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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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,…
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…
The mysterious Internet, a computerized environment once inhabited only by government scientists, is becoming more and more consumer-friendly. Although the cyberhighway can be jammed with trivia, its potential is enormous–particularly in the field of visual arts, which can be lonely territory. Off the Highway, a show of photographs at Rule…
Full of snowy paper and sleek framing, Female Problems, a new show of mixed-media photo-based art at Emmanuel Gallery, seems as crisp, white and sterile as a hospital operating room. On closer examination, however, the pristine mood is shattered by revelation after revelation of painful experiences involving the vulnerable female…
Here in Colorado, we get more than our share of “pretty” photographs of the West. These brilliantly colored fantasies portray a land full of unspoiled scenery, snow-capped peaks, green forests and crystalline lakes. But longtime residents know another West that seldom makes it into coffee-table books or postcards: a vast,…
Hard as it is to admit, Denver’s alternative scene is aging. Well-established cooperative galleries such as Pirate and Spark are celebrating anniversaries well into the double digits, and many of their members now enjoy elder-statesman status. Housed mostly in shabby storefronts in cheap neighborhoods, these hardy urban survivors can seem…
When I was around six years old, my mother took a class in oil painting at Emily Griffith Opportunity School. I have vivid memories of her bringing home boxes of smelly paint and handfuls of those tiny books filled with child-sized reproductions of the paintings of Renoir and Van Gogh…
Any curator looking to find the best women artists from the Front Range over the last twenty years would do well to read the roster of the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute. Begun in 1976, RMWI’s annual search for female (and, since 1993, male) artists, writers and performers boasts an impressive…
The phrase “read you like a book” has some basis in fact: Most observers will agree that the human body can be read for meaning, much like a text. Some artists have taken the metaphor literally, concentrating on the direct representation of body parts or inventing ways for live bodies…
Years before LoDo was a dull gleam in a developer’s eye, northwest Denver’s Highlands neighborhood shone as the city’s unofficial arts district. Artists flocked to the area, drawn by cheap rent, urban convenience and choice hangouts like My Brother’s Bar and the old Muddy’s on 29th Avenue. There artists gathered…
Rivers have always presented a challenge for landscape artists. Their majesty, their mystery and, especially, their movement all resist a flat, two-dimensional rendering. Enter German artist Mario Reis, whose recently completed North American Nature Water Color Project used an ingenious method to literally capture a river’s essence. Since 1977 Reis…
The fad of pigeonholing art into politically correct categories has created a multitude of interesting genres. Some are lively and welcome inventions, such as Outsider Art, Latino Art or the recent Reclamation Art, where environmentally contaminated areas are resurrected with the aid of public art projects. But few of the…
Denver artist Louis Recchia’s raucous, jam-packed style has changed only slightly since he burst onto the Denver art scene in the early Eighties. And in Recchia’s case, that’s a positive: His trademark mirror-filled backgrounds, found-object tableaux and flat cartoony representations of lovers, dogs, ballerinas and everything else under the sun…
