Looking out the window this morning, it’s hard to believe that there was ever a warm weekend in February. But there was and it included Valentine’s Day. We took advantage of the mild temperatures and went downtown in Denver to check out a couple of shows. Robischon Gallery was hosting three solo shows in its main galleries and a fourth in the “back room.”
Google Gnostic attracts from a distance with its bright hues and shiny surfaces until, on closer inspection, you begin to see a dismembered torso, bleeding octopus spilling intestines and a very distorted face.
In VOC Jellyfish Fry, the letters representing the first Dutch brand are found on the yellow cake. Other objects. which in Dutch paintings were rendered as whole, fresh and enticing edibles, here seem to be dripping and oozing on their way to disintegration. Like them or not, van Minnem’s work successfully carries out its intent.
Around the corner in the next gallery, was a large selection of paintings, Descriptors, by Jerry Kunkel, a Denver artist who for many years has produced work with a surrealist bent and an often wry sense of humor. In his current show, he makes reference to well known paintings from art history while providing his own twist with words layered over the images or by adding contemporary objects.
Like, an image that looks a lot like a paint-by-numbers scene, turns the table on viewers by declaring, “This painting doesn't like you.” The weathered wood border is actually part of the painting.
PB&J and Boucher places a gooey peanut butter and jelly sandwich opposite
a pair of plump delectable lovers.
Additional works filled a wall with sixteen 12” square paintings with titles such as Fiction Is Never Not True; Silence Isn’t Golden, It’s Cryptic; and There Is No Good Best Time, all amusing and very thought-provoking.
Jean Lowe’s A More Beautiful You was in the form of a bookstore or library with papier-mâché tomes presented on white shelves. Providing an uncomfortable and sarcastic view of contemporary life with titles referring to preoccupation with beauty, self-help and other topics, these lightweight books confront with their garish colors and cartoon-like shapes.
Wes Hempel’s paintings in the back room fit well with the rest of the show. Like art history selfies, they combined accomplished portraiture with text.
When You Look At Me I See What You Feel and I Feel What You See
Your Touch That Was Not A Mistake Not Mistaken
There’s still time to see these intriguing shows. They are on until March 7.
Redline Gallery and Artist Studios featured a show called Just Playing (with the word Playing inverted). This show is on until March 1.
Fuzzy Terrain, 2014, by Jodi Stuart, was a lenticular digital print in which colors and forms shifted as you walked slowly past it.
Displayed on a long table, Daisy Patten’s artist-made playing cards invited interaction. Like memory-matching games, the pieces in So Long, Farewell: Extinction in the Anthropocene Era, 2014, depicted animals under threat of extinction. Viewers were asked to match pairs of cards showing the same animal and place them in a box.
Libby Barbee used Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Nature, as inspiration for her work, With Emerson, 2014. Each of the four pieces was created according to rules stimulated by each chapter.
Homare Ikeda’s, Boundaries: When To Play and Where to Play, presented collages of such varied contents as cardboard, a clock, graphite stick, wire, painting on board, tapes and aluminum foil.
Andy Rising’s, Hypernatural Surface Flow and Core Extraction, Devil’s Head, CO, 2015, was a sculptural presence about human-size. When light played over the incised piece, the full beauty of the surface was visible.
Detail
The variety of work and the many layered meanings gave us lots to talk about during dinner at Osteria Marco in Larimer Square.
