Chicago artist Steven Carrelli creates meticulously crafted drawings and paintings in which common, often disposable objects share an invested space with a variety of architectural structures and historical artworks.
Carrelli’s Fragile Structures art exhibition will run from Tuesday, October 28, through Saturday, November 22, at Elmhurst College.
Using a strategy of poetic juxtaposition to create unexpected interactions between the monumental and the mass produced, the works in this exhibition explore the relationship between the permanent and the temporary. In combining images of flood and collapse with subjects ranging from Renaissance furniture to rubber bands, Carrelli’s works invite reflection on the ambition and the frailty of human enterprises.
“Steven Carrelli’s large-scale graphite drawings are a fascinating combination of ‘fool the eye’ realism and surrealist fantasy,” said Suellen Rocca, curator and director of exhibitions at Elmhurst College. “The unusual juxtapositions of images in his work are extremely compelling, and are based on some very interesting thoughts and ideas about the nature of objects.”
Fragile Structures will be exhibited in the Founders Lounge of the Frick Center. The Founders Lounge is open daily. A reception will be held on Tuesday, November 11, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., with an artist’s talk beginning at 5:00 p.m. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.
Fragile Structures is one of about a dozen art shows that Elmhurst College hosts each academic year in two campus venues. In addition, the College’s A.C. Buehler Library permanently houses the College’s unparalleled collection of Chicago Imagist and Abstractionist Art, which explores the vibrant, often outrageous, yet precisely crafted works of Chicago artists between 1950 and the present.
For more information, please contact Suellen Rocca at (630) 617-6110 or srocca@elmhurst.edu.