ENGAGE Projects is excited to announce Aaron Spangler’s debut exhibition in Chicago, Arcadia. Dreamy and foreboding all at once, the gallery will be filled with his hand-carved reliefs that pull from roots in rural life and culture in northern Minnesota. The shiny black surfaces intertwine scenes of the quotidian with the chimeric: cabins tucked away in the deep woods, a face protruding from a tree trunk, a man working in his garage, an abandoned car. Spangler’s landscapes are intimate and anti-pastoral; no sky in sight underneath the dense tree canopy gives the landscapes a hushed quality. A crucifix cuts its impression in the earth like a shadow underneath a cluster of three trees, a stark allusion to Protestant Christianity which shapes much of the rural Midwest United States. Relying on traditional hand tools and natural light to define his surfaces, Spangler uses iconographic relief to tell the untold stories of rural life.

Spangler’s work has been included in group shows including “Working Thought,” The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Takashi Murakami’s “Superflat Collection,” Yokohama, Japan; the two-person “American Gothic” at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (with Alison Elizabeth Taylor), Winston-Salem, N.C.; “Spectacular of Vernacular” (2011–12), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; “Heartland” (2008–10), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. His work belongs to many public and private collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Rubell Family Collection, among others. He has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2014), McKnight Foundation (2009), Minnesota State Arts Board (1998), and Jerome Foundation (1997). In 2017, Spangler’s first large-scale bronze, Bog Walker, was commissioned by the Walker Art Center’s Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Aaron Spangler, In the Canyons of Your Kiss, 2024, carved basswood, black gesso and graphite, 73 x 56¼ x 5½ in.