John Himmelfarb, “Wild West,” 2020, toy truck with found objects, 15″ x 22″ x 18″/Photo: John Himmelfarb
John Himmelfarb loves trucks. They’ve appeared in his work since the 1970s and over time have become something of an obsession, as witnessed by his show currently at the Koehnline Museum of Art at Oakton College. The show is titled “How Things Stack Up,” and is all about trucks—in two and three dimensions. There are paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures in both wood and metal—both cast and welded, all of them truck-related. The show is literally “stacked up”—there’s very little airspace between one piece and the next, and because of the subject, it works. The walls are as crowded as the beds of any of the pickup trucks shown, giving the show a dizzying, highly fun quality. Himmelfarb never shies away from amusing with his art. He often builds puns into the titles, and it’s abundantly apparent he has the time of his life creating.
John Himmelfarb, “Drama at Green Gulch Bridge,” 2021, acrylic on canvas, 40″ × 60″/Photo: John Himmelfarb
On the walls, genres seemingly collide—Himmelfarb is sublimely comfortable with a plethora of painting and drawing styles, at home in any of them, and yet they are all his styles, his methods. Like the trucks he is so fond of, they all arrive at their destination of being fascinating well-crafted art. The color is so bold that the drawings appear pale and washed out by contrast until you look closely, but if you do, you see that Himmelfarb is also skillful at drawing—they’re subtle but masterfully drawn. The painting titled “Drama at Green Gulch Bridge” is a perfect example of one of Himmelfarb’s “styles,” “Amarillo Transfer” is another, and the tongue-in-cheek “Palette” paintings are yet another. Himmelfarb is not only adept, but completely comfortable in all of them.
There are several delightful sculptures that employ actual rusty scale-model toy trucks as their base, with small rusted metal “stuff” added to the beds, sticking out at all angles like the metal collectors’ trucks you see in the alleyways of Chicago. “Intersection” and “Wild West,” from 2020, are built out of toy Tonka trucks, piled high with rusted found objects, as is “Night Fisherman,” from 2022. But Himmelfarb is not content to work on small scale—he has created multiple full-size trucks piled with industrial detritus, two of which are “parked” in private collections in Lincoln, Nebraska.
John Himmelfarb, “Amarillo Transfer,” 2019, acrylic on canvas, 62″ × 67″/Photo: John Himmelfarb
Himmelfarb has a long history with Oakton College, having first had a solo show there in 2001. The college now counts twenty Himmelfarb works among its collection. One of the large-scale paintings from that first exhibition now proudly adorns the College’s library. Thirty feet long, its bright colors and gestural lines and forms fill the wall nearly from side to side. Michael Bonesteel, who wrote the show’s catalog essay, describes Himmelfarb as someone who “revisits previous ideas and takes them up again with renewed energy and additional insights.” Based on the dates of the work in this exhibition, Himmelfarb has done that several times within the theme of trucks. Created in every conceivable medium, Himmelfarb’s trucks fill the gallery space to the brim with his delight and enthusiasm.
“John Himmelfarb: How Things Stack Up” is on view at the Koehnline Museum of Art at Oakton College, 1600 East Golf Road, Des Plaines, through September 20.
