To review the year’s visual art offerings and happenings, I chatted with FrontRow’s visual arts critics Noah Simblist, Rebecca Carter, and Lucia Simek to see what shows and exhibitions stuck out in 2010. Part one primarily discusses work in commercial galleries, while the second part touches on museums and non-profit spaces.

Noah Simblist: Some strong shows that stick out for me in 2010 include: 

Jeff Elrod ­(pictured above) After a disastrous train wreck of a lecture at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2009, I started to think differently about his abstract paintings that are part elegant monochromatic gestural works and part nostalgic elegy to early digi-art, a commentary on the tensions between the physical and the virtual in the 21st century. It seemed that they promised more heady substance than Eldrod really commits to them. But his show in March at Dunn and Brown seduced me – each painting’s subtle visuality. Trenton Doyle Hancock never ceases to amaze and his show also at Dunn and Brown showed the usual mix of object and installation, elaborate allegory and bold graphics combined with intricately crafted spaces that seem at once filled with whimsy and dread.

'Faster,' Trenton Doyle Hancock

Ink, inc at Holly Johnson was a great group show, including beautifully detailed work by M, Jacob El Hanani, and Ernesto Caivano, among others. M is one of DFW’s best talents in my mind, moving easily between gorgeously rendered line drawings and performance based music and light shows with his frequent collaborator Richie Budd.

Post-Now at Marty Walker Gallery included Anna Krachey, Buster Graybill, and Jesse Morgan Barnett ­ three artists that used photography to construct oddly abstract, oblique images absent of human presence.

At Conduit Gallery, Dee Mitchell curated The Second Program, a group of contemporary video art by David Askevold, Jonathan Gitelson, Matthew Day Jackson, Kristen Lucas, Luke Murphy, Jason Rhodes, Erin Shirreff and Bill Viola.

'Ink, inc' installation shot at Holly Johnson

Finally, Linnea Glatt’s stunning show rounded out the year with large scale works on paper and linen that give titans like Eva Hesse and Agnes Martin a run for their money.

Lucia Simek: I’m with Noah on both the INK, Inc. show at Holly Johnson and Linnea Glatt’s show, With In, at Barry Whistler. The drawing show at Holly Johnson was incredibly cohesive and thoughtful, with a real across-the-board smattering of some of the best mark-makers scribbling these days. Like Noah, I find M a tremendous talent. His meticulously articulated line drawings are always incredibly simple, but thematically rich. Jacob El Hanani’s gauzy grey drawings were also excellent. Linnea Glatt’s current show keeps the same calm, methodical pace as much of the work in the drawing show. Within the constraints of the circle Glatt has harnessed a whole world that seems infinitly plumbable.

I also enjoyed C. Meng’s Behjing Diary at Conduit. This wasn’t a very heady show, but I liked Meng’s simple approach to capturing Chinese street life. With so much complicated and powerful work coming out of Asia, these little vignette paintings were just sort of lovely and quiet, as so much traditional Chinese art can be, and I found that almost-reversion timely.

Small Works, the sculpture invitational at Marty Walker, packed a lot of punch with small sculpture with big ideas. It was a riddling show, full of puns and contrivances that tickled, but also confused. For all its apparent silliness, the show pushed some very ponderous themes.

'Ghost Madras' by Tom Orr at Marty Walker Gallery

Rebecca Carter: I’m looking forward to seeing Linnea Glatt’s show when I return to Dallas.  Speaking of drawing, I enjoyed the directness, sensitivity, and precision of Leticia Gomez’s drawings in her show at Conduit Gallery: This is Where You Live, This is Where I Live, This is Where We Live.  I’m curious to see how her work evolves in time.  Of course, I enjoyed Tom Orr’s exhibition, Ghost Stories, at Marty Walker for reasons which I’ve elaborated on earlier.

One of the exhibitions that keeps coming to mind wasn’t in a commercial gallery, but was Stephen Lapthisophon’s Specificity and Seasonal Fruit at Gallery 219 at Eastfield College.  Objects from the art class rooms mixed with worn copies of French Theoretical texts on phenomenology and the index under glass vitrines, and photographs of the objects in site incited a delight in the dynamism of their subtly interlinking presences.  Even my 2D Design students got caught up in the excitement of discovery and association.

Yuri's Office installation shot

Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation’s Yuri’s Office at the Fort Worth Contemporary had a similar initially understated quality mixed with existential voltage.

Peter Simek: Well, I don’t mean to make this boring, but my three favorites were Ink, inc., The Program, and Linnea Glatt’s show that is up now. I would say it was a strong year from Barry Whistler all-in-all. Trying to think of the most memorable shows the year, I kept coming back to things I saw in the non-profit spaces, as well as The Bank (Modern Ruin) exhibition/project/happening/thingy. I must say I was taken by Sederick Huckaby’s work at the MAC, which wasn’t universally lauded, but did show an artist taking a large step in his development (and not just because he went big). Finally, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts looks like it will continue to pump out interesting, high-caliber shows with regularity.

Image at top: Jeff Elrod, Flower Theif installation shot at Dunn and Brown Contemporary.