I moved to Chicago in 1987. The gallery scene was stylistically varied, but consolidated in just a few neighborhoods. River North, with it’s timber-lofts, contained my favorites. Rhona Hoffman was on Superior Street; Dart was on Orleans; Robbin Locket was on Wells; Donald Young and Feature were on Huron. A short bike ride away was Randolph Street Gallery and N.A.M.E..

Complimenting these galleries was the Chicago International Art Exposition, which began in 1980, and took place in a pre- renovated Navy Pier, and was North America’s premier art fair.

During the 1980s figurative painting was popular in Chicago, just as it was big in Europe and New York. Through magazines I knew Baselitz and Schnabel would let you know they were painters with a capital ‘P’ with their messy brush strokes—as though art still needed to show it’s hand with painterly drip and enormous scale.

In seeming response to this work was a much cooler, colder, and more calculating mode of art making which took inspiration not from the machismo of painterly dash, but from TV, magazines, the media, art history, and the marketplace: a reality just as real as the impulse to sling paint or break plates.

In Chicago, this more investigative work was where my gallery- going eyes wandered. Smart replaced pretty; intimate replaced the bombastic; inquiry replaced emotion; theory became part of the artist’s toolkit.

The work in this small survey captures the mood of a very specific thread of art-making in late 1980s Chicago.

– Jason Pickleman