Eriks Johnson at Rosenblatt Gallery (181 N. Broadway)
DWRI | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Today is your last chance to see Eriks Johnson's show at the Rosenblatt Gallery, a few doors down from Design Within Reach in the Third Ward.
The show of paintings, drawings and sculpture represents an experiment for Johnson, an artist with a well-established and internalized language of mark making. The small, tucked-away Rosenblatt Gallery is a great place for an accomplished painter to try something new.
His inspiration is the card game solitaire, which he played as a boy with his grandfather in the living room of the house where he now lives. He started thinking about the order and rhythm of the game, how the cards would get organized under different patterns and sets, divided by two colors. He decided to see whether card configurations could dictate a set of constraints for his art.
In truth, it seems that what Johnson really wanted was to be untethered from the pressure of his own aesthetic choices and judgments. Fair enough. Artists need a break from their own expectations sometimes.
Still, some of the best work in the show is in Johnson's recognizable language, like the large brown and white painting of built-up lines and blocks that reads like some misbegotten form of futuristic, vertical urban design. That aesthetic is still present in the petite, playing card-sized drawings -- hung on the wall like an in-progress game of solitaire -- though not quite as powerfully.
The gallery is upstairs from Artasia, which sells art objects and antiques from China, Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia and Southeast Asia. One floor up, on the 3rd floor, is Cuvee, a champagne bar.
E-mail Schumacher at mschumacher@journalsentinel.com.
To see more of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, or to subscribe to the newspaper,
go to http://www.jsonline.com. Copyright (c) 2009, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email
tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax
to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave.,
Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
For full details on (DWRI) DWRI. (DWRI) has Short Term PowerRatings at TradingMarkets. Details on (DWRI) Short Term PowerRatings is available at This Link.
- Cost Plus, Inc. Announces Organizational Changes - 01/28/10
- Design Within Reach to Match Donations to UNICEF to Help Victims of Earthquake in Haiti - 01/13/10
- DWRI: John Edelman Becomes President and CEO; John McPhee Named COO - 12/16/09
- Design Within Reach Names John Edelman as President and Chief Executive Officer - 12/15/09
- StyleFeeder Debuts One-Stop Online Furniture Shopping Personalized for Each Person's Tastes - 12/03/09
- More News >>
