Barbara Rossi

In the East Wing, CvsD is proud to present black- and-white photographs by Barbara Rossi in the exhibition Slippers. Never before publicly exhibited, these photographs open a new view to the artist’s enigmatic practice. Charged with the same mystery and paradoxical qualities as her paintings and drawings, Rossi’s photography flips the everyday on its ear, evincing the marvelous from the mundane. In these small, exquisite compositions, driftwood shifts and slides into anthropomorphic portraits that feel more like topography or celestial swirls than cast-off wood left along beaches and shorelines. Like Giusseppi Arcimboldo’s amalgams of vegetables or fish, Rossi’s wooden figures snap from complete abstraction into resolute figuration, and once the face appears it is impossible not to see. Harmony of shadow and light couples with a sophisticatedly simple, but dramatic, staging to leave one in the gaze of each single driftwood personnage. As photographs, Rossi’s Slippers are basically unique in the canon of works by Chicago Imagist artists, who did not as a rule turn to photography as a medium.

Opens Friday, April 27, 2018, 6-8 PM