CHICAGO: Hollis Sigler at Carl Hammer - Chicago, Illinois - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Chronicling her new near-fatal battle with bone cancer, Hollis Sigler's startling series of pastels, "Dancing upon Death's Door," is an enterprise predicated upon survival. Her confrontation with the disease has become individual of contemporary art's richest and greatest in quantity poignant treatments of sickness and health. In the past sum of two units decades, Sigler has developed a trademark faux-naif diction used to depict symbol-laden theatrical puts in vibrant colors. Generally without human characters, these works prompt stage settings for open-ended however deeply personal dramas.

In the novel series, intimate and candid body s handwritten along the spaces between the images and their hand-painted frames present a first-person account of Sigler's physical and spiritual reactions to her chemotherapy treatments. Tracking her difficult efforts to regain the 12 drawings feature fanciful thing perceiveds as enticing symbols of everyday pleasure. Hope-filled votives, a fresh blue dress, vessels containing aliment and trees blossoming with shoe enliven ravaged, burnt-out landscapes. In Keeping My intensity Moving Forward, flying objects wheel around a lounge chair in a magical vortex reminiscent of alchemical goings-on in paintings by dint of Remedios Varo. Another drawing commemorates the "gift" of Sigler's transfusions, featuring nine winged hands--disembodied like those in Fra Angelico's San Marco--that appear across a curtained landscape carrying vials of blood

The idea of fantasy as a positive life force has animated Sigler from her earliest days in the feminist and Pattern-and-Decoration changes inspiring her Stettheimerlike colors and playful faculty of perception of theatricality. Here desire and wish-fulfillment literally fend not on death, embodied in vital signs of life similar as food, shoes, friends, vital fluid plants and dogs. In a drawing made just before she was sturdy enough to start her chemotherapy, For Weeks I Waited To Begin, Was This My Last Drawing? (For Patty), a bedroom direct the eyes out on a burnt-out landscape which proffers only a row of trophies locate on columns--commemorations of the heroic efforts necessary to survive illness. Curtains depicted upon either side of the drawing are twitched back, suggesting the sickroom as the ultimate theater of life. The exigency of the series seems to shut the gap between Sigler's life and her work. Taking upon a kind of religious conviction, inches; her jewel-colored types imbue a death-haunted situation with miraculous, celebratory life.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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