The fall/winter show at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, POPjack: Warhol to Murakami, is a thoughtful and thought-provoking survey of the interrelationships between the American art of the 1960s and ’70s and Japanese and American art from the last five years. The compelling exhibit is highly unusual, even if the…
Spark Gallery, the city’s oldest co-op, is hosting a pair of intelligent and complementary solo shows, Sue Simon: How Many? and Foci: Photographs by Barbara Carpenter. Simon, a former scientific illustrator, has created a group of abstract paintings that vary widely in appearance even though they are apparently all part…
Denver’s new Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building, by the Denver firms of David Owen Tryba Architects and RNL Design, is the latest monument to rise at the Civic Center — which, by the way, is Denver’s premier urban space. Because of its prominent location, designing a building here has…
The Victoria H. Myhren Gallery, in the Shwayder Art Building on the University of Denver’s campus (2121 East Asbury Avenue, 303-871-2846), is hosting an exquisite exhibit titled Ronald Davis: Recent Abstractions 2001-2002. The show, which runs through November 8, was organized by Gwen Chanzit, a professor of art history at…
I said it just a few weeks ago: It’s hard to believe how many first-rate art shows this season are devoted to that old warhorse, abstract painting. There’s no question that the current positive reappraisal of abstraction — both of the historic and contemporary type — is a train that’s…
It’s strange to find a first-rate painting show on the second floor of a run-down warehouse near the National Western Stock Show Complex — but that’s exactly what’s there right now. The impressive exhibit is called hEMLOCK rOW: Paintings by Stephen batura, and it’s on display in a building known…
The Robischon Gallery is surely the flagship of Denver’s contemporary-art venues. Oh, sure, there are a handful that are every bit as good — but none are any better or have as long of a distinguished track record. The gallery’s physical plant, with its high ceilings and big walls, is…
I’m going to throw caution to the wind and say that Continuum: Magnetic Sustensions, by Joseph Shaeffer, is one of the best shows by an emerging artist that we’re likely to see during the 2002-2003 season — which, by the way, has only just started. The Shaeffer show is being…
There’s a dizzying array of notable photography shows in Denver right now. And while photographs are always on display somewhere in town, it’s hard to recall an autumn with so many photo and photo-based shows as season openers. There are a number of reasons for this. During the past thirty…
Emerging artist R. Scott Davis lives in New York, but as an alumnus of the University of Colorado at Boulder, he still has ties to this area. In Chromatic Flux, now at the Cordell Taylor Gallery (2350 Lawrence Street, 303-296-0927), Davis explores the abstract potential of photographs, adding to the…
During the past four or five seasons, a legion of exhibitions have been presented in the area that explore the rich topic of abstract art in Colorado. These shows, of both modern and contemporary stripes, have revealed the presence of an indigenous Front Range modernist scene — dating back over…
There’s a very smart-looking solo exhibit called Amorphous Unifiers at the Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173). Made up of a series of closely associated works by longtime Edge member Dania Pettus, the show is installed in the co-op’s front room. Pettus calls her pieces “photographs,” but that’s not really…
Discreet shifts have been taking place at 30th and Vallejo streets over the past couple of months. I’m referring to behind-the-scenes negotiations at the Judish gallery, located on the ground floor of the historic Asbury Methodist Church, a landmark in every sense of the word. Here’s what has happened: The…
Richard Colvin and Katherine Temple are longtime members of the Pirate co-op (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058), and every year since 1993, they have presented collaborative, site-specific installations at the well-known alternative space. This year’s piece, Remote Echoes of a Premature Past, is a re-creation of their debut installation, which was…
Nearly two weeks ago, Studio Aiello Gallery opened its doors with a juried exhibition straightforwardly titled the Grand Opening Group Show. Studio Aiello is the first phase of an ambitious project called the Aiello Center for Contemporary Art. Located in a lightly rehabbed 1940s commercial building in a former industrial…
On the first floor of the Denver Art Museum, there always seems to be some kind of blockbuster exhibition. People complain about these shows, but it makes sense that the museum would do them: The DAM needs to crank up its attendance — and not just to collect more money…
One of the new sculptures in the Civic Center has made quite a splash, winding up on the front page of the Denver Post even before it was unveiled. The untitled sculpture, by nationally famous artist Larry Kirkland, is one of several new pieces adorning the new, nearly completed Wellington…
The art season runs from September to May, roughly paralleling the academic year. There is even a corollary to summer school, in the form of the art world’s light summer season, which is just now winding down. It’s September, the kids are back in school, and a new season is…
There’s an elegant solo exhibit at Edge Gallery that’s definitely worth seeing. Installed in the middle space at the co-op, Intersections features the latest work on paper by well-respected Denver artist Susan Goldstein. The meaning of the show’s title is hard to pinpoint. As Goldstein herself suggests in the statement…
For the past few years, one of Denver’s most urbane public spaces — Skyline Park, by world-renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin — has been continually endangered by various remodeling plans, some of which include the threat of demolition. Let’s put it this way: To even discuss the destruction of Skyline…
For almost twenty years, the Curtis Arts & Humanities Center (2349 East Orchard Road, Greenwood Village, 303-797-1779) has sponsored an annual exhibition open to all artists in Colorado. The process goes like this: Artists deliver original works (not slides), and a celebrity juror goes through the hundreds of entries and…
Here at the beginning of the 21st century, it seems strange that so many artists persist in their attempts to render external reality with paint and brushes. Didn’t abstraction (on the one hand) and photography (on the other) vanquish the old warhorse of representational painting over a hundred years ago?…
