Made Flesh as Reviewed in Newcity

Vol. 23, No. 1051, p.19
August 14, 2008
by Marla Seidell

Through a series of paintings of strapping young men Rob Bondgren reveals a fixation with the male body. In “Misadventures in Candyland, 1, 2 and 3,” various stages of lusty hookups are shown. Men’s bodies are displayed in all their glory, bulging below and at different stages of undress. Throughout, there’s a juxtaposition of the happy-go-lucky alongside the insidious in the vibrant, candy-colored portraits of oversexed males. “Anderson’s Pool Party 2007” is perhaps the most vivid. Here we see various men in and around the pool, either getting it on or wearing a “come hither” look. All of Bondgren’s men are distinctly American, with handsome, chiseled faces and taught, muscular bodies. Bondgren entices us through his gorgeous depiction of men as sex gods and, at same time, shows us the dark underside of worshiping the body as an object. The most thought-provoking work is “Boy Was I Drunk.” Here four men pose next to what looks like the outline of a bright orange Humvee. There is a clear military connection, evident by the sailor hat, hint of camouflage and dog tags. Three of the men look smugly satisfied while the fourth looks away in despair. Although it’s vague, it’s clear that Bondgren is forcing us to think of sex as a symbol for the abuse of power, not unlike war. These paintings are so entertaining and seductive it’s hard to tear your eyes away. And that’s precisely the artist’s intent—to illustrate just how much of body addicts we are.

Summergroup08 showcases the work of several artists who have shown their work at estudiotres over the past year and a half and introduces the work of some artists that will be featured in future exhibitions. This eclectic mix of work includes that of seasoned veteran artists like Bernard Wideroe, Barry Lorne, and Loretta Bourque as well as that of fresh talent such as Michael Lehman and Davin Youngs.

Rob Bondgren
Loretta Bourque
Debbie Carlos
Jenny Kendler
Michael Lehman
Barry Lorne
Michael Newman
Christopher Smith
Bernard Wideroe
Davin Youngs

July 11- August 29, 2008

As part of its continued celebration of GLBT artists, Center on Halsted presents "Rob Bondgren: Made Flesh." The exhibit, which will be installed at Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St., from July 18–September 2, 2008, presents an overview of recent work by Bondgren since 2004 and includes oil paintings from his “Better Days Ahead” series, gouache and watercolor works on paper, and mixed media collages. An opening reception will be held on July 25, 2008, from 6:30p – 9:30p in the Center’s second-floor living room space. A $5 donation is requested for the opening reception.

Everyday People
May 17- June 27, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 17, 2008 from 6:00-10:00p.m.

estudiotres gallery, 5205 N. Clark Street, is proud to present Everyday People curated by David Getsy and Rob Bondgren. This LGBT themed exhibition features artists who address some of the ways that sex, gender, lust, love, life, fantasy, revulsion, and survival get worked out in the banal, the simple, and the everyday. This exhibition includes local artists Brooke Barnett, Sean Fader, and Doug Ischar as well as Jared Buckhiester from Brooklyn and Molly Landreth from Seattle.

Check out the review of THAW in New City Online

Justin Polera reviews Thaw on the Think Pink Radio blog:

The current exhibition, THAW, at estudiotres gallery in Andersonville has a great show of hot new artists.

Samia Mirza is always worth seeing and I blog about her work at www.artinthepresent.blogspot.com. But two other young queer artists really shine in this show.

A wall of photographs from Davin Youngs are sexy and definitely a site. The photographs blur the line between snap shots and fashion photography, they capture on the care-free scrap-book aesthetic that was championed by legendary Nan Goldin. But Youngs has put his own quirky, somehow shy spin on these snapshots of friends, family and himself.

Rob Bondgren is a queer multi-media artist, who handles his water color beautifully. Water color is one of the most difficult forms of painting because the artists must act quickly and from the gut. The
paint dries quickly and there is no way to “paint over” mistakes. Bondgren’s loose and free paintings emphasize the essence of water color paintings– pure liquid joy, holding nothing back and adding
nothing extra.

–Justin Polera

A group of my new mixed media collages will be included in THAW, a group exhibition at estudiotres which opens on January 18, 2008. This show also includes Samia Mirza, Andrew Winship, Nate Wolf, and Davin Youngs. Please visit the gallery's website for more information.

So you may have heard the word giclée before, but what the heck is it? Wikipedia defines it as: "Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay"), is an invented name for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The term is often used instead of Inkjet in art shops. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print." Bottom line, it's a dang nice print!

Well, I'm having some of these fancy prints done and they will be good! I am having four pieces from my show Better Days Ahead digitally scanned and will be producing very limited editions of each one. The prints will be made on high quality paper from works that were originally produced on paper, so the resulting image will look so good that you will almost not be able to tell the difference! I have indicated which pieces will be editioned in the Better Days Ahead Works on Paper section on this site. If you are interested in finding out more or getting on a waitlist to buy one of these prints, please let me know and I will be sure to get in touch with you as soon as possible.

Better Days Ahead at The Finch Gallery
Reviewed online at Centerstage Chicago by Alicia Eller

See the full story here: Now That's Rather Queer

In the past 20 years, gay culture went from being somewhat underground to totally mainstream and marketable. In this body of reactive artwork, Chicago-based artist Rob Bondgren uses drawings, gouache, mixed-media paintings on paper, and oil paintings to examine gay male sexuality and the picture-perfect, stereotypical gay male body as portrayed through pornography, fashion magazines and mainstream gay culture. In "Cruising for a Stupid Boy," an older man cruises by in a sleek Mercedes-Benz. A young, hunky dude wearing a red Speedo gazes at him longingly. Bondgren carefully abstracts the boy's legs so that they can only be inferred by the drip of red paint gliding from his groin to the ground. By abstracting portions of the piece, Bondgren literally and figuratively creates a fleeting sense of desire.

Chicago Free Press, Volume 9, No. 12
By Paul Varnell
Contributing writer

“Better Days Ahead” is the cheerfully optimistic title of artist Rob Bondgren’s first one-man show, now on view at the recently opened Finch Gallery on West Fullerton.

When you climb the steps to the second-floor gallery space, the first thing you notice is the number of multi-colored, plastic beach balls rolling around on the floor. Those more or less set the tone for the collection of 18 realistic, colorful paintings depicting beach and swimming pool scenes.

“Realistic,” that is, in the sense of representational, but not quite in the sense of showing things you are likely to see at pools or beaches. The paintings are full of hunky, naked or half-naked men, some engaging in genital display, cruising or groping other men. There is even an occasional bare-breasted woman. Many of the figures seem to include the viewer in their scene by looking out at him or her.

“It is about escapism in a way,” admits the 35-year-old artist. “The work in this show is first and foremost a reaction to my overwhelming disgust and fatigue with war, politics, terrorism and fear-mongering, and the most unfortunate politicization of sexuality. I began this series because I selfishly wanted to have fun painting people having fun. Bottom line, I wanted to escape.”

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Bondgren spent most of his youth in upstate New York. His father was an artist, too, and Bondgren says he spent a good deal of time in his father’s studio also drawing and painting. At 18 he came to Chicago to study at the Art Institute, graduating in 1994, and has been here ever since. He now teaches in the Art Institute’s school of continuing studies.

If the exhibition has a thematic painting, it is the large canvas “Anderson’s Pool Party,” which shows the smiling CNN newscaster evidently hosting a party with more than a dozen good-looking men sitting or lying around the pool. Among them, one man is lying naked in a lounge chair, another has lowered his trunks to stare at his own penis and a third appears to be intensely preoccupied with a blow-up plastic doll. Bondgren has even inserted himself into this sybaritic scene, lying on an air mattress in the pool.

“Boy Was I Drunk,” the classic rationalization of heterosexual men for engaging in homosexuality, depicts several young military men lounging around along with one obvious civilian. It is not clear whether Bondgren means to imply the possibility of later sexual interaction or an awareness that even here there are reminders of war. Possibly both.

A companion piece, “Blowing Off Some Steam,” its title also suggestive of sexual release, has more overt sexuality, with one man pulling out his penis while another inspects the penis of a third man.

Perhaps the cleverest painting, “Sailors and Floozies Remix” adapts characters from American artist Paul Cadmus’s 1938 painting “Sailors and Floozies.” Just as sound engineers add and rearrange background elements in remixing a popular song, Bondgren places the clearly drunk sailors and the obviously available “floozies” trying to rouse their interest into a new background with more characters. Just for fun, notice the bizarrely sexual hat one of the woman wears.

Bondgren mentions Cadmus among the modern gay painters he particularly likes and has drawn on for ideas. He also mentions the American Charles Demuth, who painted scenes of sailors urinating and naked men (including himself) at a bathhouse, and the contemporary British pop artist David Hockney, whose scenes of young men around California swimming pools are well-known.

Other paintings include: “Looking for a Stupid Boy,” which shows a well-dressed man in his car wearing a tell-tale red tie—long a symbol of homosexuality—cruising a young man wearing red bikini trunks; “At (or On) the Wheel,” which shows a well-built man seated in his car holding a sizable erection and looking out at people as if to say, “Hey, how you like a taste of this, buddy; and “Demon Dog,” which depicts a punk-looking young man with a mohawk haircut and a Marine bulldog or “demon dog” tattoo.

Several of the paintings have areas of white space suggesting incompleteness. The boy in “Cruising for a Stupid Boy,” for instance, is rendered only down to his red bikini, but not below. It is as if they need a spritz of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik,” that spray-in-a-can that preserves or enhances the reality or development of things. Bondgren may mean to suggest that those areas contain nothing of erotic interest or that other things are going on that are being left out. Maybe viewers are supposed to fill in the blanks.

“I never set out to change the world by making [these paintings],” says Bondgren, “But it has helped me get through three years of nightly news and that just has to be enough for me—for now.”

“Better Days Ahead,” an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Rob Bondgren, at the Finch Gallery, 2648 W. Fullerton (2nd Floor), is on view through Nov. 23. Open Fridays, 6-9 p.m., and by appointment.

Reviewed in Chicago Free Press Vol.9, No. 10

Gay Artists Exhibit at the Center
By Paul Varnell
Contributing writer

With the recent formation of a gay artists network and the opening of the Center on Halsted, gay and lesbian artists for the first time have an opportunity to participate as a group in the city’s annual Chicago Artists Month.

The exhibit mounted in the main hallway of the Center’s second floor includes 21 paintings, drawings and photographs representing the work of 15 artists as selected and curated by David Joseph. A few highlights include: “Chicago—Emerald City” by young Matthew Lew, one of the most attractive pieces in his recent output. The painting shows portions of the Chicago skyline, mostly in bright green colors, crisscrossed by light gray horizontal and vertical stripes. The gay-allusive title scarcely needs specifying.

Rowen Murphy’s contribution titled “Femme Fatale” is a brightly colorful caricature of a standing woman somewhat distorted in the manner of Chicago Imagist Karl Wirsum. It is open to question whether the painting is meant as a serious representation of a femme fatale or a comment on the distortions or exaggerations of natural femininity required to be a femme fatale.

One of the most remarkable images is Sean Fader’s cross-gender “I Want to Put You On, Raini” It shows a slender young man with visibly hairy chest lying on a couch and holding a glass of wine. But he has a zipper pulled part way up the front of his body that is part of a female skin with a gently curving breast he is surrounding himself with.

Perhaps the single most impressive piece, and one of the few that seems explicitly gay, is Curtis Bewley’s painting “Seduction of Adam.” In Bewley’s revisionist account of the temptation story in Genesis, a handsome male tempter (Michelangelo had portrayed the serpent as female) with a Machiavellian smile and a serpentine lower body is holding an almost equally handsome Adam warmly and offering him the fateful apple. Adam for his part seems pliant and, his eyes closed, very close to swooning. Certainly most gay men would be sorely tempted by such a handsome seducer. The painting is beautifully conceived and executed. Why is this man’s work not better known?

Two other works deserves special mention. People looking at Rob Bondgren’s untitled piece briefly may miss the inconspicuous details. The painting is dark on the entire left side and the lower right appears to contain a flower of some sort. But scattered mischievously and unobtrusively through the upper right quadrant are male body parts: a torso, a chest and several penises or penis heads.

And Jordan Kost contributes “Gomez,” a small—4 inches by 6 inches—and delicately shaded affectionate drawing of a cat. The seated cat is viewed from the side like many Renaissance formal portraits.

The three designated “featured artists” are photographer Jerry Pritikin and painters Eric Sosa and Juarez Hawkins. C. C. Carter, the Center’s director of community, cultural and legal programs, said they were featured because they represent different demographic segments in the community.

“Since this was our first exhibition at the Center we wanted to make sure it was reflective of as many sub-communities in our whole community as possible,” Carter said. Pritikin is a gay senior, Sosa is young and Hispanic and Hawkins is female and African-American.

Pritikin’s three photographs are primarily of documentary interest. They are records of events in San Francisco’s tumultuous gay activism near the end of the 1970s, including an anti-Anita Bryant march and a portion of the “White Night” riots that broke out when a jury refused to convict Dan White, the killer of gay city supervisor Harvey Milk, of murder.

Sosa’s work is abstract but one amusing piece purports to imitate the abstract pattern of white icing on a chocolate cake—making it realistic and abstract at the same time. Hawkins’ four pieces are monocolor red or brown female nudes—some of them self-portraits, according to Carter, who knows the artist.

Other artists represented include Bohdan Gernaga, Bret Grafton, Rob Porazinsky, Betty Lark Ross, Elizabeth Wuerffel and Daniel Zagotta.

Opening Receptions October 25 and 27, 2007
6:00-11:00pm
The Finch Gallery
2648 W. Fullerton

I am nearing my final preparations for Better Days Ahead, my upcoming exhibition at the finch gallery. I am truly excited about this show. The gallery's director, Nicholas Freeman is fantastic and has basically given me the greenlight to hang the work that I want to hang. Please read this Centerstage review of this great new space and stay tuned for more details.

Please read the review of "Drawn In" at Estudiotres printed in Chicago Free Press.

By Paul Varnell
Contributing Writer

Andersonville’s Estudiotres gallery presents “Drawn In,” a group exhibition of artists for whom drawing is an important element in their work. The exhibition includes three gay artists: George Bowes, Robert Lucy and John Parot.

George Bowes’ small porcelain “Hurricane Miniatures” are the first thing you see as you walk in the gallery door. Arranged in a lozenge pattern, the 42 gently rounded oval-shaped pieces range in size from 1 1/2 by 2 1/2 inches up to 4 by 6 inches. They resemble small stones worn smooth by the waves. Each piece has the familiar swirling cloud formations associated with hurricanes drawn on top of a gray background. Many also have bright red silhouettes of some familiar oceanfront scene: a beach umbrella, a beach chair, gulls sitting on pilings, a gull in flight and a solitary surfer braving the waves.

Bowes’ other contribution is a set of seven white 10-inch porcelain dinner plates he calls “Closet Ware.” Each plate has almost invisibly imprinted on it a term referring to a gay man, most of them demeaning if not downright hostile—terms such as “cocksucker,” “hairy Mary” “fudge packer,” “pussy boy” or “sex pig.” The writing is not in a different color but in a contrast between concave and convex dots.

Chicagoan John Parot (pronounced per-AHT) contributes three small red and black mixed media pieces with the titles “End,” “Reverse” and “Black Water.” Each consists of uncertain shapes out of which disconcerting, even macabre, mask-like faces peer at the viewer. The faces are composed of thin red and black lines against a background that consists of triangular shapes of alternating high and low gloss black. Touches of green and blue are barely visible.

The pieces contain an emotional charge in excess of their small size: none is larger than about 12 by 12 inches. Without being able to say exactly why, viewers may find themselves haunted by them days later. Exhibit curator Rob Bondgren referred to the pieces as “dark,” suggesting not only the colors but the emotional response they invite as well.

Working with colored pencil, Robert Lucy offers more colorful pictures, if mostly in muted tones, partly composed of allusions to earlier art. “Metropolis Madonna” pays a kind of homage to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” with an image of a robot woman from that film layered over a pre-Renaissance Madonna, her right breast replaced by a round fruit derived from Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

“Flow” depicts a landscape with a cataract falling between precipitous cliffs and an exotic surrealistic plant springing up in the foreground topped by a nude female child. Both foreground images are taken from work by the German romantic era painter Philipp Runge.

“Queen Kitty” depicts a large butterfly over a woman’s mouth, reminiscent of advertisements for the film “Silence of the Lambs,” while the woman—silent film actress Theda Bara playing “Cleopatra”—wears an elaborate headdress suggested by an image also in Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

Viewers are welcome to puzzle out the meaning of the pictures or the relevance of their cultural incorporations, but the pictures have an exotic visual attractiveness apart from whatever meaning they hold.

The other artists included in the exhibition are Adriana Baltazar, Jason Karolak and George Liebert, all of Chicago. Each of the artists have been associated in some way with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Whether the omnibus exhibit title, “Drawn In,” adequately captures the main features or the range of work presented is doubtful. But none of the works are without interest and can reward an unhurried visit to the small gallery.

“Drawn In,” including gay artists George Bowes, Robert Lucy and John Parot, at Estudiotres, 5205 N. Clark. Open Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat. noon-5 p.m.; Sun. noon- 4 p.m. The exhibition runs through August 24. More information about the art is availble at Estudiotres’ website at www.estudiotres.com/gallery.