St. Louis Art Capsules

Newly Reviewed
In the Tradition Drawing on the printmaking medium's master-and-apprentice roots, this group show of assorted printed matter features work by several pairings of students and their respective instructors. From handmade books to prints on handmade paper, a lineage of traditional mastery of craft emerges — and is also evidence of an ethos to challenge both the craft's limitations and each artist's self-styled approach. Deviance, here, comes in the form of playful anti-traditional tacks: Sheri Rieth's bright and massive Styrofoam relief prints were run over by a car rather than a press and printed on paper salvaged from Hallmark's trash; Katherine Rhodes Fields' printed variations on a fried-chicken theme involve several air-sickness bags bearing the fowl's image and filled with its bones. While the show generally has a facile, lyrical elegance — Joshua Monroe's gold-leafed etchings being a highlight — its experiments in material wit decisively transform certain items. (Barf bags will forever reek of new potential.) Through May 2 at Good Citizen Gallery, 2247 Gravois Avenue; 314-348-4587 or www.goodcitizenstl.com. Hours: noon-5 p.m. Wed., Fri., Sat. and by appointment. Arny Nadler Reviewed in this issue. Ongoing
American Interiors: Photographs by David R. Hanlon These oblique photographs of unpopulated interiors capture the peculiar poetics of immemorial interior spaces occupied by the spirit of waiting rooms during off-hours. Hotel lobbies, hotel rooms, conference quarters and assorted landings — while each space is viewed as though through a peripheral glance, the photographs themselves are pieces of meticulous and exquisite craft. The series forms an observational catalogue of mass-fabricated materials — Roll-A-Tex, doily-patterned bed shams, paisley wallpaper trim and matching wall-to-wall carpet — forlorn in its lack of history. Yet each discrete image suggests vague cinematic potential — as though some daily but resonant drama just occurred or is about to, illuminated by office-grade fluorescence or the sober light of day. Through May 23 at the Sheldon Art Galleries, 3648 Washington Boulevard; 314-533-9900 or www.thesheldon.org. Hours: noon-8 p.m. Tue., noon-5 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sat.

Tony Fitzpatrick: The City Etchings 1993-2003 This series of line renderings of imaginary cartoon icons haloed, Virgin of Guadalupe-style, in carnivalesque heaps of urban artifacts has the intimate, serial quality of daily entries in a notebook and the imagistic content of an illuminated manuscript drawn by a dime-store comic-book artist. With its raw emotional breadth, the work, which negotiates the passing of Fitzpatrick's father, defies this Chicago-born artist's tough-guy persona. The specter of Philip Guston looms large here, manifested in a spirit of wryly internalized loss, Piero della Francesca compositions, and the form of tragicomic characters like hooded Klansmen and blank De Chirico-esque faces. Fitzpatrick adds to this surreal cast with representative symbols of a personally fabled Chicagoland — teetering skyscrapers, water towers and tangles of train track — and that region's immigrant, working-class Catholicism and weather-worn survivalism. Hands clasped in prayer and wrapped in barbed wire float above a clip-art goose or a weeping robot against a shallow backdrop of iron bridges and piled brick. Despite the proliferation of imagistic references, the cumulative effect is honorific, nostalgic and ultimately Fitzpatrick's: a small riffraff world trying to hustle away the irrevocable with the eternal promise of art. Through May 23 at Gallery 210, TeleCommunity Center, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1 University Drive (at Natural Bridge Road); 314-516-5976 or www.umsl.edu/~gallery. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat.

Good Friday The second of two group exhibitions celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Saint Louis University's Museum of Contemporary Religious Art features work from the permanent collection that explores "the meaning of suffering, death, compassion, and unconditional love" through direct references to Jesus' last day. The show's explicit focus on the Christian tradition challenges the ecumenical spirit of the institution's identity as an interfaith repository, but one can also take the show as a point of departure for broader expression. It's a fine balance — the blend of faith-based inquiry and the secular standards of contemporary art. The show's strongest works mine this unusual context by being visually evocative, spiritually direct and singularly personal: Michael Tracy's monumental Triptych, 11, 12, 13, for instance, and Adrian Kellard's Lovers and Prayer of the Faithful in Ordinary Time. The latter, who died from AIDS in 1991, explores being a "gay man loved by god" in two emotionally wrought painted woodcarvings that move between the traditionally liturgical and explicitly kitsch in a delicate manner. Through April 26 at the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, 3700 West Pine Mall Boulevard (on the campus of Saint Louis University); 314-977-7170 or mocra.slu.edu. Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Sun.

Ideal (Dis-) Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer This exhibition of canonical canvases of slain martyrs, pious virgins and other grand dilemmas borrowed from two encyclopedic museums and replaced in naturally lit contemporary galleries is a reaffirmation of the human scale. The minimalism of Tadao Ando's building design is diffused by ornate, gilt-framed compositions that date from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, the two historical extremes meeting precisely at the fragile effects of daylight on the predominantly figural pieces. Contemplative and reverent, the show fulfills its premise so well that it seems capable of providing a discretely intimate experience for each and every viewer. Through June 20 at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, 3716 Washington Boulevard; 314-754-1850 or www.pulitzerarts.org. Hours: noon-5 p.m. Wed., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat.