With cool white walls and wide windows, the newly opened Galerie Kenilworth feels expansive. The current exhibition, “The Shape of Things to Come,” echoes this sentiment with abstract works by three artists with uniquely complementary approaches.
Karin Haas’ drawings are pastel constructions of shapes, something like building blocks that might be used for exercises in modeling light and shadow. However, subtle variations in hue are not their real interest. Her trapezoids, discs and other irregular forms are decked out with surfaces of flat color relieved by finely reserved lines. Amid the multitude of hues, this negative space creates contours where the structures shift, offering a refined pause in bold color fields.
Harvey Opgenorth’s Interference paintings are like acrylic television static on canvas. From a distance their striations are more apparent and the subtle mingling of colorful points blends together. Your eye traces the transitions that happen in horizontal bands, often concocted in a manner that is tilted a little bit off-kilter on the rectangular canvas. It becomes difficult to detect exactly where purple fades into blue and then yellow, or how the graduation and clarity of one side of the painting becomes so opposite on the other side of the composition. Opgenorth also works with this technique in three-dimensional pieces, lit in a manner that their cast shadows become like smooth grey reactions to the multicolored surfaces.
Installations by Keith Nelson are related to some of these ideas but through an entirely different set of directives. Nelson uses found materials, often things like construction supplies or industrial stuff, to organize pieces that refocus our attention from what something used to be and into a consideration of its purely visual properties. A wall of toilet tank covers, with smooth variations in surface textures as well as colors and blemishes, becomes a wall relief of softly toned porcelain reflecting spots of light.
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This idea of reconsideration, of looking at things in alternative ways and with a conscious attentiveness on small details and gestures, connects these artists and offers something to ponder about the shape of things to come.
Through Dec. 31 at Galerie Kenilworth, 2201 N. Farwell Ave.
