Top Ten Colorado Art Happenings of 2011
It’s almost 2012, and 2011 was an incredible year for art in Colorado. Here’s the list of the best art events of the year. 1. Clyfford Still Museum Opening This museum was a long time in the making. Like the Rothko Chapel in Houston or the Georgia O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe, this Museum will make Denver into an artist’s new home. 2. Huma Bhabha at the Aspen Art Museum This exhibition has barely happened, opening on Dec 22, but it ranks high for 2011. Usually Bhabha does sculpture, but her works on paper hold a mysterious quality. The works seem classically modernist, and they involve a lot more than you w...Read more
Bill Amundson at Plus Gallery
Despite the humor in most of his work, Amundson’s drawings develop integral questions about American commercial lifestyles, and, well, all of America itself. Often when looking at his work I think about what it means to be an American, and I don’t see much glamour or intelligence, just monolithic icons of consumerism. In Amundson’s work, members of the consumer class get burned the hardest, and in his work these folks seem even more mindless than usual. Commercial giants who suffer at the expense of Bill's jokes seem to be deserving subjects: Dollar stores, Wal-Mart, and cookie-cutter houses out of suburbia serve as the locus of a minimal absurdism, where there is n...Read more
Melissa Furness at Plus
Last Friday night, Plus Gallery opened a show featuring new work by Melissa Furness. Unlike most openings featuring paintings, this one was dark. The lights were dimmed so that projections of swimmers could work their way across Furness’s paintings. With the projected swimmers kicking their way across the wall, one has to think of the Pipilotti Rist piece, Sip My Ocean. Yet this relationship is perhaps too convenient. Furness’s work is aquatic in multiple senses, not just in its video content. The lacelike pencilwork patterns the surface in slate, oceanlike blue. The painted swimmers appear stippled with a large brush, particles of color melting into other parti...Read more