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1711 West Chicago Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622
By Appointment
312 455 1990
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, founded originally as Young Hoffman Gallery in 1976, specializes in international contemporary art in all media, and art that is conceptually, formally, or socio-politically based. From its inception, the gallery has launched emerging artists’ careers. In the seventies, Young Hoffman Gallery was one of the first galleries to offer exhibitions to women artists including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold. 

Since 1983, when Rhona Hoffman and Donald Young announced the establishment of separate galleries, Rhona Hoffman Gallery has continued to show young and emerging artists alongside established ones. Among the artists, the gallery has exhibited and/or continues to exhibit are Vito Acconci, Spencer Finch, Luis Gispert, Leon Golub, Robert Heinecken, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Lorna Simpson, Nancy Spero, Richard Tuttle, Brian Ulrich, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kehinde Wiley.
Artists Represented:
Vito Acconci
Derrick Adams
Torkwase Dyson
Spencer Finch
Julia Fish
Natalie Frank
Chris Garofalo
Luis Gispert
Leon Golub
Jacob Hashimoto
Susan Hefuna
Robert Heinecken
Deana Lawson
Judy Ledgerwood
Sol Lewitt
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Gordon Matta-Clark
Gordon Parks
John Preus
Michael Rakowitz
Richard Rezac
Fred Sandback
David Schutter
Nancy Spero
Siebren Versteeg
Anne Wilson

Works Available By:
Kutlug Ataman
Lina Bertucci
Huma Bhabha
Mel Bochner
Stephanie Brooks
André Butzer
Chris Dorland
Hamish Fulton
Jim Hodges
Jenny Holzer
Richard Hunt
Art & Language
Florian Morlat
Tim Rollins & K.O.S.
Robert Ryman
Lorna Simpson
Yutaka Sone
Pat Steir
Mickalene Thomas
Richard Tuttle
Brian Ulrich
Kehinde Wiley
James Wines

 

 
Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Rhona Hoffman Gallery
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Past Exhibitions

Michael Rakowitz

The Monument, The Monster and The Maquette



May 6, 2022 - June 18, 2022
The Monument, the Monster and the Maquette comprises new work from Michael Rakowitz. An artist who often works in public space interrogating urbanism, architecture and memory, Rakowitz’s two new sculptures expose the relationships between monuments in the US that have been removed and those that remain.

Derrick Adams

The Last Resort



February 19, 2021 - March 27, 2021
Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present The Last Resort, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, MD). Culminating the artist’s series Floaters, which began in 2015, the collection of large-scale works on paper present the final chapter in Adams’ feeling investigation into depictions of Black leisure. Each completed in 2020, six of the paintings on view renew Adams’ signature use of exuberant color blocking figuration to introduce the idle time of Black bodies in compositions that are joyous, abundant, and radical in their refusal of tragedy. Alongside these works, a number of intimate watercolors—whose treatment is loose, delicate, and soft—feature bathers resting upon fantastical inflatables of swans, unicorns, and rainbows.

Anne Wilson

If We Asked about the Sky



July 10, 2020 - August 15, 2020
Rhona Hoffman is honored to present “If We Asked about the Sky”, the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Anne Wilson. Oscillating between the macro- and microcosmic, Wilson’s new textile-based works set the immediacy of human labor and encounter against the infinitude of space and time. In a moment of unprecedented global transformation, the exhibition offers an opportunity to “meditate on living in and through loss,” as the artist describes. The exhibition is anchored by Wilson’s suite of 21 Material Drawings (2018-20). Each work begins with the chance operation of throwing ink onto a fragment of white damask cloth; through capillary action, the ink absorbs into the fibers of the cloth, expanding outward to form circular shapes with irregular fractal-like edges. Wilson then develops the results of her immediate gestures with a deliberate, slow stitch of hand embroidery with silk thread and hair. The image associations shift between everyday phenomena—a pin prick, a spill, or a splatter—and a celestial idiom, evoking planets, craters, and galaxy clusters. “The work proposes both smallness and vastness,” Wilson says, “and inhabits a space of contemplation between the mortal world and a celestial universe that is infinite and unknowable.” Also on view is Absorb/Reflect (2020), a floor installation of embroidered gold roundels and mourning garlands made from black ribbon. The golden forms face upward and evoke the light and constancy of the sun, while the black garlands are meant as objects of meditation on loss, offering a way to remember, transferring the care of a maker to another person. Wilson first began to make the mourning garlands in the late 1980s for friends who had lost loved ones during the AIDs epidemic. A portion of the sales proceeds from the garlands will be donated to Doctors Without Borders. The exhibition takes its title from a work that is installed on the far wall of the gallery entrance—a large, tapestry-like damask tablecloth transformed into a sprawling map of blue ink and embroidered hair. “If We Asked about the Sky,” it asks us, what could we learn about our experiences on earth?

Chris Garofalo

falling up: becoming from undoing



July 10, 2020 - August 15, 2020
Rhona Hoffman Gallery is delighted to present our seventh solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Chris Garofalo. For the past three decades, Garofalo has developed her signature form of ceramic sculptures inspired by the flora and fauna of the world’s ever-changing and increasingly precarious ecosystems, from the rainforest to the desert to the depths of the ocean. Garofalo fires multiple layers of glaze on her handworked clay forms, rendering lifelike skins, shells, and membranes that appear to have grown organically. Her specimens recall real-life organisms, but all of the sculptures are born of Garofalo’s imagination, playing with and transcending standard scientific classification. Animated by theories of evolution and metamorphosis, the works seem almost to breathe, grow, mutate, and respond to their environments. For “falling up” Garofalo has crafted an extraordinarily delicate installation of ceramic forms that hang from the ceiling and walls of the gallery, in what the artist considers its own ecosystem. The fragility and contingency of the works invoke the natural environment that inspired it, serving to remind us that humans present both an existential threat to our planet’s biodiversity as well as the greatest hope for its preservation. “Whether blossom or human being, life is fragile and temporary,” Garofalo writes. “‘falling up” invites us to undo conventional notions of human primacy and separation from nature, to embrace the profound porosity between categories of living beings, becoming more empathetic members of the entire biological community.”

Spencer Finch



April 3, 2020 - May 9, 2020

The Armory Show 2020



March 4, 2020 - March 8, 2020
Image description: Natalie Frank Woman (over the shoulder), 2019 Mixed media on panel 20 x 16 inches

Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Soil, Seed, and Rain



February 21, 2020 - March 28, 2020
Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to announce Soil, Seed, and Rain, an exhibition of new work by Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn. This is his third exhibition with the gallery. New paintings and works on paper continue Quinn’s exploration of the human form, testing the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, memory and perception. Rendered in the artist’s signature mode—what he calls “expressionistic cubism”—the deconstructed portraits give subjective form to the connections between Quinn and people in his life, from loved ones and neighbors to more recent acquaintances. Privileging emotional honesty over literal representation, these latest works result from a more intuitive process than Quinn’s earlier portraiture. He builds each composition in response to a few initial strokes of paint laid down on the painting’s surface, allowing this unmediated energy to guide the image. “Those initial strokes are the most fervent, most honest, most genuine,” he says. “Those are the strokes that are far less likely to be controlled or conditioned." The exhibition’s title, Soil, Seed, and Rain, speaks to Quinn's interest in a more elemental, pared-down approach to human connection and form—one drawn from the literal stuff of life.

Gordon Parks

This Land Is Your Land



January 10, 2020 - February 15, 2020
“...I feel it’s the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.” —Gordon Parks Rhona Hoffman Gallery is thrilled to present an exhibition of photographs by Gordon Parks, one of the greatest documentarians of 20th-century American and African American life. Focusing particularly on Parks’ images of African American youth, the exhibition This Land Is Your Land includes works from the 1940s to the 1960s, many of which are being shown for the first time. Children were a subject Parks captured throughout his career. Photographing them allowed Parks to expose contemporary issues of racial, social, and economic inequality, while also often presenting the possibility of a hopeful future. Included in the exhibition is the iconic image Doll Test, Harlem, New York (1947), which documents the infamous psychological experiment that tested the effects of segregation on black children, as well as selections from Parks’ 1956 Life Magazine photo essay “A Segregation Story.” Meanwhile, in the more ambiguous Untitled, Harlem, New York (1963), a young boy stands astride a police barrier—the setting left undetermined to the viewer—exuding a casual self-possession that can only come with youth. Together, the works in This Land Is Your Land attest to the singular vision of one of America’s most important photographers, artists, and advocates for social justice. One of the seminal figures of twentieth century photography, Gordon Parks left behind a body of work that documents many of the most important aspects of American culture from the early 1940s up until his death in 2006, with a focus on race relations, poverty, civil rights, and urban life. Born into poverty and segregation in Kansas in 1912, Parks taught himself photography after buying a camera at a pawnshop. He found employment with the Farm Security Administration (F.S.A.) in the 1940s, which was then chronicling the nation’s social conditions, before his employment at Life magazine (1948-1972). He has received countless awards, including the National Medal of Art, and his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Art Institute of Chicago

Gladys Nilsson

New Work



September 13, 2019 - October 19, 2019

Chicago Imagists from the Phyllis Kind Collection



July 16, 2019 - August 14, 2019

Martha Tuttle

The Dance of Atoms



July 12, 2019 - August 14, 2019

Derrick Adams

The Ins and Outs: Figures in the Urban Landscape



May 31, 2019 - July 6, 2019

Deana Lawson & Dru Donovan



April 19, 2019 - May 25, 2019

Robert Heinecken

Mr. President... Mr. President...



March 1, 2019 - April 13, 2019

Signs and Systems



January 11, 2019 - February 16, 2019

Michael Rakowitz

The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (Room Z, Northwest Palace of Nimrud)



November 2, 2018 - December 21, 2018

Torkwase Dyson

James Samuel Madison



September 14, 2018 - October 27, 2018

Everything is Politics



July 13, 2018 - August 17, 2018

Embodied Politic



May 25, 2018 - July 6, 2018

Judy Ledgerwood

Far From The Tree



April 6, 2018 - May 19, 2018