Summer Group Show

Although the summer show at Russell Bowman Art Advisory doesn't have a theme, it's pretty typical of what the gallery does all year—presents art and objects of lasting cultural value. Since establishing his business in Chicago three years ago, Bowman has drawn on his two decades in the museum world (the last 17 as curator and later as director at the Milwaukee Art Museum) to establish a healthy niche in the secondary art market. Bowman specializes in championing work by late-20th-century artists, often those whose once-glittering reputations have dulled somewhat in the early years of the new millennium, but also those whose output has grown richer with maturity.

In his small Superior Street space (which feels more like a minimalist salon than a gallery), Bowman has assembled a gratifyingly eclectic collection of fine pieces including some famed Gees Bend quilts.

Not every great artist is great throughout his entire career, which may be why Bowman has chosen to show Worked able, an assemblage by California artist William T. Wiley. This piece clearly reflects Wiley's connection to the Funk Art movement of the 1950s. Another construction, Walking at Midnight, is by the under-recognized artist James Surls. During a recent gallery visit, Bowman described Surls's work as "every New Yorker's idea of a Texas artist in the '80s".

The show also includes pieces by artists whose work remained consistently interesting throughout their careers. A large 1985 Roger Brown oil vividly displays many of the painter's signature elements: an overall geometric organization of the canvas, the vocabulary of repetition and formally arranged figures, the luminous cloud patterning. It's a treat to see a 1970 color-field exercise, Roswell #3, in the impasto technique by Milton Resnick, who died in 2002, and the 1967 pencil drawing of nudes by Philip Pearlstein, who Bowman says is going strong at 81.—Philip Berger