Entry #1: Jennifer Norback Gallery, Visited on 3/13/2011

On Saturday afternoon, following a morning of Saint Patrick's Day festivities, I took the 22 bus towards Howard to get to the Aldo Castillo Gallery on North Franklin Street. I had found the gallery on a basic Google search, but despite the prosaic manner of our meeting, I was sure that Aldo Castillo could offer me something appealing: an introduction to Latino art in Chicago. Yet as I walked by the gallery's Google-give address for the third time, searching for an door that wasn't locked and covered in brown butcher paper, I became less and less convinced that this would be my gallery for the day. The most wonderful thing about being alone and without a schedule is that I could flit right over to the next best things, which happened to be another art gallery about a block away. 

This was Jennifer Norback Gallery. The gallery shares a building space with an upscale restaurant; the restaurant is up the stairs and the gallery is down the stairs. 

I had been told that the gallery scene can seem intimidating for a young person. The trick is to remain nonchalantly confident in the face of gallery owners or employees who ignore, snub, or condescend to anyone who doesn't appear to be able or willing to drop $7000 on multicolored smears of oil paint. Independent and assured, then, I walked down the stairs and into the gallery. Unfortunately for me, the gallery floor was quite stealthily raised, about half a foot higher than the floor at the foot of the stairs. I announced my presence with the loud thud of my boots hitting the floor's edge, then attempted to make up for my misstep by gracefully gliding in front of the nearest painting. 

There was a hip, twentysomething woman sitting at the desk wearing a colorful checkered blouse, perfect winged eyeliner, and shiny dark hair. She asked if she could help me with anything, but I told her I was just looking. Here are three different versions of what I think she looked like, from my memory:

There were quite a few different things to look at in the gallery, but the current show (March 4 - April 7) is "Art from Romania," featuring art by Aurel Patrascu, Emilia Persu, and Claudia Lazar. The only unifying elements I saw between these three artists were that they are all Romanian they all work with abstraction in some way (i.e. they are not realists). Other than that, their work is dissimilar. 

Persu's art looks like experimental compositions with shapes, where certain common forms and colors--rounded triangles and gold--can be found amidst mixed media canvases of paint and pencil. It has a childish quality of craftiness and imprecision. The shapes do not come together to create or even suggest anything whole, like a landscape or a group of people. Instead, they are only really suggestive in themselves, and otherwise float about in an abstracted orbit. Persu's work is not as precise as that of Miró, Klee, or Kandinsky. 

Lazar's work seems inspired by Monet's Water Lilies series, perhaps. It has very atmospheric qualities. To me, its swatches of colored marks on a colored backgrounds suggested certain types of skies or bodies of water. 

Patrascu's work--the gallery's favorite for advertising the show--is figurative in a warm, tribal-mythological sort of way. It is not clear exactly what the pieces are supposed to be, whether they are body parts of simply shapes, but they are reminiscent of human or animal bodies. If I didn't know that Patrascu is Romanian, I would be inclined to think she is from the American Southwest. Her color palette--rusty reddish browns, golden yellows, and turquoise blues, among others--reminds me fondly of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Patrascu's imaginative detail and textile-quality patterning is truly impressive, but it wasn't as interesting to me as some of the non-featured work that I found in the back room of the gallery.

Aurel Patrascu

Aurel Patrascu

This was the work of Herbert Murrie, a contemporary abstract expressionist. In a process pioneered by modern greats like Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaller, Murrie pours paint. He doesn't, however, pour it onto canvas, but onto acetate, starting with polymer resin and then layering the resin for a three-dimensional effect. To create further visual excitement, he contrasts airbrushed backgrounds with sharp, crisp foreground shapes. His work looks extremely glossy and sharp, almost like a cut-open geode. I love his work for the fact that I could find a hundred things in just one of his paintings. In this one below, I could show you an eclipsed moon, molten lava, the underside of a caterpillar, a browned marshmallow...

Herbert Murrie

Herbert Murrie

Herbert Murrie, Dying Butterflies

Dying Butterflies detail

The only other thing I have to say about this gallery is that it really illuminated for me the importance of setup and space. In the hallway pictured below, I could barely take in the entirety of a painting without getting dangerously close to hitting the opposite wall. I didn't mind this too much, but I imagine that if I were seriously considering buying some of this art, I would want to be able to see the whole piece from a reasonable distance. A viewer should be able to "take in" a painting without being bombarded by its neighbors, and a cramped gallery space can ruin this option and make very attractive artwork far less appealing. I've begun to consider it much more now that I'm looking for these things, and it's all a game of sales. Placement, lighting, and space are pivotal, but sometimes they seem to be forgotten, either out of ignorance or necessity (i.e. too many pieces for the space). 

back room of the gallery

compared to front room

First gallery visit is now complete, not to mention that now I know the exact location of the famous Gino's East pizzeria and can hopefully visit the area again soon, this time for non-artistic purposes.