The weather is warming, and local galleries are blooming with vibrant new artistic offerings this spring. Although there are plenty of new sights, sounds and experiences in the Pikes Peak region this month, here’s a highlight reel of some art destinations you should visit from Manitou Springs to downtown Colorado Springs.
“Assemblage” by Gary Weston, Michelle Bracewell, Liz McCombs and Michael Cellan
The Bridge Gallery, 218 W. Colorado Ave., through April 27.
This jewel of a gallery under the Colorado Avenue Bridge attracted a crowd on First Friday for this exhibition pulled together by a quartet of local artists and lots more plundered bits and bobs. Liz McComb’s sculptures combining biological once-living components and mechanical never-living ones may seem macabre, but McComb presents them as natural expressions. Gary Weston’s fun, retro-futuristic sculptures evoke a 1940s science fiction-fantasy aesthetic that looks like it could’ve inspired “The Jetsons.”
“Relics of Abstraction” by Amy Guadagnoli and Jerry Rhodes
Commonwheel Artists Co-op, 102 Cañon Ave., through April 29. Information: commonwheel.com
Commonwheel’s gallery may be small, but this month they punch above their weight class with 2D and 3D offerings from an artistic duo.
Amy Guadagnoli’s bold, chaotic and colorful woodprints, usually framed in long compositions, are abstract spans of excited imagination. They’re an effective complement to Jerry Rhodes’ intricately crafted pottery featuring bonsai trees, Spartan helmets and a cluster of skyscrapers as toppers.
Exhibits by Brett Fox, Deb Prewitt, Lori DiPasquale, Nichole Montanez and Shannon Dunn
Auric Gallery, 125 E. Boulder St., through April. Information: auricgallery.com
Newcomers to Auric may not realize that the powerhouse gallery was once two powerhouse galleries, so describing the galaxy of offerings is … a lot. In a good way!
Lori DiPasquale’s “Redefine” presents textured “landscapes” that are bucolic in one piece, but bleak elsewhere. Nichole Montanez’s “In Lieu of Flowers” are new, small and colorful flowers on super-glossy black reflecting a superposition of life and death, of suffering and relief.
The bright paintings of Deb Prewitt’s “The Stories We Tell,” accented with black, collectively feel like an out-of-focus kaleidoscope on life repainted back into an abstract clarity.
Brett Fox’s paintings for “Walk This Way” are humanist, gritty abstracts based on a literal twist.
Auric’s physical centerpiece this month is the maximalist cornucopia of Shannon Dunn’s “Paradox.” Her aquatic-themed works and goopy horizons join studies of space and nature in ways that are a departure from her relatively subtle works last year at G44 Gallery (now part of Auric).
Portions of topographically exaggerated river — made partially from foam and resin — leap out at you while a trio of individual square lights project through sculpted ripples. Each work feels like its own world — a loud, imaginative statement.
25th Annual “Wunderkind”
Manitou Art Center, 513 Manitou Ave., through April 27. Information: manitouartcenter.org
You don’t have to wander long around the MAC’s Hagnauer Gallery before it becomes apparent how Pikes Peak-area high school juniors and seniors have carried the juried “Wunderkind” exhibition for a quarter-century now.
An excellent collection of mixed-media offerings — paintings, photography, sculpture, digital and more — doesn’t just highlight young, local talent, it effectively reveals myriad thoughts and feelings, showing how these students see their world through a different lens than the snarky, overly brief takes we get on a modern social media diet.
