CHICAGO — Two of probably the most pleasant solo exhibits up in Chicago proper now concern human our bodies. Each are playful and witty, filled with shiny coloration and surprising shapes. One gleefully declares itself corporeal: Huguette Caland’s Bribes de corps, a collection of whimsical and abstracted physique components painted within the Nineteen Seventies, on view on the Arts Membership. The opposite makes no such claims. And but, Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse, an exhibit at Compound Yellow of idiosyncratic origami fashions just lately made by Hai-Wen Lin, has a relationship to human anatomy simply as necessary.
Artwork needn’t explicitly state its issues, although it might. Subtlety and obscurantism fall throughout the bounds of creative prerogative, as do boldness and explicitness, and artists don’t have any obligation to decide on one mode over one other. There are sufficient causes to take one’s choose, from aesthetic desire to emotional necessity to political and cultural imperatives.
Caland, who was born in Beirut in 1931, led a life whose forthright, feministic pleasure-seeking radiates from her canvases. The daughter of Lebanon’s first post-independence president, she took up artwork making in her 30s, left her husband, lover, and youngsters for Paris, discovered there one other lover, collaborated with Pierre Cardin on a line of caftans, and later moved to Venice Seaside, California, all alongside the way in which protecting her household devoted and her residence studio open to social gatherings. Although she struggled professionally for many of her profession, she was rediscovered in her 80s, with star turns in varied biennials. The curiosity has solely grown since her demise in 2019, with retrospectives on the Drawing Middle in New York and, simply this previous summer season, on the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Artwork historian Hannah Feldman, who curated the latter, additionally put collectively the Arts Membership show, which focuses on Caland’s greatest identified physique of labor.
Set up view of Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps on the Arts Membership of Chicago. Left: “Bribes de corps” (1973), oil on canvas; proper: “Accroupie” (1979), oil on linen (photograph Lori Waxman/Hyperallergic)
Bribes de corps means “body bits” in English, and it’s an apt descriptor for many of the 27 canvases included right here. Caland painted them between 1968 and 1980, and they’re exuberant, amusing, poppish, and horny. Nevertheless it’s a foolish, intelligent eroticism, like two giant, rosy coloration discipline work that take some time to disclose that also they are fleshy buttocks sitting on the canvases’ edges, or a small tondo with mysterious black, white, and purple shapes that may very well be a penis assembly a vulva. A number of work play with the bounds of facial and gender recognition, as options resolve from the geometric to the genital to the physiognomic. Or don’t: in every other context, a few of these photos can be plain abstraction, however right here two lime blobs on a lemon floor very almost contact and the impact is electrical, like knees grazing beneath a desk. An angular, creamy composition conjures the curve of a torso with a raised arm or perhaps a pert breast. An enormous white canvas is bordered by a set of quivering, sizzling pink strains, telling a body-positive joke on hard-edge abstraction and minimalism.
Geometric purists and aesthetic prudes can doubt all they need concerning the erotic content material of the above, however there’s no denying the naughtiness of the tiny scenes Caland doodled with the best of brushes throughout a handful of her work. Suppose Shel Silverstein however happier and for adults solely. Likewise, her transformation of pale summary types, by means of a pair of purple lips or some well-placed shading, into one thing that shifts lustily between face, physique, and land mass.
Set up view of Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps on the Arts Membership of Chicago (picture courtesy Arts Membership of Chicago, photograph Michael Tropea)
There are additionally two caftans on view, modeled on sculptural mannequins, that epitomize the work’ spirit in gown type. Caland designed many such clothes for her personal use. “The First Dress” has a collar, sleeves, and hem stitched with colourful amoebic blobs, maybe as a result of amoebas had been among the earliest life types; “Tendresse (Dress #5),” embraced by a pair of embroidered arms, is certainly a young gown.
Delicate clothes is a technique of describing the work for which artist Hai-Wen Lin has begun to be identified. The 31-year-old Taiwanese-American artist was a standout in Floor Flooring 2024, the Hyde Park Artwork Middle’s biennial round-up of prime latest graduates from Chicago’s varied MFA packages, for a pair of kites designed for each flying and donning. The material, handled with cyanotype answer, bears the traces of its wearer’s physique — together with a hand throughout the torso that serendipitously echoes Caland’s caftan. The impact exceeds the plain ingenuity of the design due to the poetics of the idea, of a physique given flight. Different garment-kites of Lin’s creation, every with a singular and touching narrative twist, have featured in native solo exhibits at Facility and Prairie Gallery.
Hai-Wen Lin, “Mystery (Folded)” (2025) (photograph by the artist)
This isn’t what Lin presents at Compound Yellow, an artist-run gallery and backyard in Oak Park. Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse is called for traditional origami strikes, and it is filled with the artist’s uncommon origami fashions. This comes as a shock, though it’s not laborious to think about how properly the talents of garment-making and origami relate. The biggest mannequin in Petal Fold is the dimensions of a human physique, a dainty however soiled determine organized from a 12-foot-square sheet of plain white paper, featureless, laid out on the ground very nonetheless, legs crossed. Essentially the most paradoxical works are 4 items of crumpled paper scattered about, besides they’re similar, that means they aren’t crumpled paper in any respect however quite origami that comply with a mind-bendingly intricate sample to duplicate a wad of paper. Informal issues could be the toughest to attain deliberately.
A collection of six fashions, every produced from a bit of two.5-square-foot paper, fold up into unclassifiable shapes that look prepared to leap, stroll, or fly off their cabinets. One is unfolded and framed flat, a beneficiant transfer that reveals a fancy internet of creases, dashes of paint that really feel tutorial, and collaged images of watery landscapes, their horizons lined up with particular person folds, as if the world had been being bent. Every is painted, and named for, the flavour of a Dum-Dum lollipop, together with “Mystery,” which after all is purple. The oldest works within the present clarify the reference: a handful of tiny motion figures folded from these sweet wrappers, precisely the form of factor a child would make for their very own amusement, if that child had been deeply completed at origami.
Set up view of Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse: New Works by Hai-Wen Lin at Compound Yellow, Chicago (photograph by the artist)
Hai-Wen Lin was simply such a child, and certainly all of the bigger works in Petal Fold are primarily based on fashions they invented after they had been youthful. These obtained boxed up across the time Lin transitioned, and altered their title, and so they’ve solely just lately been unpacked, throughout a residency on the Bemis Middle in Omaha. The metaphoric potential, which Lin explores in a jewel of an artist textual content, astounds: Origami as an artwork of rearrangement, the place new issues can seem with out the necessity for gluing or chopping, simply by cautious creasing and tucking, and getting one’s papers so as. Take into consideration that for a second by way of the physique and gender.
One of many non-origami artworks on view spells it out: 14 items of vertical lined paper, purchased in Taiwan, on which Lin practiced writing their chosen title over and over, till a brand new signature emerged. When you pay attention deeply, truthfully, and playfully to what a physique wants, the mandatory strains and folds will ultimately current themselves. In any case, paper can all the time be redrawn and refolded.
Hai-Wen Lin, “Dust (After Shafer)” (photograph by the artist)
Set up view of Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps on the Arts Membership of Chicago. Left to proper: “Bribes de corps” (1973), oil on linen; “Bribes de corps” (1973), oil on linen; “Bribes de corps” (1968–70), oil on canvas. (photograph Lori Waxman/Hyperallergic)
Hai-Wen Lin, one among 5 tiny “Warriors” produced from Dum-Dum lollipop wrappers (photograph by the artist)
Set up view of Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps on the Arts Membership of Chicago. Left: “Blanc de blanc (Bribes de corps)” (1975), oil on linen; proper: “Bribes de corps” (1973), oil on linen. (photograph Lori Waxman/Hyperallergic)
Hai-Wen Lin, “Mantra” (2025) (photograph by the artist)
Huguette Caland, “Self Portrait (Bribes de corps)” (1973), oil on linen (courtesy Huguette Caland Property)
Set up view of Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse: New Works by Hai-Wen Lin at Compound Yellow, Chicago. Foreground: “dumdum” (photograph by the artist)
Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps continues on the Arts Membership of Chicago (201 East Ontario Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) by means of August 2. The exhibition was curated by Hannah Feldman.
Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse: New Works by Hai-Wen Lin continues at Compound Yellow (244 Lake Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois) by means of June 29. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
