All the Best Art Exhibitions (and Art Deals) in Denver This Weekend

Find art shows this weekend and beyond in all directions, including dreamy landscapes by Danielle Winger at Visions West in RiNo, co-op openings in Lakewood and on Santa Fe Drive, and We Are the Sky at the Ent Center in Colorado Springs, to name a few. However you hang it, all the hot art indoors is preferable to the even hotter temperatures outdoors.

That said, it’s time to make a plan.

Frea Buckler, Roundabout
Jennifer Omaitz, Structural Gestures
Conny Goelz Schmitt, Past Future
Space Gallery, 400 Santa Fe Drive
Through August 10
Through July and just into August, Space Gallery presents a trio of artists who upend the stalwart geometric abstract with ideas that put a twist on those usually hard-edge constructions. Frea Buckler does a kind of stylistic legerdemain by printing or painting them freestyle, giving them a sentient quality. Like chips or dominoes, her compositions tumble and fall into place. Jenniffer Omaitz, on the other hand, inserts gestural comments in ribbons across static geometric islands on solid or graduated background colors in her recent acrylic paintings, and Conny Goelz Schmitt turns her geometric shapes into many-sided, outside-the-box folded sculptures comprised of vintage book covers and jutting out in three dimensions.

Danielle Winger: Half the Day Is Night
Visions West Contemporary Art, 2605 Walnut Street
Through August 29
Danielle Winger paints dreamscapes, powered by nature and the supernatural colors of moonlight, sunrises and savored memories. In the artist’s words, they represent a subjective mediation “between the creative and the divine” resulting in deeply personal reflections depicted in deep shadows, high peaks and dark water. If you like your landscapes with a heaping spoonful of modernized romance, head for Visions West.

We Are the Sky
Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery, Ent Center for the Arts, 5225 North Nevada Avenue, Colorado Springs
Through October 5
Artist Talks: Saturdays, July 20, August 3 and August 17, noon to 1 p.m. (artist lists TBA)
Butterfly Effect Performance: Thursday, September 12, 6:30 to 8 p.m.; free, tickets here
Panel Discussion and Performance: “What Kinda Brown Are You”: Thursday, September 19, 6 to 8:30 p.m.; free, tickets here
The more than forty Pikes Peak region artists chosen to participate in We Are the Sky looked to the late Colorado Springs artist Starr Kempf’s visionary kinetic sculptures and life for inspiration to make art reflective of our shared struggles and creativity, from 2D and 3D gallery works to performances and ephemeral experiences. The opening reception was the only chance to experience some site-specific activations and performances included, but the core exhibition of nineteen works, enhanced by additional live events and talks, will be available throughout the run of the show (see above for details).

Five Years, Five Cheers: The High Five Anniversary Show
The Transmigration of Lines: Fred Voigt Becker
D’art Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive
Through July 28
Opening Reception: Friday, July 12, 5 to 8 p.m.
Music with Perpetual Motion: Friday, July 19, 6 to 8 p.m.
Dessert on Santa Fe with Artist/DJ Dmitri: Friday, July 26, 6 to 8 p.m.
The artists of the D’art Gallery co-op on Santa Fe Drive celebrate their fifth anniversary and the first five years of building a reputation for attractive shows and special events with a group exhibition…and a peek at the future: Not only has D’art established a good foundation, but members are now beginning to expand into even more exhibition space and studios after their neighbors at Spark Gallery moved out to start a new chapter of their own. In the meantime, be sure to wander over to Fred Voigt Becker’s solo show in the East Gallery rental space.

Sasha Novotny, Grandeur Obscured
Bell Projects, 2822 East 17th Avenue
July 12 through August 25
Opening Reception: Friday, July 12, 6 to 10 p.m.
Closing Reception: Saturday, August 24, 6 to 10 p.m.
Sasha Novotny (aka Sasha the Kid) re-creates classic masterpieces from art history in childlike, oil-stick line drawings on canvas. The colors are basic, like a crayon drawing, but the drafting itself surpasses the naive. 

Translated Landscapes
Firehouse Art Center, 667 4th Avenue, Longmont
July 12 through September 8
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 13, 6 to 8 p.m. (artist remarks, 6:30 p.m.)
Firehouse hosts the group show Translated Landscapes with works by Chloe Wilwerding, Chuck Brenton, Kerry St. Laurent and Adam Michael Kozak, who all take modern, mixed-media and multimedia approaches to natural scenery, often with the landscape’s relationship to science and evolution intertwined. The earth is way more complicated than an orb rotating in space these days; the four artists will show you the way while logging your brain into more analytical data.

Goddess and Warrior
Art Contained Del Sol Art Collective, 3058 West 55th Avenue
July 12 through August 24
Opening Reception: Friday, July 12, 5 p.m.
The shipping-container gallery Art Contained del Sol reopens for Goddess and Warrior, a community exhibition exalting heroic tropes from Aztec culture, beneficial deities who served their subjects healthy crops and great wisdom. In the images of these helpers, viewers see themselves as strong, resilient and an active part of human life.

Intricacy
The Lab on Santa Fe, 840 Santa Fe Drive
July 12 through August 10
Opening Reception: Friday, July 12, 6 to 9 p.m.
The Lab celebrates two years on Santa Fe Drive with Intricacy, a group exhibition of work born of intricate processes, from assemblage to embroidery painting, and other techniques you’ve never heard of before.

Peter Yumi
Talk Gallery, 4382 South Broadway, Englewood
Saturday, July 13, 6 to 10 p.m.
Longtime Denver artist Peter Yumi is leaving for São Paulo, Brazil, next week, and is liquidating his portfolio to start over again, with help from Gordon Mehterian and Talk Gallery. Mehterian will host a farewell party and blowout sale with deeply discounted prices at the Englewood art space, where Yumi is chopping the last zero off every price tag, so what previously went for $1,000 will now be $100, and so on. It’s a fascinating collection of layered imagery driven by Yumi’s interest in how the internet (and, more recently, AI specifically) distorts reality and twists minds. Friends, collectors and the arts community are all invited to drop by, wish Yumi well, and, should they choose, take advantage of a deal no one could possibly refuse. Yumi, whose art inventions have taken a regular place in our arts coverage over several years, will be missed, and we wish him the best.

Interested in having your event appear in this calendar? Send the details to editorial@westword.com.