Utah Exhibition Reviews published in 15 Bytes, Utah’s art magazine, including reviews of local Utah artists, regional artists, group exhibitions and traveling exhibits of national and international artists.
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t associate these first, heavy paintings in oil with everything else that follows in the Harrison Museum of Art’s retrospective exhibition of Logan artist Jane Catlin. In this small alcove, a half-dozen eerie paintings in thick oil; throughout the rest of the gallery, […]
The exhilarating, devastating, and undeniable truth at the center of the art world is that everybody’s taste is different. In many cases, what is good or even great to one viewer barely registers with another, regardless of any of a thousand distinguishing factors between each artwork and each […]
Surely no one can be unaware of the strife along the border between the United States and Mexico. It seems a wall is going to be built, no matter how we feel about it. Two architect-designers, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, who collaborate under the name Rael […]
Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey began her journey in Los Angeles in 1932, where and when she recalls feeling she was an American. She would soon learn, however, that her Japanese family background marked her in ways she did not understand, and she still refuses to accept. Forced at […]
The exhibition’s title, Home Is Never Dead, It Isn’t Even Home, is a reference to a quote from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, which goes, “the past is never dead, it isn’t even past”—and in this installation by SLC artists and partners Julian Croft and HALO, the […]
So many of Utah’s storied art venues have lost their homes, or are in danger of losingthem, that you could be excused for thinking we must have too many of them. Why are they among the first places developers think of when looking for somewhere to build? The […]
A statewide exhibition brings an opportunity to show work to an audience that may not be reachable otherwise, but the work should accurately represent the artist’s materials, style, and subject matter, not create expectations that additional explorations of the artist’s body of work will not fulfill. Or should […]
A visitor to Phillips Gallery during what are becoming their annual showings of the art of Melinda and Joseph Ostraff (see last year’s here) might initially have the impression that the artists work in two formats. One, the more common by far this year, is about the size […]
The main gallery at Phillips is large enough to allow viewing a painting from a moderate distance, a point of view where one current work presents as a charming landscape, featuring a cottage beneath two large trees that resemble tulips. On a clothesline from one of the trees […]
The title piece of Elmer Presslee’s first Salt Lake exhibition since 2017, “The Flannel Void” may be the least disturbing work for many visitors to this chamber of playful horrors in the Underground Gallery at Bountiful Davis Art Center. While his fans will accept it as part of […]
It was a time of rapid change and innovation, but also of anxiety and turmoil: the hope of progress walked hand in hand with the anguish of suffering. And all of it was reflected in the proliferation of art movements in Europe at the beginning of the 20th […]
A muse is what the ancient Greeks called it: the voice that inspires the artist. The Celts had Brigid. For the Christian artist, there’s the Holy Spirit. The Hindus have Saraswati. For Scotty Mitchell, the voices speaking to her came from an entire menagerie. “One morning, while drinking […]
In 1986, I toured a pair of museums on Trafalgar Square in London: the National Gallery, possibly the finest collection in an international field marked by many superb contenders, and the National Portrait Gallery, where I encountered a modern portrait that came to haunt me over the years. […]
You may already be familiar with McKay Lenker Bayer, or at least with her creative mind. She’s the one who decided you should get on your hands and knees with a magnifying glass to look at really small versions of art. What began as a class assignment, and […]
Shiya Zeng exhibits unfamiliar magic around the perimeter of what I like to call the Sunset Gallery, at Finch Lane. Then, to show just how magical it is, she contrasts it with a relatively mundane counterpoint that appears to restore her audience to Salt Lake City, though to […]
At the Springville Art Museum’s 2023 Spiritual and Religious Art of Utah exhibition, among the hundreds of excellent works that found their way into what must be one of the largest exhibitions of recent art anywhere, one piece that stood out was by an artist unknown to me. […]
If the only John Wood painting in the gallery was “Shared Experience,” a casual viewer could be excused for thinking him a landscape painter in the Impressionist School. This panel, which is almost twice as wide as it is tall, seems to show a body of water, a […]
