A couple of months ago, Cherry Creek North’s Pismo Gallery (2770 East Second Avenue, 303-333-2879) moved from its familiar spot on Fillmore Street, where it had been for a decade, to a gigantic and handsomely finished showroom next to Hapa Sushi. Relocation, always a risky prospect for a small business,…

Since taking over as president of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center a couple of years ago, Michael De Marsche has made many changes — some for the better, some for the worse. But one call no one can argue with is his decision to bring in Chihuly, a massive…

There are so many talented representational painters in the area, it’s a wonder that no curator of some local museum or art center has thought to put a group of them together in a show. The next best thing might be a duet, which is essentially what’s shoehorned into the…

Although its roots go back almost a century, to the World War I-era work of Marcel Duchamp, only in the past thirty or so years has conceptual art become a common approach. Today the Denver area has many proponents of conceptualism; key among them is John McEnroe, currently the subject…

The other day, Jim Peterson, who runs DEN Gallery (757 1/2 Santa Fe Drive, 303-507-6100), called to me from across the street. Ordinarily, this would annoy me. But if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known that DEN was open, because the chief access to it is through Space Gallery, which…

I think it’s easy to comprehend why artists have been so taken with the ethos of abstract expressionism. As the late philosopher king Andy Warhol once noted, it’s easier to be sloppy than it is to be neat. Well, that explains abstract expressionism’s appeal to painters, but not why it’s…

Rule Gallery (111 Broadway, 303-777-9473) is currently putting on a pair of back-to-back solos, both of which are made up of sophisticated abstract paintings. In the front is Udo Nger: Light as a Material; in the back is Maggie Michael: (T)rain. The Nöger paintings are more modest examples of what…

Entering the first of the galleries off the main entrance of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, viewers are surrounded by white-on-white color-field paintings by German-born Udo Nger, one of three artists in WHITE OUT: Lighting Into Beauty. As I looked around at the dazzling lack of color, it occurred to…

Every year at this time, LoDo’s David Cook Fine Art (1637 Wazee Street, 303-623-8181) presents a group show that’s filled with museum-quality pieces by a who’s who of Western artists working during the last part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. This is an important…

The objects on display are only the most visible aspects of exhibitions. There are other key components that, though less prominent, are equally essential. The most important of these is the idea underlying the display. Without an idea — even a bad or misguided one — there is no show…

There’s an interesting sculpture show now at Pirate: a contemporary art oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) called Sanctuaries. The abstract wall and floor works by Craig Robb are made of steel, wood and plastic. Some include recognizable things, such as tiny chairs and houses, but the best ones are completely…

Depictions of the figure are getting hot in the art world again; I haven’t seen this much interest in the topic since the 1980s. Falling in line with this international trend, the Robischon Gallery is presenting Stefan Kleinschuster, a mega-sized show that provocatively fills several of the spaces up front…

The spare, monochrome paintings in Angela Larson’s Seeking Harmony, at Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2200), may look like neo-minimalist compositions, but they’re not. In fact, these pieces have nothing to do with minimalism or any other art theory, but rather are based on the I Ching. Larson says…

It was two years ago that I first became aware of an unexpected curve in the art road. Despite all expectations, digital media was on the wane, and painting was waxing. The thought gave me a good laugh, because it was such an outrageous idea. Fast-forward to the present, and…

t’s amazing that in the current art world — where it seems like everyone is searching for the next outrageous irony — good, old-fashioned representational painters are still going strong, as evidenced by Contemporary Realism, at the William Havu Gallery (1040 Cherokee Street, 303-893-2360). Come to think of it, that’s…

Bobbi Walker, owner and director of Walker Fine Art, has worked hard to break into the top ranks of Denver’s contemporary galleries and, at the same time, make a profit. I can’t comment on how it’s possible to make money in the art business, but I can say that Walker’s…

Currently, there are three shows at Pirate: a contemporary art oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) that have an after-dark character. In two of them, it’s because the galleries themselves have been shrouded in darkness, but in the third, which is well-lit, the nighttime feel has to do with the adults-only…

It’s hard to think of James McKinnell, whom everyone called Jim, without also thinking of his wife and artistic collaborator for more than fifty years, Nan McKinnell. Nonetheless, we are going to have to get used to the idea of one without the other, because on April 13, Jim died,…

The young artist with the epic name of Jared David Paul Anderson is a one-man art movement. Not only is he a serious painter, as he demonstrates in Red, White and Black, now at the Assembly (766 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5501), but he’s also the founder of an artists’ collective,…

Although Denver has long been the largest city in Colorado, historically it was not the art-making center of the state. No, that distinction was held by Colorado Springs — even before the launch of the Broadmoor Academy in 1918, which transformed the town into a full-fledged art colony. That knowledge…

In the same way that the works at the Center for Visual Art may be described as post-Chicano (see review), three of the four artists in discourse & decadence at Studio Aiello (3563 Walnut Street, 303-297-8166) are doing what could be called “post-queer.” Addressing this particular topic is an act…

The Center for Visual Art in LoDo is currently taking on the interesting — and risky — topic of “post-Chicano” art in the group exhibit Leaving Aztlán: Rethinking Contemporary Latino and Chicano Art. It’s interesting because many of the pieces in the show are great, risky because there’s an entire…