Frank Piatek

Last updated
Frank Piatek
Born1944
Chicago, Illinois, United States
NationalityAmerican
Education School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Known for Painting, Drawing, Installation art
Spouse(s)Judith Geichman
Awards National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council
Frank Piatek, Untitled, oil on canvas, 1967. Frank Piatek Untitled 1967.jpg
Frank Piatek, Untitled, oil on canvas, 1967.

Frank Piatek (born 1944) is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Piatek emerged in the mid-1960s, among a group of Chicago artists exploring various types of organic abstraction that shared qualities with the Chicago Imagists; [6] [7] [8] his work, however relies more on suggestion than expressionistic representation. [9] In Art in Chicago 1945-1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) described Piatek as playing “a crucial role in the development and refinement of abstract painting in Chicago" with carefully rendered, biomorphic compositions that illustrate the dialectical relationship between Chicago's idiosyncratic abstract and figurative styles. [10] Piatek's work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum, [11] Art Institute of Chicago, [12] MCA Chicago, National Museum, Szczecin in Poland, [13] and Terra Museum of American Art; [14] it belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and MCA Chicago, among others. [15] [16] Curator Lynne Warren describes Piatek as "the quintessential Chicago artist—a highly individualistic, introspective outsider" who has developed a "unique and deeply felt world view from an artistically isolated vantage point." [8] Piatek lives and works in Chicago with his wife, painter and SAIC professor Judith Geichman, and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974. [17] [18]

Contents

Life and career

Francis Piatek, Jr. was born in 1944 in Chicago into a Polish- and Swedish-American family. [19] His late father, Frank, Sr., was a community activist and neighborhood association president and has honorific street signs in his name. [20] Piatek was raised in the city's ethnic Irving Park neighborhood and began creating art when he attended nearby Lane Technical High School, which bordered the Riverview amusement park; [19] [21] in the 1970s, when he rented a studio across from the park after it closed, its ruins played a role in his work of the time. After a childhood in which he was stricken with polio, he studied at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC), earning BFA (1967) and MFA (1971) degrees. [19] [10] He attracted critical attention as an undergraduate, including a 1967 studio visit by Whitney Museum curator John Baur and Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) director Don Baum that led to his inclusion in the 1968 Whitney Biennial; that same year, he received a Ryerson Travel fellowship from SAIC. [11] [6]

Piatek used the grant to study and travel throughout Europe for a year, filling notebooks with sketches, while developing a sense of the continuity of history that would fuel ideas throughout his career. [10] [21] Over the next decade, after returning to Chicago, Piatek appeared in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), [22] [23] MCA Chicago, [24] [25] National Gallery of Canada and Renaissance Society, and had solo shows at N.A.M.E. Gallery (1975), HPAC (1969) and Phyllis Kind Gallery (1972), which was associated with the city's Imagist artists. [6] [10] In subsequent years, Piatek had solo exhibitions at the Roy Boyd and Richard Gray galleries, and was featured in shows at the MCA Chicago, [8] [10] AIC, Chicago Cultural Center, [26] HPAC, [27] Terra Museum of American Art, [14] and Smart Museum of Art. [28]

Work and reception

Frank Piatek, Untitled (small X painting), acrylic on canvas, 24" x 23.5", 1967. Frank Piatek Untitled (small X painting) 1967.png
Frank Piatek, Untitled (small X painting), acrylic on canvas, 24" x 23.5", 1967.

Art writers such as Mary Mathews Gedo and James Yood have described Piatek's work as lying outside dominant artistic orders, such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, or (in Chicago) Imagism, sidestepping the limitations of such movements regarding real-world forms, illusion, or content. [6] [29] [30] They categorize his art into two bodies: more widely known images of intertwined, tubular forms; and primal works of sculpture, collage and installation that reveal his inner thoughts and creative process. [31] [6] [32] Despite their abstraction, his tubular works draw on figurative art—from Renaissance and Baroque artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Velasquez to more modern figures like Manet, Léger and Balthus—and abstractionists, such as Frank Stella; both bodies explore symbolic forms from ancient sources, such as the Book of Kells, the caduceus, and Aztec, Minoan and pharaonic Egyptian iconography. [29] [33] [32] [34] Gedo and Yood have written that Piatek's work hovers between abstraction and figuration, providing a screen to stage open-ended, "sensuous and seductive dramas" [29] alluding to biology, sexuality, machine elements, and spirituality. [6] [35] [32] [34] Dennis Adrian tied Piatek's interests in the mythic, metaphysical and elemental to both the Romantic temperament and visionary aspects of Chicago art. [36]

Early work

As an undergraduate, Piatek created two groups of paintings that brought early recognition. One employed shaped canvasses—wave, "X," or upside-down "U" forms—that featured stripes or tubes, often following the contours of the canvas edge, such as Untitled (small X painting) (1967). [8] [37] [26] Writers described them as direct responses to Frank Stella's minimalist stripe paintings that nonetheless broke with the era's dominant Greenbergian formalism by employing chiaroscuro modeling and illusionistic space rather than affirming the flatness of the picture plane (as Stella did). [6] [8] [26] Piatek also experimented with a motif of monumental, writhing tubular forms (e.g., Untitled, 1967); these works were his first awarded prizes (in the AIC 1967 and 1968 "Chicago and Vicinity" shows) [38] [39] and acquired by a museum (AIC, 1970). [40]

The tubular paintings became a trademark body of work that has explored wide-ranging variations for four decades. Piatek has painted them as twisting, patterned and symmetrical forms that emerge out of dark, packed, enigmatic space; reviewers such as Franz Schulze and Jane Allen described them as evoking close-up magnification of organic (bodies, limbs, phalluses, worms, intestines, trees), man-made (coils, ropes, chains, metal piping, knots, balloons), and symbolic forms. [41] [42] [43] [36] They further characterize this work as featuring forceful drawing and rhythmical design that suggests coiled energy, subtle wet-on-wet modeling, cross-hatched brushwork and active surfaces, luminous color, and glowing ethereal light. [44] [42] [45] [46] [36] [41] In the 1970s, Allen called them "portholes into a dimly lit fluorescent world of intertwining, undulating forms" that became a "fascinating exercise in the primary sensations of form"; [41] Schulze described them as formally sober, seemingly abstract works that suggest visceral figurative associations, eroticism, fantasy and magic. [44] [35] [1]

Frank Piatek, N.A.M.E. Gallery installation, mixed media, 1975. Frank Piatek N.A.M.E. installation 1975.jpg
Frank Piatek, N.A.M.E. Gallery installation, mixed media, 1975.

Piatek developed his second body of introverted, shamanistic work in the early 1970s, during a time of personal and artistic crisis; writers identify key its themes as death and rebirth, macrocosm and microcosm, myth and the collective unconscious. [6] [47] [21] He was initially inspired by a mural commission [43] that sought a landscape or tree image, leading him to experiment with sinuous, archetypal forms and emblematic hieroglyphs. [43] [26] He pursued this direction privately in directly referential, symbolic drawings of spiders and trees, artifact-like sculpture, and carvings of snakes, stars, podlike sarcophagi and dead men in boats, covered in mud, twine and fabric. [9] [6] [47] [21] The new work ended his relationship with Phyllis Kind Gallery, but culminated in an experimental installation at the alternative N.A.M.E. Gallery (1975), featuring a ritual-like arrangement alongside his established tube images. [48] [31] [49] Several reviews noted the interplay between the primal imagery and contemporary paintings, as well as the insights into Piatek's heretofore hidden process and inspirations. [49] [31] [48] Franz Schulze called the carvings persuasive, "fetishistic objects … sinister, private things, like effigies, full of atavistic implications;" [49] Derek Guthrie, however, found the primitive approach less convincing and over-intellectualized. [50] Piatek has continued to explore this more intimate work in various media and formats throughout his career.

Frank Piatek, Glowing Forms, oil alkyd on canvas, 62" x 72", 1984. Frank Piatek Glowing Forms 1984.jpg
Frank Piatek, Glowing Forms, oil alkyd on canvas, 62" x 72", 1984.

"Allusive Abstraction"

In the early 1980s, Piatek and the Chicago painters William Conger, Miyoko Ito and Richard Loving formed a group based on a shared interest in abstraction that embraced real-world associations, illusionism, and form as metaphor. [51] [52] [10] They coined the label "Allusive Abstraction" for their approach, eventually promoting their ideas through Chicago Art Write, an artist-written publication co-edited by Piatek, Conger and Loving. [53] [54] The group's collective effort attracted critical attention in national publications [51] [55] [56] [57] and generated traveling exhibitions of Chicago abstraction. [36] [27] Piatek also moved to Roy Boyd Gallery (six solo shows, 1984–2001)—well-known for its focus on abstractionists, including Conger and Loving—to further highlight their mutual concerns. [6]

During that period, Piatek continued to explore similar formal concerns in his tube motif, but experimented widely with painting techniques and materials ranging from old-master glazing techniques to methods adapted from modernists like Willem de Kooning to acrylic paint. [3] [58] [4] These new methods—inspired by research for an SAIC painting course he developed—shifted his work toward a more layered, soft-edged, painterly approach [30] [47] [58] with a loosening of form, more rhythmic surface activity, [3] and more brilliant color and spatial depth (e.g., Glowing Forms, 1984). [1] Critics such as Alan Artner and Christopher Lyon identified a greater sense of eroticism in the work, alternately comparing it to the fleshy ruddiness of Rubens, the odalisques of Ingres, and musculature of Michelangelo. [59] [60] [30] [61] [62] Reviewing several exhibitions, they also noted that the work of this period emphasized Piatek's drawing more, both within his paintings and in delicate willow and vine charcoal works on paper that he exhibited. [58] [62] [2] [61]

Frank Piatek, Untitled (collage), acrylic photocopy transfer, 1994. Frank Piatek Untitled (collage) 1994.jpg
Frank Piatek, Untitled (collage), acrylic photocopy transfer, 1994.

Collages, assemblages and installations

In an "upstairs-downstairs" format exhibition (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1987) reflecting his studio set-up, Piatek introduced a new medium in his more intimate body of work: a decade's worth of collage-assemblages on the theme of art-making, which he displayed in a lower gallery beneath his paintings on the main floor. [63] [32] The collage work breaks with linear time, joining photocopy-transferred, early notebook images (of Piatek, his studio and ceremonial objects), present work, text, and mythic forms in an overlay of memory and archetype that suggests both a psychic archaeology and connection to a greater collectivity. [5] [32] [64] Critics such as Alan Artner and Andy Argy described these combinations of mixed-media, layered marks and processes as among his most elaborate works—dark, distilled stream-of-conscious pictorial diaries engaging genealogies of cultural history that reveal the sensibilities and interplay of abstraction and figuration underlying his paintings. [63] [32] [58] [62] [2]

Piatek extended this exploration of the creative process Ii several later installations. He mounted two double-installations with his wife, painter Judith Geichman—Studio Process Residue (1999) and Picturing the Studio (2009)—that explored studio residue (raw materials, sketches, books, sources) as a companion text illuminating the artist's work; in both shows, they each created representations of their studios, including finished work. [18] [65] [66] Almost Voyage Time/Traveler’s Report (2008) was an altar-like installation of two boat/pod forms from which paper tags marked with drawing, symbols and text fragments hung, suggesting a gathering of material for transformation. [21] The installations Kerux Aion (2007–8) and Theater of the Concealed Index (2014) continued Piatek's emphasis on text and the act of mark-making, combining drawings of words with myriad tags or pieces of cut paper that were marked and painted, often with iconic symbols or patterns, and hung in rows by twine. [67]

Teaching and writing

Piatek has taught art for more than four decades, primarily at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). After a year at Washington University in St. Louis (1973–4), and several years teaching part-time at SAIC (1971–2, 1974–84), he accepted a full-time position at SAIC in 1984, which he continues to hold . [17] From 1990–3, he served as Co-Chair of the Painting Program with Richard Loving. In 1976, Piatek researched and reconceived the school's discontinued "Materials and Techniques of Painting" course, introducing contemporary theoretical discourse, such as that era's so-called "Death [End] of Painting crisis,” as well as a wide range of historical painting processes; the course has continued for over four decades. [8] [6] [47] He also conceived and developed a longstanding lecture/studio course, "The Spiritual in Art," in 1991. [68] [69] Piatek has written and lectured about drawing, abstraction, regionalism, and the spiritual in art in Whitewalls and Chicago/Art/Write and at the College Art Association. [70] [53] [54] [71]

Collections and recognition

Piatek's work belongs to several public art collections, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, [15] MCA Chicago, [16] Arkansas Art Center, [72] C.N. Gorman Museum at UC Davis, [73] Elmhurst College, [52] Illinois State Museum, [74] Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, [75] Minneapolis Institute of Art, [76] Smart Museum of Art, [77] University Club of Chicago, [78] and Washington State University Museum of Art. [79] He has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts (1985), Illinois Arts Council (1980), [80] and Francis Ryerson Foreign Travel (1967) fellowships, as well as the Pauline Palmer Award and John G. Curtis Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago, among honors. [39] [23] [17]

Related Research Articles

The Chicago Imagists are a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s.

Visual arts of Chicago refers to paintings, prints, illustrations, textile art, sculpture, ceramics and other visual artworks produced in Chicago or by people with a connection to Chicago. Since World War II, Chicago visual art has had a strong individualistic streak, little influenced by outside fashions. "One of the unique characteristics of Chicago," said Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts curator Bob Cozzolino, "is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo." The Chicago art world has been described as having "a stubborn sense ... of tolerant pluralism." However, Chicago's art scene is "critically neglected." Critic Andrew Patner has said, "Chicago's commitment to figurative painting, dating back to the post-War period, has often put it at odds with New York critics and dealers." It is argued that Chicago art is rarely found in Chicago museums; some of the most remarkable Chicago artworks are found in other cities.

Richard Wetzel American painter

Richard Wetzel is an American artist. He is best known for his oil paintings but also has exhibited collages and sculpture. In 1969 and 1970, Wetzel exhibited with the Chicago Imagists, a grouping of Chicago artists who were ascendant in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

David Klamen American painter

David Klamen is an American artist and academic. He is known for visually diverse paintings that meld technical mastery with postmodern explorations of the processes by which humans understand and interpret experience. Klamen has exhibited across the United States, Europe and Asia, including individual shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), the Chazen Museum of Art and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, and major group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Crocker Art Museum. His work sits in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Klamen has been based in Chicago for most of his career, which includes being an educator for over thirty years, primarily at Indiana University Northwest, where he was appointed Founding Dean, School of the Arts in 2018.

Miyoko Ito

Miyoko Ito was an American artist known for her watercolor and abstract oil paintings and prints. Ito was part of an informal group of like-minded, but visually diverse Chicago painters, self-named the "Allusive Abstractionists" and formed in 1981. The group, which also included William Conger, Richard Loving and Frank Piatek, was formed to spark dialogue and make space for a wider conception of abstraction that included more subjective, metaphorical work. Though tangentially involved with the Chicago Imagists, Ito's own style diverged and synthesized cubism and surrealism.

Julia Fish is an American artist whose paintings have a deceptive simplicity. She paints in oil on stretched rectangular canvases of varying size. By means of close observation of everyday subjects—leaves of a tree seen through a window, a section of floor tiles, an old fashioned light fixture— she makes, as one critic says, "quiet, abstract manifestations of observed realities." She is a studio artist who paints not what she sees in an instant but rather what she observes continuously, day after day. The result, she says, is not so much temporal as durational. Her paintings compress many instances of observation so as to become, as she sees it, "a parallel system to a lived experience." The paintings lack spatial orientation and, as a critic says, can "be described as both highly realistic and abstract without compromising either term." In 2008, Alan G. Artner, writing in the Chicago Tribune, said "This is work of small refinements and adjustments. The world of everyday things generates it, but Fish's qualities of seeing and touch elevate the things to a plane on which they leave behind their humble character."

Corey Postiglione American painter

Corey Postiglione is an American artist, art critic and educator. He is a member of the American Abstract Artists in New York, and known for precise, often minimalist work that "both spans and explores the collective passage from modernism to postmodernism" in contemporary art practice and theory. New Art Examiner co-founder Jane Allen, writing in 1976, described him as "an important influence on the development of contemporary Chicago abstraction." In 2008, Chicago Tribuneart critic Alan G. Artner wrote "Postiglione has created a strong, consistent body of work that developed in cycles, now edging closer to representation, now moving further away, but remaining rigorous in approach to form as well as seductive in markmaking and color."

Don Baum American curator, artist and educator

Don Baum (1922–2008) was an American curator, artist and educator, most known as a key impresario and promoter of the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists that had an enduring impact on American art in the later twentieth century. Described by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) as "an indispensable curator of the Chicago school," Baum was known for lively and irreverent exhibitions that offered fresh perspectives combining elements of Surrealism and Pop and that broke down barriers between schooled and untrained, or so-called outsider artists. From 1956 to 1972, Baum was exhibitions director at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center. It was there, in the 1960s, that he became involved with a group of young artists he exhibited as "Hairy Who" that later expanded to become the Chicago Imagists. That group included Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, and Karl Wirsum. Baum mounted two major shows at the MCA that featured the emerging artists in their first museum exhibitions: "Don Baum Sez: 'Chicago Needs Famous Artists'" (1969) and "Made in Chicago" (1973), which shaped a vision of Chicago's art world as a place of meticulous craftsmanship and vernacular inspiration.

Arthur Lerner American painter

Arthur Lerner is an American artist, known for his atmospheric figurative paintings and drawings, landscapes, and still lifes. He is sometimes described as a realist, but most critics observe that his work is more subjective than descriptive or literal. Associated with Chicago's influential "Monster Roster" artists early in his career, he shared their enthusiasm for expressive figuration, fantasy and mythology, and their existential outlook, but diverged increasingly in his classical formal concerns and more detached temperament. Critics frequently note in Lerner's art a sense of light that evokes Impressionism, delicate color and modelling that "flirts with dematerialization," and the draftsmanship that serves as a foundation for all of his work. The Chicago Tribune's Alan Artner lamented Lerner's comparative lack of recognition in relation to the Chicago Imagists as the fate of "an aesthete in a town dominated by tenpenny fantasts." Lerner's work has been extensively covered in publications, featured in books such as Monster Roster: Existential Art in Postwar Chicago, and acquired by public and private collections, including those of the Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, among many.

William Conger American painter

William Conger is a Chicago-based, American painter and educator, known for a dynamic, subjective style of abstraction descended from Kandinsky, which consciously employs illogical, illusionistic space and light and ambiguous forms that evoke metaphorical associations. He is a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters self-named in 1981, whose paradoxical styles countered the reductive minimalism that dominated post-1960s art. In 1982, critic Mary Mathews Gedo hailed them as "prescient prophets of the new style of abstraction" that flowered in the 1980s. In his essay for Conger's fifty-year career retrospective, Donald Kuspit called Conger art-historically daring for forging a path of subjective abstraction after minimalism had allegedly purged painting of an inner life. Despite being abstract, his work has a strong connection to Chicago's urban, lakeside geography and displays idiosyncratic variations of tendencies identified with Chicago Imagist art. A hallmark of Conger's career has been his enduring capacity for improvisation and discovery within self-prescribed stylistic limits.

Rodney Carswell American painter

Rodney Carswell is an American abstract artist. He first gained recognition for human-scaled, geometric paintings that feature exposed, projected support structures, creating interplay between sculptural presence and richly painted pictorial surfaces. His recent paintings eschew the superstructures and evoke a greater sense of immediacy, playfulness, and narrative. Critics often describe Carswell's work as uncanny, elusive or quirky, for its tendency to negotiate "in-between" spaces and embrace contradictions such as order and instability, intention and accident, or back and front. Employing irregularly shaped canvasses, thick supports, and openings or holes that reveal the stretcher construction and walls behind them, works like 3 (1994) often occupy a place between painting and sculpture. In a similar way, Carswell uses the modernist languages of Minimalism, Suprematism and Constructivism, yet eludes those categories with postmodern allusions to architecture, the body and spiritual iconography, and with his process-oriented, "hand-made" surfaces. In his essay for Carswell's mid-career retrospective at Chicago's Renaissance Society, Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel suggested that his understated paintings worked their way into the one's consciousness in a "supple, somewhat unsettling manner" that achieves a subtle, but lingering shift in perception.

Jan Cicero Gallery was a contemporary art gallery founded and directed by Jan Cicero, which operated from 1974 to 2003, with locations in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois and Telluride, Colorado. The gallery was noted for its early, exclusive focus on Chicago abstract artists at a time when they were largely neglected, its role in introducing Native American artists to mainstream art venues beyond the Southwest, and its showcasing of late-career and young women artists. The gallery focused on painting, and to a lesser degree, works on paper, often running counter to the city's prevailing art currents. It was also notable as a pioneer of two burgeoning Chicago gallery districts, the West Hubbard Street alternative corridor of the 1970s, and the River North district in the 1980s.

Seymour Rosofsky American painter

Seymour Rosofsky was an American artist, who has been described as one of the key figures in twentieth-century Chicago art. He emerged in the late 1940s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of several G.I. Bill veterans, including Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli and H. C. Westermann, who would join Don Baum, Dominick Di Meo, June Leaf, and Nancy Spero to form the influential movement later dubbed the "Monster Roster" by critic Franz Schulze, which was a precursor to the more well-known Chicago Imagists. Like others in the group, Rosofsky was drawn to the unsettling, macabre side of Surrealism, initially creating gestural, expressionist renderings of grotesque, existentially angst-ridden figures in isolated or uncomfortable situations, that gave way in the 1960s to more fantastical, observational paintings that examined power, politics and domestic relationships in an unflinching way.

David Sharpe (artist) American painter

David Sharpe is an American artist, known for his stylized and expressionist paintings of the figure and landscape and for early works of densely packed, organic abstraction. He was trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked in Chicago until 1970, when he moved to New York City, where he remains. Sharpe has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), The Drawing Center, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Chicago Cultural Center, among many venues. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, and been acquired by public institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, MCA Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, among many.

Susan Sensemann American painter

Susan Sensemann is an American artist, educator and arts administrator, most known for her detailed, largely abstract patterned paintings and photomontages reflecting gothic, baroque, spiritual and feminist sensibilities. She has exhibited her work at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, A.I.R., The Living Art Museum (Reykjavík), Indianapolis Art Center, Chicago Cultural Center, and Art Institute of Boston, on four continents. Her work has been widely reviewed and resides in numerous private, university and corporate collections. Sensemann is known as a versatile and prolific creator, whose ideas have led her to explore diverse painting materials, media, subject matter, and styles from abstraction to realism. Critics note her work's densely packed compositions, shallow fields of oscillating space, complex tactile surfaces, and sensuous color and linearity. James Yood wrote that Sensemann's abstract paintings were "fraught with meaning, charged with value, and seething with import" in their spiritual seeking. Art historian Leisa Rundquist described her photomontage self-portraits as "strangely sensual, yet disturbing" images drawn from "the depths of the unconscious."

Paul Lamantia American visual artist (born 1938)

Paul Christopher Lamantia is an American visual artist, known for paintings and drawings that explore dark psychosexual imagery. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the larger group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists.

Helen OToole American painter and educator

Helen O'Toole is an Irish-born painter based in the United States, who is known for abstract paintings suggestive of landscape. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and the United States, in Singapore, and at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Tacoma Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her work has been featured in the journals Artforum, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Zyzzyva, as well as the Chicago Tribune,The Irish Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and National Public Radio. Art writers frequently discuss the interplay in her work between abstraction, the evocation of otherworldly light, land and space, and a commitment to investigating meaning through a painting process akin to the processes of cultivation and excavation. Artforum critic James Yood wrote, "echoing the often inchoate quality of nature, her paint surges toward mystery and hints at a kind of chiaroscuro of the spirit"; curator Bonnie Laing-Malcomson suggests her "richly colored monumental paintings evoke the moody landscape of her rural Irish homeland, summoning the force of J. M. W. Turner and Mark Rothko." She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, a Contemporary Northwest Art Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (2013), among other awards. O'Toole lives in Seattle, Washington and is Professor of Art and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Program at the University of Washington.

Judy Ledgerwood American abstract painter

Judy Ledgerwood is an American abstract painter and educator, who has been based in Chicago. Her work confronts fundamental, historical and contemporary issues in abstract painting within a largely high-modernist vocabulary that she often complicates and subverts. Ledgerwood stages traditionally feminine-coded elements—cosmetic and décor-related colors, references to ornamental and craft traditions—on a scale associated with so-called "heroic" abstraction; critics suggest her work enacts an upending or "domestication" of modernist male authority that opens the tradition to allusions to female sexuality, design, glamour and pop culture. Critic John Yau writes, "In Ledgerwood’s paintings the viewer encounters elements of humor, instances of surprise, celebrations of female sexuality, forms of vulgar tactility, and intense and unpredictable combinations of color. There is nothing formulaic about her approach." Ledgerwood has exhibited widely at galleries throughout the United States and in Europe and at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Renaissance Society. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Art Institute of Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others; a monograph, Judy Ledgerwood, was published in 2009 by Hatje Cantz. Ledgerwood lives and works in the Chicago area with her husband, artist Tony Tasset, and teaches at Northwestern University.

Neil Goodman American sculptor

Neil Goodman is an American sculptor and educator, known for bronze works that combine elegant arrangements and forms with hand-wrought, textured surfaces. He has explored a wide range of formats—still-life compositions, wall and floor installations, free-standing works and monumental public art—in a formalist style that has evolved from spare representation to abstraction and minimalism.

Richard Loving (artist) American visual artist

Richard Loving (1924–2021) was an American artist and educator, primarily based in Chicago, Illinois. He gained recognition in the 1980s as a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters, whose individual forms of organic abstraction embraced evocative imagery and metaphor, counter to the dominant minimalist mode. He is most known for paintings that critics describe as metaphysical and visionary, which move fluidly between abstraction and representation, personalized symbolism taking organic and geometric forms, and chaos and order. They are often characterized by bright patterns of dotted lines and dashes, enigmatic spatial fields, and an illuminated quality. In 2010, critic James Yood wrote that Loving's work "mull[ed] over the possibilities of pattern and representation, of narrative and allegory" to attain a kind of wisdom, transcendence and acknowledgement of universals, "seeking understanding of self within the poetics of the physical world."

References

  1. 1 2 3 Schulze, Franz. "Artists the Critics Are Watching: Frank Piatek, Twenty Years of Monumental Tubes," ARTnews, May 1981.
  2. 1 2 3 Holg, Garrett. "Frank Piatek at Roy Boyd," ARTnews, January, 1999.
  3. 1 2 3 Yood, James. "Frank Piatek," New Art Examiner, February 1985.
  4. 1 2 Artner, Alan G. "Piatek expanding creative boundaries," Chicago Tribune, October 29, 1998.
  5. 1 2 Depree Art Center. Searching for the Spiritual (catalogue), Holland, MI: Depree Art Center, Hope College, 1997, p. 31.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Gedo, Mary Mathews. "Abstraction as Metaphor: The Evocative Imagery of William Conger, Richard Loving, Frank Piatek, Miyoko Ito", Arts Magazine, p. 112–117, 1982.
  7. ↑ Adrian, Dennis. "Private Treasures, Public Spirit," Art in Chicago 1945-1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Warren, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, p. 78. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Warren, Lynne. "Frank Piatek," Selections from the Dennis Adrian Collection (Catalogue), Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 1982. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  9. 1 2 Bonesteel, Michael. "Frank Piatek at Richard Gray," Art in America, December 1981.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Smith, Courtney A. "Frank Piatek," Art in Chicago 1945-1995. Museum of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Warren, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, p. 275. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  11. 1 2 Whitney Museum of American Art. "1967 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Painting, Dec 13, 1967–Feb 4, 1968," Exhibitions. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  12. ↑ Art Institute of Chicago. "70th Annual Exhibition of Artists from Chicago and Vicinity," 1967. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  13. ↑ Hyde Park Art Center. Transcultural Visions 2 (catalogue), Chicago/Szczecinie, Poland: Hyde Park Art Center/Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie, 2002, p. 151–6.
  14. 1 2 Terra Museum of American Art. Surfaces: Two Decades of Painting in Chicago (catalogue), Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 1987.
  15. 1 2 Art Institute of Chicago. "Frank Piatek," Artists. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  16. 1 2 Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. "Frank Piatek," Artists. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  17. 1 2 3 School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "Frank Piatek," Faculty. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  18. 1 2 Hawkins, Margaret. "Carnal knowledge of the spirit," Chicago Sun-Times, 1999.
  19. 1 2 3 Bojko, Szymon. Polish-American and Polish Artists in Contemporary American Art, Oficyna Wydawnicza Kucharski, 2007, p. 249–55. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  20. ↑ Parsons, Monique. "Residents Leading War Against Graffiti," Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1992. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  21. 1 2 3 4 5 Wise, David Mark. "Frank Piatek: Profile of the Artist," New City, July 17, 2008. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  22. ↑ Watson, Jerome. "She Wins Top Award at Art Institute Again," Chicago Sun-Times, March 1, 1968, p. 45.
  23. 1 2 Art Institute of Chicago. "72nd Annual Exhibition of Artists from Chicago and Vicinity," 1969. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  24. ↑ Schulze, Franz. "The Joys and Wonders of Chicago Art," Chicago Daily News, March 22, 1969, Panorama, p.4–5.
  25. ↑ Morgan, Ann Lee. "A Chicago Letter," Art International, November–December 1982.
  26. 1 2 3 4 Adrian, Dennis. Masterpieces of Recent Chicago Art (catalogue essay), Chicago: Chicago Cultural Center, 1977.
  27. 1 2 Moser, Charlotte. "Abstract/Symbol/Image: A Re-vision," Abstract/Symbol/Image (catalogue), Chicago: Illinois Arts Council Traveling Exhibition, 1984.
  28. ↑ Smart Museum of Art. "Trends in Post-War Chicago Art, December 26, 1996 – January 16, 1997," Exhibitions. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  29. 1 2 3 Yood, James. "Frank Piatek," in Spirited Visions by Patty Carroll and James Yood, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  30. 1 2 3 Artner, Alan G. "Frank Piatek," Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1981.
  31. 1 2 3 Morrison, C. L. "Frank Piatek's 'Cooking,'" Midwest Art, 1975.
  32. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Argy, Andy. "Frank Piatek and Tim Linn," New Art Examiner, January 1988.
  33. ↑ Schulze, Franz. Fantastic Images, Chicago Art Since 1945, Chicago: Follett Publishing, 1972.
  34. 1 2 Polanski, G. Jurek. "Transcultural Visions: Polish American Contemporary Art," ArtScope, 2001. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  35. 1 2 Schulze, Franz. "The art that's made in this big funny town," Chicago Daily News, March 20, 1971.
  36. 1 2 3 4 Adrian, Dennis. Chicago: Some Other Traditions (catalogue), Madison, WI: Madison Art Center, 1983.
  37. ↑ Chicago Daily News. "Surrealism His Hobby," Chicago Daily News, November 10, 1969.
  38. ↑ Halstead, Whitney. Review, "The 70th Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity," Artforum, May 1967, p. 64–5. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  39. 1 2 Barry, Edmund. "Evanston Artist Repeats as 'Best' in Institute Show," Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1968.
  40. ↑ Art Institute of Chicago. 138th Tube Painting Dedicated to St. Lucy and Don Quixote, 1968, Frank Piatek," Collections. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  41. 1 2 3 Allen, Jane and Derek Guthrie. "Gallery notes," Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1972.
  42. 1 2 Haydon, Harold. "Variety is the spice of showings," Chicago Sun-Times, February 18, 1972.
  43. 1 2 3 Schulze, Franz. The Art in Main Bank of Chicago (catalogue essay), Chicago: Main Bank, 1975.
  44. 1 2 Schulze, Franz. "February farrago in galleries," Chicago Daily News, February 1972.
  45. ↑ Adrian, Dennis. The Chicago Style: Painting (catalogue essay), Chicago: University of Chicago, 1974.
  46. ↑ King, Mary. "Frank Piatek Exhibition Is at Meramec Community College," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 1974.
  47. 1 2 3 4 Lyon, Christopher. "Frank Piatek moves beyond tube shapes," Chicago Sun-Times, December 23, 1984, p. 12.
  48. 1 2 Lavin, Carl. "N.A.M.E. Gallery: Avoiding the Salesmen," The Chicago Maroon, October 24, 1975, p. 2, 5.
  49. 1 2 3 Schulze, Franz. "Linn & Piatek," Chicago Daily News, October 1975.
  50. ↑ Guthrie, Derek. "Frank Piatek and Tim Linn (N.A.M.E. Gallery)," New Art Examiner, November 1975.
  51. 1 2 Gedo, Mary Mathews. "Interconnections: A Study of Chicago Style Relationships in Painting," Arts Magazine, September 1983, p. 92–97.
  52. 1 2 Elmhurst College. "Francis Piatek, Notre Dame Sheela Rite of Passage/Entry Eye of the Needle, 1969". Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  53. 1 2 Piatek, Frank. "On the Issue of Place," Chicago/Art/Write, Summer 1986, p. 5–6.
  54. 1 2 Piatek, Frank. "Notes toward Re-Visioning of the Concept of Abstraction," Chicago/Art/Write, Summer 1987, p. 4–5.
  55. ↑ Moser, Charlotte. "Regional Revisions: Houston and Chicago," Art in America, July 1985, p. 90–9.
  56. ↑ Gedo, Mary Mathews. "Speakeasy: Mary Mathews Gedo," New Art Examiner, April 1985, p. 12–3.
  57. ↑ Kuspit, Donald. "The 'madness' of Chicago art," New Art Examiner, May 1986, p. 226.
  58. 1 2 3 4 McCracken, David. "Piatek's switch to acrylic energizes his expressiveness," Chicago Tribune, December 28, 1990, p. 64.
  59. ↑ Lyon, Christopher. "Frank Piatek," Art Express, November/December 1981.
  60. ↑ Lyon, Christopher. "Abstract/Symbol/Image," ARTnews, December 1984.
  61. 1 2 Polanski, G. Jurek. "Spectrum: Contemporary Art in Chicago," ArtScope, May 2002.
  62. 1 2 3 Artner, Alan G. "Apparently abstract," Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1996.
  63. 1 2 Artner, Alan G. "Piatek's collages provide a new interest," Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1987, p. 58.
  64. ↑ Jacobs, Jodie. "Art `Pleasures' easy to see but often difficult to define," Chicago Tribune, December 12, 2003. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  65. ↑ Camper, Fred. "Garden Variety Inspiration," Chicago Reader, September 16, 1999. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  66. ↑ ArtDaily. "School of the Art Institute of Chicago Presents 'Picturing the Studio,'" ArtDaily, 2010. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  67. ↑ Carrigan, Maggie. "A Visit to 'Tracing Affinities' and 'Faculty Projects,'" F Newsmagazine, January 28, 2014. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  68. ↑ Elkins, James. On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, New York: Routledge, 2004.
  69. ↑ Hawkins, Deborah. "Spirituality in Art: An Ongoing Exploration," Yoga Chicago, March/April 2007. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  70. ↑ Piatek, Frank. Drawing in the '80s Issue, Whitewalls, Spring 1986, p. 49.
  71. ↑ Piatek, Frank. "An Abstract of Abstraction," Chicago/Art/Write, Summer 1987, p. 11.
  72. ↑ Arkansas Art Center. Collection. Retrieved July 17, 2018.
  73. ↑ C.N. Gorman Museum at UC Davis. "The Permanent Collections,". Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  74. ↑ Illinois State Museum. "Dyadic Caryatid II, 1978" Collection. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  75. ↑ Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art. "Frank Piatek," Collection. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  76. ↑ Minneapolis Institute of Art. "Frank Piatek, Untitled, 1969," Collections. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  77. ↑ Smart Museum of Art. "Francis John Piatek," People. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  78. ↑ University Club of Chicago. "Frank Piatek," Artists. Retrieved August 2, 2018.
  79. ↑ Washington State University. "WSU Museum of Art to Present Large Drawings Collection," February 6, 2001. Retrieved August 2, 2019.
  80. ↑ Chicago Tribune. "Arts Council gives grants to 5 artists," Chicago Tribune, February 21, 1980.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.