November in Chicago: By now, Lake Michigan has shifted from the vivacious teal of summer into a churning mass of taciturn gray – and it is a crapshoot whether the first snow has blanketed our streets. Meteorological variables aside, one thing remains certain: the heat and exhibitions are most certainly on. Ranging from explorations of the banal to the sublime, political liberation or its abnegation, many galleries and institutions are meeting the discursive and lived challenges of today with gusto. Peppered across the city are seven new and noteworthy shows to make the shortening days feel fuller.

Bassim Al Shaker, Thomas Hirschhorn, Annette Lemieux, Brian Maguire, Michael Rakowitz, and Paul Seawright
‘These Times’ 
Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Through December 21, 2024

After more than 50 years of operation, Rhona Hoffman recently announced she will be shuttering her West Town exhibition space come spring, but the doyenne of Chicago’s art scene has no intention of coasting to the finish line. If the artist list and title are not dead giveaways, ‘These Times’ balances intellectual and formal rigor with a confrontational look at a world mired in uncertainty. Each artist brings an equal measure of eye-catching precision with an acrid critical bent, but perhaps most tantalizing is the potential for interplay between Hirschhorn and Rakowitz, who share a mutual affinity for the social epiphanies found buried in the disjecta membra of globalized consumerism.

Frederick Kiesler
‘Vision Machines’
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Through March 15, 2025

Traveling from an earlier iteration at the Jewish Museum in New York, ‘Vision Machines’ brings to Chicago a rare encounter with one of Modernism’s most idiosyncratic and utopian minds: Frederick Kiesler. As an architect, Kiesler is known less for buildings than for his work in set design and pedagogy, having run the Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from 1937 to 1941. The exhibition assembles a bewildering smorgasbord of Kiesler’s frenetic sketches, theoretical writings, and notes, ranging in interest from gallery designs commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim to a mechanical apparatus that could recreate how the brain sees dreams.

Anneke Eussen
‘Beyond purpose’
DOCUMENT
Through December 21, 2024

In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant explains beauty as ‘purposiveness without purpose.’ ‘Beyond Purpose’, Anneke Eussen’s first exhibition to solely focus on her assemblages made from repurposed panes of glass, which she calls ‘glassworks,’ gamely agrees. Arranging found sheets of glazing over and in proximity to one another, Eussen probes the grammar of historical Minimalism while also questioning how glass itself becomes a rhetorical figure that facilitates spectatorship almost unnoticed in most viewing experiences. Seeing glass for the sake of glass, rather than seeing through it as an intermediary, Eussen explores the perceptive possibilities found in the humblest of situations.

John Akomfrah
‘Four Nocturnes’
Wrightwood 659
Through February 15, 2025

Wrightwood 659 is not a space for the faint of heart to exhibit within. The stunning interior structure by Tadao Ando, enveloped within an early 20th-century school building, has the habit of swallowing exhibitions and artworks whole if they do not live up to the unforgiving concrete of their immediate surroundings. Thankfully, if anyone is up to this task, it is Ghanaian British artist John Akomfrah. ‘Four Nocturnes’ consists of the titular 2019 three-channel video – which uses the extermination of the African elephant as a cipher for humanity’s own death-drive – and Toxic Cloud (2019), an installation of dirtied plastic water jugs suspended overhead. Despite there being only two works, Akomfrah’s installations operate at a similar scale as the building, enrapturing viewers in their desolate sublimity.

Torkwase Dyson
‘Of Line and Memory’
GRAY
Through January 25, 2025

It is sometimes through the most deceptively simple gestures that the most complex of meanings can emerge – and Torkwase Dyson’s practice regularly provides credence to this. For her debut exhibition with GRAY, Dyson presents new architectonically scaled sculptures alongside paintings and constructions in glass and wood. Plumbing her own memories spent along Chicago’s waterways amid the broader collective experience of yearning in diaspora, the works in ‘Of Line and Memory’ continue to sharpen the formal and theoretical contours of Dyson’s particular vernacular in material, monochrome, and line. In her work, these myriad factors coalesce in a formal poetics endowed with meaning but unburdened by didactic limitations.

‘The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies 1970 – 2020’
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Through March 23, 2025

‘Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated’ may be a misquotation of Mark Twain, but the sentiment feels comfortably attributable to painting’s self-conscious turn since the postwar era. Organized by senior curator Jamillah James and assistant curator Jack Schneider, ‘The Living End’ probes painting’s mutual relationship with the rapidly accelerating technological and social progressions that have arisen since the 1970s. Featuring an all-star cast, including Sayre Gomez, Tishan Hsu, Jacqueline Humphries, and Sturtevant, the exhibition conjures a case for the medium the market can never get enough of – without taking its subject’s stability for granted.

Celeste Rapone
‘Big Chess’
Corbett vs. Dempsey
November 16 – December 21, 2024

Celeste Rapone’s paintings – and this exhibition’s titular game – are thoroughly concerned with how one positions oneself. Rendering her figures in contortions ranging from awkward to downright painful, the artist explores the pleasures and perils of striking a place for oneself against an inconspicuously callous environment. In the Chicago-based painter’s second solo exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey, her twisted bodies seem to share the viewer’s discomfort, toying with our emotions, minds, and eyes.