PHILADELPHIA—Though New Yorkers jestingly call it the sixth borough, Philadelphia has a cultural scene all its own. I viewed recently some of the best exhibitions on display in the city, including a career-spanning survey of Karen Kilimnik’s work at the ICA, a show at Larry Becker Fine Art of paintings all in black, the Locks Gallery’s historical survey of abstract painting, and an exhibition at Pageant Soloveev that channels the spirit of the legendary blues singer Bessie Smith.

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
“Karen Kilimnik”
Through Aug. 5

The first career-spanning survey in the U.S. of Philadelphia native Karen Kilimnik’s work benefits from an appropriately dramatic opening. The Institute of Contemporary Art’s 5,000-square-foot main gallery, with its 30-foot ceiling, is empty except for two very different installations. To the left of the entrance is Kilimnik’s 1989 breakout The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers, a cluttered arrangement of photocopied images, clothing, drawings, and other objects that reverently obsesses over the glamour, danger, and mod kitsch of the 1960s television show. The work earned Kilimnik acclaim for the “scatter” style of her installations when it was first shown.

In contrast, toward the back of the towering space, a freestanding structure houses a sampling of Kilimnik’s more recent painting (along with a few older photographs and drawings). The amateurishly painted works crib scenes of animals, women, and children, among other subjects, from Childe Hassam, Joshua Reynolds, and other familiar painters. The works are hung salon-style against a backdrop of red patterned wallpaper, and the whole enclosure is treated as an installation with the descriptive title The Red Room in the Modern Artchitecture (2007).

From there, the retrospective branches out to encompass early drawings, which resemble journal entries of a fashion magazine-obsessed high school student, and more installations, including I Don't Like Mondays, the Boomtown Rats, Shooting Spree, or Schoolyard Massacre (1991), a schoolyard shooting gallery with a pop soundtrack. On the second floor, a gallery is devoted to Kilimnik’s choppy videos and several artist books, while another includes her recent ballet-themed video set in a fairy-tale white tent—The Bluebird in the Folly (2006).

The swaggering teen angst of the artist’s early work might seem at odds with the more genteel imagery she has pursued since turning to painting in the 1990s, but the exhibition draws attention to the continuity between her bodies of work. It’s not difficult to see how hand-copied pictures of models and celebrities relate to work meticulously done with the loose technique of a Sunday painter, or how glamorous teenage fantasies transition into period daydreams of saccharine beauty. The great strength of this show is that it feels like a single, albeit scattered, installation.

GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

Larry Becker Contemporary Art
“Quentin Morris”
Through May 19

The backstory behind a group of new paintings and works on paper by Quentin Morris at Larry Becker Contemporary Art could easily be the most intriguing part of the exhibition. Born in 1945, Morris continues to live and work in his childhood home in South Philadelphia. He graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1967, and shortly thereafter began working entirely in black. He cites everything from color theory to spirituality to a determination to undermine the color’s negative cultural associations as the reasons why he hasn’t stopped.

Morris’s practice has, however, gone through several permutations in the past several decades. His paintings and drawings have taken shape on different materials, though for a while they were exclusively on found objects. He has also employed a laundry list of black media—printing ink, roof coating, spray paint, acrylic polymer—to create the fluctuating sheens, textures, and surface effects that add layers of detail to individual works.

It is the play between abstraction and physicality that makes the nine paintings and five drawings in the current exhibition so interesting. The paintings are 72-inch circles of unstretched canvas drenched with pigment, each suggesting a black hole unexpectedly rich with small gestures. Some contain shimmering clouds of mica-infused acrylic, others drip-painted curves. Untitled (July 2006) shows a matte black surface interrupted by faint gridlines; stepping back for a second, however, it’s clear that the grid resulted from preexisting folds in the canvas rather than any expressionistic impulse.