Corbett vs. Dempsey

Big Youth

By Laura Pearson: Time Out Chicago / Issue 231 : Jul 30 - Aug 5, 2009

In her 2007 oil-on-canvas depiction of a musk ox, Jenn Wilson deftly blends sweeping brush strokes and tidy details. But it's the squat, shaggy-coated animal's impassive gaze that really gets us. Musk Ox is one of the most expressive works among an impressive array of styles and subject matter.

With "Big Youth," gallerists John Corbett and Jim Dempsey stray from their usual specialty, mid-20th-century American art, to showcase 13 emerging Chicago painters. All of these young artists are affiliated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and many have a connection to Saugatuck, Michigan's Ox-Bow art school.

While smaller-scale works add variety in the form of colorful abstractions such as Jason Karolak's bright, multilayered swirls and zigzags and J. Austin Eddy's paintings of cartoonish creatures, the larger paintings tend to command greater interest. Rachel Niffenegger's modestly sized Melted Teeth and Marl with a Ponytail Shadow (2009) is an exception. Niffenegger employs a variety of materials and techniques, including spraying and dripping paint, which yield a captivating, spectral portrait of a decaying head.

In The Curling Fingers of Tomorrow's Flowers 4 (2009), Carl Baratta plays with color (primarily rich oranges and reds) and spatial conventions, animating a gnarled tree in a sun-scorched field. Isak Applin combines a pastel color palette and a jumble of patterns and lines in Good Morning Norm Jacques (2009) - creating a warm pastoral scene complete with a tiny farmer waving from his tractor. In this show, even a genre as traditional as landscape painting gets an imaginative twist.