from the press release


After Glow
The Chicago Cultural Center
78 E. Washington Street
Chicago, IL
312.744.6630

Opening Reception:
Friday, July 10 / 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

After Glow Afterparty
Jennifer Wolfe Photography
2021 W. Fulton
Chicago, IL

Gallery Talk: Thursday, July 16 / 12:15 p.m.

Tom Torluemke is a well-known, Chicago-area artist whose professional accomplishments include highly imaginative work in a wide variety of artistic mediums. A versatile and prolific artist, Torluemke’s artworks range from major public projects to site-specific installations, to oil paintings, watercolors, and his continuing use of paper in many forms. For this exhibition, the artist pursues his gallery work by showing mainly figurative, semi-abstract paper constructions in both two and three dimensions, with socio-political content guided by personal experiences. In Torluemke’s skillful manipulation of imaginative forms, his non-objective watercolors present intensely autobiographical themes relating to life experiences, states of being, and states of mind.

Pushing the limits of his imagination at all times, Torluemke has ventured to invent new ways of conveying his artistic language in collage, culminating in three separate bodies of collage work: using contact paper, construction paper, and inlaid painted paper. Just two of his collage portraits seen here collectively contain 60 parts, while his three new wall reliefs are complete works of sculpture, individually worked out to be an interesting, interlocking combination of fabricated elements.

His work addresses a myriad of complex domestic and social situations, taking us on numerous visual journeys of exploration and invention laced with life experiences and reflections on nature, man and society. They are intricate beyond our first impression, and both playful and profound at the same time. By employing collage techniques that are reminiscent of grade school art projects, and by manipulating and recycling his own pre-drawn images within the medium, Torluemke strikes a perfect balance between accessible abstraction and innovation. One wall of facial likenesses also exposes genitalia in the abstract, using the veiled sexual imagery that he favors in his deeply personal practice.

Tom Torluemke is a Chicago native now living in northern Indiana, with a career spanning more than 25 years. He has a long list of solo exhibitions since 1982, predominantly in the Midwest. In addition, he has participated in group shows too numerous to list, which took place in many states from California to New York. Torluemke has works in museum permanent collections and private collections in Chicago, Indiana, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Germany, in addition to his public and private commissions. In 2007, Torluemke was the recipient of the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, in addition to receiving other awards and honors for his educational work and community contributions. Besides giving private studio classes, Torluemke has taught as an adjunct instructor at Valparaiso University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and as a full-time instructor for 12 years at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.

The Michigan Avenue Galleries exhibitions are generously supported by Friends of the Chicago Cultural Center.
EXHIBIT RUNS THROUGH September 27.