Burt Michaels

Spring will arrive and gleeful kids will walk on water in Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain and never give a thought to Richard Gray. Couples will stroll around Magdalena Abakanowicz's Grant Park installation "Agora" and Richard Gray will never cross their minds. Tourists admiring the sculpture outside the Hancock or the Jim Dine painting in its lobby will make no connection with Gray. Though he minimizes his involvement in the Millennium and Grant Park sculptures, Gray's gallery, in its forty-third year, represents Plensa, and Abakanowicz, and Dine, and a careful selection of other world class contemporary artists--including local wonder David Klamen, whose current show, which is totally sold-out, runs through May 5.

In the market for a Lichtenstein? DeKooning? Picasso? Talk to Gray, the only non-New Yorker ever elected president of the Art Dealers Association of America, who also does a brisk trade in the secondary market for both modern masters and contemporary artists, both here and in his New York gallery.

In 1963, with his family's businesses tottering and three kids to support, Gray opened a gallery "because I needed a job." He'd taken a high-school art class, studied architecture for two years, dabbled at painting and, through his in-laws, knew some local collectors. "Since I had no reputation, I needed artists with strong appeal, so I arranged to share representation of stars like Louise Nevelson, DeKooning and Mondrian. And to survive I quickly got into the secondary market." Since those days Gray has observed "an explosion of the art market. Where there were six serious galleries in Chicago in 1963 there are ten times that today, and ten times as many collectors. New museums are opening daily."

The art Gray lives with and collects isn't necessarily what his gallery sells. "I'm interested in an artist's primary ideas on paper--drawings, water colors," he explains. Nowadays, he concentrates on building a collection "that has kept going back in time, to the old masters," and remains publicly frenetic as a trustee of the Art Institute, the Goodman, WTTW, the Smart Museum and the Humanities Festival.

Richard Gray Gallery, 875 North Michigan, #2503, (312)642-8877.

(2007-04-24)

Also by Burt Michaels

Art Break
You might not expect to find Rhona Hoffman, whose venerated-but-hip gallery is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, cheering at a Mite-level hockey game (her grandson's), enjoying Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" or reading cosmology, but this stanchion of contemporary art is replete with contradictions--most notably her predilection for art that is abstract, that strives for art-historic breakthroughs and museum status, yet sends a progressive socio-political message
(2007-03-20)

Eye Exam
As a fine-art photographer, Brian Ulrich traffics in youth-oriented pop culture, but this time, in the series "Copia" (which means "abundance"), he takes us on a romp where we've all been: through the malls and big-box stores of middle America
(2006-12-05)

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