s over-the-top doris laughton: theSplatphenomenon2003. In it, Laughton used the shape a drop of water makes when it hits a hard surface to inspire scores of prints, photos, sculptures and a…
For the group show Balance, young sculptor David Mazza installed his fabulous pieces throughout the building as well as in the sculpture garden outside, where he put a trio of major pieces. Mazza’s abstract compositions, in which both straight and curved metal bars and tubes are precariously stacked on a…
Pursuits of Passion at Walker Fine Art was technically a group show, but it included what could have been a very large solo focusing on Boulder artist William Vielehr, whose sculptures were installed throughout. The most important Vielehrs were large abstracted figures made of fabricated aluminum sheets; one of Vielehr’s…
Denver artist Annalee Schorr felt she was “embedded” in the Iraq war because she watched televised news coverage of it all the time. To create Shock/Awe, her politically charged solo at Spark Gallery, Schorr used enlarged photos of her TV screen. The juxtaposition of bomb-ravaged cities taken from cable news…
The spectacular exhibit now at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art has the novella-length title OVER A BILLION SERVED: Conceptual Photography From the People’s Republic of China. The work in this knockout show, which is mostly digitally produced and deals with such hot topics as the Tiananmen Square revolt, SARS and…
Director’s Choice marked the first time Ivar Zeile and Ron Judish worked together on the same exhibit. The occasion was the launch of their new art venture, + Zeile/Judish Gallery. The striking show featured the work of emerging Colorado artists who previously were little known in Denver. One exciting find…
Metro State’s Center for the Visual Arts hosted a show last month that highlighted some of the most influential pottery of the last century. The traveling exhibit, Picasso: 25 Years of Edition Ceramics From the Edward and Ann Weston Collection, included more than sixty pieces of Picasso’s ceramics that were…
