Jack Balas has built a national reputation the hard way. He lives in a small town in northern Colorado, and his style is a very idiosyncratic version of post-pop that’s often messy and crammed with incongruous imagery and text. And if that’s not enough, his chief subject matter — the…
The Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788, www.robischongallery.com) is currently featuring Tattoo Detour, one of two solos in town by Jack Balas (see review, page 45), but there’s a good deal more happening at the gallery as well. In the center space is William Lamson: Experiment, which is the East…
One of the weirdest twists in the art world over the past few decades has been the way artwork with recognizable subjects has gone from being the most traditional aesthetic pose to being at the forefront of experimentation. Of course, I’m not referring to sweet and sappy depictions of animals…
In 2005, Switzerland’s premier photo institution, the Musée de l’Elysée (www.elysee.ch) in Lausanne, celebrated its 20th anniversary by organizing an exhibit called Regeneration: We are all photographers now, which showcased the rise of amateur photography in the digital age and its inevitable mutation into its own full-fledged art form. The…
Painting is making its umpteenth comeback right now after having been declared dead an equal number of times over the years. The reason that paintings haven’t been supplanted permanently by videos, installations and the like is that artists refuse to cooperate. As a result, collectors and curators won’t let go,…
There are a bunch of shows at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173, www.edgeart.org) that link up with one another pretty well. The buzz, however, has zeroed in on the most ambitious of the group: Timmy Flynn’s Hardware Store, which occupies the front gallery. The show, Flynn’s homage to a…
Fort Collins is somewhat off my beaten path. Like Colorado Springs, it’s more than an hour away, but Fort Collins doesn’t have a major art-exhibition venue comparable to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Last week, however, I made my way up there to be a juror for the 2008…
The name Walter Netsch isn’t a household one, but it should be, especially in Colorado, because he’s the man who designed the 1954-1964 Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, unquestionably among the most significant cycle of buildings in the country. At the time, Netsch was a partner at the prestigious…
It was in the nineteenth century that artists in Europe and the United States, for the first time in millennia, went outside to create their works. This led to a rise in the status of landscape paintings, previously a secondary type of art overshadowed by historic narrative painting and the…
Using pictures to tell stories was definitely a no-no in classic modern art and for the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Manipulating form was the thing for painters to do instead. But in the 1980s and ’90s, narrative painting made a huge comeback in contemporary art circles, and…
It’s funny how things go in waves in the art world. One minute there’s a gaggle of landscape shows everywhere you look, and the next minute photography and photo-based works are everywhere. This phenomenon is under way again, as there seems to be a lot of three-dimensional work on view…
Though stone carver Vicki Rottman and photographer and ceramicist Loay Boggess, didn’t work collaboratively, they have nonetheless intermingled their separately produced works in a set of installations. This conjoined twin of a solo, Sticks and Stones: Branching Out, is on view at Ironton Studios and Gallery (3636 Chestnut Place, 303-297-8626,…
When I think of a gallery, the typical image I have is of a capacious, carefully lit room. Conjure up the many spaces of this type at the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, the Lab at Belmar or any number of the city’s better commercial venues, like…
Thinking small is the theme of my reviews this week, so it makes sense to look at what is perhaps the smallest gallery in Denver, Michele Mosko Fine Art (136 West 12th Avenue, 303-534-5433, www.michelemoskofineart.com). Owner Michele Mosko was born and raised in Denver but spent more than 25 years…
Design is the stepchild of the visual arts, with none of the high status of its cousins, painting and sculpture, or its big brother, architecture. This is most likely because of its ubiquitous nature. On the plus side, the ready availability of design — which is all around us —…
East Colfax Avenue as it runs through central Denver is definitely on the way up. From downtown to the Monaco Parkway, storefronts are being spiffed up, shops and restaurants are opening, and people are starting to fill the formerly seedy sidewalks. The part of the street that seems to be…
Dale Chisman is an exceptional figure in Denver’s art world, not simply because he’s one of the region’s most talented abstract painters, but also because he’s been at it, day after day, for more than forty years. What makes this kind of commitment remarkable is how rare it is. In…
Cydney Payton, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver (1485 Delgany Street, 303-298-7554, www.mcadenver.org), has programmed the place to the max, and shows are constantly opening and closing there. One that’s on the way out soon is Making Public Buildings, a traveling show with special relevance to the MCA. The…
The development of abstract painting a hundred years ago can be easily explained by the rise of photography fifty years before that. Since cameras were much better than brushes at recording reality, painters moved toward new ideas, like abstraction. Given this, it’s hard to explain the continuing appeal of representational…
In the past few years, Denver’s art world has reached such a critical mass that many of our marvelous alternative spaces have been lost in the shuffle. As a palliative for that, I’ll now lead a whirlwind tour of the present offerings at two of the best. At Spark Gallery…
Sandy Carson Gallery is featuring two sculpture shows in the front and a large print show in the back — the latter being a late addition intended as an introduction to the gallery’s new owners and a new era there. I’ve covered the changes previously, but here’s a recap: Sandy…
Art offerings along Santa Fe Drive are uneven, at best, but a few places always seem to have something worth looking at. There’s the Sandy Carson Gallery, of course, the ArtDistrict’s flagship. But there is also Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1088, www.spacegallery.org), directly across the street. Space ordinarily…
