Evan Gruzis. Shell Game, 2014; acrylic, wood panel, spray paint, readymade objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Located more than nine miles west of Chicago’s city center, the Suburban is one of a number of alternative spaces that have caught on in the bordering village of Oak Park. It’s quiet, affluent, and easily accessed by public transit, yet Oak Park is an unlikely host to such alternative spaces as Terrain Exhibitions, the Franklin, and the Suburban, all of which locate innovative art within domestic settings. Terrain Exhibitions hosts its installations on artist Sabina Ott’s front porch and yard, while artists Dan Sullivan and Edra Soto present the Franklin in a backyard gallery. Pioneering this microscene since its founding in 1997, the Suburban currently occupies two outbuildings in the backyard of artist, educator, and curator Michelle Grabner, with her husband, the artist Brad Killam.

This month’s trio of exhibitions at the Suburban includes an inaugural exhibition of art guest-curated by Green Gallery directors Richard Galling and John Riepenhoff (of Milwaukee, Wisconsin), along with a performative/restorative work by Seth Hunter (who is repairing structural damage done to the Suburban’s main gallery in an earlier performative car wreck). At the Suburban’s second space, Grabner presents an exhibition of new works by painter Evan Gruzis.

Despite a broad and international career, Gruzis fits well into this midwestern family. He exhibited at The Green Gallery in 2012 and belongs to their roster of represented artists, he also exhibited with Riepenhoff at the Hyde Park Art Center’s 2013 A Study in Midwestern Appropriation (curated by Grabner), and is currently an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s painting department along with Grabner (and, formerly, Galling). One of the benefits of alternative spaces, and the Suburban in particular, is its inversion of the usual anxiety about exhibiting one’s friends and colleagues, making the Sunday afternoon exhibition (and accompanying barbeque) feel light for an opening: intimate and even celebratory.

Evan Gruzis. Free Box, 2014; textile dye and acrylic on canvas; 48 x 32 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The title of Gruzis’s exhibition is drawn from the name of the show’s only sculptural piece, Shell Game (2014), which greets visitors with a faux-rock shelf, a painted shell, and the smallest of the show’s paintings, cracked and purple. Like the paintings, these objects present a cool and wavering psychedelic color spectrum, at once intense and ice-cold.

The works in Shell Game represent a major departure for Gruzis, whose earlier work used intensive ink washed to create hazy, funky riffs on the objects and places that make up a kind of pop-culture landscape by way of Los Angeles. These new paintings not only feel different—more sober, more serious, more contemplative—but look dramatically different as well. Using fabric-dying techniques rather than brushed paint, Gruzis has layered these medium-sized paintings with nesting frame shapes, or splayed radiating lines across the paintings’ surfaces against tie-dye patterns in smoky purples, blues, and icy grays. The effect is mesmerizing, and while dealing less in signification than visual intensity, Gruzis’s new body of work describes a double movement. In one direction, the paintings reintroduce the fades and drop shadows typical of post-internet aesthetics into the familiar tensions in optical abstraction; while at the same time, the works seem to be abstractions of earlier paintings by Gruzis, selecting from his own history and giving former stylistic effects—such as the fade behind a landscape in silhouette, the splash of color across sunglasses—room to operate on their own.

Evan Gruzis. Hurricane Shutter, 2014; textile dye and acrylic on canvas, 38 x 26 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The illusive representations—a print of a pattern, a floating rectangle, a drop-shadow frame—play gentle tricks on the eye, simultaneously creating and flattening visual space in a familiar friction, yet they do so in a freshly retro and very slick way, as if Gruzis has channeled Modernism by way of Spencer’s Gifts. One imagines a plasma ball would accent the paintings nicely, but without any overt wink or nod to push the exhibition toward either riffing humor or meditative engagement, Shell Game hovers in multiple states.

Evan Gruzis’ Shell Game was on view at the Suburban through May 15, 2014.

Phillip Stearns. Linear Abstraction, 2015; installation view, Gutstein Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Photo: Marc Newton.

As its title so aptly demonstrates, the show uses the concept of the line—or more specifically, the hard-edged line—as a starting point in exploring how contemporary artists approach abstraction. Obviously, lines are omnipresent in art—in fact, it would be hard to preclude artists from being in the show if the engagement of lines were the only criteria. Visitors to this exhibition may also remember the Museum of Modern Art’s On Line, presented in late 2010 in New York. This exhibition attempted to explore the use of the line throughout modern art; in the end, predictably, artworks filled every wall of every gallery, showing the ubiquity of this most fundamental of formal devices.

Avoiding a survey-like mentality, Linear Abstraction uses the line as a lens in which to view specific works, and in turn the curators have created a show that comments not so much on the deliberate use of line, but instead on trends within contemporary abstraction. By using the word linear in the title, viewers are forced to reconcile each work with the idea of the line. Thus the curators have created an environment in which the works are meant to be read in a specific way.

Linear Abstraction, 2015; installation view, Gutstein Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Photo: Marc Newton.

Viewing works in these conditions often reveals multiple layers, and this is the case with Phillip Stearns’ Coplanar Nations: Israel & Palestine (2014). A digital video that could be categorized as glitch art, the work features ambiguous lines and shapes constantly and randomly shifting, with jagged, pixelated lines that pervade the entire space of the composition. As described by the artist, the work is the result of creating two polygons in the same virtual space—one shape is masked with the flag of Israel, the other with that of Palestine. Stearns then allows the polygons to rotate arbitrarily on top of each other. The visual rendering of such a procedure results in a process called z-fighting, where the computer tries to simultaneously display multiple surfaces that occupy the same space. The political overtones are immediately recognizable in such a work, mimicking the conflict between two nations over the same piece of land. Here lines are extricated from their formal use; instead, they point to geopolitical boundaries, especially those that are arbitrary and constantly evolving.

A work from Walead Beshty’s Black Curl series features lines as a vehicle for aesthetic conceptualization. Photographs created without a camera, these works are photograms that result from prearranged chance operations performed in a dark room. By using such a systematic procedure with little control over the finished image, Beshty’s works undermine the deterministic approach typical of photography as well as the innate aesthetic concerns inherent in many post-painterly abstract works from the postwar period. Like Stearns’ video, Beshty’s series of works uses a minimalist formalism to examine dominant structures within political and aesthetic spheres.

Linear Abstraction, 2015; installation view, Gutstein Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Photo: Marc Newton.

The other pieces in the show are not as overtly political, but they do reference specific commonalities shared by many contemporary abstract works. Once such trend is the conflation of the physical and the digital. John Houck’s works—including his Untitled #257, 614, 655 (2014)—subvert this dichotomy. For each of his works on display, he begins with a monochromatic, computer-generated field of lines printed on large-format paper. Once the work is printed, he makes a single crease at a seemingly random line through the middle of the paper. He then photographs the work from above, prints the image out, and repeats the entire process. With each cycle of its creation, the work becomes flatter, as each physical crease is transformed into a digitally printed line.

Several works in the show also demonstrate how abstraction no longer relies on media specificity, itself an interesting concept since abstraction is closely linked with the essentialism of painting. Rebecca Ward’s A (Goading) (2015) and X (Navy and Baby Blue) (both 2015) exist simultaneously as painting, sculpture, and fiber art. Michelle Grabner’s Untitled series, consisting of large-scale photographs of plaid fabric, easily connects to the lineage of post-painterly abstraction, and her silverpoint tondo Oyster 8 (2014) hangs from the ceiling on a single thread, drawing a line from the ceiling to the work. Like an Alexander Calder mobile, this hanging painting is at once sculptural and interactive, forcing viewers to navigate around it and responding to shifts in air pressure as they do.

Rana Begum. No. 529, 2015; installation view, 2015. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Photo: Marc Newton.

Finally, many of the pieces in the exhibition directly reference key works of modern abstraction. Rafael Vega’s paintings, including Untitled #9 (2014), contain violent cuts in their surfaces à la Lucio Fontana. Rana Begum’s marvelous wall installation No. 529 (2015) casts neon light—via reflection, not actual lights—onto the wall in a way reminiscent of the works of Dan Flavin. And Russell Tyler’s CPAA and TAFS (both 2014) directly conjure Josef Albers and Frank Stella, respectively, albeit painted in loose gestural brushstrokes that are antithetical to the minimalist works they reference. These citations are recognizable throughout the exhibition, and they posit a core hypothesis about contemporary abstraction: Artists are attempting to marry the lineage of formalist abstraction with the concerns of contemporary society. While the works in this exhibition vary in their approach and use of lines as a formalist element, the show’s curators have also uncovered several commonalities shared by contemporary abstraction.

Linear Abstraction is on view at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art through April 3, 2015.

David Robbins. Open-Air Writing Desk (Italian Version), 2012. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Raucci/Santamaria, Naples.

Michelle Grabner: As you know, I am frequently visiting university art departments and art schools. In the past two years, it has become routine for me to find a copy of your book, Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy, in the miscellany of resource material that compose many students’ studio libraries. Why do you think that developing artists gravitate to this history?

David Robbins: [I speculate it’s because] they’re in the material-culture business, and likely they welcome another way to think about material culture. Some want to better understand their comedic instincts, and it’s a happy affirmation to learn there’s a tradition to those instincts. Others suspect that thinking in the terms laid out by the visual-art context may not be, for them, the right path. All would be seeking [the invigoration] that any secret or invisible history provides. At this point, both the art and the comedy systems are awfully [predetermined] and careerist, whereas my book charts a course of inventive behavior for which no career path has been identified. Concrete Comedy suggests that wiggle room is still available. Wiggle room is always attractive.

Read the full article here.

Evan Gruzis. Shell Game, 2014; acrylic, wood panel, spray paint, readymade objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

This month’s trio of exhibitions at the Suburban includes an inaugural exhibition of art guest-curated by Green Gallery directors Richard Galling and John Riepenhoff (of Milwaukee, Wisconsin), along with a performative/restorative work by Seth Hunter (who is repairing structural damage done to The Suburban’s main gallery in an earlier performative car wreck). At the Suburban’s second space, Grabner presents an exhibition of new works by painter Evan Gruzis.

Despite a broad and international career, Gruzis fits well into this midwestern family. He exhibited at The Green Gallery in 2012 and belongs to their roster of represented artists, he also exhibited with Riepenhoff at the Hyde Park Art Center’s 2013 A Study in Midwestern Appropriation (curated by Grabner), and is currently an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s painting department along with Grabner (and, formerly, Galling). One of the benefits of alternative spaces, and The Suburban in particular, is its inversion of the usual anxiety about exhibiting one’s friends and colleagues, making the Sunday afternoon exhibition (and accompanying barbeque) feel light for an opening: intimate and even celebratory.

Evan Gruzis. Free Box, 2014; textile dye and acrylic on canvas; 48 x 32 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The title of Gruzis’ exhibition is drawn from the name of the show’s only sculptural piece, Shell Game (2014), which greets visitors with a faux-rock shelf, a painted shell, and the smallest of the show’s paintings, cracked and purple. Like the paintings, these objects present a cool and wavering psychedelic color spectrum, at once intense and ice-cold.

The works in Shell Game represent a major departure for Gruzis, whose earlier work used intensive ink washed to create hazy, funky riffs on the objects and places that make up a kind of pop-culture landscape by way of Los Angeles. These new paintings not only feel different—more sober, more serious, more contemplative—but look dramatically different as well. Using fabric-dying techniques rather than brushed paint, Gruzis has layered these medium-sized paintings with nesting frame shapes, or splayed radiating lines across the paintings’ surfaces against tie-dye patterns in smoky purples, blues, and icy grays. The effect is mesmerizing, and while dealing less in signification than visual intensity, Gruzis’ new body of work describes a double movement. In one direction, the paintings reintroduce the fades and drop shadows typical of post-internet aesthetics into the familiar tensions in optical abstraction; while at the same time, the works seem to be abstractions of earlier paintings by Gruzis, selecting from his own history and giving former stylistic effects—such as the fade behind a landscape in silhouette, the splash of color across sunglasses—room to operate on their own.

Evan Gruzis. Hurricane Shutter, 2014; textile dye and acrylic on canvas, 38 x 26 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The illusive representations—a print of a pattern, a floating rectangle, a drop-shadow frame—play gentle tricks on the eye, simultaneously creating and flattening visual space in a familiar friction, yet they do so in a freshly retro and very slick way, as if Gruzis has channeled Modernism by way of Spencer’s Gifts. One imagines a plasma ball would accent the paintings nicely, but without any overt wink or nod to push the exhibition toward either riffing humor or meditative engagement, Shell Game hovers in multiple states.

Evan Gruzis’ Shell Game is on view at The Suburban through May 15, 2014.