Stunningly light, the sculptures of Madeline Gallucci and the paintings of Margaret Crowley bear witness while mourning the impossibility of full recognition.
In *Sympathy Ribbon*, currently on view at Grunts Rare Books, the pairing of Gallucci’s and Crowley’s work holds the perfect, painful tension between remembrance and transition.
Gallucci’s paintings manipulate surface and depth to make us acutely aware of the distance between the two. The top layer of her compositions features stark blue marks that imitate painter’s tape, painted in sharp contrast to the hazy contents below. Though the tape frames the paintings and guides our eyes toward semi-legible letters or shapes, we quickly seek to look beyond—and therein find resistance.
Past the tape exterior, textured gradients become the foggy window of a car or a glass door after a scalding shower. Innumerable coats of vivid color are pierced by instances of removal, as seen in *SPAT* (2025), where lightened swipes against a muddy green-grey background could be the fingertips of someone tracing in condensation—a record of some unknown previous presence.
We strain to look deeper and identify what’s beyond the veil, but instead get lost in eternal depths.
Crowley’s sculptures use form and material to hold longing. Most prominent is *50 Years of Service* (2022), glimmering on the gallery floor. A body-sized replica of a thin metal watch, the piece is modeled after a commemorative gift given to her grandfather by the International Union of Operating Engineers.
Curatorial text reveals the large watch is papier-mâché made from postmortem documents for her grandfather—a strong use of medium to register the artist’s grief. Even without context, the watch begs to be witnessed, with its face to the ground and links slumped awkwardly over.
It echoes the ache of Gallucci’s paintings, which yearn for someone to look through them and find recognition, but offer only a vague palimpsest of prior hands.
Both practices offer us the uneasy gift of attending to what remains when presence slips into memory.
**Sympathy Ribbon**
Through November 9
Saturday–Sunday, 1–4 PM
Grunts Rare Books
1500 S. Western #403
[gruntsrarebooks.us](http://gruntsrarebooks.us)
https://chicagoreader.com/visual-arts/art-review/sympathy-ribbon-grunts-rare-books/