Chicago Art Review - MiniReview: Berry Sanders @ Co-Prosperity Sphere

(Note: I’m catching up on my backlog of shows I attended, photographed, and never wrote about. Enjoy the pictures and the brief summary.)

Berry Sanders is a painter from Eindhoven, Netherlands (home of the Van Abbe Museum, recently mentioned here), and his show Tales From the Bubble was a series of large, black and white narrative oil paintings down at Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere. That each had a self contained story was a rare thing in contemporary painting, moving the focus and the strength of the work into the illusion, into its content rather than its form. Like much of narrative, representative work, the paintings demanded more attention to unpack and experience than I was really willing to give, limited themselves to mediocrity even while doing their job better than most. Flooded alleys, space-suit chimps, and jungle militias glazed by superficially – I was more interested in the scale, eerie blacks and greys, and especially the ivy ease with which Berry had painted the wall piece.