EXPO CHGO ONLINE: Miles McEnery Gallery

"Whitney Bedford’s landscapes and oceanic vistas were emotional, elusive, uncommon, sometimes based in story, or sweetly teetering on the verge of collapse. Her relationship to the paintings—and by extension ours—was both dualistic and deeply personal. Precisely drawn renderings anchored her compositions in place with specificity, while gestural, diffuse atmospherics strutted across the armature."

- Shana Nys Dambrot in Artillery Magazine

"In American painter Inka Essenhigh’s fantastical world, the goblinesque creatures and their environments seem to be lit from within, whether cast in the cool light of the predawn morning or in the deep burnt orange of a Chinese restaurant. With nods to Surrealism and animation, Essenhigh’s landscapes are populated by characters from folklore and mythology, in some cases existing only as faceless shadows. At a time where the real world is filled with screaming headlines and endless stressors, Essenhigh’s magic garden offers a lovely, transporting respite."

- Caroline Goldstein in ArtNet News

"The ability of Fishman’s work to draw in, encompass, and swallow the viewer proves the most redemptive feature of her self-inflicted dilemma. Most of the forms she uses have some kind of passage or gateway built in, either literally in the form of an aperture in their surface, or a color change that suggests the fundamental distinction between exterior and interior spaces."

-  William Corwin in The Brooklyn Rail

"The door is Rico Gatson’s chosen canvas. The bright, flat colorful abstractions seen in a series of new paintings meet the resistance of the prefabricated, ready-made object. It allows Gatson to ground his painting practice, conceptually in his training in sculpture and symbolically in what the artist calls “notions of accessibility." His hypnotic play with the spectrum of color conjures the politics of independence, liberation, and peace of the 1960s and '70s in a graphic language that emanates in lines, circles, triangles, and rectangles that form stars, fires, diamonds, and rainbows."

- Antwuan Sargent in "Rico Gatson: Spiritual Abstraction" 

"Still committed to repetition and tight organization, Isensee deploys his wavering forms to divide the canvas into quadrants. And here is where his current works get interesting. Since the irregular shapes neither completely fill the quadrants nor perfectly abut their adjacent, mirroring forms, there are ample leftover spaces that the artist fills with almond-shaped and eye-like units, lozenges, boomerangs, and teardrops. This use of interstitial space enables Isensee to juxtapose two or more sets of colors to distinguish the larger concentric groupings from the smaller insets, and the smaller groupings from each other."

- John Yau in Hyperallergic

"When I first saw a Tom LaDuke painting, I was shocked. Shocked on so many levels: genuinely floored, breath taken away. It was something I had never seen before, and it was astonishing to be in the presence of a painting that was unlike any other. I was not sure what I was looking at. It was seductive and extreme and complicated; it was a new weirdness, with a committed narrative, or anti-narrative, lurking deep down. I remember feeling a great joy in its other-language-ness—its range of voices, in all their inflections, shouts, subtleties, and whispers."

- Benjamin Weissman in "Pluralizing the Act of Looking"

"Martin has spoken about her painterly process as an endurance test, wherein touch, strength, and control push against the limits of the physical. She has also confessed to consistently retracing her supple lines to arrive at the proper degree of roundness. The tangibility of these efforts places the Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. The opposite of hard-edged abstraction—the late 1950s style that emphasized the impersonal arrangement of clean lines and contrasting hues—Martin’s approach to paint application proves to be as distinctive as her signature."

- Christian Viveros-Fauné in "Walking the Tightrope: The Art of Heather Gwen Martin"

"Today, with ten years of painting on wood under his belt, Middlebrook is  often inspired by the jagged outer contours of each slab, expanding on their inherent qualities, and experimenting with hard-edge designs and blended colors that scale from light to dark. Meandering, concentric, and parallel lines give way to chevrons, triangles, and polygons in a labyrinth of colors that shimmer against the natural wood background. The resulting works are endlessly inventive, complex art objects that embrace both botany and geometry. They are at once paintings and sculptures with a large measure of admiration for abstract art and its various histories."

- Mary-Kay Lombino in "Tracing Trees"

"Architecture, as it is commonly understood, is designed and implemented to house the human and is itself the manifestation of our constructed realities and temporalities. When looking across the street into another skyscraper or apartment building, there are both darkened and lit rooms with shadows or people mulling about....Elements like these can make architecture almost comforting in its functional uniformity, so when such signs of life are missing, the result is in an unsettling subversion that upends and questions what we’ve come to expect of both architectural spaces and the organized linearity of time." 

- Emily McDermott on Daniel Rich in “A New Temporal Understanding"

"There’s a compelling physicality to his canvases; each stroke of his brush leaves an irregular ridge of paint across the top and bottom of the line, resulting in a canvas that feels deliberate, handmade, and intensely human. "Not every artist is able to develop a signature style, even over an entire career, but Guy has achieved a unique style that’s his alone. He can paint anything and you know it’s him. That’s very rare," says Benjamin Derouillon." 

- Catherine Hong in Galerie Magazine