Roy Lichtenstein Retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago
Belying the work’s widely recognized surface appeal of glorious color and deceptively simple composition, the Art Institute’s career-arc-spanning Roy Lichtenstein retrospective revealed to all who came to see it the true breadth and depth of the artist’s career. Within his early abstract expressionist work one could see the frame being laid for “Brushstrokes,” and the black and white of his early pop is the spine upon which his definitive, pulp-appropriating masterpieces were built. Shown were his most famous works, and with good reason; “Whaam!” and “Drowning Girl” are legendary, and seeing them up close, pornographically saturated in color and texture and screaming from the walls, they are the center of the viewer’s world. But the show’s greatest feat was continuing on, beyond the comics page, to Lichtenstein’s “Perfect/Imperfect” series, his nudes, his interpretations of classic works; all proved something fans of the artist have already known, namely, that Lichtenstein was about more than Ben-Day dots.

Audience Choice: I CAN DO THAT at Variable Space

Best of Chicago 2012

Escape from Thorne Mansion

The Art Institute’s collection of sixty-eight Thorne Miniature Rooms is one of those forever-present idiosyncratic marvels that most of us tend to take for granted. Especially since a busy gallery full of high-energy tourists and attention-challenged children make pensive contemplation unlikely. But the AIC has a virtual tour on its website that manages to take this old familiar and give it a fresh injection of imaginative vigor. Sure you can study photographs of each and every room if you want, but it’s far more fun to play Escape from Thorne Mansion, a take on the old-school RPG style of clicking around a room to find hidden passages in search of a prize or destination. While not likely to vex Zelda masters, it manages to create a bizarre sense of congruity between the otherwise stylistically incompatible rooms.

artic.edu/aic/thorne-game

Best of Chicago 2011

Elbow room

All that new space allows the museum to trot out some rareties and gives free rein to sprawling installations. The galleries just seem to go on and on in this labyrinth of modern art. But big isn’t necessarily better; there are several moments when small-scale and subtle works get their time in the light, too.

Audience choice:
The architecture by Renzo Piano

Best audience comments:
“How it adds to the insane confusion that is navigating that labyrinth of a museum”; “Clown Torture!”; “Someday it’ll be an eerie reminder of how close we came to our potential after our civilization crumbles and is replaced by apocalyptic anarchy / the vending machines still really picky about dollars.”

Best of Chicago 2009

Gerhard Richter at the Art Institute of Chicago
One of the most moving paintings to grace the walls of the Art Institute could be found at the end of this comprehensive flood of artifacts from the 70-year-old German artist. “Reading,” from 1994, is a smallish canvas, oil on linen. If you stand close, the painting seems hardly there, implausible that such illumination could come from such minimal matter. The texture of the fine fabric soaks up the numinous, blatant homage to Vermeer, shimmering with technical fastidiousness. It has a photo-realist edge yet it is incandescent with mystery. Light falls onto the neck, hair and hands of his wife, the woman he loves, as she reads a newspaper while standing in profile. Simple mastery, as if mastery is ever simple. Simple sentiment: the wisdom of age.

111 South Michigan (312)443-3600

Audience choice: (Tie)Chihuly in the Park: A Garden of Glass at Garfield Park Conservatory through November 4/Van Gogh and Gaugin: The Studio of the South at the Art Institute of Chicago
Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 North Central Park Avenue
(312)746-5100

Best of Chicago 2002