Dan Devening

Fenestra Falsa

August 8, 2026 - October 10, 2026
Opening reception August 8, 2026, 1 - 3 pm

OS Projects is honored to present Fenestra Falsa, a solo exhibition of collages and paintings by Chicago artist Dan Devening. The exhibit opens August 8, 2026 and continues through October 10, 2026. A public reception for the artist takes place on Saturday, August 8 from 1 – 3 pm.

Dan Devening is an image builder who combines decisive subject matter with gestural mark-making, spray enamel, collage and stitching to express a life experience shaped by the unexpected, the surprising and the unknown. Like much of what has held his interest over the years, the works in this exhibition engage the ways in which perceptual nuance and optical and spatial play come alive in compositions built on rigorously considered parameters.

The project’s point of departure is the rounded rectangle, a shape that is ubiquitous in the devices that connect us to the outside world: iPhones, iPads, computer monitors and televisions. All these devices employ the "friendliness" of the rounded rectangle to suggest comfort and simplicity while effortlessly holding us captive. The shape’s affability—and invitation to use, peer into, and be mesmerized—mirrors the current state of culture, reflecting not only how we consume information, find entertainment and create connections but also the darker, more sinister undertones that are ever-present.

The rounded rectangle also serves as a portal. It can frame an aperture or function as a window revealing a landscape. It can press outward against the picture space, swelling and suffocating the frame, as if straining toward its breaking point. This capacity, to both expand outward and pictorially recede and dissolve inward, makes the shape both flexible and multivalent, giving Devening room to explore the ways in which physical and perceptual experiences frame psychological response.

Fenestra Falsa’s collages and paintings are fully grounded in the formal concerns of art making, offering the viewer the opportunity to be transported through purely material means. Form builds the image, reveals the subject and tells the story. Form creates chromatic intensity and calibrates the relationship between sharpness and blur, qualities that echo the devices that hold us hostage. Like those devices that incessantly demand speed and immediacy, the works in Fenestra Falsa induce the same pull toward absorption, elevation and immersion—only slowed down, stilled, held.

About the Artist

Dan Devening is a Chicago-based artist, educator, curator, gallerist and writer. He is currently Professor, Adj. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University from 1993 to 2008. His paintings, works on paper and installations have been exhibited extensively, including shows at Geary Contemporary, Launch F18, Apex Art and Printed Matter, Inc. in New York; 65Grand, LVL3, Heaven Gallery and Autumn Space in Chicago; Kinkead Contemporary in Los Angeles; and Ditch Projects in Eugene, Oregon, among other national venues. Devening’s international projects include exhibitions in Germany at the Kunstmuseum Ahlen; Galerie Grölle in Wuppertal; Kunstverein Recklinghausen; the Museum Kurhaus in Kleve; dok25A in Düsseldorf; Renate Schroeder Gallery in Cologne; and galerie oqbo, Schau Fenster, Scotty Enterprises and Neues Problem in Berlin. He has also exhibited work in Vienna, Brussels, Tokyo, Toronto, Monterrey, Melbourne and Amsterdam.

Devening has curated exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including projects at galerie oqbo, dok25A, Hagiwara Projects (Tokyo), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Block Museum of Art (Chicago) and Ditch Projects, among many others. His essays have appeared in several publications, including Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy and Purpose; Clay Pop: What’s New in Clay; and Where the Echo Drifts, an essay on the work of Leipzig artist Dagmar Varady, published in Expanded Studio. He is a MacDowell, Yaddo and Dora Maar Cultural Center Fellow and has received grants from the Hallie Ford Family Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation (International Connections), among others. He recently completed the installation of a major public art commission for the CTA Irving Park Blue Line train station.

Devening founded and currently owns and directs Devening Projects, a Chicago-based gallery featuring exhibitions by emerging and established contemporary artists. He is the founder and former co-director of Paris, London, Hong Kong in Chicago.