CHICAGO — Two of essentially the most pleasant solo reveals up in Chicago proper now concern human our bodies. Each are playful and witty, filled with shiny colour and sudden shapes. One gleefully declares itself corporeal: Huguette Caland’s Bribes de corps, a collection of whimsical and abstracted physique elements painted within the 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 vital.
Artwork needn’t explicitly state its issues, although it might. Subtlety and obscurantism fall inside the bounds of inventive 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 choice 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 kids 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 best way maintaining her household devoted and her house studio open to social gatherings. Although she struggled professionally for many of her profession, she was rediscovered in her 80s, with star turns in numerous biennials. The curiosity has solely grown since her dying 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 finest recognized 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 (picture 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. However it’s a foolish, intelligent eroticism, like two massive, rosy colour area 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 might 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 another context, a few of these footage can be plain abstraction, however right here two lime blobs on a lemon floor very practically contact and the impact is electrical, like knees grazing below a desk. An angular, creamy composition conjures the curve of a torso with a raised arm or possibly a pert breast. An enormous white canvas is bordered by a set of quivering, scorching 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. Assume Shel Silverstein however happier and for adults solely. Likewise, her transformation of pale summary types, by the use 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, picture 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 a number of 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 recognized. The 31-year-old Taiwanese-American artist was a standout in Floor Flooring 2024, the Hyde Park Artwork Middle’s biennial round-up of high latest graduates from Chicago’s numerous 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 novel and touching narrative twist, have featured in native solo reveals at Facility and Prairie Gallery.
Hai-Wen Lin, “Mystery (Folded)” (2025) (picture 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 known as for traditional origami strikes, and it is stuffed with the artist’s uncommon origami fashions. This comes as a shock, though it isn’t exhausting to think about how properly the talents of garment-making and origami relate. The most important mannequin in Petal Fold is the scale 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. Probably the most paradoxical works are 4 items of crumpled paper scattered about, besides they’re equivalent, which means they aren’t crumpled paper in any respect however slightly origami that comply with a mind-bendingly intricate sample to duplicate a wad of paper. Informal issues could be the toughest to realize 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 educational, 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 in fact 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 achieved at origami.
Set up view of Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse: New Works by Hai-Wen Lin at Compound Yellow, Chicago (picture by the artist)
Hai-Wen Lin was simply such a child, and certainly all of the bigger works in Petal Fold are based mostly on fashions they invented once they had been youthful. These acquired boxed up across the time Lin transitioned, and adjusted their identify, 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 reducing, simply by cautious creasing and tucking, and getting one’s papers so as. Take into consideration that for a second when it comes to 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 identify again and again, 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 finally current themselves. In any case, paper can all the time be redrawn and refolded.
Hai-Wen Lin, “Dust (After Shafer)” (picture 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. (picture Lori Waxman/Hyperallergic)
Hai-Wen Lin, certainly one of 5 tiny “Warriors” produced from Dum-Dum lollipop wrappers (picture 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. (picture Lori Waxman/Hyperallergic)
Hai-Wen Lin, “Mantra” (2025) (picture 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” (picture by the artist)
Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps continues on the Arts Membership of Chicago (201 East Ontario Road, 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 Road, Oak Park, Illinois) by means of June 29. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
