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Best Sculpture Show — Group

Unbound: Sculpture in the Fields

The Arvada Center

The Arvada Center's Collin Parson and Kristen Bueb have put together one great exhibit after another, but their finest effort to date has been the combination of shows that included Unbound: Sculpture in the Fields, for which they tapped the expertise of Cynthia Madden Leitner of the Museum of Outdoor Art. Not only is it a cogent survey of some of the top abstract and conceptual sculptors active in Colorado, but it also marks the artistic activation of a formerly empty lot next to the center — which appears to be the perfect space for giant sculptures. The works will remain there through September.

Best Gallery Show — Solo

Emilio Lobato

Longtime Colorado artist Emilio Lobato spent the last few years caring for his terminally ill wife, Darlene Sisneros, who ultimately died. Afterward, sadness over her loss was combined with doubts about whether or not he had done enough to help her. The result of these contemplations was Emilio Lobato: The Measure of a Man, a spectacular solo comprising some sixty works. Taking a literal approach to the show's title, many of the pieces incorporated measuring devices, such as yardsticks and rulers. While the signature pieces subliminally conveyed the fact that the artist was healing from his grief, the dark palettes of the last few years were eventually replaced by vivid color schemes, as if Lobato was lightening his spirits by brightening up his art.

Readers' choice: Lauri Lynnxe Murphy

Best Gallery Show — Group

Natural Surroundings

The swanky new neo-modernist building that houses Michael Burnett's Space Gallery provides the ideal setting for the kind of neo-modernist abstraction that is the venue's mainstay. For the ambitious Natural Surroundings, Burnett invited ten artists from Colorado and elsewhere, most of whom did paintings that employed encaustic, a paint made by mixing pigments with wax, resulting in a viscous substance that may be applied in extremely thick layers. When dried, the encaustic is translucent, and that quality, combined with the material's thickness, lent these paintings a rich and intriguing three-dimensionality.

Readers' choice: Momentum, Space Gallery

Best Conceptual Show

Dmitri Obergfell

Conceptual art is usually more about thought than beauty. Not so for Dmitri Obergfell, who creates credible idea-pieces that are also gorgeous. On an intellectual plane, all of the offerings in Yinfinity: New Works by Dmitri Obergfell at Gildar Gallery were based on ancient or familiar symbols like the yin-yang circle, or the double profile of a bust of Janus. What made them beautiful was the artist's use of a custom-car finish called interference paint which, once applied in a mirror-smooth layer, caused the pieces to actually change color as viewers passed by them. It was a tremendously cool effect.

Best Abstract Show — Solo

Joseph Coniff

Wes Magyar

When longtime Denver art dealer Robin Rule died last year, a trio of faithful assistants — Valerie Santerli, Rachel Beitz and Hillary Morris — decided to resurrect her namesake gallery and carry on her legacy. The new Rule Gallery, inside Hinterland, is small and informal, but it meets the minimal requirements for an exhibition space for first-rate art. One of the earliest shows there was Joseph Coniff (in parenthesis), an elegant affair made up of the artist's chic-looking post-minimal paintings. Though his color choices were unnatural, the paintings conceptually evoked landscapes, as each was divided into three broad horizontal bars that easily stood in for foregrounds, mid-grounds and backgrounds. This was in spite of the fact that the Coniffs were utterly flat, with no illusion of depth whatsoever. Because of the high quality of its presentations, the new Rule is a worthy successor to the old one.

Best Abstract Show — Group

Layered Perspectives

Courtesy Michael Warren Contemporary

The art of New Mexico and Colorado has been intimately intertwined for a century — an affair that continued with Layered Perspectives at Michael Warren Contemporary. The show focused on three abstract artists: Angela Berkson of New Mexico and Teresa Booth Brown and Stanley Bell, both from Colorado. Curator Mike McClung presented each artist in depth. Berkson employed arrow shapes mounted on the wall that were potentially kinetic, since they could be spun. The Browns — updated versions of classic abstract expressionism done in exaggerated horizontal formats — were sublime. Bell embraced a more-is-more approach, covering the surfaces of his paintings with as many visual flourishes as possible and then inserting little toy figurines here and there. Each artist staked out a different abstract territory, and the resulting combination economically expressed how persistent an interest in abstraction is here in the West.

Best Show That Was Both Retro and Contemporary

Angela Beloian

For Angela Beloian: In Technicolor, the Boulder-based artist created a body of sharp-looking paintings and screen prints that riffed on minimalism, abstract surrealism, psychedelic art and op art simultaneously. Using flowing hard-edged lines, Beloian created interlocking shapes that are filled in by shifting shades of color that overlap. And what marvelous colors she used. The relationship between them suggested the illusion of light and shadow, lending these utterly simple compositions an unexpected three-dimensionality. The Beloians looked very 1960s-'70s retro, like they had come right off the set of a Star Trek episode. But if the artist's aesthetic sensibility recalls the past, her methods are thoroughly up to date: Her preliminary studies were done on her iPhone.

Best Show About Time and Space

Tobias Fike

Tobias Fike is best known for performance-based videos and photos done with collaborator Matthew Harris, but for the elegant meta-modernist Tobias Fike: Then and now and then, Fike focused on himself and his place in the universe. In the sculpture "My Own Night," for instance, a cube covered in sheets of black fiberboard was pierced with tiny holes through which points of light shone in an arrangement that corresponded to the position of the stars in the sky over his birthplace on the night he was born. The showstopper was "Accumulation," a pyramid of internally lit open cardboard boxes which were also pierced, reflecting stars that are 38 light-years away — Fike's age. The conflation of the personal and the universal made this show very smart, but it was Fike's eye for formal elegance that made it great.

Best Show About Paper

Paper Work

Paper provides the base for watercolors, drawings and pastels, and it's a key component of collages. For Cecily Cullen, the creative director at Metropolitan State University's Center for Visual Art, it also works for sculptures and bas-reliefs. In the ambitious Paper Work, Cullen welcomed many artists who work with paper, including Melissa Jay Craig, Jennifer Ghormley, Anne Hallam, Bovey Lee, Diane Martonis, Dawn McFadden, Mia Pearlman, Susan Porteous and Liz Miller. Though everything was breathtaking, especially given the meticulous craft skills necessary to manipulate the fragile material, it was Miller who created the exhibit's tour de force, a room-sized installation called "Splendiferous Jungle Warfare" that was made especially for the show.

Best Show About Glass

Chihuly

Brandon Marshall

Trees, shrubs, bushes, flowers and cacti have always been the true stars of the Denver Botanic Gardens, but the institution added sculpture shows a few years ago — and the idea has allowed for one triumph after another. This past year it was Chihuly, featuring monumental art-glass installations by Dale Chihuly, the internationally famous glass artist. Each work was made up of hundreds of separate blown-glass elements; the resulting compositions found the perfect foils in the DBG's 24 acres of foliage and water features. The show attracted more than a million visitors, setting an attendance record for the DBG. The cherry on top was the announcement before the show closed that Robert and Judi Newman and the Kemper family had come up with about $1 million to purchase "Icicle Tower — 'Colorado,'" an eleven-foot-tall tower rising from the pond behind the historic Waring House. The piece comprises some 700 glass spikes in red, orange and yellow — inspired, Chihuly says, by Colorado's famous sunsets.

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