For more than a decade Ann Wiens has been making hotly colored animal paintings that radiate an almost dangerous sensuality. In her six new panel paintings at Byron Roche, various nonmammalian creatures are depicted in front of brightly patterned backgrounds that set off their lush colors. Eight-Spotted Forester (Alypia Octomaculata) juxtaposes a red-and-white caterpillar with a red background punctuated by green and blue circles that intensify the reds and curves of the caterpillar. In Spotted Salamander the amphibian’s tail curls around one of the black disks in the background, emphasizing the artificial arrangement.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The intense colors in a 1988 exhibit of 15th-century Sienese paintings inspired Wiens to begin painting in layers. These works lacked Renaissance perspective–“they’re spatially all wrong,” she says, “but painted with so much confidence that it makes you think they’re right.” Aware that she’d been painting variations on the same subjects for years and that her butterflies and moths failed because they were “too pretty–they never had the creepiness factor,” Wiens asked the Field Museum to let her photograph their insect collection. She placed each specimen in front of a patterned paper, which later inspired her painted backgrounds, and the resulting 30 photographs on view here are almost as lush as her paintings. In the photograph Virgin Tiger Moth (Grammia Virgo), black-and-white sunburst patterns make it seem that a black, white, and pink moth is ascending. Though all the insects reveal the pins stuck in them, Wiens’s dizzying patterns and colors undercut any sense of rationalism.
When: Through April 30
Where: Aron Packer, 118 N. Peoria
Katrin Asbury
